Steven desJardins

Marriage Equality

2008-07-01T18:28:18Z

I've committed myself to donating money¹ to the pro-marriage² campaign in California. Does anyone know which group would be the most effective and meritorious donatee?

1: I purchased a bad poem, in the verse form³ and on the subject⁴ of my choice.

2: Definition of 'pro-marriage': the side which is in favor of allowing people to marry. For some reason which I just cannot understand, this definition is not universally accepted.

3: A villanelle.

4: The 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

An Obvious Oversight

2008-06-08T19:06:27Z

One very obvious point I should have made in my last post, but didn't, is that Clinton got really crappy press. Some of it was her fault for doing and saying dumb stuff, but mostly it was the same sort of piling on that hammered Al Gore in 2000. It seems likely that in a fair fight, unhampered by press misogyny or Clinton Derangement Syndrome, she would have squeaked out just enough additional delegates to take the prize. (Or perhaps not; Obama's district-by-district tactical maneuvering was brilliant.) I think it's a good thing that Obama won the nomination, but if the press managed to change the course of the election, that's very bad; media bias is an extremely pernicious force in the US, and I hate to see it win any victories.

Hooray Obama

2008-06-06T11:00:13Z

It took me surprisingly long to decide which candidate to support, and I think events have vindicated my choice. I vacillated between Obama and Edwards for a while, but eventually decided that while Edwards's policies might be a bit better, Obama was a much better campaigner. Clinton has impressed me more on policy as time goes on, but I find her mindset unpleasantly authoritarian and I dislike her political strategists immensely (they're the same ones who sneered at Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy a few years ago).

Still, I have to give Clinton credit for coming in a very close second, despite running a campaign that was in many ways atrociously dumb. Obama had a plan for each Congressional district, Clinton seemed to think she could ignore whole states and somehow rely on "momentum". It shows how appealing a figure she is, that she could do so many dumb things and still come close to winning. Mark Schmitt has an interesting article analyzing her economic message. It may be that she's succeeded in discovering a new way to talk about the economy, but had the misfortune to be overshadowed by an even more groundbreaking campaign. Let's hope she has a long and productive career in the Senate.

Caroline the Moderately Surprising

2008-05-05T02:41:40Z

Back when I was in middle school, I took the SAT's as part of a Johns Hopkins research program, and did pretty well. The program's still going on, and my niece Caroline, who's in sixth grade now, took the SCAT test last fall.

The awards ceremony was today. Caroline had the highest quantitative, the highest verbal, and the highest combined scores in the state of Maryland.

Even for a family that's accustomed to doing well on standardized tests, that's moderately surprising.

Unexpected Discoveries

2008-03-05T07:27:41Z

I'm almost finished with a novel for Project Gutenberg, a juvenile pulp paperback called A Prisoner of Morro written during the Spanish-American War, set in the Spanish-American War. I think this is one of the ones I picked up for a few dollars at World Fantasy Convention, when one of the dealers started heavily discounting some of his stock.

Today I started poking around on the web to see what I could find out about the author, Ensign Clark Fitch, U. S. N. What I found was that this was part of a series of books a young author wrote under a pseudonym, a few years before he began publishing under his own name: Upton Sinclair.

I think it's important to preserve cheap pulp paperbacks, to preserve a large sample of the popular literature of previous eras before it vanishes forever. It feels odd—and good—to discover that one of these books is more significant than I suspected.

(It is, incidentally, not a good novel, but he was sixteen years old when he wrote it, and was writing at the rate of fifty-six thousand words a week.)

New Year's resolution

2008-01-01T06:18:32Z

I'd like to learn Hungarian. It would be nice if I could get to the point of being able to puzzle out an average written text, with the help of a dictionary. My hypothesis is that that's the point where learning the language goes from being difficult and frustrating, to slightly less difficult and actually kind of fun.

Undistributed Proofreading

2007-12-27T13:17:37Z

I decided to do one project solo, without putting it through Distributed Proofreaders. It was a short book, and I thought it would be a good experience.

Biggest problem: the tools assume that the book's been stitched together from DP from individual page files. Starting with a single text file means that there are no page markers to work with, which means the program can't associate the scans of each page with the associated text. Makes it harder to double-check things. I'd definitely want to come up with a work-around before doing this again.

As for the proofreading itself, I think the accuracy is probably pretty good. I read through the text file once, then ran the spell-checker and various automated tests, and found about a dozen typos I'd missed on the first pass (including obvious ones like "flre" for "fire"). That's more than I'd like to have missed, but not so many that I'm seriously concerned.

Still, it can use another pass to try to catch more errors. It'll probably be a few days before I can upload it, anyway, since somebody has to check that it's in the public domain before Project Gutenberg will accept it. (It was published in 1878, so there's no real question, but they usually only review the copyright clearances about once a week.) So I'll wait to get the clearance, then read through it one more time. In the meantime, if you want to take a look, I've put The Forest King; or, The Wild Hunter of the Adaca, by Hervey Keyes, up on my website.

The Chauvinism of Missionaries

2007-12-22T06:59:11Z

I'm currently proofing the account by a missionary of his time in India. It's fairly interesting when religion isn't the subject, tolerable when discussing Christianity in isolation, and infuriatingly bigoted when contrasting Christianity to native religions or discussing native religions without reference to Christianity.

I just came to a passage which is a mild, but otherwise typical, example.

Once, when thirty miles away from Ranee
Khet, I met a lad whom I recognized as an old pupil.
I asked him if he remembered what he had been taught.
He said he did. He went to a house close at hand,
brought a copy of St. Luke's Gospel, read at my request
the fifteenth chapter, and explained its meaning with an
accuracy which surprised me. At the same place I
met a man of a different order. He told me he was
going to a mela, to which I was also proceeding. I asked
him what he was to do there. He said he was to bathe,
to wash away his sins. I asked him what was the sin
which oppressed him. He said, "I am a husbandman.
In ploughing my fields I destroy much life, which is a
great sin. This is the worst thing with which I am
chargeable." The lad taught in the school knew something
of what sin was, as the poor man did not.

To me, it sounds more the other way around. The poor man has a thoughtful conception of sin, while the lad taught in school merely parrots what he's been told. But the missionary sees any deviation for Christian thought as mere error, so a sophisticated philosophy which differs from his own is interpreted as amusing ignorance. If he's typical of missionaries of the period, it's no wonder they had (by his own account) virtually no success in making converts, despite decades of effort.

The Melting-Pot

2007-12-19T22:24:34Z

It's been a while since I mentioned any of the books I've been reading, or posting. I should try to catch up with the backlog; it's nice having a record. In the meantime, I wanted to show off the HTML version of The Melting-Pot, by Israel Zangwill, which I think turned out very well.

Accessorize my e-Book

2007-12-05T04:54:39Z

I bought a Sony Reader Digital Book to take with me on long trips, so I don't have to carry a heavy bag full of books. I've read a couple of books on it and I'm reasonably satisfied.

The biggest problem is the cover, which is made of leather or a leather-like material. The pictures in the online store don't emphasize the cover, so I didn't realize this until I had it. I'm going on a vegetarian tour of India next month, and I'd rather not make a bad impression. Unfortunately, the replacement covers I can find are all either leather (and expensive), or amazingly ugly (and expensive). My idea is to make a sort of slipcover for it—get a piece of denim that's somewhat larger than the cover, fold it over (cutting out a notch where the brackets are), and staple the interior folds in place. (Sewing would be better, but I can't sew.) If the craft-y people reading this think this will/won't work, or have a better suggestion, I'd appreciate hearing from them.

I'd also appreciate suggestions for what books to load onto it. So far I've loaded it with public domain books by Frank Richard Stockton, Rafael Sabatini, Ernest Bramah, Alexandre Dumas, Anthony Trollope, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, Mór Jókai, and Sir Walter Scott. I also downloaded a travel book by Harry de Windt, and plan to look for more travel books in the PG catalog.

I also plan to get some in-copyright works as well, but I haven't found much that's available, that I want to read, and that I don't already own. A few books by Lawrence Watt-Evans, some Robert E. Howard, a John M. Ford Star Trek novel. Out-of-print s.f. is probably my best bet, but I'm not sure what's out there.

Lars and the Real Girl

2007-10-25T04:42:46Z

Lars and the Real Girl is the best movie I've seen in a long time. Lars is a solitary person with severe social anxiety—you describes other people's touch as like the feeling you get after your foot gets numb from the cold, then starts to warm up. A co-worker is obviously pining after him, but the idea plainly terrifies him. And worst of all, everyone is pestering him to have dinner, get a girlfriend, don't spend so much time alone.

So one day...he orders a sex doll. And he introduces her to his family as his new girlfriend, Bianca, a Brazilian missionary, who has to use a wheelchair to get around, who doesn't speak much because her English is so poor, who doesn't have any clothes because the airplane lost her luggage. He's delusional. And the psychiatrist they bring him to tells them to go along with. The delusion is serving a purpose, even if they don't know what it is, and the best thing to do is play along, while bringing him in for weekly therapy.

And soon the whole town is playing along. Because, really, what else are they going to do? They like Lars. And it's fun to pretend. Soon Bianca has more of a social life than Lars does. And in his companionship with the doll, and his sessions with the psychiatrist, Lars slowly finds his way past the anxieties that have held himself back so long.

The premise, reduced to a single line, sounds like a comedy. And it is a very funny movie. But at its heart it's a serious movie, because the important relationship is the one Lars is most afraid of—the love between Lars and the real girl. This is a movie that could go wrong in so many different ways, yet never does. It always treats Lars, and his delusions, with respect.

Business Advice

2007-10-20T01:47:01Z

I'm scanning Harold Whitehead's Dawson Black: Retail Merchant, a novel intended to illustrate sound business practices. At one point, Dawson Black proposes the following motto:

Eternal humping is the price of Success.

E-books of the Week

2007-10-18T01:13:08Z

I haven't uploaded any books to Project Gutenberg recently, but I've scanned several.

Fifty-Two Stories For Girls is just that, fifty-two stories ranging from three to nineteen pages, in the categories School and Home; Girlhood and Youth; Pluck, Peril, and Adventure; In the World of Faery; and Romance in History.

Dainty's Cruel Rivals is an 1898 pulp romance by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller. I've put in the St. Valentine's Day queue, meaning it won't be released into the proofreading rounds until then. I ordinarily don't scan things so far in advance, but since I'm falling a bit behind in my post-processing, I thought it was a good idea.

I also scanned two 1918 serials from All-Story Weekly magazine, which somebody removed from the magazine and rebound. The Pirate Woman by Captain Dingle is billed on the cover as "A Breathless Romance of the Caribbean", while Claire by Leslie Burton Blades is "The blind love of a blind hero, by a blind author."

Books of the Week

2007-10-18T00:59:03Z

My Happy Days in Hell is a sort of novelized autobiography by George Faludy—I presume it's broadly accurate, but I suspect some of the incidents are embroidered. It's an interesting look at Hungary's slide into totalitarianism. Faludy fled Hungary in 1938, then fled Paris in 1940 after the Germans invaded. He lived in Morocco for a while, before emigrating to the United States. After the war, he returned to Hungary, knowing it wasn't safe, but wanting very much to be home again. He saw the new Communist government consolidate power and conduct show trials, and was not surprised when he was arrested, made to sign a false confession, and shipped to a labor camp where he was expected to starve to death. The most compelling part of the book is the final section, where he describes how he and his fellow prisoners schemed to get extra food or to minimize the energy they consumed, and worked to keep their spirits up.

Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik is the fourth book in her Napoleonic dragon series. It's somewhat darker than the earlier books, as her heroes sail to Africa to find the cure for a dragon plague and the British slave trade takes on a central role in the plot. It's definitely one of those books where you're meant to admire the hero and identify with him, and while I wouldn't want a steady diet of that sort of book, they're fun to read every once in a while.

Don't Try This At Home is an anthology of short essays from famous chefs describing culinary disasters and how they dealt with them. It's a mixed bag; most of the chefs tell a story about some other chef they happened to be working with, or something that's pretty much off-theme, but there are some good stories about things that went wrong in the kitchen and how they salvaged it.

Wizards at War is the eighth book in Diane Duane's series, and the formula is growing a bit tired. The wizards keep throwing around more power with each book, the stakes keep getting higher, and it's getting farther away from what wizardry was about in the first book: talking to things and finding out what they want. It's not a bad book, but a lot of the heart has been replaced by flash and bang.

E-books of the Fortnight

2007-10-06T18:22:45Z

I've uploaded three books to Project Gutenberg since my last update.

The first is Debts of Honor, by Maurus Jókai, a 19th century Hungarian novelist. At his best, he reminds me of Dumas, with characters so perfect they become larger than life. Of the characters in this novel, my favorite is the wealthy eccentric, who delights in tweaking the noses of the civil authorities with his flagrant atheism and irreverence.

The second is Perils and Captivity, an 1827 book containing three narratives from the French: The sufferings of the Picard family after the shipwreck of the Medusa, in the year 1816; Narrative of the captivity of M. de Brisson, in the year 1785; and Voyage of Madame Godin along the river of the Amazons, in the year 1770. The wreck of the Medusa was a major scandal, as scores of passengers were abandoned on a raft without food or water, and most were murdered or died of exposure before the few survivors were finally rescued. Pierre Raymond de Brisson was shipwrecked off the coast of Senegal and enslaved. Madame Godin was the only survivor of a party travelling down the Amazon River. I'm especially pleased to have finished this one, because the stories are both interesting and historically valuable.

The third is Frank Merriwell's Pursuit, in which the hero encounters a most persistent villain. Porfias del Norte is shot through the head, buried beneath tons of rock by a landslide, and trapped on the top story of a burning building moments before it collapses. He finally dies from self-inflicted poison after being arrested; even then, Frank won't believe it until a doctor examines the corpse.

The quote of the day comes from an 1854 fictionalized biography of Humphry Davy, which I haven't finished post-processing yet:

"Not many years back the floors of our nobles' houses were strewn with rushes, but at present even our gentry are beginning to find a sanded room unpleasant to their feet, and so they must needs have soft carpets to tread upon—as if they had all at once grown as tender-footed as negroes. There's Squire Austell has already carpetted his best sitting-room; and mark my words! there's sufficient of the monkey in our natures to make his great and little neighbours ape the Squire's manners. Ugh! We shall be as unmanly as fiddlers before many years have passed over our heads. Haven't we got to drink slops for breakfast instead of a horn or two of good strong ale, as they did in our fathers' time? and do you think, sir, strength, and courage, and energy are to be got out of teacups?"

I also scanned three books: Frank Merriwell's Son, Ben's Nugget by Horatio Alger Jr., and "Young Glory and the Spanish Cruiser", a dime novel published during the Spanish-American War (although, actually, it cost only a nickel).

Books of the Fortnight

2007-10-06T17:46:04Z

It's been slow. I started Gyula Krúdy's Sunflower, a 1918 Hungarian novel full of elaborate seductions and passionate despair and I really couldn't care less. It's a slim book, but I wasn't making much headway, and finally I dropped it for something more entertaining.

Charles Stross's The Clan Corporate is an entertaining installment from the middle of a series about a secret war between a world-hopping family of drug smugglers and the folks who really aren't happy to find out about them. I didn't feel like it was breaking a lot of new ground, though, and it felt like the plot was getting so tangled that some of the subplots were getting choked off before they could fully develop. A good choice for when you want to clear the cobwebs of dull 19th century erotica from your head, but when you think about it, that's a pretty limited market.

I didn't finish A Separate War and Other Stories by Joe Haldeman either, but I did enjoy all the stories I read tremendously and do plan to come back to it. Haldeman's last few novels haven't thrilled me, but this short work is excellent.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan raised the question of, how do we know what's good to eat? He looks at industrial-scale food production, and how it's affected the quality of our food; at a small, intensively managed organic farm; and at hunting and gathering. I found it absolutely riveting, and not just because it reinforces my preconceptions. The ways in which farm policy and corporate culture have changed the way we eat, and the question of whether artisan methods can significantly replace mass-produced commodities, is discussed with a great deal of depth and insight. Very much recommended.

Anna's meme

2007-09-30T17:34:40Z

Via annafdd, bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish, strikethrough the ones you hated. I don't know what the numbers mean.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53)
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)

Random Friending

2007-09-17T02:13:49Z

I just friended a bunch of people with "distributed proofreaders" as an interest. If you're one of them, well, that's why.

Books of the Fortnight

2007-09-16T20:43:48Z

I'm pretty late on my "Books of the Week" post.

Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande has some interesting things to say about training doctors, medical error, and just plain uncertainty.

The Memory-Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards has an interesting premise—a woman gives birth to twins, one with Down Syndrome, and the husband (who delivered the babies) tells her that one of the babies died. He has the nurse take the babies to an institution, but she decides to run away and raise the child herself. The lie, and the husband's inability to talk to his wife about his guilt and his worries, drives a wedge between them; meanwhile, the nurse finds love and fulfillment raising the daughter as her own. This was one of the selections for my condo's book club, and I liked it quite a bit.

The Third Rumpole Omnibus is a set of mysteries by John Mortimer about a curmudgeonly barrister who's very good at offending judges while fighting for his clients. Formulaic and predictable, but entertaining.

The United States of Arugula is a nonfiction book about how American food stopped being boring, and embraced all kinds of new ingredients and styles of cooking. It talks about who first imported things like balsamic vinegar from Italy, or brought free-range chickens into restaurants, but it's somewhat weaker on explaining why none of this happened sooner. Still, it's chock-full of detail and well worth a look.

I uploaded one book to Project Gutenberg, Frank Merriwell's Bravery. Frank is mistaken for Black Harry, a notorious outlaw who happens to be Frank's exact double; accepts a ride on an experimental flying machine, and is stranded in a valley of murderous Mormon terrorists; tracks a missing girl, and wrestles a grizzly bear; and is swindled by a counterfeiter, who happens to be an exact double of his friend Bart Hodge's fiancée.

I scanned Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer, a 1908 pulp novel ("Manifestly, no history was ever written that could give space in such detail to the adventures of a single man, no matter how important his life's work may have been; it really takes a line of so-called fiction to do it, and we can honestly say that the stories in this line do justice to the interesting character of Buffalo Bill."); The Prison Chaplaincy, and Its Experiences by Hosea Quinby, who was chaplain of the New Hampshire state prison from 1869 to 1871; and The Corsair King by Maurus Jókai, a short novel which I scanned for International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I kind of hoped that The Corsair King might make it to the third proofing round in a single day (since special day projects have priority, until the day is over), but there are 25 projects ahead of it in the Talk Like a Pirate queue, so it may not be quite so fast.

Overhead at TIFF

2007-09-13T01:13:21Z

"I've never been out of the country, really. New Jersey doesn't count."

TIFF Too

2007-09-12T04:16:00Z

The Secrets is about Naomi, the daughter of a famous rabbi, who decides to study in an Israeli seminary for a time after her mother's death, instead of immediately marrying the man her father has chosen as his successor. Another student, who was sent there to curb her rebellious behavior, challenges Naomi's complacency; they visit a fallen woman with food, and drink tea with her, and gradually Naomi learns first to make her own judgments, and then to defy authority by trying to devise a ritual to cleanse the woman of her sin. The ritual does more than bring a fallen woman closer to God; it teaches Naomi to be responsible to her own understanding of God's will, even when others disagree, even when a small secret defiance becomes a public, irrevocable breach. The best of the ten movies I saw.

Continental, un film sans fusil (a film without guns) is about four characters, whose paths intersect but whose stories don't. It's a quirky film that reminds me of Jarmusch, with odd, deadpan humor. Interesting, but the parts failed to become a whole.

A Jihad For Love is an interesting documentary about gay Muslims. They're in a tough situation, since the Koran has a fairly explicit condemnation of male homosexuality which is hard to re-interpret. (Women have a somewhat easier time.) A few Muslims take a liberal view, but most are conservative and closed-minded. Despite this, the gay Muslims we see are often cheerful and charming; sometimes, regretful and tormented. Worth seeing.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a Wayne Wang film about a Chinese man from Beijing who comes to visit his daughter in America after her divorce. He wants her to be happy, to find a good man and bear his grandchildren, but she resents his efforts to fit her into a traditional mold. Eventually a secret grudge from her childhood is revealed, and resolved. It's a movie full of silences, rewarding patience. I liked it very much.

Happy New Life is a Hungarian film about a young Roma man who was brought up in a foster family. Now eighteen, released from the foster care system and living on his own, he tries to find the truth about his past, but the official documents he finds tells him nothing or where he came from. He has dreams, flashbacks, memories. It ends badly, as his sense of disconnection overpowers him. There's a lot of raw emotion, and it's not a movie I would warn people away from, but it's not one I can honestly recommend, either.

TIFF Talk

2007-09-10T03:01:58Z

I'm about halfway through my stay in Toronto, and so far I've seen five movies. The biggest name stars I've seen are Nancy Kwan, Kate Bosworth, and Sigourney Weaver. I gather such namedropping is obligatory among TIFF attendees, who are automatically every celebrity's best buddies. ("I have a question for Sigourney...")

My first movie was Hollywood Chinese, a documentary about the history of Chinese-Americans in movies, and it was interesting to see both the minor roles Asian-Americans did succeed in getting in movies and the long procession of stereotypes they were mostly forced into, plus all the white actors made up to play starring Asian roles like Fu Manchu and Genghis Khan. There were a couple of movies that were very good for Asian actors, notably "Flower Drum Song", but it wasn't really until the late '80's that movies with largely Asian casts really began to be produced. Very interesting.

Before that I spent a few hours at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, which is definitely worth a trip if you like pottery. The permanent collection is stronger on European pottery than Chinese or Japanese, but I was lucky enough to show up right before a docent tour of a special exhibition which had a lot of Chinese pieces, so I got a nice balance.

Friday was frustrating, since most of the movies I wanted to see were sold out. If they hadn't all been sold out, though, I doubt if I would have gotten tickets to The Visitor, a very enjoyable movie by the director of The Station Agent, and my favorite fiction movie of the festival so far. The protagonist is a tweedy economics professor who's doing the bare minimum of work necessary to keep his job, a cold and unsympathetic character, who's been frozen ever since the death of his wife. When he goes to New York for a conference, visiting the apartment he owns there for the first time in decades, he discovers a pair of recent immigrants living there. As he gets to know them, he begins to feel genuine warmth for Tarek, and questions the worth of his own life. It's quite strident in denouncing our treatment of illegal immigrants, in our collective indifference to the value they bring to us, but beyond that it's a story of transformation and hope. The performance of the protagonist is a bit distracting—I could never quite forget I was watching an actor, and one with impeccable comic timing—but the performances of the immigrants are outstanding.

Saturday I had lunch Mary Pugh, a friend from grad school, and met her two-year-old son. We went to Flower Drum Song, which was impressive for its time, but forty-six years later seems a bit corny.

Today I went to The Dictator Hunter and The Girl in the Park, and devised a scheme with velochicdunord to register celebritydoughnuts.ca and apply for press passes to next year's festival.

The Dictator Hunter is about a human rights lawyer's effort to bring the ex-dictator of Chad (now in exile in Senegal) to justice. The local alt-weekly didn't like it, and I can see how it could have been tightened up, but the subject is an interesting one and it's encouraging to see Senegal and the African Union show at least lip service to the idea that these crimes can't simply be ignored. In practice, nobody is willing to deal with the problem, so they all pass the buck to somebody else, but each time the buck passes, the simple fact that the courts or the President of Senegal or whoever took the matter seriously makes it harder for the next buck-passee to simply ignore the issue, until finally a meeting of the African Union resolves that Senegal is obligated to try the case. It's still uncertain that justice will be done, but every incremental step towards establishing accountability for government murders and torturers serves to discourage current leaders from committing these types of abuses.

The Girl in the Park is about a woman whose three-year-old daughter vanishes from the park one day (in a you turn your back for a second, and never see her again kind of way). Sixteen years later, the mother, who has never really recovered, sees a young woman who reminds her of her daughter, and lies to save her from being arrested for shoplifting. The girl and Weaver forge a tenuous relationship, and it's never quite clear if the girl has figured out that Weaver thinks she's her daughter and is running a con, or if the hints that's she's really the lost daughter are all in Weaver's imagination, or if she actually is the lost daughter. And in the end I'm not sure it matters—they need each other, they help each other cope, and so neither will establish the truth. Sigourney Weaver's been in a bunch of good movies lately; it's nice to see her getting good roles, and good roles getting her.

E-books of the Week

2007-08-28T15:50:17Z

I uploaded one book this week, Frank Merriwell Down South. Highlights include an ancient Mexican treasure city, located within the caldera of a volcano, which is destroyed by an eruption just as Frank comes within sight of it.

I also scanned one pulp novel, A Woman at Bay by Nicholas Carter. This is one of the longest-running series in history, with over a thousand volumes.

Books of the Week

2007-08-28T15:34:35Z

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino has for its protagonist a boy who climbs a tree one day and refuses to come down. What is initially stubbornness becomes a vow and then a lifestyle, as he adapts to his self-imposed limitations. It's more a sequence of interesting events than a unified story, unless there was something going on that I missed; what ties the sequence together is a sense of history, that the world is irrevocably changing and what has happened will never happen again.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon is a Sherlock Holmes story set in 1944. The mystery involves a parrot owned by a mute Jewish refugee child, which repeats long lists of numbers in German. Holmes finds the parrot, but he never does learn what the numbers mean. He seems like a relic from an earlier era, who has not yet realized that a dividing point in history has been reached.

The best of the comics this week is Casper the Friendly Ghost volume one. The stories are mostly saccharine and predictable, but they're also often surprisingly charming, and the presentation is first-rate, with clean black-and-white artwork on good paper. And it's a good-sized package, nearly 500 pages, with 100 stories.

Can you convert 3/16 to a decimal value?

2007-08-26T03:03:30Z

If so, you're smarter than this expert witness. It's amazing—the opposing lawyer tries to make him explain what 3 3/16" represents on a map where one inch equals 20 feet, and he can't do it. He's unwilling to make any computation without his formula sheets in front of him. The lawyer literally hands him a calculator and asks him to convert 3/16 to decimal form, and the witness says he can't (or won't) do it without a formula sheet.