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Mon May 1 07:37:16 EDT 2017
Slept from ten-thirty to six-thirty. Woke briefly around four.
High of seventy. Showers in the morning.
Work:
- Fix Gab backups
Done.
Scott took the afternoon off.
I think he's a bit upset that Danielle quit (mental health issues, apparently).
The Broadcom NIC in kosmokrator, or its driver, decided to freak out and drop 30% of packets.
A reboot seems to have fixed it.
Didn't have time for lunch or a walk.
Home:
- Update FreeBSD .tmuxrc
Done.
- Finish reading Effective Go, make a few "idomatic go" notes
Done.
https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#data
If not for the archive.org link, I'd assume this was a bit Borges-style tomfoolery.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200411/?read=article_collins
https://archive.org/details/storyofdonmiffas00dabn
> It is difficult to get very far into Don Miff without suddenly holding the book very gingerly, examining the binding for radioactive scorch marks or other signs of time travel, and then finally exclaiming—“What the hell is this?”
> The rhetorical bobbing and weaving, the presumed futuristic reader, the numbered fragments of narrative, the sardonic keeping of everything—book, reader, and himself—all at arm’s length, the neurotic fussing over the means of the book’s own production, the telephonic interruptions in a narrative that is irritated by the very presence of its readers—all these make Dabney seem like a colleague of Vonnegut and Barth, and not some bearded and top-hatted fogy from the era of Horatio Alger and Louisa May Alcott. But there it is, stamped on its title page: 1886.
> If we wonder why Don Miff is forgotten, we might also ask—why did it take seventy years for Moby-Dick to be recognized as a masterpiece? Until the 1920s, it was out of print in the United States, and appreciated in the United Kingdom primarily as a maritime tale. It was not until the excavation of Melville by Lewis Mumford and his fellow critics, and the rise of Modernism, that—oh, look! A masterpiece!
> Which, of course, it is… now.
> To understand this, let us consider furniture. This should be convenient, as I assume you are sitting or laying on a piece of it right now. Yes, furniture. Furniture has a tale to tell us: or, at least, I do, and it happens to be about furniture. The first time I brought the woman who was to be my wife to my parents’ house—oh, the filial moment of terror—she looked around the room we were staying in, appraising the sproingy old loveseat and heavily carved side tables.
> “It’s very 1970s,” she mused.
> This left me perplexed.
> “Honey,” I explained patiently, “there’s… there’s nothing under a hundred years old in this room.”
> “Yes,” she replied with even greater patience, “but this is what people were collecting in the seventies.”
> And so it was: and so it is with literature. Certain authors are, depending on the era one lives in, the furniture that is now being collected. The art that we associate with any given historical period is not an accurate representation of the past; rather, it is what we have chosen to remember as representative of what we would like the past to be. These choices probably say less about the past, and about what our ancestors were reading, than it says about the present and what we would prefer our ancestors to have been reading.
> The past doesn’t change: it can’t change. It is dead. But history—the interpretation of that past—changes constantly, and it is at the convenience of those who wield it in the present. So perhaps for many years we had no need for Moby-Dick to be a masterpiece. But by the 1930s, the whaler’s crew proved a splendid ready-made metaphor of melting-pot America, or of the world itself, and Ahab a handy stand-in for fascist or communist monomania—take your pick. Moreover, Melville’s mixing of narrative forms—what Evert Duyckinck called his “intellectual chowder”—seemed to prefigure the collage-like narratives of John Dos Passos and other Modernists.
Watched a couple of Father Brown episodes.
Played a little Zelda.
Explored the time stop shrine.
Breakfast: carrots, almonds, spinach, coffee
Lunch: nuts
Dinner: sub, fries
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