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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
scholarist's InsaneJournal:
| Sunday, October 5th, 2008 | |
| 7:45 pm | October 5 2008 Back in the days when I fancied myself a blogger, my site featured daily posts of three or four sentences jammed together, each linking to some site that I found interesting. I called it "linkblogging" but I was actually "microblogging", using a traditional and ill-suited weblog platform. I do the same thing on Twitter these days, almost effortlessly. |
| Friday, September 19th, 2008 | |
| 3:09 pm | September 19 2008 Some things I looked up this morning: BSA motorcycles, and more particularly the Victor 441 of the late sixties; Horkay Istvan, contemporary collagist from Hungary; artist's books; Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte, a graphic collage novel published in 1934; the COBUILD Corpus, a database of English language texts that allows the user to query for sentences containing a word or search string; Secret Ballet, a novel by Detlev Fischer written exclusively by sampling sentences from the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary, which is based on the COBUILD Corpus; The Punishments of China, an 1804 book of engravings featuring methods of capital and non-capital punishment found in China at the time (available at the NYPL Digital Gallery); and a Wikipedia article on Windows Clipboard. Weather is warm but not too warm, with a bit of high cloud cover. I think we're going on a cub scout nature outing tomorrow, so if the weather holds, that will be a good time. People were telling me that the fall Nature Trek is better than the January Winter Trek, for obvious reasons. At lunch walked down to the mall, got 50 bucks and checked out Jackson Mac Low's Stanza's for Iris Lezak, in case I need to read it this weekend. I've never made it all the way through this book, but lately I've been wondering a lot about collage and that includes the sort of word collage that Mac Low constructed from existing texts. Finally realized that while I'm done with the freshman access reports I had been working on, there are at least two more that I need to do to update something we have on the web. |
| Monday, April 28th, 2008 | |
| 9:05 pm | I had a long weekend and I felt the hangover today. I certainly didn't get loaded over the week end, but the fatigue set in and I had trouble focusing at work. This showed up in some data checking I was doing, which took me longer to do than it should have. I also noticed a mistake from last week that shouldn't have been there and I'm hoping its not too late to revise. So I finally had to put that project aside after spending half the day Noon, I went out for a walk. I checked a couple |
| Sunday, April 27th, 2008 | |
| 8:42 pm | Obsessions We were at Target today and I spent a minute looking at the jigsaw puzzles in the game section. I used to do these when I was a kid and I have sort of a wistful desired to do them again. Logistically it would be hard to lay out that much space and time to do them. I also feel that jigsaw puzzles are a way of giving up, by spending a large amount of time on a hermetic activity, as jigsaw puzzles are a pastime that touches on the wide, wide world in only a few limited ways. I know that somebody out there has to make puzzles, but the actual puzzling is an extremely self-centered activity of no use to any body but the puzzler. Jigsaw puzzles are just killing time. Chess or reading are competitive, to say the least. Probably solitaire is the activity most like jigsaw puzzling, The only more isolated activity I can imagine would be designing an abstract and fairly simple sports game, playable by one person, who plays matches and leagues and so on. Sort of like the old Robert Coover book, only about a sport that nobody actually plays. Still, I want to puzzle. Its almost like a wish for sleep, or death. |
| Saturday, April 26th, 2008 | |
| 5:00 pm | Very busy Saturday. We all took LW down to the Crazy Legs run downtown
around 9.30 and it took us awhile to get out of there, what with the traffic
and the blocked streets and so on. We got to the Church around 10.00 and
started to help picking up sticks in the parking lot. Three other scout
families were there and we actually got some work done. Its cold and windy
today; really windy, actually, and Emmie was freezing. I drove her home to
get her winter jacket and then back home again after we picked up AW at the
parking lot for bathroom breaks and snacks. We got down to the stadium
around 11.15 but LW left a message on my voice mail saying that the race
didn't get started until around 10.20. So, we waited for a while and the
kids got bored, though I didn't really lose my temper at all. LW showed up
around the time we were going across the street to get some food, so we
all walked back to the car, which was six or eight blocks away. LW ran in
the 8 K race, which impressed me quite a bit. I mean, that's a fair chunk of
mileage for anyone to cover.I took her back home and took the kids to Culver's for lunch.
We did some room clean up at home then played this game that AW won at
Family Fun night The last print edition of TCT came out today. All week they've been talking about the transition to web publication and mentioning William Evjue's name as often as possible. I get the idea that Evjue would have thrown the current paper management out on their asses. No body I know at the paper is happy about this, and almost nobody thinks it will succeed (including LW). There's a farewell party tonight on the west side and I'm sure I'll get an earful of this. |
| Friday, April 25th, 2008 | |
| 8:48 pm | Boox Finished Roberto Bolano, Nazi Literature in the Americas today and I enjoyed it is at the end as much as I did at the beginning. The last story, the longest in the book, was expanded into a novel titled Distant Star, which I'll have to read soon. |
| 8:08 pm | Friday It was another busy day at work, I finished off two projects for the week, one satisfactorily, the other not as satisfactorily. Pretty much worked through lunch, which was ok because it was really stormy most of the day. (I hear the temps will go down tonight and tomorrow). After work, we went to Family Fun night at the school. This is a fund-raiser carnival with food and games. AW won a couple of collectible card-figurine games, while Emmie was just mostly tired and upset. I was too, actually; Family Fun night went on about half an hour too long. I have to say, though, that I'm not really that useful after work, and having a small portion of pizza and some popcorn and a lollipop really doesn't help matter. Now that I'm home, things are better, but there were a lot of people in the school cafeteria making a lot of noise, there was Emmie, and there was crabby old me. |
| Thursday, April 24th, 2008 | |
| 9:03 pm | Wausau Had a conference in Wausau today. I drove up in the morning, getting there at 10.20, after a 2 + hour drive and 45 minutes of getting lost downtown and then trying to figure out parking. I did see three good presentations and learned a lot; I also talked with a couple of people I needed to. The drive back was long and in the rain. I stopped at Culver's in Stevens Point and go in by 7.30. I have to take the car back tomorrow; someone will pay a late fee but I didn't want to wait for a bus in the rain at 8.30 pm. |
| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 | |
| 4:10 pm | Boox Last night was very relaxing. I spent most of the time on the couch reading Nazi Literature in the Americas. I found it audacious. At least I think that's the word you're supposed to use. Its a novel written as a critical history of an imagined literary movement or tendency in the postwar Americas. One point made over and over is how a group of appalling individuals who share an appalling set of beliefs can in many respects act like normal poets, playwrights, and novelists. Still, many of them are too sensitive to live in a world that is either indifferent or hostile to their work. Its a quick read, made up short, pithy essays on the fictional members of this group. Interestingly, a couple of possible science fiction writers are here, including one who wrote for a real magazine (Strategy and Tactics, which I read in the 1970s), as are a number of characters whose death-date is in the future, as late as 2029. The who, what, when, and why of the authorship is not very clear. |
| Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | |
| 4:25 pm | Bought a couple of printer cartridges at the bookstore, spending 65 bucks on a credit card. Man, that's expensive. |
| 1:31 pm | Boox Finished up the Ross MacDonald book, The Moving Target on the bus this morning and returned it to the library at noon. I started the new Roberto Bolano book, Nazi Literature in the Americas. Bolano seems very hot and very dead right now, at least among people who pay attention to these sorts of thing. Over lunch hour I saw Joyce Carol Oates Journals for 1973-1982. A couple of the entries were well-written, engaging the day-to-day and the bigger concerns of the artist's life. A bunny in the garden, going for walks, reducing guilt about going for walks by claiming the observation she does will show up in her writings, problems with reading Sentimental Education, and so on. I might look it up sometime. |
| Monday, April 21st, 2008 | |
| 7:52 pm | Typewriters Came across mytypewriter.com, which deals in collectible typewriters. Has a nice collection of portables from the 50s and 60s which caught my eye; Great postwar styling and pretty colors. |
| 7:21 pm | Politics The Pennsylvania Democratic primary is tomorrow and nobody seems to be predicting a win by either candidate. General wish that Clinton would pull out of the race, because its hard to see how she goes on after a loss or a small victory tomorrow.
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| 6:22 pm | Right after work I got out in the yard and laid down 25 pounds of corn gluten, a corn byproduct that makes a pretty good organic weed-and-feed. I wanted to do it quickly because it might rin tonight and that helps get it into the ground. I'll be able to reseed the grass at the end of May.
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| 3:07 pm | Noon I spent on a 40 minute walk around west campus listening to the first Aphex Twin album on my iPod. The walk back along the lakeshore was fun, and the path had a lot of foot traffic. The kiddo told the pediatrician that I don't get any exercise so I want to make sure I get out and walk as often as I can. |
| 10:56 am | My burgundy Sheaffer Imperial gave it up this morning. It has a plastic body and metal threads and I tightened the barrel together just a little too much just one too many times, driving the threads into the plastic barrel, breaking it apart. When I opened it up to see what happened, it came apart in my hands. A pity. I've had it for about 4 years and I always found it to be a very smooth writer, though just a little small for my hands. (it was what they used to call a "woman's pen", which usually meant it was half-an-inch shorter).
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| Sunday, April 20th, 2008 | |
| 8:37 pm | Last night we got to watch Juno. Charming and quirky with lots of witty dialog. Being a middle aged male, I responded most strongly to the comparison between Mark, the future adoptive father, and Mac, the kid's father. Mark is a 35 year-musician/composer married to the professional Vanessa. He's cool and Juno likes him, but gradually it becomes more and more clear that just because Mark's cool, he's not exactly responsible or even decent; he's not ready for parenthood because there are "things" he wants to do, and a kid would get in the way of his guitar and his horror movie collection. Mac, on the other hand, is the squarest of the square, a former army man who runs a HVAC business. He's a hard-ass and a jerk when he wants to be, but he gets the job done of being a parent and he's a rock at the end. Among other things, the flick is about what it means to be a man. It's also a lesson that you should never give up your dream, unless your dream is to be the next Kurt Cobain and you're older than Cobain was when he shot himself.
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| 8:34 pm | It was the best day of the year so far, and I worked up quite a sweat playing backyard soccer with AW. We went to a party for TCT late in the afternoon in a local bar, and Emmie was sort of the hit of the party, basically by acting really hyperactive. AW had a play date; he's found another little friend, J., who also loves Lego Star Wars. They played together most of the afternoon. |
| Saturday, April 19th, 2008 | |
| 2:00 pm | We picked up two bags of canned goods for the Cub Scout food drive. AW was a little disappointed but I told him that's about par for the course, especially since the local food pantry has a pretty active block captain. He also go some playing in with his little buddy S.
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| 11:23 am | Weekend AW had his last winter swimming lesson this morning and he graduated to the next level, with the "Minnows". He's eligible for the Y swim team, which meets every day for practice and costs $200 including the booster contribution. He's interested of course, but we have to talk about it.
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