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Catching up...
Nov. 25th, 2004 06:23 amIt has been a furiously quiet shift so far (knock on wood and spit three times), as it should be, as today is technically a day off for the crew. I use the weasel-word "technically" in the sense that the crew can never totally veg out and do something like sleep in until noon; there are readings to take, physical exercises to perform, experiments to monitor, and so on. However, the flight controllers on both sides of the world do keep interruptions to a minimum, with the Russians sometimes relaying local radio broadcasts carrying news and music to the crew during VHF passes (if the US side tried to do that, NASA'd be overrun with lawyers in less time than it takes for you to dial from one end of the FM band to the other).
I got to thinking about a recent resurgence in my reading, due in some part to whatever sleep disorder it was I suffered from during and shortly after my weekend in Moscow. While in Russia, I pretty consistenly awoke around 2 am and ended up cracking open one of the paperbacks that I'd taken with me. The first was something I mistakenly believed to be a mystery, titled The Hammerhead Ranch Motel. Despite the fact that there are numerous homicides in the story -- most having to do with the drug trade and a mysterious attache case containing $5 million -- the book is not a mystery in the classic sense. Instead, the author keeps poking at your curiosity with strange doings that only come together in the course of the telling, sort of like a James Ellroy novel, except not as tense.
The other book I read in Moscow was Fade Away, by Harlan Coben. This book more closely follows standard mystery story formulas, with a serial detective who is really a sports agent with a supportive friend who is highly intelligent yet appears to be a complete sociopath, too. It was, I recall, a good read.
Based on a recommendation in the NY Times Book Review from a couple of Sundays ago, I tracked down something called Doing Our Own Thing, by John McWhorter, mostly on the basis of a very intriguing subtitle: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care. I got about 25 pages into the text before it occurred to me that the ideas being expressed were not altogether foreign to me. On a hunch, I turned to the front material to check what else the author had written, and sure enough, McWhorter -- who is a linguist at UC Berzerkeley -- is the same guy that wrote a book I read a while back titled The Word On The Street, which provided (for me) a rational linguistic justification for why, for example, the plural "their" ought to be completely acceptable in places where purists would use the singular "his" (or the politically correct but awful "his or her").
In this book, McWhorter is approaching his theme -- that discourse and thinking suffer when being cool trumps being articulate -- very slowly, and it is good that he is doing so, because it would be all too easy to misconstrue his point as being something along the lines of "society is going to hell in a handbasket because of dangling participles," or something equally noxious. I'm going to try to savor the book over the next few weeks.
Finally, there is the entertaining and challenging No Plot? No Problem!, by Chris Baty, who started the whole "National Novel Writing Month" idea. The theme of the book is simple: how to write a novel in 30 days. I'm about 50 pages through the thin tome and convinced it can be done (and if that's not enough, LJ friend![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
brenk is living proof it can be done, because she did so in 2002).
One side effect of reading the book is trying to grok the method in the madness of what I believe to be possible and what is not. Can one write a novel in 30 days? I'm confident it can be done (though not in a week, unless one is highly motivated). Can one day-trade one's way from, say, $20,000 to over a million in the same month? I'm confident one cannot.
Why do my beliefs differ like this? One possible explanation is that I don't risk losing anything in the former effort (except time, and I've lost enough of that in my life), while I risk losing a chunk of hard-earned money in the second. Another is that I know I have the skill set to put words down on phosphor, whereas I doubt I have the time, patience, and possibly intelligence to figure out the nuances of what makes the market go up and down (not to mention that I am not confident at all that there are any such consistent rules). Yet a third is that "writing a novel," although it sounds grand, is not quite as ambitious as "writing the Great American novel and having it published to glowing reviews." (In other words, it's quite modest, unlike the latter goal.)
However you slice it, I guess the reason I think writing a novel in a month is doable (while trading my way to the big bucks is not) is because I don't see the former to be anywhere near as much of a risk, though in reading Baty's book, it becomes clear to me that he is well aware that it's not exactly a cakewalk, either. I'll have to muse some more on this, but not now.
There's a little more than an hour left in the shift, and although I haven't left on time yet this week (my replacement has been diverted to telecons and there was that plane crash on Monday), having an hour left is somehow more comforting than having, say, four hours left. I look forward to the smell of baking turkey in the oven later in the day.
Cheers...
I got to thinking about a recent resurgence in my reading, due in some part to whatever sleep disorder it was I suffered from during and shortly after my weekend in Moscow. While in Russia, I pretty consistenly awoke around 2 am and ended up cracking open one of the paperbacks that I'd taken with me. The first was something I mistakenly believed to be a mystery, titled The Hammerhead Ranch Motel. Despite the fact that there are numerous homicides in the story -- most having to do with the drug trade and a mysterious attache case containing $5 million -- the book is not a mystery in the classic sense. Instead, the author keeps poking at your curiosity with strange doings that only come together in the course of the telling, sort of like a James Ellroy novel, except not as tense.
The other book I read in Moscow was Fade Away, by Harlan Coben. This book more closely follows standard mystery story formulas, with a serial detective who is really a sports agent with a supportive friend who is highly intelligent yet appears to be a complete sociopath, too. It was, I recall, a good read.
Based on a recommendation in the NY Times Book Review from a couple of Sundays ago, I tracked down something called Doing Our Own Thing, by John McWhorter, mostly on the basis of a very intriguing subtitle: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care. I got about 25 pages into the text before it occurred to me that the ideas being expressed were not altogether foreign to me. On a hunch, I turned to the front material to check what else the author had written, and sure enough, McWhorter -- who is a linguist at UC Berzerkeley -- is the same guy that wrote a book I read a while back titled The Word On The Street, which provided (for me) a rational linguistic justification for why, for example, the plural "their" ought to be completely acceptable in places where purists would use the singular "his" (or the politically correct but awful "his or her").
In this book, McWhorter is approaching his theme -- that discourse and thinking suffer when being cool trumps being articulate -- very slowly, and it is good that he is doing so, because it would be all too easy to misconstrue his point as being something along the lines of "society is going to hell in a handbasket because of dangling participles," or something equally noxious. I'm going to try to savor the book over the next few weeks.
Finally, there is the entertaining and challenging No Plot? No Problem!, by Chris Baty, who started the whole "National Novel Writing Month" idea. The theme of the book is simple: how to write a novel in 30 days. I'm about 50 pages through the thin tome and convinced it can be done (and if that's not enough, LJ friend
brenk is living proof it can be done, because she did so in 2002).One side effect of reading the book is trying to grok the method in the madness of what I believe to be possible and what is not. Can one write a novel in 30 days? I'm confident it can be done (though not in a week, unless one is highly motivated). Can one day-trade one's way from, say, $20,000 to over a million in the same month? I'm confident one cannot.
Why do my beliefs differ like this? One possible explanation is that I don't risk losing anything in the former effort (except time, and I've lost enough of that in my life), while I risk losing a chunk of hard-earned money in the second. Another is that I know I have the skill set to put words down on phosphor, whereas I doubt I have the time, patience, and possibly intelligence to figure out the nuances of what makes the market go up and down (not to mention that I am not confident at all that there are any such consistent rules). Yet a third is that "writing a novel," although it sounds grand, is not quite as ambitious as "writing the Great American novel and having it published to glowing reviews." (In other words, it's quite modest, unlike the latter goal.)
However you slice it, I guess the reason I think writing a novel in a month is doable (while trading my way to the big bucks is not) is because I don't see the former to be anywhere near as much of a risk, though in reading Baty's book, it becomes clear to me that he is well aware that it's not exactly a cakewalk, either. I'll have to muse some more on this, but not now.
There's a little more than an hour left in the shift, and although I haven't left on time yet this week (my replacement has been diverted to telecons and there was that plane crash on Monday), having an hour left is somehow more comforting than having, say, four hours left. I look forward to the smell of baking turkey in the oven later in the day.
Cheers...
