Accept no substitutes

Month: February 2006 (Page 4 of 4)

House of Paper

My mother-in-law gave me a small book for my birthday. Brief but dense, allusive and slightly magical yet real in that Southern South American way. Indeed, it was by a Uruguayan Carlos Maria Dominguez. “House of Paper” is about obsessions with books, about literature and personalities, about intertextualities of all kinds, about how lives intertwine, about (the author claims, correctly I think) “how books change lives” (but he often means the physical books, rather than the contents), and about passions.
The book begins with a death. A scholar and lover of the tale-teller is hit by a car as she crosses a street in Cambridge, UK while reading Emily Dickinson. Then a package arrives. A book. Conrad’s “Shadow Line” with concrete on the cover and an inscription made by the dead woman to a former lover (not the tale-teller). With that we’re off on a quest with the writer/speaker that takes us to Uruguay by way of Argentina. Borges is a heavy influence here but others touch the brief (just over 100 page in small format) book. And of course, Conrad who is saluted throughout the book and specificially given praise at the last.
I haven’t read “Shadow Line” I suspect few living have. It’s not a well-known Conrad book. From my first probings I see that book is about crossing the line into full adulthood and like so much of Conrad a sea tale with the subtitle “A Confession.” The Conrad book is out of copyright and available in many forms including from Project Gutenberg (see link above).

Birthday Socks

My parents think I am tough on socks. Every year at my birthday, they send me more socks. Last year, dark blue. This year, darker black.
I’m hoping that the increased darkness is only a matter of style and not some omen.
To counteract the black, my son gave me a Carolina blue “Cackalacky” billcap.
Sally gave me a dark chocolate Oaxaca Bar (with guajillo and pasilla chillies) — a bit of sweet/bitter darkness with hot spice not unlike that made in Chocolat.

Speaking of darkness: I wonder if anyone besides me was surprised that Woody Allen’s Match Point was somehow described as a comedy by the local movies site!

Match Point R
Comedy sexuality
Woody Allen is back in fine form with this dark and engaging story starring Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, whose chemistry is captivating. – wire 2 hours, 4 minutes.

Along the way, I found audio of Robert Bly reading his translation of Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to my Socks”and other poems at Unity Temple, in Oak Park, Illinois, on October 22, 2005.

Crossing safety – not in the plans?

Today just as Carolina finished off Clemson for the 52nd time in a row at home, WRAL ran a teaser interview with our neighbor Maeda Galinsky, The longer story is to be aired at 11 pm this evening.
Meada was, and will be, talking about the accident that caused the death of her husband, David, recently. David was crossing Fordham Blvd at Manning Drive on his way to meet Maeda at another Carolina game. Maeda’s point is that the road and crossing were not designed with people in mind. That lack of design causes deaths and leaves the drivers having to live with some horrible guilt. The fix is to reevaluate the design of intersections such as Fordham/Manning.

Is a 50% profit margin high enough

Charles R. Eisendrath (via Phil Meyer) writes about “Telling Rotary About the News Business.” Among the many revealing points:

* Business practices: How many of you business people, I ask, make a profit of five percent on sales? Lots. How about ten percent? One or two. Twenty percent? Nobody, and some giggles of disbelief. Well then, how about 50 percent? At that point, somebody asks whether the speaker is putting them on. So I tell them what everyone in journalism knows:

Fifty percent is what prosperous television stations make. Some newspapers also earn profits in that range but in recent years they’ve averaged 20-25 percent. That’s still double what they earned for several decades ending in the mid-1980s, when the steadily increasing profits engineered by corporate owners replaced steady community coverage as the must-do goal of all but the very best, exceptional few.

On Main Street, these figures are incendiary and there’s gasoline close to this fire—right down the road in Detroit. A five percent profit is what auto companies (U.S. or foreign) make in banner years; usually it has been half that. Their margins are slim because of what it takes to make the product reliable.

Which Way the Wind Blows

Last night on WCOM, I was not only the brief poet guest, but I was also the weatherman or at least the weather reader. I can’t remember all about the four days or so of weather prediction that I read. It was handed to me quickly. But I do know that the current weather (for last night) included a bit about the wind speed. None of the later reportlets did. But as a reader, I kept looking for some symmetry in the writing. There were highs and lows. Sunny or cloudy. Not the word breeze or windy after the first time mentioned. At the end, I said something like “no word on wind.” I can’t quite recall exactly. Others who heard did recall, but no one quite had the same story. I’m less interested in that it was me doing the talking and more interested in what different people heard. My son thought I was too emotional about the weather. Another friend was kinder, she said I was dry — seems right for weather this week. Perhaps I was breezy as well.

In related news, Phil Meyer points us to Andrew Postman’s tribute/essay to his father on the 20th anniversary of the publication of “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”

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