Items tagged “books&rdquo
12February
2010
maura @ 8:10 pm
Today is the only day during the year that CUNY is closed but the public schools are OPEN. As if I needed another reason to like our 16th president.
In honor of this day I am doing no work at all. None! And also a couple of errandy things. And reading something for fun.* And I took a very small nap. Woo hoo!
* Just because I’m reading a book about plagiarism doesn’t mean it’s not fun!
Anyway, I have a couple of partially-written things to post here (or elsewhere) but I’m too tired from my day off to finish them now. Here’s some Twitter to tide you over.
RT @notjonathan My first iPhone app is live! http://cryptogram.com/tarot (iTunes http://bit.ly/bLLKH6) DM or @ me if you’d like a free promo code #tarot
1:22 PM Feb 11th from Tweetie Retweeted by you and 1 other
A brisk snowy walk, the quiet of the office before the library opens, taking some time to write. Happy Thursday!
8:40 AM Feb 11th from web
From the parent coordinator at my kid’s school: school is OPEN tomorrow. Best. Email. Ever.
6:27 PM Feb 10th from web
@alevtina Go, City Tech! Snow can’t stop the awesomeness, oh yeah. :)
8:20 AM Feb 10th from Echofon in reply to alevtina
RT @kittenwithawhip: RT @DrinkWellDoGood Southern Foodways Alliance seeking interns for Oral History programs. http://tiny.cc/8tVfD
11:36 PM Feb 8th from Echofon
Dear printer, Actually, paper is *not* jammed in the transport unit. Please get a grip. Thanks, Maura
4:07 PM Feb 8th from web
One of the cats likes to nap on the shelf next to my desk. Study buddy! http://twitpic.com/122mcu
10:23 AM Feb 8th from Echofon
RT @mwesch Check out “The Class” a parody of The Office on technology in the classroom from @LynnSchofClark ’s class at DU http://bit.ly/cerGqP
7:48 AM Feb 7th from web Retweeted by you and 16 others
Watching Fringe + swooning over Olivia Dunham’s awesome black wool coat, as usual. 3 buttons on the sleeves!
10:41 PM Feb 6th from web
Brooklyn, NY = NOpocalypse. Bummed.
3:11 PM Feb 6th from web
Already disappointed that we are not going to get enough snow. Bah.
7:40 PM Feb 5th from web
Gus would like me to know that he does NOT have a giga-memory, GOSH, how can he POSSIBLY remember all of the THINGS he has to DO before bed!
8:41 PM Feb 4th from web
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15November
2009
maura @ 7:35 pm
This has been a weird day. I woke up with a sore throat and a headache and the sinking feeling that I may be getting sick at what’s really not the best time of the semester for it. (Though is there ever really a good time to be sick?) So instead of using this partly sunny + fairly warm day to go for a bike ride with Gus in the morning and maybe schlep us all to the Bronx Zoo in the afternoon, I sat on the sofa and read 400 pages of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and drank herbal tea.
I always feel kind of guilty when we spend the whole day inside if it’s nice out, even when there’s a good excuse. Gus played video games and read nearly a whole book (The Great Cheese Conspiracy, a refugee from my ’70s childhood) and played D+D with Jonathan. Over dinner Gus asserted that he didn’t want to go for a bike ride today anyway. But it still seems somehow wrong to spend the whole day inside. Maybe I am also feeling a bit guilty that I just read today rather than tackling all of the other stuff on my list, much of which can be accomplished perfectly well from the sofa with my laptop.
We did get out yesterday, and in far more inclement weather. We went to Manhattan to see Fantastic Mr. Fox (surprisingly only playing in 2 theaters), which was a good time for the adults + the kid. Gus <3s Roald Dahl, and for the adults the movie was pretty much standard Wes Anderson fare with puppet animals instead of people.
Cloud Atlas is really good. I’m still in the middle of the other Cloud Atlas, which is a bit surreal. And the Mitchell book has a sticker in the back with the correct author information that’s covering a sticker that mislabels the book as the Callanan book. Woah, meta.
I could get to those other tasks now (Gus + Jonathan are playing a little Super Mario Galaxy before bed), but there’s only about 50 pages left in my book and I’m dying to know how it ends. Later, gators.
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2May
2009
maura @ 10:15 pm
This morning* I had an idea for a short story/novel/work of fiction, the second this month. I don’t want to write it, but I do want someone else to, because it sounds like a cool story.
* Where this morning = 4/29, because that’s when I started the draft of this post.
Today’s idea is about pens. Yesterday I went to a meeting and passed around my own pen with the sign-in sheet, and of course it didn’t make it back to me. Which is not a big deal — frankly, the library is nothing if not a repository for pens left behind, so I never want for pens. But I started thinking about pens, how they move around between people. What if there were tracking devices in them, cameras and recorders? What if the pens were semi-intelligent and they had a plan, an agenda?
(Probably this was inspired by the evil pen that kills people in The Lost Room, btw.)
Pens left behind in the library might be part of the story, too. You decide!
The other idea actually got a bit more fleshing out because I started thinking about the last time we visited my mom; it’s a 2-ish hr drive, so I made Jonathan talk to me about it for a while. The basic framework sprang from archaeology: archaeologists assemble knowledge of prehistory from an incomplete record.* No one knows how incomplete it is, and while they work in scientifically rigorous ways there’s still never 100% certainty with any interpretation of the past.
* I remember a great diagram in the shape of an inverted triangle from my archy days that depicted the estimated amount of stuff (animal bones, I think, because that was my bag) that makes it into the archaeological record. Each level of the triangle depicted something else that happens to the bones: carried off by scavenger animals, crushed by accumulating sediment, etc. Probably under copyright; I can’t find it on the interwebs.
(This goes for historical archaeology too, but I feel like the existence of historical records can make a big difference in interpretation.)
Anyway, then I started thinking about ground-penetrating radar, and how it’s been such a boon to archaeology to have the technology to “see” sites before digging them up (and even instead of excavation, in some cases, since excavating a site essentially destroys it). And I started to wonder: what will the next technological breakthrough be? What if a machine were invented that could not only see the shapes of buried objects and features but actually tell you with certainty, this posthole is from a dome-shaped structure made of wood and skins, or this bone fragment is from a domesticated goat? That kind of technology could potentially completely rewrite prehistory and even history as we know it.
As Jonathan and I talked about it we tried to come up with a plot, since this is really just a setup, but we couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve aliens, which is kind of lame (and makes the whole dealie too much a derivative of Battlestar Galactica anyway). And this is probably a book only an archaeologist would love, sigh.
So if anyone wants to take these ideas and run with them, please do! Just write them quickly, because I’m almost out of things to read.
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26April
2009
maura @ 8:41 am
I’ve had a hard time keeping up with leisure reading this semester. I think it’s partly because I’ve been reading lots for a research project I’m starting soon, and also trying to keep up w/general library + higher ed news. Or maybe it’s TV — there seems to have been much more good stuff on lately (and we haven’t even started watching Dollhouse yet).
Another reason for the leisure reading drought is probably because the last piece of fiction I read was Neil Stephenson’s latest 900 page bruiser “Anathem.” It was intense + awesome: compelling and academic scifi with lots of good plot twists in all the right places. I haven’t been so sad about finishing a book since “Time Traveler’s Wife” (which still hurts to think about, actually).
A couple of weeks ago I finished 2 disappointing nonfiction books. And afterwards I experienced an incredibly intense need for fiction, it was really weird. Now I’m reading “Never Let Me Go,” courtesy of our building’s ad hoc basement lending library. It’s pretty good so far, creepy + atmospheric + engaging.
Next up I think I’ll read an old collection of Kelly Link stories, “Stranger Things Happen.” Jonathan recently reminded me that it’s available for free for Stanza, the awesome iPhone ebook reader. And I have a bunch of meetings in Manhattan coming up this week so it’ll be convenient not to have to carry an extra book with me.
One of our recent TV diversions was this 6 hr miniseries that ran on the Scifi Channel a few yrs ago called The Lost Room. The intriguing premise is that there’s a hotel room that disappeared 50 yrs ago, no one knows why. The objects that were in the room have weird powers, and the key makes any door open into the room (and when you leave you can come out of any door that you can envision). It was a good ride for the first 5 episodes — the plot moved fast + hung together well — but the last ep was kind of weak, as if the miniseries had been a pilot for a show that wasn’t picked up.
When we finished watching the show Jonathan proposed that it was kind of like reading Borges or Donald Barthelme or Steven Millhauser or Kelly Link: “They’re all working on the same project. I don’t know what that project is, but clearly they’re all involved.” Which is what made me remember that Kelly Link book in the first place.
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24November
2008
maura @ 9:37 pm
On the heels of last night’s longish post, well, here’s a cop out. I had some insomnia last night and I’m tired, and I want to read the (fiction!) book I got from the library last weekend. It’s a kids book w/a gorgeous cover written by a fellow citizen of the CUNYverse; hope it doesn’t disappoint.
So I leave you with this, which is apparently what happens every day after Jonathan gets home from the coop and leaves his backpack open on the floor as he’s unloading it. And today he took a picture.
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11May
2005
maura @ 8:53 pm
Oh yes, April sure was full, and only sometimes with fun stuff. In brief (and in order):
- We visited my dad in VT
- I got a really heinous head cold
- Me + Jonathan did the dinner/silent auction fundraiser at Gus’ school, which raised a lot of dough (yay!)
- Gus got strep throat and was out of school for almost a week
- I got an AWFUL stomach flu (plus fever!) for 3 days. My mom came up to help and she + Jonathan insisted I go to to the ER, which was actually sort of a nice break from Gus, who’d been a bit feral
And that was that.
Now it’s May and things are better. Finally it’s mostly warm out — Gus and I hit the botanic gardens yesterday after school with our neighbors to play in the pink snow (what he calls the piles of fallen cherry blossoms) and smell the lilacs (purple smell better than white, says he [and I agree]). This weekend our whole building is having a stoop sale which makes me very happy: I get to get rid of our old stuff, make a few bucks, and hang out with the neighbors for a few hours, fun!
I also got four (4!) books out of the library last week, so the great nonfiction drought is over. Powered through the Mamaphonic book* and am really enjoying Unconditional Parenting a lot, much more than I expected, actually. Of course, the problem with any book espousing a parenting philosophy is that what sounds good on paper is often hard to put into practice in the field, when your 3.5 yr old is throwing his shoes down the hall steps rather than bringing them into the house, for example. But I’m game if he is.
*Man I am a SUCKA for the mothering essays. A stone cold sucka. Maybe it’s because they sustained me during that very tough first year with Gus, the no-sleeping-painful-breastfeeding-fussy-baby year. Maybe it’s because I worry that my brain is completely atrophying, and want to reassure myself that other moms feel this way too. Anyway, I at least have stopped buying them — they’re the ultimate literary candy for me and it’s just way more economical to get them from the library.
And anyway, it’s not totally Gus’ fault my brain is mushy. That started before he was born. I’d planned to tell you all about it, but Lost and Alias are almost finished taping and I have a date with 2 weeks worth of unfolded laundry, so I’ll catch you later.
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31March
2005
maura @ 10:38 pm
Our bags are packed + ready to go, the alarm is set for 6am tomorrow (oof!), and the car to the airport is reserved for our trip to visit one of our 4 grandparental households, which means that I actually have time to write here. I write spazzy little blog entries every freaking minute in my head, it seems, so why can’t I think of anything to say?
I’ve gotten sucked into reading the (mostly parental) blogiverse lately. It’s so easy to bounce from place to place, read about everyone’s kids and the adorable + infuriating things that they do. Let’s add something from my own day to the mix, shall we?
ADORABLE: Gus woke up from his nap today by saying, “I’m ready to wake up now because I’m not tired anymore”, ran out, Ringo Starr bedhead flying, into the living room, and plopped immediately down to play with his fire truck, as if he’d been thinking about it the whole time he was napping, that he Just Couldn’t Wait to get up and play with it again.
INFURIATING: So then our friends S (mom) and E (daughter) called and I invited them to come over to play, and suddenly he fell into a post-nap grump and said he didn’t want E to come over, which bummed me since we haven’t seen them in a while (and, since I worked at home today, I hadn’t seen another grownup all day besides Jonathan). So S and I chatted on the phone for a while, then suddenly Gus said “I do want E to come play with me,” by which point E had fallen into an accidental nap. Grrr. I believe the spirited kids book calls it “negative first reaction” + “slow adaptibility”.
Also, I am out of things to read (at least nonfiction things, which are my chosen things lately), which is my grownup infuriating thing of the day. Still waiting for a few requests to come in at the library, as well as being pissed off that I can’t get the Mimi Smartypants book or the most recent Ayun Halliday books there (a necessity since our puny leisure budget is pretty much all spent visiting child-friendly restaurants with playdates these days, for sanity’s sake [grownups to talk to, plus beer!]). If I had a laptop or miniPC-type thing I could read the blogiverse while Away From My Desk, but I’d rather hunch over a good juicy Why-America-Doesn’t-Support-Families or Anti-Consumerism tome these days. These are the kinds of books I’ve been into recently (minus the homeschooling stuff, I just can’t get behind that, but maybe that’s because Gus is such a huge spaz). Yes, I’m a humorless hippie, you can stop reading right now.
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