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I just finished reading "The Intuitionist", by Colson Whitehead, a strange but ultimately winning novel about race and intrigue amongst elevator inspectors. This choice was itself inspired by some great lectures and readings I found online with Harvard's Du Bois Institute -- discussions with contemporary black writers, as well as great lectures on anthropology, sociology, etc.

Also, without quite meaning to, I've started learning a bit of French. What happened was I became a fan of the "Journal de France" newscast they used to run with English subtitles on cable. But now that's off the air, and so I have/get to web-stream it from the source -- thus I'm finding I need to pick up a bit more vocab to have it make any sense.

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Photo of the pseudo-stream in our backyard (can't even see the plastic this way); and a self-portrait in the storm sewer out front.

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[email fragment]

Excellent with the accordion and all. [...] Due to my preadolescent enthusiasm for Weird Al Yankovic, I've long had a soft spot for that most huggable of instruments. Which probably goes at least part way to explaining the disproportionate zydeco representation in my current music library. Not to mention the place of Paul Simon's "Graceland" near the top of the all-time-favorite-albums pile -- with its brilliant mixing the accordions of Soweto, Louisiana, and East L.A.

[...]

Books I've been reading: Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter, about John Brown's family; a collection of short stories by gen-x Spanish-language authors. [Se habla espan~ol: voces latinas en USA] Como se dice epiphany? Not sure, not that I'm good enough to recognize them when they pop up. And I think I'm going to try a Nobel laureate a month for 2005 -- Mr. January has been the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert (depending on how you count he's my second-favorite Slavic poet, or my least-favorite, the one other being Old Man Milosz, RIP [not true -- you forgot Zbigniew Herbert, and one or two more -- ed.]). Mr. Feb will be Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese novelist.

  
A couple of auto-timed self-portraits on the park bench across the street from my house. I worry this might be a violation of the pseudo-anonymity of this blog. But at least there are still the sunglasses.

  
Right now my morning walks have the sun at such a height that, when the clouds break and the pavement's wet, all sorts of great reflections result. I took these a couple of weeks ago.

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Fog and spiderwebs from my 5min. walk a few mornings back.

Boston, PA

Digital camera for Christmas + finally figuring out flickr's online photo stuff = images, maybe. We'll start with the above, a (literal) screenshot from last Sunday night's Journal de France newscast. The story was about major US cities affected by the recent blizzard. Two for three ain't bad.

The uncritical enthusiasm of the European intellectual for tribal culture appears in the exclamation of the architect Le Corbusier on first seeing Manhattan: "It is hot-jazz in stone." It appears again in the artist Moholy-Nagy's account of his visit to a San Francisco night club in 1940. A Negro band was playing with zest and laughter. Suddenly a player intoned, "One million and three," and was answered: "One million and seven and a half." Then another sang, "Eleven," and another, "Twenty-one." Then amidst "happy laughter and shrill singing the numbers took over the place."

Moholy-Nagy notes how, to Europeans, America seems to be the land of abstractions, where numbers have taken on an existence of their own in phrases like "57 Varieties," "the 5 and 10," or "7 Up" and "behind the 8-ball." It figures. Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an industrial culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures.

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

NY Times: Is Alaska's Only Elephant Happy? Some say that Maggie should be moved from the Alaska Zoo to a warmer climate where she could get more outdoor exercise. Zoo officials have responded with plans to build her a treadmill.

LA Times: TAIPEI, Taiwan — The radio show called "Special Communications" was an unlikely hit, given that it consisted of announcers reading strings of numbers for 15 minutes.
Taiwan used the mind-numbing program in the 1980s to send coded messages to its spies in mainland China. But like many Taiwanese propaganda broadcasts, it could also be picked up locally. To the surprise of many at the government-run Radio Taiwan International, the show soon developed a cult following among Taiwanese. [full story]