"A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendship, all the
enjoyments of sense and reason; and indeed all the sweets of life."
Joseph Addison, The Spectator, Dec. 29, 1711
Younger son has been reading Future Tech, and he was particularly interested in Asimo, a humanoid robot created by Honda. Honda claims that Asimo does not refer to Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer who came up with the three laws of robotics for his stories. The Wikipedia has a pretty thorough article on Asimo.
...3) Listening to an album all the way through
The single is one of the unlikely beneficiaries of the internet – a
development which can be looked at in two ways. There's no longer any need
to endure eight tracks of filler for a couple of decent tunes, but will "album
albums" like Radiohead's Amnesiac get the widespread hearing they
deserve?...
...14) Dead time
When was the last time you spent an hour mulling the world out a window, or
rereading a favourite book? The internet's draw on our attention is
relentless and increasingly difficult to resist....
[This is why we are totally offline on vacation. For the first time, daughter is bringing a laptop so that she can write, but we won't connect to the internet. We hardly watch any TV on vacation either. We did bring a huge bag of games, and many bags of books.]
...Then,
out of the blue, my agent got a call. Some guy named Vince Vaughn was
interested in talking abt film deal. . . and I, as a
not-typically-a-movie-person, had no freaking clue who this guy was. I
googled him. I found an article about this documentary on graffiti art
& music & Northern Ireland, & I read some interviews, &
I learned that a) he's kinda kickass interesting and b) he made films
both as an actor and a producer.
... Caroline Thompson (our top choice!) wanted to write the screenplay.
*pauses*
Ok, now I've already said that I don't do movies, right? There are exceptions. Caroline has written several of them. In fact, i own several
films that she's written. [NOTE: I own maybe a dozen films. My family,
of course, has somme, but I personally don't buy many movies.] She
wrote The Secret Garden (which is one of 2 VHS tapes I own,
the other is Hamlet which I bought for a class I was teaching back when
VHS was what we used in the classroom). She also wrote Nightmare Before Christmas .
. . which became weirdly "meant to be" be when Caroline commented on
the shirt I was wearing in my author picture for WL. I bought myself a
Jack hoodie the day I sold the books (March 2006) as my
gift-for-selling. Yeah, I could've NEVER guessed that Caroline would
one day adapt my book.
I've seen most everything she's written.
I've talked to her & emailed with her & generally could not
think of anyone I would trust more. She gets it. She gets my world, my
characters, folklore, fairy tales, & feminism. With Universal,
Wild West Picture Show Productions, & Caroline, I have faith that
my texts are in the right hands.
And--continuing with the surreality--they have totally kept me involved.
But, it's an interesting article. I liked the part best near the end:
Pleasure reading is also known as "ludic reading." Victor Nell has studied pleasure reading (PDF). Two fascinating notions:
When we like a text, we read more slowly.
When we're really engaged in a text, it's like being in an effortless trance.
Ludic
reading can be achieved on the Web, but the environment works against
you. Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story
again.
I suppose ludic readers would be the little sloths
hiding in the jungle while everyone else is out rampaging around for
fresh meat.
So, I'm a little sloth, enjoying my online ludic reading. My favorite things to read are thoughtful posts that present ideas in a new way (serious, dreamy, spicy, whatever) - the opposite of what they recommend.
Speaking of thoughtful posts, I don't know if I've mentioned from these hills: Beauty & Wisdom from Appalachia before. It's one of my daily reads, and younger son and I spent a while yesterday evening looking through the current month's posts. She has beautiful photos, and she includes poetry, quotes, and sometimes her own reflections. I was going to add links to some of my favorites, but I don't really have any - I enjoy them all. I've added it to my list of links (to the right).
Now, this may seem strange from someone who writes about pretty dresses
(mostly) every day, but: You Don't Have to Be Pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your
co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe
it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it
to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for
occupying a space marked "female".
I'm not saying that you
SHOULDN'T be pretty if you want to. (You don't owe UN-prettiness to
feminism, in other words.) Pretty is pleasant, and fun, and satisfying,
and makes people smile, often even at you. But in the hierarchy of
importance, pretty stands several rungs down from happy, is way below health, and if done as a penance, or an obligation, can be so far away from independent that you may have to squint really hard to see it in the haze.
But
what does you-don't-have-to-be-pretty mean in practical, everyday
terms? It means that you don't have to apologize for wearing things
that are held to be "unflattering" or "unfashionable" -- especially if,
in fact, they make you happy on some level deeper than just being
pretty does. So what if your favorite color isn't a "good" color on
you? So what if you are "too fat" (by some arbitrary measure) for a
sleeveless top? If you are clean, are covered enough to avoid a
citation for public indecency, and have bandaged any open wounds, you
can wear any color or style you please, if it makes you happy...
