About Fred

Random 10 12-6-13

Last week. This week:

  1. “Hold On” by Tom Waits
    If you live it up you won’t live it down
  2. “It’s All Understood” by Jack Johnson
    And fact and fiction work as a team
  3. “Something Good Coming” by Tom Petty
    And there’s somethin’ lucky about this place
  4. “Shelter From the Storm” by Bob Dylan, guessed by random passer-by
    Try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm
  5. “One Night” by Elvis Presley
    I ain’t never did no wrong
  6. “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley, guessed by Clayton
    ’cause every little thing gonna be all right
  7. “High School Yum Yum” by the Donnas
    There’s no time to brush your teeth
  8. “Dirty Magazine” by Bree Sharp
    Some girls as sweet as a ripe nectarine
  9. “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family, guessed by Occupant
    And if you say, hey, go away, I will
  10. “Keep the Car Running” by Arcade Fire
    The same city where I go when I sleep

Tuesday

I have had worse days, I’ll just say that.

I finished one review report and sent it to the commissioning editor this morning, then kind of unexpectedly did the same for another review report after lunch. Both are projects that I inherited from colleagues who’ve left the company — at their own choosing, and we were sorry to see them both go — and the latter is just one I’m helping to shepherd along until our new development editor starts work in a few weeks. In all honesty, there wasn’t a lot to be done, and I was just compiling the reviews and summarizing what they said. Of course, there weren’t a lot of reviews, so points of consensus were a little scarce on the ground. But the feedback was generally positive, and I think the book will do just fine without me.

I always feel a little weird talking about work here, in part because I’m not sure it’s interesting to anybody else but me. (Then again, I could probably argue that about two thirds or more of what I post here.) I like what I do, but the mechanics of it aren’t necessarily exciting. I do market research, look at courses and enrollments, send out questionnaires and surveys to instructors, get feedback on textbook chapters and pedagogy, look for points of consensus about the strengths we want to highlight and the weaknesses we need to address, and put this all into a format that’s hopefully easily digestible for the book’s editor and its author(s). I do other stuff, taking books from proposal to production to publication, but that’s the main thing. And while textbook research can be surprisingly interesting — I think about pedagogy more now than I ever did as a student — it’s probably not the kind of interesting that’s easily conveyed in a weblog post, much less that’s infectious.

Though, honestly, without all that, the most interesting thing that happened all day was that I forgot my MetroCard at home and had to buy a new one this morning. And if you thought collating and summarizing reviewer feedback was less than scintillating…

Anyway, it was a pretty good day.

Sunday

The Sunday crossword puzzle and my weekly writing group. I don’t ask a lot out of Sunday.

She had been interrogated. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, Sergei thought. There was not a spot of blood, for one thing, and although her left eye was blackened and swollen shut, he knew for a fact that she had arrived here like that. A souvenir of the front, he’d been told, though possibly self-inflicted. Already the medics had seen to it and her other wounds, and she was in better health than most of the other prisoners that had arrived the same day. There was nothing about her now that bespoke of hardship or captivity, much less the fist and boot of a proper interrogation.

The recruits they sent him, these young boys from the country, were so helpless and timid. They handled her with kids’ gloves, if they handled her at all. The duty sheet nailed outside the cell door said she had last been visited three hours ago, shortly after the noonday meal, and questioned. He saw the word forcefully penciled in beneath that but knew it was a joke. The boys meant well, even those who were enlisted only because the farms held no more work, but they wouldn’t know forcefully if it slapped them across the face. They would put their questions to the woman, dutifully repeat the scripts they had been handed, but they did not recognize her danger. They did not understand that you needed real force to loosen the enemy’s tongue, that you survived this war only with cold steel in your veins, and that you should never suffer a witch to live.

He had not seen the witchcraft himself. Even the soldiers who had delivered the prisoners, had faced this woman and her compatriots on the field of battle, would speak only hesitantly about what the hag had done. Darkened skies, a river turned to mud. Sergei had seen these things himself in the war’s early days, before the enemy’s mages had been killed, before he’d lost his leg and had been re-stationed here. Now, though, these magics were less common, more woman’s work, and the soldiers who encountered them were perhaps less prepared to act. They could not even tell him if she’d lost her eye in the volley of fire or…

We got movie sign

Last night, I watched How to Steal a Million, which, while enjoyably pleasant, was maybe less than you’d expect from a romantic heist movie set in Paris starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.

This afternoon, I re-watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I haven’t seen in several years. It’s still quite stunning, and a hugely important work, but it’s a movie I probably admire more than I enjoy. (I’m sort of tempted to seek out the sequel, which I remember having something of the opposite problem.)

After that, I went for a walk, then came back and watched Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. I do think I like his earlier movies, like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo better, but there’s no denying this is much more epic and beautifully shot. Seriously, I could watch the castle attack — which this clip shows but doesn’t really do justice to — almost all day.

After that — I took a short break to go to the local diner with my parents for dinner — I watched John Carpenter’s The Ward, which I was just kind of waiting to be over. It’s really not very good, boring more than anything else, with a twist ending that almost seemed clever the first hundred times I’ve seen it in other movies. A couple of months ago, I watched Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, which is at least interesting in its flaws. Weirdly, unshakably interesting. The Ward, on the other hand, isn’t even representative of Carpenter at his absolute, crazy worst (like the terrible In the Mouth of Madness). There’s nothing distinctive about it at all. It’s not even risibly bad; it just kind of is.

Which isn’t a great way to end the evening or a day spent mostly in movies. But there you have it.

It’s hard to believe the long weekend is almost over. There’s still tomorrow, and I don’t go back to the office on Monday, but it’ll be back to work for me soon. Of course, that’s only for a couple of weeks. When the heck did it become December already?