I have just finished Twisty Little Passages by Nick Montfort.
I am close to the end of The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols.
I just purchased Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem.
Life is good.
Tag: reading
Furor Scribendi
I have finished Off to the Side , and am wiser therefore.
Reading Jim Harrison has always affected me, usually hitting me with strong wanderlust, cabin fever, and a general dissatisfaction with many areas of my life. This time through I drove around a lot, explored those parts of Kent County of which I had always been aware, but never seen. I also tried purposefully to get lost, but what with the sun always directly south and the large number of large roads, this turned out to be impossible.
On Sunday I sat down with my dead-tree journal, an apple, and a bottle ($5.99) of Leelanau Cellars Autumn Red, a wine which has never disappointed. My idea was to enjoy the wine and the apple (which seemed an appropriate pairing) and, sip by sip, describe the experience of drinking.
And I discovered that this wine, which I have always quite liked, does not hold up all that well under close scrutiny. Granted that I am far from a connoisseur of wine, but this just tasted a little…off. Musty. Thick. If chilled in the refrigerator and drunk on a hot summer day it would more than serve, as it is quite dry, but slowly taken at room temperature with a tart apple it suffered.
The argument could be made that one gets what one pays for with wine, but last winter I picked up a case of, uh, some red wine for $20.00 which was excellent, light and dry and a steal at twice the price. Currently my favorite red is St. Julian Great Red ($5.99), which is difficult to beat at any price.
For some interesting writing about food -or using food as metaphor for sex, death, etc.- pick up Harrison’s book The Raw and the Cooked, a collection of his food columns from various magazines during the 1990s.
Next up is the Rowe book Living Philosophy , which should build my brain muscles up to where I can dive into Dostoyevsky after the Thanksgiving holiday.
The Post-Apocalyptic 1800s
Have finished Son of the Morning Star. Now working on Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I am 60 pages into this beautiful, hellish book, and I know, I just KNOW, that when I finish I will wish I had never read it, so I could discover it, again, for the first time. Consider this excerpt, in which a group of men are traveling through the southwestern desert:
“That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geography was not stone but fear.”
Again, when I re-create my book page, I will post a small review.
Pre-launch Blathering
I built ECCESIGNUM using a combination of XML, XSL and PHP on the back end, and XHTML and CSS2 on the front. Thus I have a site which I can change completely by modifying two files: the XSL stylesheet and the CSS stylesheet. One for structure and one for presentation. The XML file contains all of the information necessary for markup and structure, so I could, in theory, have a choose-your-preferences panel which would allow the user to set up combinations of preferences which would make the site look completely different from one user to another.
So now I have to go through and re-create the rest of the site in XML. The largest of the files (the archives) went together smoothly, and the rest await inspiration.
We at BBK Studio have been busy enough that I can hardly bear the sight of code or mark-up at the end of the day. We are meeting handoff deadlines at the rate of about two a week, a feat not easily matched in the web development world.
So to take my mind off of computers I have been reading Son of the Morning Star by Evan Connell. I may post a review when I have finished grokking. I can tell you this, though: Custer was an extraordinary individual, with a temperament and sensibilities more in line with East European nobility than with the men he commanded.