Happy Belated Birthday, wee blog!

In a rare moment of reflection, I discovered that "Sycorax Pine" is more than a year old (the blog, that is. I am considerably older.). In fact, she (can't blogs have a gender, too?) is 14 months old as of yesterday. Happy, um, fourteenth monthday (with a remainder of 24 hours), blog!

To celebrate, I give you a quiz that will tell you what LOLCat you are.

Here's hoping that next May I am a little more aware of the second anniversary....

Eh Joe

I had to copy something I wrote for an academic discussion I am having in a reading group devoted to film and theatre (because I always wished that I had gotten around to blogging about "Eh Joe"):

One aspect of cinematic grammar that I have always envied as a theatrical practitioner is access to shifts between close-ups, middle distance shots, and landscapes/panoramas/long distance views. A few years ago I saw a very interesting negotiation of the boundaries between film, television and theatre in Atom Egoyan's production of "Eh Joe," which Beckett wrote for the small screen. Egoyan balanced Michael Gambon's silent, live, embodied, theatrical performance of the only visible character with a (also live) projected close up of the protagonist's face on a scrim that lay between us (the audience) and Gambon. What struck me most forcibly was the incredible seduction of the close-up - even when I self-consciously tried to focus on Gambon-the-whole-man, unmediated-by-the-camera (which I had some strange impulse to consider a more "authentic" performance), I found my eyes irresistibly drawn back to the cinematic close-up. Finally I became convinced that Gambon was, in effect, giving two simultaneous performances: with his body he gave a theatrical, gestural performance appropriate to the scale of a midsize theatre, while with his face he gave a subdued, while infinitely nuanced, cinematic performance of micro-expression.

Tidbits

The theme of this collection of linkiness? Research that I wish I was doing, in place of what I actually do:

• Did you know that there are lexicography conferences? What do they do there, you ask? Well, among other things, they participate in word-making workshops, according to the wonderful blogger behind Dictionary Evangelist. My favorite of the neologisms described here is "Googlegänger" - 'the other person who shows up in Google search results when people search for you."
• How does a chimpanzee's laughter differ from our own? Why does a stroke victim give a lopsided smile when asked to laugh on command, but laughs with both sides of the face when told a joke? Discover Magazine tries to get at the roots of laughter in this article. Would that I were doing this sort of research: "A number of tickle-related studies have convincingly shown that tickling exploits the sensorimotor system’s awareness of the difference between self and other: If the system orders your hand to move toward your belly, it doesn’t register surprise when the nerve endings there report being stroked. But if the touch is being generated by another sensorimotor system, the belly stroking will come as a surprise."
• Check out the Open Library demo for an ebook that overcomes one of my major objections to the medium - the loading lag between pages - while managing to look really sumptuously tactile. It is a thing of beauty.

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In other news, I am still hard at work at The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which is very easy to immerse myself in (phenomenal characterization!), but nonetheless somewhat slow going. I couldn't help but start Black Swan Green somehow, and it is also very gripping (I am glad to get back to my NYT Notable Books list). David Copperfield has, sadly, fallen by the wayside this weekend, and I begin to fear that I won't finish it this month (NOOOO!!!).

Yesterday D and I went bowling with the people he works with, and I discovered that I am a bowling wimp. I acquired just about every minor bowling injury it is possible for the game to inflict on a person, from broken nails to bruised fingers and sore arms, and managed to drop the ball at least once on my back swing. Ah yes, public humiliation.

Today we plan to do a bit of furniture shopping (exciting stuff, given the ... spartan nature of our apartment furnishings), and perhaps finish of the first disc of the second season of "The Shield." So far it doesn't seem to be quite as vitally brutal and well-characterized as the first season - which we watched last summer and loved - but I will give it time to improve.

Onwards!