The Laursonian Institute

Welcome to part one in my occasional series: things that makes me happy.

Two facts have recently come to my attention.

January 12th, 2014 | Tags: books, ttmmh | Category: life | Comments Off

Too tired… can only list:

• drove to Oakland
• hung out in favorite local bookstore (FOPL!)
• had lunch at Rattos with favorite local work friends!
• had second lunch with Armand in Berkl!
• nerded around model train store
• read books and birdwatched on campus
• visited favorite Berkl coffee shop / classical music shop and adjacent bookstore
• drove back to Davis
• had chinese takeout with the Lawyers + Schmidts
• tried enquicken Lawyer computer (failed)

Tomorrows gonna be a big day.  I think it might be join-the-gym day.  And early morning blood sample day.  But it’s also hang out with Heather and Kevin day, and the big trip to the nursury to get our fruit trees and front yard goodies!  Yay!

March 25th, 2009 | Tags: berkeley, books, bookstores, friends, list, oakland, rattos, spring break | Category: life | Comments Off

Hi, blog.  It’s me.  I’m sorry I’m too dumb or surly or tired to write every day like I’m supposed to.  I do think about you when I’m off doing other more restful things.  And besides, you know I’ll always come back.

It’s the last week of the quarter.  More specifically, tomorrow is the last day of classes.  This is the one time I sincerely wish I didn’t have sections on Friday nights.  I’m not sure how many folks will actually come, though I have a hunch it should be about normal.  I’ll get a small bump from pre-finals freakouts, but a negative effect for being late on the last day, so all in all, no net change.  I’m hoping it goes alright… my lesson plan this week didn’t go off too well yesterday (good greif, was that only yesterday?) and I haven’t thought of what I should do to make it more fun.  Reviewing just isn’t that exciting.  And the other alternative is to talk about historical linguistics, which is also rather unexciting and I don’t want to bother the students too much with the specifics since they won’t need to know most of it.

As far as my own classes go, it really doesn’t feel like they’re over, though all I have left is to turn in the papers.  They’ve been consuming so much of my time, it’s incredible to me to think that I won’t be seeing any of those familiar faces or places, or be obsessing over any of those topics for the foreseeable future.  Not that I won’t run into people around the department.  I just have really cherished my theory class, and grown accustomed to needing to be constantly working on my 260 project.  Seems like certainly this must only be a temporary reprieve from work and when the holidays pass we’ll be back to the same-old.  Except instead, I’ll be learning about brain scans and semantics and Quechua.  Oh Linguistics, you’re a charmingly broad field.

I finished my book (Flaubert’s Sentimental Education) and I’m at that point in my reading cycle where I need to detox from my old book before I can dive into a new one.  This is awkward around now (bedtime) when I’m ready to turn off and go curl up in bed, but have no motivation to do so since I’ve not go anything to entertain myself to sleep with.  I’m also not sure what the next book should be.  I’ve got strong candidate in a new Louise Erdrich (new to me, anyway), and the newest W. S. Maugham we bought (Moon and SIxpence) as well as a Vietnam-era war book I picked up on the recommendation of my favorite old English teacher.   It’s nice to try and balance out the reading regime.  I’m rather fond of those naturalist/victorian-type writers (Zola, Trollope, Flaubert) but their writing is so absorbing and thourough I can’t just read them back-to-back.  I require something more modern, or at least with lighter prose to offset them with.

Last night I tried picking up a book someone gave us (The Time Traveller’s Wife).  I had been hesitant about this one (as about most books people give us) since my tastes aren’t very Oprahs-book-club-y and I do tend to prefer classics and my small set of more modern writers to the wider wilds of modern literature, but I wasn’t quite ready to commit to anything else.  I got through the prologue and first section, and I think I’m ready to put it back on the dust gathering shelf it came from.  There’s something which I’m sure is a natural direction for our modern novels to move in (and I’m certainly no Lit or English major, so what do I know?) but it really doesn’t satisfy my novelust to read books that sound like screenplays.  The overly chatty, dialogue-driven, sparingly (or conventionally) described just starts getting on my nerves.  Dan Brown’s novel was like that, and so is The Time Traveller’s Wife. Why did we go from 0-to-sexy-romp in just a few pages?  Did I need to be titilated to convince me this book is worth reading?  The premise sounds interesting, albeit somewhat cheesy-scifi-y, but the tone of the novel has completely thrown me off.  I understand that it’s supposed to be realistic and people have sex in real life, I just get annoyed at having to sexualize all the characters in a novel when I’d rather be reading something else.  Though this really does probably point out more than I’m some kind of moral conservative who wants people to keep their sexy stuff to themselves than it says about modern prose.  But why read something that doesn’t please you?

Alright, enough epistolating about literature.

December 4th, 2008 | Tags: books, class, reading, stuff, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off