 | Pit Stop | May 6, 2007 |
Change moves in spirals, not circles. For example, the sun goes up and then it goes down. But everytime that happens, what do you get? You get a new day. You get a new one. When you breathe, you inhale and you exhale, but every single time that you do that you're a little bit different then the one before. We're always changing. And its important to know that there are some changes you can't control and that there are others you can.
Dan, (Half Nelson, 2006)
 | Cats | Sep 16, '09 3:32 PM
for everyone |
|  | Six hundred plus photos taken in the course of 3 days, 4 nights in Spain. I will probably delete 30% of them because I took several photos of the same thing just changing the distance, angle, shutter and aperture settings. That said, the photos will take some time before they will be posted on Flickr.
In the meantime, here are some photos of cats playing about in the grounds of the Alhambra. I couldn't resist capturing these rambunctious kittens on my camera, being a cat lover that I am. |
"The greatest joys I believe one can feel is to share that which they find beautiful with someone who otherwise wouldn’t have noticed it."
-Alexis Tioseco (1981-2009) The whole essay can be read here or here. And so the much awaited and much dreaded exam is over... For some reason, I was calm before I took it. Normally, I would feel a little nervous but this time, I was just unfailingly calm. Results will be out in February. Stephane, the moniteur of the Samedi du velo class, said it would take around 45 minutes to reach Satigny. We knew it would take more than that to reach the countryside but he forgot to mention that there is a lot of uphill pedaling involved. The city bike we rented didn't seem to fare well in steep climbs plus on the way back to Geneva, we had a hard time boarding and unloading it from the train. Oh yes, we were too tired to cycle back to the city. By 4 pm, the muscles in our legs were screaming and even if we wanted to explore the vineyards a little bit more, the uphill climb deterred us. We also wanted to rest a while in a cafe but for some reason, the ones in the main street were closed!
The route:
 I think we biked more than 10 kilometers that day. Next destination is Sézenove.  It's a little farther than Satigny if my map reading skills prove me right so I really need to prep up well before this ride.
The thing about postmodernism is it's impossible to pin down exactly what might make a book postmodern. In looking at the attributes of the essential postmodern reads, we found some were downright contradictory. Postmodern books have a reputation for being massive tomes, like David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" -- but then there's "The Mezzanine" by Nicholson Baker, which has just 144 pages. And while postmodern books would, you'd think, have to be published after the modern period -- in the 20th or 21st centuries -- could postmodernism exist without "Tristram Shandy"? We think not. Below is our list of the 61 essential reads of postmodern literature. It's annotated with the attributes below -- the author is a character, fiction and reality are blurred, the text includes fictional artifacts, such as letters, lyrics, even whole other books, and so on. And while this list owes much to George Ducker and David L. Ulin, you can address all complaints to me. And now: The 61 essential postmodern reads! 
Kathy Acker's "In Memorium to Identity" 
Donald Antrim's "The Hundred Brothers" 
Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin"
Paul Auster's New York Trilogy
Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine"
J.G. Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition"
John Barth's "Giles Goat-Boy"
Donald Barthelme's "60 Stories"
John Berger's "G"
Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser"
Roberto Bolaño's "2666"
Jorge Luis Borges' "Labyrinths"
William S. Burroughs' "Naked Lunch"
Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"
Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler"
Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch"
Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Henry J. Waugh, Proprietor" 
Stanley Crawford's "Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine"
Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves"
Don Delillo's "Great Jones Street"
Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"
E.L. Doctorow's "City of God"
Geoff Dyer's "Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D. H. Lawrence"
Umberto Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana"
Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
Steve Erickson's "Tours of the Black Clock"
Percival Everett's "I Am Not Sidney Poitier"
William Faulkner's "Absalom! Absalom!"
Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated"
William Gaddis' "JR"
William Gass' "The Tunnel"
John Hawkes' "The Lime Twig"
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter"
Aleksandar Hemon's "The Lazarus Project"
Michael Herr's "Dispatches"
Shelley Jackson's "Skin"
Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn"
Ben Marcus' "Notable American Women"
David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress"
Tom McCarthy's "Remainder"
Joseph McElroy's "Women and Men"
Steven Millhauser's "Edwin Mullhouse"
Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"
Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire"
Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds"
Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor"
Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"
Philip Roth's "The Counterlife"
W.G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn"
William Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
Gilbert Sorrentino's "Mulligan Stew"
Christopher Sorrentino's "Trance"
Art Spiegelman's Maus I & II
Laurence Stern's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy"
Scarlett Thomas' "PopCo"
Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five"
David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"
Colson Whitehead's "John Henry Days"
-- Carolyn Kellogg  | Teaser 2 | Aug 25, '09 5:23 PM
for everyone |
 Buda Castle at night
This was taken on my first night in Budapest. I was lucky I met two fantastic guys who happen to be photo geeks as well. We stopped frequently whenever we saw an interesting subject, took photos, talked and had a great time. | Budapest | Aug 24, '09 4:07 PM
for everyone |
Teaser 1
Chain Bridge
 From Jessica Zafra's blog: I need to be reminded that although life is cruel and full of sorrow, it holds out the possibility of the sublime. Just sharing a wonderful blog post from the NYT.
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/averted-vision/?em
The author writes "We do each have a handful of those moments, the ones we only take out to treasure rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy.” One of the last times this happened to me, inexplicably, I was driving on Maryland’s unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio."
| excited | Jul 30, '09 4:50 AM
for everyone |
Is gonna travel again.... Whooopeee. As I would say when I was younger, 8 more sleeps!  And I am off. | | le travail d'artisans, des animations et scènes de vie du 16eme siècle (le temps de Calvin) |
| | sort of like Mardi Gras... |
Seriously annoyed with people who cannot spell properly in English and Tagalog. Just because it is an email doesn't mean one has to write the words phonetically. Argh. More annoyed with people who put h's on nicknames when there isn't!!! (So, for the record, never spell my nickname with an h if you don't want to incur my ire.)  I've been reading poetry again after a break of more than one year. The ones I read in grad school have been pretty dense and painful that I opted to concentrate on prose. Lately, however, I have been enamored with Whitman's The Leaves of Grass. I have forgotten how difficult it is to read poems but I have all summer to enjoy his work.  It's hard to feel exuberant when for the past few months I've been feeling pretty down in the dumps... I'm cautious of whatever happiness I have right now that I want to keep things to myself. When you've worked hard to be happy, it's heartbreaking to see someone just crush it with a thoughtless word carelessly thrown. The thing is, it is still fragile, it is still unsteady.
I have somehow lost myself when I got to Geneva. I am happy to find it again.
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