Friday, June 07, 2002

My wife's cry for help: Dear Abby,   When we go camping, I like to bring foods that are nutritious and make sense to our budget.  The trouble starts when the people we are camping with bring all these awesome, tasty snacks and of course, because they are awesome people, they offer to share.  My family, under leadership of my husband, act like those cokes and chips are the only thing between them and eternal salvation.  My resistance, which is saying "there is tapwater and carrots in the cooler...", is worse that futile.  It just makes them eat faster with the fear that the food in front of them will be taken away.  How should I handle this?   -- Losing the battle in Minnesota 4:17:22 PM    comment []

I asked Brian Stenquist about the Monkey Mind, or " the constant background chatter-thoughts of the undisciplined mind ". He said to me, "When the monkey takes over, go to the breath.  The breath is the sweetest fruit in the forest and the monkey always goes to the breath."  He is a wise man and he is right.  A deep breath can subjugate the monkey and make him shut up for long enough to remember who I am.  12:46:56 PM    comment []

My one year old son, Frank, likes to eat stuff.  He got ahold of some magnetic poetry and put a few words away before I caught up to him.  In his diaper the next day were the words "mother" and "rose".  Open to interpretation, I guess. 12:37:06 PM    comment []

More thoughts about Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon wrote the following in an introduction to Slow Learner: "...beginning with something abstract - thermodynamic coinage or the data in a guidebook - and only then going on to try to develop plot and characters. This is simply, as we say in the profession, ass backwards. Without some grounding in human reality, you are apt to be left only with another apprentice exercise, which is what this uncomfortably resembles." This is what someone wrote on the Pynchon mailing list about it: >so is he violating the rule with most if not all of his works? Yes, I believe he is. In ALL of his works. I think his "without some grounding in human reality" phrase is the key to understanding what he meant. He doesn't deny that he is doing things "ass backwards," but he doesn't want it to show. So his task is to hide his trail by applying "human reality" to his structure, and he succeeds to a greater and lesser degree in each of his works. GR is his best IMHO. This helps answer the question about whether you should read any of his books.  His big goal is to overcome this ass-backwards way of writing fiction, meaning his way of goofing on some abstract scientific or social insight and then creating characters around it.  He wants to make you laugh, feel, be disgusted.  And so you read his work wanting to see if he can pull it off.  And sometimes he does and that makes it worth all the work.  7:57:25 AM    comment []