unlucky Japan

Cheated on a bad offsides call, but then they get a good save from their goalie.

but will they score?

USA women playing very well, but unable to convert any scoring chances so far.

sponsorship

The women’s World Cup Final is sponsored by Rogaine?

I’d like to know the thinking here. Is it that middle-aged guys with thinning hair are watching this, or that their wives are watching it and will discreetly suggest that their husbands start using Rogaine?

bedtime reading these days

I’m back on Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! It’s usually rated very highly among his works, but I find it to be one of the weakest of his novels that I’ve read.

Problem number 1: he’s trying too hard to be the Southern version of Joseph Conrad. If you’ve reread Heart of Darkness reasonably recently before this novel (as I have) it can make you cringe now and then. And the funny thing is, Absalom, Absalom! is by no means one of Faulkner’s early works, so the Conrad influence (which is widely recognized) ought to have been fully digested and transformed by this point in his career.

Problem number 2: the structure of the work is unconvincing. It’s a let’s-get-to-the-bottom-of-this-old-local-mystery sort of thing, but the conversations in which the characters collaborate to solve the mystery often feel forced, especially the ones between Quentin and his father and Quentin and Shreve.

Problem 3: we know from elsewhere in Faulkner that Quentin will soon commit suicide at Harvard. But while I’m not done with the current novel yet, there’s little sense of that from the Quentin presented in the current novel (despite his famous closing defensive lines about the South, which I skipped ahead to read). This leads the novels to weaken each other slightly rather than providing mutual reinforcement.

Problem 4: it’s one thing for an author to slip into using a heavy dose of polysyllabic words, but quite another to put those words in the mouth of a character where they don’t fit. In this respect the dialogue of Rosa Coldfield feels completely unconvincing to me.

I think Faulkner is generally at his best when he’s even more experimental than this. The Sound and the Fury is such a masterpiece that it would be one of the five greatest novels of all time if it had a more epic scope. In my opinion he’s also better when he’s unconsciously Southern (to whatever extent possible) rather than forcedly self-consciously Southern.

next Hong Kong article

For any readers of this blog who happen to be subscribers to the South China Morning Post, my latest article has appeared in today’s edition under the title “Drifting Interstellar Rogues Bump Astronomy Into a Lively New Orbit.” The subject is the recently discovered rogue planets that drift freely through space without a solar system in apparently vast numbers, and which might be a possible home to life (surprisingly enough).

Japan-USA

Women’s World Cup Final this afternoon. I’ll try to catch it. Sorry I missed the Brazil game, which sounded great.

a related tip

Sometimes there is the assumption that you need to work on the parts of your project in a specific order. I’ve already tried to suggest that this is untrue, and that you can and should attack different stages of the project depending on what you feel like doing on any given day.

But there’s another way of looking at this. Namely, sometimes if you feel like working on a later stage of the project rather than the next one, this might be a message that you ought to change the order anyway.

For example, if you’ve written Chapter 1 and are now stunted and blocked on Chapter 2, I’ve said that it’s fine to jump forward and work on Chapter 5 right now. But if that’s what you really feel like doing, it might be a signal that Chapter 5 really belongs right after Chapter 1, and that you should rethink the meaning of the project with that in mind.

Much of our thinking goes on at a vague pre-verbal level of hunches and intuitions. I’m in agreement that the end product has to be a lot more than that, but it’s usually better if the starting point of a project molds the primal clay rather than trying for premature clarity. Clarity is a result, not a starting point. At the start you have to follow what your mind and body feel like doing; otherwise, there’s the danger that you’re simply mimicking someone else’s work rather than generating your own.

In several cases I’ve had the entire spirit of a project change because I was stalled on one chapter, decided simply to dump it, and by bringing in the things I felt like working on the entire project became a lot more genuine than in its initial formulation.

an overused phrase

“talking past each other”

It happens often enough in academia, but I’ve found that people are generally too quick to pull the trigger on this phrase. Quite often there’s a very clear and interesting disagreement that gets misdescribed in this manner.

something I’m surprised still exists

Scrolling text on websites. Maybe someone’s figured out a way to make it work (my apologies if any of my readers use it on their own websites), but for my part I’m always affected by it with a sort of comical annoyance.

the latest Egyptian Revolution martyr

Mostafa Ahmad Hassan was shot in the head on January 28, but just died from it. Very sad. HERE.