Dangling Conversations

Posted 22 Dec, 2004 at 22:12 by matt in /Chatter | Permanent link

Who thought that having a sheep in the basic set of MSN Messenger emoticons as a good idea?

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Posted 13 Dec, 2004 at 18:51 by matt in /Math | Permanent link

If anyone reading this could point me in the direction of a gentle introduction to wavelets, and specifically their role in image enhancement, I'd be most grateful. I'm apparently going to be telling a bunch of high-school and junior college teachers about them at a workshop in six months' time. This means that I need to know something about them within that span of time.

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Posted 13 Dec, 2004 at 17:49 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

So we haven't had any Books entries in far too long (considering how much the lot of us read); I'm trying to put off grading; and I see Wendy's reading Haruki Murakami stories again. And thus: an excuse to blog.

I can't remember whether Wendy introduced me to Murakami's work, or whether we were both introduced by our mutual friend, the Former Ponytail-Boy. In any event, I ended up reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles a few years ago, and I was... a little overwhelmed. Probably because I was doing a lot of the reading on airplanes, buses, and the like; I don't remember the exact circumstances, but I think this was around the time of Thanksgiving and/or Christmas vacations, and I wasn't driving around that year. Anyhow, it's a book that I think would reward more concentration than I was capable of giving it, I think. Unexplained things kept happening, characters would appear that we may or may not have already seen, and I kept feeling that I was continually half a lap behind.

I didn't think about Murakami again for another few years, until I found myself in Illinois about a year ago, waiting around at a friend's place with nothing particular to do while he was away doing his job. Lying on the side-table by the sofa was another Murakami novel: Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The name rang a vague bell, the title intrigued me, and so I spent the morning on the book. And it was, I thought, fabulous. The chapters alternate, as the title suggests, between hard-boiled Wonderland -- the real world, imagined through a noir, vaguely cyberpunk sort of lens -- and the End of the World, which isn't a place so much as a dreamlike state. Gradually the connection between the two worlds becomes clear; it's a book that I think I'll have to read again sometime, just to re-evaluate the earlier chapters using later revelations as a guide.

Both of the books I've mentioned are more or less surreal, but some of his earlier novels are more naturalistic. Norwegian Wood is a coming-of-age story that feels very autobiographical, at least in parts; it's about young love, and music, and death, and lots and lots of sex. South of the Border, West of the Sun partakes of many of the same elements, but whereas the former novel is about an adolescent becoming an adult, Border is more about settling into one's adult life: making the choice to settle, put down roots, eschew the temptation to throw it all away when something shiny comes along.

I agree with Wendy that most of his perspective characters (all of the novels I've mentioned are wholely or partially in first-person) seem very much the same; for the most part, they tend to be acted upon in the stories, and are rarely protagonists in their own stories. His depictions of women, as well, seem to fall into a small number of basic categories. I'm not sure to what extent all this is deliberate -- autobiographical, as Wendy suggests, or maybe he's playing games with archetypes and perspectives.

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Posted 08 Dec, 2004 at 14:59 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

Blogmeme picked up from John Scalzi: what songs in your music collection are exactly three minutes long, and are they perfect pop songs? I seem to have many, many three-minute songs, so more below the fold.

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Posted 02 Dec, 2004 at 16:17 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

That's how much music I've currently got sitting on my hard drive. Now granted, there's a certain number of duplicates in there: songs that appear on their original albums and on greatest-hits, for instance, or individual downloaded songs which were later ripped from my CD collection. (I'm not counting different versions of the same song by the same artist as the same because I'm a bit of a geek that way.) And there's still some songs that have yet to be properly culled, that drifted into my possession when I helped DJ a wedding a year and a half ago.

And the best part is: I've still got a bunch of CDs that I haven't added to the pile yet.

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