Expanding endlessly

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The theater department at Berkeley had a booksale where everything was $1. And so, after a self-imposed abstinence from the pleasure of buying books I went and bought not one, not two, but 17 books related to the theater. The trick is now to find a place in my bookshelf for them, since it’s completely full.

After the booksale I went for lunch, which was large and full of potatoes. After that I went to a reception for the groundbreaking of a new bioengineering building — since the Governor was attending, the catering was a notch or two above the Safeway carrot-and-celery platter. And they had Bogle wine, which I rather like.

Between all this buying and eating and eating I felt like I had expanded to epic proportions. The food will go away. But I think it’s high time I started the purge cycle of my reading bulemia…

second look

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Well, I slept on it, and when I woke up in the morning I didn’t want to destroy the whole site and replace it with a “under construction” sign. Saw Matrix II with my roommate last night in Emeryville. There’s this gigantic mall (open air, since it’s California), and nobody there. I mean, the place is huge, and it’s summer, so you would think the movie theater would at least have a line. The whole place felt like Disneyland, minus the huge scary walking cartoon characters. Which, incidentally, are usually women, even if the cartoon character is male. I’m not sure why that is, but oh well.

Maybe I will write something this weekend. Idle hands are the devil’s playground after all.

Tinkering

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I’ve been mucking around with the stylesheets on this site, and have gotten little-to-nothing done for my prelim studying or research, or anything that would make me a useful human being. But basically, the system seems to work. Which is good, because I was half-afraid I was going to break it into tiny pieces. Added the reads section, and will probably add an eats section later. And maybe for some real nerding I’ll have a mini-research journal, but that seems a bit excessive. I’d have to make some more progress on my research.

Next on the agenda — the EWB website. I guess I need to learn CSS for real soon, or I’ll really be confused.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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This is a slim novel that won Thornton Wilder a Pulitzer for fiction. It tells the stories of five people who lost their lives when an old vine-and-board bridge collapsed in Peru. The Marquesa, Esteban the copyist, and Uncle Pio are all inhabitants of Lima, and all are connected in ways which the book manages to reveal very gracefully. The best thing about it is that these relationships don’t seem at all forced, and so seem all the more truthful. The whole thing is framed as an attempt to “set the record straight” about who these people were, their secret dreams and aspirations, and how they all came to be on the bridge on that fateful day.

I’m going to have to reread Our Town and The Skin of our Teeth now, to see if there are similarities between those and this novel, maybe in style.

Well, here I go…

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In a fit of impulse-shopping online I bought the domain name ergodicity.net and then decided to buy some hosting and put a site up. I wouldn’t expect too much of it though.

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