marginalia.org
type: channel
description: Various Enthusiasms
language: en-us
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2011-09-19T22:15:47-08:00
generator agent: http://www.movabletype.org/
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Breakthrough Pain
items: Reading: January & February 2011
items: Year In Reading 2010 (non-fiction)
items: Year in Reading 2010 (Fiction)
items: A Farewell
items: So very sorry
items: Weschler on Trevor and Ryan Oakes
items: Captured Time
items: Things To Read and A Thing To Possibly Use
items: Outtakes
items: Snow Storm
items: Let's do this more often
items: Can't Not Say Something
items: Trip Report IV - Phnom Penh
items: Trip Report III - Chiang Mai

Breakthrough Pain
type: item
description: On September 3rd, my dad died due to a very agressive and rare cancer of the kidney called collecting-duct carcinoma just six weeks after first experiencing symptoms. This was nine months to the day after my mom died from metastasized breast cancer two years after her initial diagnosis. I've learned a lot from witnessing their deaths. I learned that when...
encoded: On September 3rd, my dad died due to a very agressive and rare cancer of the kidney called collecting-duct carcinoma just six weeks after first experiencing symptoms. This was nine months to the day after my mom died from metastasized breast cancer two years after her initial diagnosis. I've learned a lot from witnessing their deaths. I learned that when someone is in the last stages of cancer, pain management is at two levels, a base amount of pain killer, and a supplemental medication - hydromorphone in my experience - that is given for breakthrough pain. Hydromorphone, commonly called hydromorph, is administered via a butterfly IV in the upper arm area, which will be clearly labelled as there is likely another IV on the opposite arm for other drugs - sedatives, or anti-seizure medication that becomes necessary when there are metastasizes in the brain. I learned that there is a moment when the person you know as your mother or father is essentially gone, and you are sitting with them waiting for their body to die. You begin to talk more openly with siblings about their passing, about after, though seldom with bare words like die, which is a word that sits heavily in the room whenever uttered. I learned that you sit, and you wait, and you start to learn about how approaching death smells bad, that you will involuntarily recoil from their breath as you lean forward to whisper what may be a final goodbye and wonder if they will be gone before you come back the next day, and part of you hopes that maybe they will be, as there is no hope left beyond the hope for this all to end. I learned that the death rattle is real. I learned to say thank you when people express their condolences, and to wish that there was something to be done when they ask if there is anything they can do. I learned that sometimes the person having a really bad day is me, and that I can be the person distractedly texting while walking down the street, and maybe it is true that everyone is fighting…
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2011-09-19T22:15:47-08:00

Reading: January & February 2011
type: item
description: Rather than a ridiculous year-end summary as I did for 2010, I'm going to try and do one every couple months. On to the books! Accelerando by Charles Stross I described this to someone as a pretty boingboingy book, and I stand by that description. There's lots of gee-whiz stuff about uploading and replicating your consciousness and it gets a...
encoded: Rather than a ridiculous year-end summary as I did for 2010, I'm going to try and do one every couple months. On to the books! Accelerando by Charles Stross I described this to someone as a pretty boingboingy book, and I stand by that description. There's lots of gee-whiz stuff about uploading and replicating your consciousness and it gets a bit eye-rolling in its technophilia at times. The book rolls along because Stross knows how to plot, but the characters didn't feel very human. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem I took a break from this book half-way through for a few months, but eventually came back and finished it. It's a bit hard to describe the plot, as I'm not sure the plot was a strong consideration for Lethem - it doesn't have the genre structure holding it up as in his earlier books, so the focus is really on Lethem's obsessions, the top one being New York city itself. The writing needs to carry this book, and it does - the characters are very well drawn, and the sci-fi elements (I refuse to use the term magical realism) are rendered in an almost deadpan way that fits the tone of the book. Everything Matters by Ron Currie Jr A boy is born knowing that the world wil end in exactly 36 years, 168 days, 14 hours, and 23 seconds. The novel tells the story of how he copes with this knowledge, his damaged family, and love. I really loved this book. It has great imagination and energy, and the writing is wonderful. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino A savage and raunchy novel about the literary world of New York in the 50s and 60s. I was surprised that this was from 1971, as its style was very current-feeling, with many flourishes that had a post-modern feel to them: the author addresses the reader, acknowledging that these are characters he has created, there are argumentative footnotes disputing points in the text by a Zuzu Jefferson, and you are generally never left to forget that this is a literary creation. This sounds like something…
subject: Books & Reading
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2011-03-04T21:16:28-08:00

Year In Reading 2010 (non-fiction)
type: item
description: As promised! I read a lot less non-fiction than fiction this year, but I seem to have made up for it by highlighting favorite passages a lot more. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky A road trip with David Foster Wallace in 1996. Essential if you’re a DFW fan. how other people regard you does...
encoded: As promised! I read a lot less non-fiction than fiction this year, but I seem to have made up for it by highlighting favorite passages a lot more. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky A road trip with David Foster Wallace in 1996. Essential if you’re a DFW fan. how other people regard you does not have enough calories in it, to keep you from blowing your brains out That I think a lot of people feel—not overwhelmed by the amount of stuff they have to do. But overwhelmed by the number of choices they have, and by the number of discrete, different things that come at them. And the number of small … that since they’re part of numerous systems, the number of small insistent tugs on them, from a number of different systems and directions. Whether that’s qualitatively different than the way life was for let’s say our parents or our grandparents, I’m not sure. But I sorta think so. At least in some—in terms of the way it feels on your nerve endings. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. So I think it’s got something to do with, that we’re just—we’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow. And there’s some kinds of escape—in a sort of Flannery O’Connorish way—that end up, in a twist, making you confront yourself even more. And then there are other kinds that say, “Give me seven dollars, and in return I will make you forget your name is David Wallace, that you have a pimple on your cheek, and that your gas bill is due.” we’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and…
subject: Books & Reading
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2011-01-26T22:45:16-08:00

Year in Reading 2010 (Fiction)
type: item
description: One of the really nice things about the Kindle is that it's a lot easier to know what books I've read this year. While it's not exhaustive, as I still have a hardcopy book habit going on, the Kindle took over a lot of my reading. The kindle website also makes it pretty easy to pull out a list...
encoded: One of the really nice things about the Kindle is that it's a lot easier to know what books I've read this year. While it's not exhaustive, as I still have a hardcopy book habit going on, the Kindle took over a lot of my reading. The kindle website also makes it pretty easy to pull out a list of what you've read and any highlighted passages and notes. What follows is a brief summary of all the fiction I read on the Kindle - I may go back and add some physical books I read as well as I remember what they were (all I really remember is Sophie's Choice, but I'm sure there were others). All quoted passages are ones I highlighted as reading - the number of quotes is probably some indication of how much I enjoyed some of the writing in the book. I'll be adding non-fiction (a somewhat shorter list) in a future post. The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott I enjoy Elliott's unadorned style, which feels very honest and open. The book is a mix of memoir and true-crime book as Elliott becomes obsessed with the Hans Reiser murder case while also suffering from a bad case of writer's block. He totally nails the technical details when explaining what a file system, which is always nice to see in a non-technical book. Recommended. And if you're like me, that's going to be a time when you're making your living selling drugs out of your freezer, living in a squat a bullet away from Cabrini Green. You'll have to represent something, like the other side of the tracks, but safe. Someone who, when the time comes, when the party's over, she can turn around and guide to a place where life is a little more predictable. But when the party was over I didn't want to turn around. I didn't want to go to law school or get a real job or love only one person forever though in many ways she was the most loveable person I was ever going to meet. It didn't matter. I had to test my dissatisfaction. Anathem by Neal Stephenson Stephenson is one of my favorite authors, so I was well prepared to be totall…
subject: Books & Reading
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2011-01-24T21:14:17-08:00

A Farewell
type: item
description: There's a species of cat owner that is convinced that their own personal feline is pretty much the best on the planet. For the past eight years I've been that kind of cat owner, as I shared my life with Mrrt, who joined us as Felicia from my sister, but quickly found a new onomatopoeic name thanks to her...
encoded: There's a species of cat owner that is convinced that their own personal feline is pretty much the best on the planet. For the past eight years I've been that kind of cat owner, as I shared my life with Mrrt, who joined us as Felicia from my sister, but quickly found a new onomatopoeic name thanks to her regular chatter. She's been a constant and welcome presence in my life as the us became just me, and it got to be impossible to imagine my apartment without her in it. Sadly, I'm going to have to start doing just that, as she died on Wednesday after a long decline from kidney problems. I am constitutionally allergic to being maudlin in public, but for her I'll make an exception: thanks for being part of my life. I'll miss you and always remember you fondly, and you really were the best cat on the planet. PS: A big thanks to West King Edward Animal Clinic, who were always friendly and helped me keep her healthy for a long time.
subject: Marginalia
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2009-06-10T22:44:42-08:00

So very sorry
type: item
description: It's true, I have removed my copy of the beloved DFW commencment speech. As I thought might be obvious, the recent publication of the text in book form brought a stern copyright enforcement letter to my door. I lack the time and money necessary to fight such a thing, so, as much as it meant to me to play a...
encoded: It's true, I have removed my copy of the beloved DFW commencment speech. As I thought might be obvious, the recent publication of the text in book form brought a stern copyright enforcement letter to my door. I lack the time and money necessary to fight such a thing, so, as much as it meant to me to play a small role in making it known to people, I won't be hosting it any more. Happy googling.
subject: Books & Reading
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2009-05-10T10:36:07-08:00

Weschler on Trevor and Ryan Oakes
type: item
description: Lawrence Weschler, who is pretty much my favorite writer of non-fiction at the moment, has an article in the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. It examines the art of Ryan & Trevor Oakes, who are doing some really fascinating work with perspective. You should read it. There were the conversations as well in which they began to take note...
encoded: Lawrence Weschler, who is pretty much my favorite writer of non-fiction at the moment, has an article in the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. It examines the art of Ryan & Trevor Oakes, who are doing some really fascinating work with perspective. You should read it. There were the conversations as well in which they began to take note of the curious way in which their noses severely narrowed the expanse of their depth of field. They became convinced that a person's nose, even though usually occluded by the operations of his visual cortex such that it tended to disappear from view, served to anchor the scene before him, though not in the way one might expect, as a beacon pointing the way ahead right down the middle of his visual field. Rather, it might be more accurate, in considering bifocal vision, to think of the nose as appearing doubled to either side of the visual field, as if it were bracketing or bookending the scene before us (blocking the right eye's leftmost view, and the left eye's rightmost). And this was a phenomenon, they came to feel, with implications not only for vision generally but for art-making in particular. One day Ryan was studying a recent suite of abstract paintings by Trevor and, never one to accept the arbitrary nature of anyone's mark, he took to focusing in particular on a seemingly recurrent triangular motif off in the lower corner of several of the paintings. "Wait a second, Trevor," he announced exultantly. "That's our nose!" Such shapes appeared not only in Trevor's paintings but in those of other students as well. And indeed, come to think of it, in those of all sorts of other, far more accomplished artists. The Chicago Reader did a long piece on them last year; it also details how Weschler's relationship with them formed - he actually played a small but significant role in the development of their careers.
subject: Art
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2009-04-01T23:25:29-08:00

Captured Time
type: item
description: This bit from the film Spectre of Hope has been on my mind recently: This notion of capturing the world in what is cumulatively a very small amount of time is interesting to me, and I realized that, given that all of my digital photos record the exposure for each frame, I could calculate exactly how much actual time I...
encoded: This bit from the film Spectre of Hope has been on my mind recently: This notion of capturing the world in what is cumulatively a very small amount of time is interesting to me, and I realized that, given that all of my digital photos record the exposure for each frame, I could calculate exactly how much actual time I have recorded. I wrote a script (details on that after the jump) to do just this for all the photos I've taken since I got my first camera in 2002, and the total exposure time for 27611 images is 2360.473 seconds, or a bit under 40 minutes. That I take the occasional long exposures inflates this figure to a certain extent, but even with that it's a small amount of time for something that feels a lot longer. By the way - Spectre of Hope is currently available in its entirety on YouTube in 5 parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. More...
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2009-03-29T14:16:21-08:00

Things To Read and A Thing To Possibly Use
type: item
description: Item the first: Popular article where you should absolutely read the whole thing: Wall Street on the Tundra. Walking into the P.M.’s minute headquarters, I expect to be stopped and searched, or at least asked for photo identification. Instead I find a single policeman sitting behind a reception desk, feet up on the table, reading a newspaper. He glances up,...
encoded: Item the first: Popular article where you should absolutely read the whole thing: Wall Street on the Tundra. Walking into the P.M.’s minute headquarters, I expect to be stopped and searched, or at least asked for photo identification. Instead I find a single policeman sitting behind a reception desk, feet up on the table, reading a newspaper. He glances up, bored. “I’m here to see the prime minister,” I say for the first time in my life. He’s unimpressed. Anyone here can see the prime minister. Half a dozen people will tell me that one of the reasons Icelanders thought they would be taken seriously as global financiers is that all Icelanders feel important. One reason they all feel important is that they all can go see the prime minister anytime they like. Secondly - Late to the party award, I just read Hiroshima, by John Hersey. One of the more famous pieces of journalism to come out of World War 2, and deservedly so. I am in awe just thinking about what it must have been like to do the reporting for this. Lastly - Apparently when I’m not being paid to code, I code for free, hence a new little thing I’m calling Twitter Day. Of interest only to people that know and use Twitter. (And quite possibly not even then.)
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2009-03-16T20:58:46-08:00

Outtakes
type: item
description: I took both of these shots in London last year. Even though the focus is better in the first shot, I like the second shot a lot more: no other people, better composition, and a more intimate pose. It's the one I ended up posting to flickr. I felt more comfortable taking shots like this in London than I...
encoded: I took both of these shots in London last year. Even though the focus is better in the first shot, I like the second shot a lot more: no other people, better composition, and a more intimate pose. It's the one I ended up posting to flickr. I felt more comfortable taking shots like this in London than I typically do here; there was a much greater feel of anonymity.
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2009-03-15T21:56:40-08:00

Snow Storm
type: item
description: Sunday was a day of micro-climates, we drove from sunny to this to sunny again. This was shot with my relatively new Flip Mino HD, which so far I'm enjoying shooting with, but is giving me that babe in the woods feeling whenever I'm editing/outputting. The provided software is great if you just want to slap titles on something...
encoded: Sunday was a day of micro-climates, we drove from sunny to this to sunny again. This was shot with my relatively new Flip Mino HD, which so far I'm enjoying shooting with, but is giving me that babe in the woods feeling whenever I'm editing/outputting. The provided software is great if you just want to slap titles on something and ship up to youtube, but making sure all the settings are right for proper HD and such is still a work in progress. I'm lucky enough to have access to some knowledgeable help, which is really the only reason this is up and actually in HD. (Thanks M!)
subject: Video
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2009-03-10T00:17:41-08:00

Let's do this more often
type: item
description: For a long time I've been telling people "I dunno, maybe someday" when they ask if I'll ever start posting regularly here again. And there's all kinds of things I was telling myself I'd like to do to the site to make writing on it more appealing, like maybe erasing all the archives and just starting fresh with a completely...
encoded: For a long time I've been telling people "I dunno, maybe someday" when they ask if I'll ever start posting regularly here again. And there's all kinds of things I was telling myself I'd like to do to the site to make writing on it more appealing, like maybe erasing all the archives and just starting fresh with a completely rethought design that really focused on the content and would allow me to easily highlight my photos, and a bunch of other things. Today I realized that that's all just a way of making a problem interesting enough, and hard enough, that I never actually get beyond the half-baked design stage. Yes, I could spend hours figuring out a cool new publishing system that works just with plain text files and publish with rake (no really, there are two), or I could just start posting again, and see what happens. It's easy to do nothing and blame perfectionism, but I'm going to try, as Rilke put it in a wonderful phrase I read today in Lewis Hyde's The Gift, 'a continuous squandering of all perishable values'. So today I upgraded Movable Type, reset all the templates to defaults (sorry to feed readers for the spam today, last time I promise) and now let's go. The only thing I can promise you is that you will never see 'Share This!' buttons littered under every entry.
subject: Marginalia
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2009-03-08T14:27:44-08:00

Can't Not Say Something
type: item
description: It seemed kind of weird to have that damn picture of skulls at the top of the page on a day when I'm probably getting more visits than I have in years, all due to hosting David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, which people are reading in a new way today as news of his suicide spreads. I've read many heartfelt...
encoded: It seemed kind of weird to have that damn picture of skulls at the top of the page on a day when I'm probably getting more visits than I have in years, all due to hosting David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, which people are reading in a new way today as news of his suicide spreads. I've read many heartfelt and beautiful remembrances today, and it's a shame that his ability to so precisely articulate the weird pain and loneliness that being wrapped up in your skull can bring, did not, in the end, give him freedom from that anguish. This passage -- from an essay on Kakfa -- has been richocheting around my brain today: [T]he horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. ... [E]nvision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward -- we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch. Goodbye Dave, and thanks.
subject: Books & Reading
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2008-09-14T12:00:27-08:00

Trip Report IV - Phnom Penh
type: item
description: As we drove away from the Choeung Ex Genocidal Center, my driver asked me if I was interested in going to a shooting range. While I turned down the offer, I couldn't help but wonder if a common reaction to visiting the Killing Fields was wanting to go do something pointlessly violent. It's an entirely helpless feeling, wandering about...
encoded: As we drove away from the Choeung Ex Genocidal Center, my driver asked me if I was interested in going to a shooting range. While I turned down the offer, I couldn't help but wonder if a common reaction to visiting the Killing Fields was wanting to go do something pointlessly violent. It's an entirely helpless feeling, wandering about this quiet place that was host to such horrors, and knowing that the thousands killed there - most of whose skulls you can view in the memorial chedi - represent a tiny fraction of those killed by the Khmer Rouge. I really wish I could say something meaningful, or hopeful, about the memories preserved here and at the Genocide Museum, but it's hard for me to believe that such remembrances, as much as they honour the lives destroyed, have meaning beyond this when genocide continues to happen. Beyond this, all I have to offer is silence.
subject: Travel
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2006-11-30T21:04:48-08:00

Trip Report III - Chiang Mai
type: item
description: While there are some not-to-be-missed tourist highlights in Chiang Mai - the night market, Doi Suthep - for me, it was mostly just a great place to walk around. It's a city I felt I could grasp in my head, which is pretty much impossible in Bangkok. More laid-back than Bangkok, and way less seedy than Pattaya, it was...
encoded: While there are some not-to-be-missed tourist highlights in Chiang Mai - the night market, Doi Suthep - for me, it was mostly just a great place to walk around. It's a city I felt I could grasp in my head, which is pretty much impossible in Bangkok. More laid-back than Bangkok, and way less seedy than Pattaya, it was a good place to stroll, take pictures, eat random street food, take a cooking class, and sit and read, and it just so happens is how I spent my time there. Highlights: The night market is several city blocks of stalls selling the usual Thai market stuff: buddhas, clothing, wallets, watches, massages, etc. etc. The odd thing for me is that I really enjoyed strolling through it but I ended up buying pretty much nothing, as it wasn't that kind of trip for me. What was fantastic was the open-air food section, which was a large seating area surrounded by different restaurants. You picked whatever section looked good and the wait staff took care of you from then on. I never had a meal that wasn't delicious (and cheap, as per usual in Thailand). Doi Suthep, just outside Chiang Mai, is almost ridiculously photogenic, as can be seen on the right. I visited early in the morning, and as I approached the (three @#*@#!!* hundred) steps up to the temple proper, rays of light pierced through the mist steaming through the canopy of trees, at which point I almost started looking for mist-generating machines, so postcard-perfect was the moment. The entire temple was beautiful (more pictures here), and really shouldn't be missed if you're anywhere near it. I took a one-day cooking class (another thing-to-do in Chiang Mai) at a place called Baan Thai that was a lot of fun, and well worth the $25 cost. We made and ate five dishes over the course of the day; and I can definitively state that Thai cooking is easy when you don't have to do any cleaning and there are several sharp-eyed Thai women watching over your every move. Oh, and if there's one secret to Thai cooking, appa…
subject: Travel
creator: Bill Stilwell
date: 2006-11-28T22:21:40-08:00