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Casting about
Jan. 7th, 2006 11:59 pm
High temp today, here: -1. Dewpoint then: -3. High dewpoint: -3.
High temp today in TO: 0. Dewpoint then: -2. High dewpoint: -2.
Low temp today on the balcony: -6.5. High: -0.8. Current: -1.3. (RH has been stuck on 79% for three days now. I surmise the hygrometer doesn't work when it's below freezing.)
New batch of literary reviews appeared in the library today. I do believe I'd have to say the NYRB is the most consistently interesting of the three, which kind of annoys me in that it's the most consistently lefty. (I'm funny that way. I only like to like people I don't like. Speaking of which, unsurprisingly enough, last week's Maclean's marked the end of Peter Mansbridge's terminally bland career as a columnist; this week, Marc Steyn is introduced as, more or less, his replacement. You might have expected they'd go right when Ken Whyte took over, but this is pretty sharp right. Marc Steyn is, however, unfortunately, a snide jackass.)
Can't remember what I read where, but along the way, in one of the Brit ones, there was Angela Hewitt, the Canadian concert pianist (who, last I heard of her, seemed to be devoting her life to being the Bach anti-Gould), reviewing a book on pianos. It was very interesting, though I no longer know why, because my brain is broken, because I haven't gotten enough sleep in several weeks, and wolves are after me. Well, there's this: something called "square pianos", which I'd never heard of before, were burned en masse in the early 20th century as piano manufacturers tried to get people to modernize. (I was much horrified last year to learn from a talk on pianos that pianos of all sorts were burned and otherwise scrapped en masse in the early 20th century, since people didn't need them anymore, since they had grammophones.) And also this: the dampers of London pianos, but not those of their Continental counterparts, for some long time were raised and lowered by a lever rather than a pedal, and so London audiences acquired a taste for blurry piano music (or, perhaps, alternatively, I suspect, a distaste for the piano). And some pianos at some point had a pedal that raised and lowered the lid of the piano.
Elsewhere, a review of a variety of books on Joseph Smith. Is it just me, or are the Mormons, like, breaking out or something? It's probably just me. I wouldn't have even heard of the movie (and I must say, that's an oddly sparse IMDB entry, and especially strange that there's no comments) if I hadn't been to Salt Lake City in the fall. (It was, of course, a big freakin' deal in the SLC newspaper.)
Apart from that, I have no clue what I read today, though I spent a lot of time reading it, whatever it was, and it seemed all very interesting and important at the time, so important that it was quite necessary, of course, for bad faith and moral luck to be delayed and delayed and delayed. There was, however, eventually, this (a propos to a comment in the neighbourhood), in Being and Nothingness: "Take a mode of being which concerns only myself: I am sad. One might think that surely I am the sadness in the mode of being what I am. What is the sadness, however, if not the intentional unity which comes to reassemble and animate the totality of my conduct? It is the meanig of this dull look with which I view the world, of my bowed shoulders, of my lowered head, of the listlessness in my whole body. But at the very moment when I adopt each of these attitudes, do I not know that I shall not be able to hold on to it? Let a stranger suddenly appear and I will lift up my head, I will assume a lively cheerfulness. What will remain of my sadness except that I obligingly promise it an appointment for later after the departure of the visitor?"
Here's that bit of Camus, that I'd wanted to set just that thought of Sartre's (though I hadn't known it was Sartre's, but it's everyone's, after all) against: "Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in a mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful."
That passage, I'm fairly certain, I first read when it was posted to soapbox--the UNIX-based mini-usenet back at Queen's, which led me to a.g., which led me here. To here, and here, and here. (Maybe it was posted by the same guy who posted, one day: "Mon chien est mort aujourd'hui." To which the guy who led me to a.g. replied, "It's *ma mere* est mort aujourd'hui." To which the first guy responded, "Yes, but my mother didn't die today. My dog did." That just killed me.)
High temp today in TO: 0. Dewpoint then: -2. High dewpoint: -2.
Low temp today on the balcony: -6.5. High: -0.8. Current: -1.3. (RH has been stuck on 79% for three days now. I surmise the hygrometer doesn't work when it's below freezing.)
New batch of literary reviews appeared in the library today. I do believe I'd have to say the NYRB is the most consistently interesting of the three, which kind of annoys me in that it's the most consistently lefty. (I'm funny that way. I only like to like people I don't like. Speaking of which, unsurprisingly enough, last week's Maclean's marked the end of Peter Mansbridge's terminally bland career as a columnist; this week, Marc Steyn is introduced as, more or less, his replacement. You might have expected they'd go right when Ken Whyte took over, but this is pretty sharp right. Marc Steyn is, however, unfortunately, a snide jackass.)
Can't remember what I read where, but along the way, in one of the Brit ones, there was Angela Hewitt, the Canadian concert pianist (who, last I heard of her, seemed to be devoting her life to being the Bach anti-Gould), reviewing a book on pianos. It was very interesting, though I no longer know why, because my brain is broken, because I haven't gotten enough sleep in several weeks, and wolves are after me. Well, there's this: something called "square pianos", which I'd never heard of before, were burned en masse in the early 20th century as piano manufacturers tried to get people to modernize. (I was much horrified last year to learn from a talk on pianos that pianos of all sorts were burned and otherwise scrapped en masse in the early 20th century, since people didn't need them anymore, since they had grammophones.) And also this: the dampers of London pianos, but not those of their Continental counterparts, for some long time were raised and lowered by a lever rather than a pedal, and so London audiences acquired a taste for blurry piano music (or, perhaps, alternatively, I suspect, a distaste for the piano). And some pianos at some point had a pedal that raised and lowered the lid of the piano.
Elsewhere, a review of a variety of books on Joseph Smith. Is it just me, or are the Mormons, like, breaking out or something? It's probably just me. I wouldn't have even heard of the movie (and I must say, that's an oddly sparse IMDB entry, and especially strange that there's no comments) if I hadn't been to Salt Lake City in the fall. (It was, of course, a big freakin' deal in the SLC newspaper.)
Apart from that, I have no clue what I read today, though I spent a lot of time reading it, whatever it was, and it seemed all very interesting and important at the time, so important that it was quite necessary, of course, for bad faith and moral luck to be delayed and delayed and delayed. There was, however, eventually, this (a propos to a comment in the neighbourhood), in Being and Nothingness: "Take a mode of being which concerns only myself: I am sad. One might think that surely I am the sadness in the mode of being what I am. What is the sadness, however, if not the intentional unity which comes to reassemble and animate the totality of my conduct? It is the meanig of this dull look with which I view the world, of my bowed shoulders, of my lowered head, of the listlessness in my whole body. But at the very moment when I adopt each of these attitudes, do I not know that I shall not be able to hold on to it? Let a stranger suddenly appear and I will lift up my head, I will assume a lively cheerfulness. What will remain of my sadness except that I obligingly promise it an appointment for later after the departure of the visitor?"
Here's that bit of Camus, that I'd wanted to set just that thought of Sartre's (though I hadn't known it was Sartre's, but it's everyone's, after all) against: "Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in a mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful."
That passage, I'm fairly certain, I first read when it was posted to soapbox--the UNIX-based mini-usenet back at Queen's, which led me to a.g., which led me here. To here, and here, and here. (Maybe it was posted by the same guy who posted, one day: "Mon chien est mort aujourd'hui." To which the guy who led me to a.g. replied, "It's *ma mere* est mort aujourd'hui." To which the first guy responded, "Yes, but my mother didn't die today. My dog did." That just killed me.)
