Tag: 59’th year

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running


This book is a memoir by the Japanese novelist Hideki Murakami
about the place long-distance running has in his life.

I’ve enjoyed a couple of his novels (
Kafka
on the Shore and Norwegian
Wood) quite a bit, and I enjoyed this memoir too.

He took up running when he stopped running a
bar/restaurant/jazz club so that he could write full time.
Running the bar had been fairly active work, but sitting at the
desk and writing wasn’t. So he needed to do something and he
decided on running. He runs at least one marathon a year, and
has experimented with triathlons and ultra-marathons.

He often discusses the
relationship between running and writing novels:

Right now I’m aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is
less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance,
that’s all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like
it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I
run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end
of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of
tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day
right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and
the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest
Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to
keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term
projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The
problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed — and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

He also says things that resonate with me about the importance
of daily practice:

Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running
every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I
push myself? How much rest is appropriate — and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would have definitely been different.

This is a bit how I feel about practicing musical instruments
every day.

There’s also a fair amount of discussion about how aging is
affecting his ability to run, and really good descriptions of
what the last couple of miles of a marathon feel like.

I have friends who run as an important part of their life, and
the way they discuss their times and their injuries isn’t
anything like as interesting as this book.

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Whatever Works

This
movie is a pleasant Woody Allen romp through New York.

If you don’t know Woody Allen, this isn’t where to start. If
you find him irritating, this isn’t going to convince you
that he isn’t. But if you usually enjoy his movies, you will
probably enjoy this one.

The plot is ridiculous, but it is fun to see a family come from
backwoods Mississipi and find fulfillment in academic/artistic/gay
New York.

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Program for the December 17 concert

We’re starting to get settled on the program for the concert
we’re playing at the Boston Public Library at 2 PM on December
17, in the Rabb Lecture Hall. There’s not a lot of time for
rehearsing, so we’re having to limit the amount of new stuff we
play, but these are mostly people who haven’t heard us before,
so it won’t matter to them.

There will be three sections, with me playing Diego Ortiz
Ricercada’s in between sections.

First there will be songs about drinking, dancing, and
smoking. Most of these we’ve performed many times before, and
the one that we haven’t is mostly a vocal solo by a very
experienced performer.

Then there will be a group of “religious” music. When you
first start playing Renaissance music, you tend to think that
everything religious was church music and everything secular was
performed in the home, but in fact there were wide swaths of
Europe where the established church discouraged polyphony in the
church, and people liked it, so they played it in the home. There
are a couple of carols that everybody knows, and a Byrd about
Susanna, and a round about Judith and Holofernes.

The last section will be all Thomas Morley. We’re mixing the
Fantasias from the Two-voyce canzonets with the vocals from both
the two and three voice canzonets.

There’s a flyer, which includes the program
which you should give to all your friends. If you’re someone
who could possibly go to a 2 PM concert in Boston’s Back Bay,
you should come.

Fados

I once went to a live Fados concert, because a Portuguese
friend assured me that I would like it. I did enjoy the music,
but it was vocal music, and I understood very little of the
words. This concert was in New Bedford, where a majority of the
residents probably speak more Portuguese than I do, and I’m sure
it was a vast majority in this audience. The rest of the
audience seemed very enthusiastic, so I’m sure the performers
made the right decision to not bother with trying to put the
words across to non-Portuguese speakers, but I would have
enjoyed it more if I’d known what they were singing about.

This
movie is what I was looking for. The performers are making
no concessions to explaining their performances, but there are
subtitles. The movie just moves from one performance to the
next, often beautiful productions with scenery and dance and
fluid costumes.

There are titles on the performances, but it’s not always clear
whether they’re the location, the name of the song, the name of
the group, or the name of a style. But it really doesn’t
matter.

The director, Carlos Saura, has produced other movies like
this. I’ve seen Flamenco,
which I enjoyed but wasn’t as interested in as I was in Fados.
But Tango
might be worth checking out.

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Group brewing

Yesterday’s was another time-delay post; I was in West Roxbury
brewing a imperial oatmeal stout.

My homebrew club has
discovered the joys of using a 60 gallon liquor barrel as a
fermentation vessel, but of course, homebrewers don’t have the
equipment to brew 60 gallons at a time. But the club
has several dozen people with the equipment to brew 5 gallons at
a time. So the organizing problem is how to get at least a dozen
people to brew their 5 gallons to the same recipe at the same
time.

It isn’t anything that would have occurred to me, since I do
all my brewing on my kitchen stove. But the answer they came up
with last year and refined this year was to get people to bring
their equipment to somebody’s back yard and all brew together.
The way this works is that people with better access to their
back yards than I have have usually concluded that it’s faster
and less messy to do the boil on a propane stove in the back
yard. So in theory, everybody brings their stove, their
brewpot, and their mash-tun to the group brewing site. I said
that I could only bring the pot and the mash-tun (in my case a
10-gallon Gott cooler with a plastic false bottom), and they
assured me there would be an extra propane burner for me to
use.

It was actually a brilliant piece of organizing. There were
about a dozen people brewing, and two or three other people
dropped by to be assistants or just hang out. Some people were
able to brew more than 5 gallons, so we ended up with a couple
of fermenters going besides the barrel, which will be used to
top up the barrel, and to provide a control to see what flavors
are being contributed by the wooden barrel.

They had the grain all crushed and measured, so when you were
ready to mash, you just took a bag and added it to the heated
water. The hops were similarly measured out in little bags for
the 60 minute, 10 minute and 1 minute additions.

One of the assistants manned the grill, so there were sausages
and sweet potatoes for lunch, and donuts, cookies, chile, and apples for breakfast and
snacks. Brewing is mostly waiting around between bursts of
activity, so it was nice to have people to talk to in between
the activity. And of course, you get to see everyone else’s
equipment in action. And we had ideal weather — 50’s and sunny.

My major reason for going was that I haven’t brewed since the
hip arthritis flared up, and I thought it would be good to get
back into it with lots of strong young men around to help with the
heavy lifting. I think they weren’t really any more necessary
than they would have been 15 years ago when I was brewing twice
a month or so. But there was an incident that would have lost
more wort if there hadn’t been assistants easily to hand.

Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade

This is another hot topic on the blogs and forums that discuss
such things. See the slashdot
discussion for examples. The reason people use the Ubuntu flavor of Linux is
that it consistently gives you an upgrade every 6 months, so you
don’t have to be way behind the new, improved versions of
programs, but 6 months is usually enough time to get a set of
tested applications together.

I installed my laptop last week, and have not managed to solve
the problems that my fairly trivial usage on that system shows
up, so it will be a while (or maybe never) before I put it on my
desktop.

The most obvious problem was that the screensaver was asking me
for a password whenever I came back to it. I couldn’t find a
screen where I could tell it not to do that.

I also found a couple of times where the machine was hung when
I came back after being gone for a while, so I removed
xscreensaver, and went with gnome-screensaver, which does have a
screen to tell it not to ask for a password, but it ignores it.

The machine also hung in gnome-screensaver, so I told it not to
run. But it’s still asking me for a password.

This is not behavior I can put up with on the desktop, and if
just going away from the computer is going to break things this
badly, I would say the distribution probably got inadequate
testing.

On the other hand, I haven’t yet found any major problems when
I’m actually using the computer. Firefox, rhythmbox, and Adobe
digital editions under Wine all work fine. There’s one little
glitch with the firefox packaging — you expect there to be a
little firefox icon at the top of the screen. There is a firefox
button, but it’s blank. This is the kind of problem you expect to
encounter in a new distribution. Changing your screensaver
options on you with no path to get them back again is not.

Apparently there are people in the world for whom this upgrade
was easier than the one last April, but I’m not one of them.

The Year of the Flood

This
book by Margaret Atwood is a post-apocalyptic novel set in
the same world as her 2003 Oryx
and Crake. I read that at the time it came out,
and don’t remember it well enough to comment on the
relationships, but I’m sure it illuminates two of the main
characters in that book. As well as providing several new
interesting characters.

One particularly well-written aspect of the book is the
description of the way the different locales (fast food
restaurant, religious commune, corporate enclave…) smell. For
instance, here’s Ren, one of the two main point of view
characters, shortly after she’s moved from the HealthWyzer
compound to the Gardeners’ community:

Rose-scented soap was the best. Bernice and me would take some home, and IÂ’d keep mine in my pillowcase, to drown out the mildew smell of my damp quilt.

(The quilt was mildewed because the Gardeners didn’t use
dryers.)

I recommended the book to a Vegan friend because it’s one of
the few works of literature I’ve run into where there are
vegetarian characters who really think about the relationship
between food and morality.

I enjoyed this one a lot. I don’t know whether it will replace
The
Handmaid’s Tale as my favorite, but I can certainly see
rereading it. And it made me want to reread Oryx and
Crake, too.

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Repulsion

I think this
movie was Roman
Polanski’s first movie in English. I’d say it’s a good one to
start with if you like arty European movies and don’t want to
bother with subtitles. And if you don’t mind movies about mental illness.

The most artful aspect of the movie is the urban sounds. The
beginning of the movie is largely the interaction of Carol, the
main character, played by Catherine deNeuve, who is going mad, and her sister and a
coworker, who have their problems but are dealing with them. The
sister is clearly irritated by the trolley bell which is very loud
in the apartment she and Carol share, but after it passes, she
forgets about it. Carol tenses when it stops, and remains tense,
and then tenses more when the next irritation comes.

Another aspect that’s well done is the way the apartment
looks. One of Carol’s hallucinations is that giant cracks are
opening up in the walls. Of course, there are cracks that should
be fixed; there are ornate plaster ceiling medallions that might well come
down…

Another very well done piece of acting is the smells. Of
course, even people like me who’ve just installed the latest in
home theater equipment don’t have smell-o-vision yet, but one of
the things that happens in this movie is that after her sister
leaves, Carol isn’t coping with anything at all. So she takes a
rabbit out of the refrigerator, and puts it down to answer the
phone, and never gets the ability to put it away. So of course it
attracts flies, which adds to the jangle of annoying sounds. But
after a while, everyone who comes into the apartment wrinkles
their nose in increasing horror, so you really do know how it smells.

If you don’t think too hard about the plot, this is a
remarkably good movie. Of course, someone who can’t put the
rabbit back in the refrigerator couldn’t really murder two
ordinarily fit men on the first try. So of course one of the
things to wonder about is whether that really happened, but if
not, why did the sister scream like that when she got home?

What version to watch

I put this on my Netflix list when the New York Times reviewed
the recent release of the Criterion edition. I have linked to the
blu-ray version, because that’s the one I watched, but I doubt
that this is a movie that particularly needs blu-ray. The extra
dots were probably good for watching plaster cracking, but the
sound (apparently originally in mono), was only mixed to stereo. So if you
don’t bother with director’s commentary (I didn’t), you may well be just as
well off with the $10
older transfer.

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Bonnie’s keepsakes

In the course of cleaning out Bonnie’s house, of course I threw
out all kinds of stuff that would have been necessary if someone
wanted to write a biography of her.

Of course, if someone did want to do that they should have come
and taken all the stuff off my hands, and they didn’t.

I did take a small cedar box with some things she must have
wanted to save, mostly from college or before. I scanned three
letters from that box, so I’m posting them here mostly for her
friends. As far as I know, they’re from before any of her friends
that I ever met knew her.

I apologize for the orientations in the PDF,
and also for its size. Transcribing them was interesting for the
number of errors even highly literate people put up with in a
handwritten note.

Summer job

The last letter was from a woman who had hired her to cook for
her family for the summer of 1963. I think Bonnie did recall this
job fondly; I remember her mentioning the rowboat. She was 20
that year.

Bayberry Bluff
South Orleans, Mass.

July 20, 1963

Dear Mrs. Rogers,

Forgive me for not writing to you long before this to give
you word about Bonny. She is doing a most satisfactory job for
us, unfazed by the size of the family, a refrigerator too small
for the present situation and a gas oven whose regulator is
ailing and irreplacable [sic]. I gave her ample warning on all
these points, but she has handled the situation with composure
and always with a smile, which is a joy to me. And her meals
are so good always!

I hope she is enjoying her summer. We take her in the
sailboat which she seems to enjoy particularly and she takes
many shorter expeditions in the row boat and has one or more
daily swims. We are very glad that she wanted to come to
us.

With kind regards to you and your husband. I am yours
Sincerely,

Susan M. Brooks

Microbiology research

The other two are from Mary
Bunting, who was President of Radcliffe College when
Bonnie was there, but from these letters must also have been
teaching a microbiology course. I had no idea Bonnie was at
all interested in microbiology.

Both letters are postmarked 1962, so Bonnie would have been 18
in the Spring, and turned 19 in June.

PS. — I guess I’ll send you the actual data too.

Radcliffe College
Cambridge 38, Mass

Office of the President

Sunday 4/1

Dear Bonnie:

Your plates were beautiful! The VI series ran approx [table
omitted from transcription]
but there were no variants that I would wish to differentiate on any
plate. There weren’t even any that I would question — ie some
like the ones you showed me before. I gues [sic] they are
pretty rare except in old stock or other aging cultures.

There were some odd differences in size — ie — plates VI
9-12 had small colonies whereas VI 13 — 16 had very large
colonies.

Now What?

Have a good vacation! M.I.B.

Radcliffe College
Cambridge 38, Mass

Office of the President

5/31

Dear Bonni:

Thanks for the excellent report!

You’ve developed a great deal of scientific insight in one
year. It would mean a lot of study but you could do this stuff
if you wanted. In any event I think you have an appreciation of
the demands of investigation which will stand you in good
stead.

Its been nice to have you in class.

Sincerely
Mary I. Bunting

Overheard conversation

My next door neighbor has a 10 year old son, and they were
walking by my door the other day.

The son said, “I can’t wait to be grown up.”

The father asked, “Why’s that?”

The son said, “I want to be able to boss a kid around.”

I don’t think I ever would have put it that way, but I’m pretty
sure that’s exactly the way I felt at his age.