Tonsor Retonsus

tonsorial \tahn'sohr-ee-uhl\ adjective
1: of or relating to a barber or his work

I had a haircut a few days ago, and I went from being very shaggy to very short, so now my head feels about 2 lbs. lighter. I also can't headbang quite as well. The haircutter based this haircut on a picture of George Clooney and assured me that women would be falling into my lap. We'll see how that prediction turns out.

Yesterday I went skiing for the first time in a long time, grandly girded with new (to me) equipment. I hung out on the bunny-hill runs for a while, then stupidly decided to take on all my favorite blue- and black- (i.e. medium and difficult) level runs. One or two turned out to be a little steeper than I had anticipated, and I found myself digging in to the side of the mountain with my skis to keep from tumbling off. Attempting to move forward in this position requires the exertion of one's leg muscles, and mine were somewhat withered from disuse, the upshot of which is that my thighs and especially my calves felt like they had been injected with gasoline and set alight. But I valiantly stuck it out until the end, went home, and was more or less unable to walk or even remain standing for more than a few seconds. They're better today, as in "I can walk," ("Mein Führer, I can walk!") but now my arms hurt. Oh well, no pain, no gain. And it was a hell of a lot of fun.

In cultural news, I just finished reading The Book of Sand, a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. I've also read his The Aleph and Other Stories, and his Labyrinths is in the stack. He's a wonderful writer, cosmopolitan and literate but distinctly South American, phantasmagorical yet punishingly real. He deals often with religion, philosophy, and infinity (which reminds me of an interesting but long essay on time my dad sent me recently), and often uses vividly pictorial metaphors: circles and spheres, cubes, mazes, darkness (Borges was blind), sand. His stories are horrific (There Are More Things, which was dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft), A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, The Sect of the Thirty), fantastical (The Aleph, The Book of Sand, The Other), figurative (The Circular Ruins (which was the subject of The Borges Project, a fascinating multinational theatre project covered in American Theatre), The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths, The Mirror and the Mask), and realistic (The Bribe, The Night of the Gifts, Ulrike). He's one of the few South American writers whose oeuvre I am more or less familiar with, the others I can think of being Gabriel García Marquez and Isabel Allende. I read the first few stories in The Book of Sand several months ago and never got around to finishing them, but while browsing in the library the other day I found it again and decided to finish it. My personal favorites from the collection are the fairy-tale-like "The Mirror and the Mask" and the straightforwardly dreamlike "The Other," though Borges states in the introduction that he believes two different stories in the collection, "The Book of Sand" and "The Congress", to be some of his "greatest works in short fiction." He also mentions in "The Bribe" what he calls something like "the peculiar determined predilection of Americans to be even-minded." That was a bit surprising to me, as I've always tried to be exceptionally even-minded and noticed the predilection of many of my acquaintances, whether I agree with their opinions or not, to tend to regard people who disagree with them as utter fools. (Notice that I attempt to show my own even-mindedness by adding the cautionary "whether I agree with their opinions or not." Heheh.)

I am ashamed to say that much of the preceding was referenced from Wikipedia, which as everyone knows is a highly suspicious website and probably not the best place to get your information from, since any Joe Schmo can upload any crap he likes and people will assume it as fact until it gets taken down. Consider the case of John Seigenthaler Sr. as evidence of Wikipedia's spuriosness.

While poking around in the dictionary for a good word to use in place of the cumbersome "spuriousness," which sounds akin to words like "spokesperson" in construction, I found an amazing array of similar-sounding words meaning "doubtful," that is, not "worthy of being doubted" (which is what I was looking for with "spuriousness") but "in a state of doubt": dubitancy, dubiety, dubiosity, dubiousness, or doubtfulness. Amazing concoction, the English language.

Bibliotheca

bibliotheca \,bih-blee-oh'thee-kuh\
1 archaic : BIBLE
2 : a library or collection of books
3 : a list or catalog of books

I read a lot, though I haven't been reading as much for the past month or so due to the immense amount of stuff I've had to do. Generally I read literature, classic novels and so on, with the occasional indulgence like Artemis Fowl or The Rule of Four, interspersed with a lot of plays (as I'm a drama nerd), biographies, science books, history books, and whatever else I feel like. Being homeschooled gives me some choice as to what I can read and don't have to read, since my parents don't micromanage my reading list and generally assume that I'm reading something good. If they walk by and see me holding The Master and Margarita or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, they can walk away with satisfied smiles.

As an example of the sort of stuff I read, here is my reading list (which I keep diligently, one might almost say obsessively) for the past few months. The presence of a reading list somehow encourages me to read more so that I'll have something to put on the list, especially at the end of each month.

October
The Rule of Four- Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Stuff Happens- David Hare
Mother Courage and Her Children- Bertolt Brecht
Nehru- Shashi Tharoor
Uncommon Carriers- John McPhee
Purity of Blood- Arturo Perez-Reverte
The New Life- Orhan Pamuk
Three Tall Women- Edward Albee
Impromptu- Tad Mosel
No Exit- Jean-Paul Sartre

November
The Children's Hour- Lillian Hellman
The Clothes They Stood Up In & The Lady in the Van- Alan Bennett
The Duck Variations- David Mamet
Freakonomics- Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Oh, Play That Thing- Roddy Doyle
Invisible Cities- Italo Calvino

December
Blue Door- Tanya Barfield
Bad Science- Gary Taubes
Strange Pilgrims- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Jesus' Son- Denis Johnson
The Shia Revival- Vali Nasr

While looking at this reading list at one point, and the entire year's worth of books listed before it, I noticed how woefully lacking it is in female authors. My selection of subject material is wide and various, and authors of many nationalities are represented on this list, but there are really very few women, aside from a disproportionate number of female black playwrights- Suzan Lori-Parks, Lynn Nottage, Tanya Barfield, and Lorraine Hansberry, for example. Am I just subliminally sexist? Are there just not that many books written by women? The latter explanation does not account for this woeful shortage.

So to rectify this abominable situation, encouraged by my mom's plan to read more books by femal authors (specifically, if I recall, American female authors), I've decided to increase the female-penned segment of my reading list. This happens to coincide with the New Year but has nothing to do with it- I don't make New Year's resolutions because I never keep them and therefore it's a waste of time. Some of the female authors I'm planning to read are E. Annie Proulx, Toni Morrison, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Alice Walker, Lillian Hellman, Wendy Wasserstein, Marilynne Robinson, and maybe even Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, or (egads!) Willa Cather. Not all at once, of course; I'm still going to intersperse these with scientific books (Darwin, Dawkins, Feynman, Hawking, Sagan), plays (Albee, Ionesco, Pinter, Shepard, O'Neill, Soyinka), biographies (MLK Jr., actors like Alec Guinness or John Gielgud, political leaders/revolutionaries), and plenty of novels by men (some that spring to mind are Schindler's List, Child of All Nations, The Satanic Verses, In the Lake of the Woods, and On the Road).

I'll keep you posted.

Anacrusis

anacrusis \an-a'kroo-sis\ noun
1 : one or more syllables at the beginning of a line of poetry that are regarded as preliminary to and not a part of the metrical pattern of that line
2 : UPBEAT; specifically : one or more notes or tones preceding the first downbeat of a musical phrase — called also pickup
3 : a preparatory gesture leading into an accented or climactic dancing movement

Though anacrusis has several specific definitions and does not actually mean the commencement of just anything, I'm sure I can extend it metaphorically to mean "commencement of just anything" (such as a blog) without the Semantic Police locking me away. But anyway, this blog is going to deal with a variety of subjects, primarily cultural/artistic matters (such as literature, music, theater, film, etc.) as well as linguistics, hockey, politics, and other things which I find significant. I'll also try to provide a Word of the Day with each post, which may or may not have any bearing on the actual content of the blog, with words which I think are cool or useful.

I'm a student from Montana who's been considering a blog for quite a while now, and since a couple of my family members have joined Blogspot I figured I would conform. I may not post very often, as I have many other exciting things to be doing with my life in general, but meh, c'est la guerre.