Sunday, November 24, 2002

What Will I Do When I'm Done? I just finished reading Volume V of In Search of Lost Time, The Prisoner and The Fugitive, for tomorrow night's meeting of our reading group. I have only the slim Finding Time Again to go, and I will have gotten all the way through Proust, though with a sense that I missed much of what I passed along the way and a resulting compulsion to make the trip again (though not right away). What strikes me most about his writing is, despite the staggering length of the novel, how much he can put into a couple of sentences. Here he covers much of Lucretius's philosophy: Our love of life is no more than an old affair that we do not know how to discontinue. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality. And here he describes everything that went wrong with my youthful attempts at dating: And suddenly I thought that the real Gilberte and the real Albertine were perhaps those who offered themselves up in a single glance, one by a hedgerow of pink hawthorn, the other on the beach. And it was I, unable to understand something which I was to retrieve only later in my memory, after a delay during which the whole emotional undercurrent of my conversation had made them fear to be as frank as they had been in the first instance, who had spoiled everything with my clumsiness. 8:58:14 PM     What do you think? ()

What's in the New York Times? Thursday, there was an article about computer support on Christmas that begins "Nothing ruins a Christmas morning more than a shiny new gadget that does not work." In my experience, that does suck, but I would add that being the person expected to get that shiny new gadget working and not being able to do so will also ruin Christmas. Today, there's a well-written, comprehensive article about wireless Internet access points in New York. All of the Utopian sloganeering aside, the vision of a city full of affluent people with laptops sitting in the same place and ignoring each other is a bit too reminiscent of the current reality of people with cell phones wandering around and talking over each other's conversations for my comfort. My favorite part of the article was Kevin Milani, a clueless techie in Brooklyn who provides wireless access through his DSL connection: As for his potential redistribution of the bandwidth provided by Panix, he said: "I don't think they really care. They're a bunch of techies." But Panix does care. For residential accounts, says the company's president, Alexis Rosen, this is "strictly prohibited." Maybe the Times was not the place for Kevin to announce his public spiritedness. Also today, there's a discussion of the growing backlash against SUVs, something that makes me happy. Although the stricter fuel efficiency standards, the growing awareness of the relationship between fuel consumption and terrorism, and the pressure from religious organizations are all great, I think that the decline of the SUV will ultimately be driven by a growing collective distaste--perhaps a result of those factors--which is to say, they will just fall out of fashion. Does anyone know which ring of the Inferno is reserved for Liz Cohen? So many seem appropriate. Finally, just for fun, politicians quoting Bob Dylan. 10:48:49 AM     What do you think? ()

© Copyright 2003 Morgan N. Sandquist. Last update: 11/2/03; 10:31:20 AM.

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