Archives for Category "Meta"
March 27, 2009
NEW LOCATION FOR FEEDS
This post is only here to let people who read this via feeds know that there is a NEW LOCATION FOR MEDLEY FEEDS: http://uncorked.org/medley/feed/ and a new design at Medley (now using Wordpress). Check it out.September 5, 2008
This and That
One of my projects while on maternity leave (haha - I know how laughable this concept is, but allow me my delusions) is to one way or another get through a large pile of unread periodicals. I figure, if I don't read them while I'm on leave and not working, then I'm never going to read them. I can't quite bring myself to just toss them (yet), so I'm trying to skim through one or two per day. If progress continues as slowly as it has, I may start tossing some, though. The piles are really starting to bug me. As is always the case when I do get around to skimming periodicals, I find stuff that's worth mentioning or blogging about. Here are a few things I've come across recently:Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, may be the purest expression yet of his fabulating impulse. Set in a faraway time, the 1500s, and dividing its pages between two storied lands, the Mughal Empire and Renaissance Florence, it is replete with princesses and pirates, mysterious strangers and long-lost cousins, enchanted waters and magic cloaks. But what it does not contain is as telling as what it does. The Enchantress of Florence exhibits none of the complex allegorical structures, dense systems of allusion or broad political implications--in short, none of the satanic ambition--that both weigh down his major works and give them weight. The result, if relatively slight, is probably Rushdie's most coherent and readable novel.I also liked the reviewer's conclusion regarding Rushdie's take on the importance of storytelling and family - topics that are much more salient in our house these days:
The passage suggests the underlying unity of Rushdie's two great commitments: storytelling and family. Storytelling is the place where families begin. Families know themselves through the stories they tell themselves about themselves. Family trees are storybooks in graphic form. Like Lady Black Eyes, long-lost relatives come back all the time, in the stories we tell about them. Like Niccolò, we are defined by the family stories we carry within us. But at the same time, families are the place where storytelling begins. The first stories we know are the ones we hear from our family, about our family. Childhood is the time of stories, the time when everything is still possible and every story is still true. If Rushdie's magic realism is meant to re-enchant the world in the wake of modernity, it is also meant to re-enchant it in the wake of adolescence and adulthood. But again, with a bittersweet ambivalence, he seeks to incite two simultaneous and contradictory reactions, and perhaps 10 years old is exactly the age he wishes to make us. On the one hand, the childhood sense of open-mouthed wonder. On the other, the dawning skepticism that looks up from the page and asks, "But is it really true?"
The 158,000-square-mile Phoenix Islands Protected Area, covering about 12 percent of Kiribati's watery domain, holds some of the world's most pristine coral reefs as well as a great abundance and diversity of tropical marine life. And it's the first reserve to place such a large area of open ocean off-limits to commercial fishing. The reserve is one of the planet's ecological bright spots, the boldest, most dramatic effort to save the oceans' coral reefs, the richest habitat in the seas. No wonder the I-Kiribati (pronounced ee-kiri-bahs, which is what the people call themselves; the country is pronounced kiri-bahs) want to showcase the reserve as a uniquely un- spoiled center for marine science, recreational diving and eco-tourism.Neat stuff. There's video of the reef at the site. Also, there is a major new exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History: Sant Ocean Hall; it opens later this month. Sounds pretty nifty, as well. It includes a lifelike replica of a 'right whale' - not just a generic right whale, but a specific one named Phoenix; the replica took three years to develop. So many places on my list of places to take TLG once he's a bit older - I'm sure there will be many, many, many trips to the Natural History Museum and other Smithsonian destinations; Mama can't wait!
<=> | in: Books / Entertainment / General Musings / Meta / Parenting / Personal Organization / Science / Tourism and Travel
September 1, 2008
Meta Thoughts on This Here Blog
Comments here have been broken forever, I know. The current plan is dump MT and transition to WordPress sometime RealSoonNow and then comments will be back. While I've been on maternity leave I've had a sudden surge of interest in redoing all of my websites again. The presence of TheLittleGuy and his (reasonable for a baby) demands poses some challenges for implementation, but it's on my list of BigToDos while I'm away from work. We'll see.Anyway, since TheGuy works from home and I've been home with TLG, we've had a number of conversations recently about blogging. And, we've been each other's audience for all sorts of things we would blog if we were updating our sites. Suffice it to say that many terribly brilliant, insightful, and oh-so-savvy things have been said in this house the last few weeks -- too bad we don't run a tape recorder sometimes! Hee.
TheGuy's been resurrecting some old content on his site and one of the things we've discussed is how the tools tend to coerce a particular bloggin style/format that isn't necessarily what works best for each person. I think I might try adopting his old style of one post with just a few random comments rather than feeling like each post needs to stand alone. Titles will end up being things like 'this and that' probably. But it might let me feel like I can post a bit more frequently. We shall see.
