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asher553My current job (since mid-February) is part IT and part warehouse work. The warehouse portion entails a fair amount of physical labor; the upside is that I'm saving a ton of money on gym memberships. The IT part is more administrative than technical, and it consists mainly of receiving returned equipment at the warehouse and entering tracking numbers, model numbers, and serial numbers into a spreadsheet. The reader may have surmised that this is picky and somewhat tedious work; and the reader would be correct. The saving grace of this job is that it's a very short commute - literally a 4-minute drive from my apartment, past the traffic light on Evergreen and turn left and drive 2 blocks and I'm there. On a nice day - and those will be coming very shortly - I'll be able to walk to work.
New in the mail is my print copy of Damon Knight's 'Creating Short Fiction', which I am reading and enjoying greatly. Knight was well known as a science fiction writer and editor, and he led creative writing workshops for years. The book itself is beautifully written and a model of clarity. DK includes one of his own stories, titled 'Semper Fi', with annotations explaining how he introduces various details at certain points to build the picture in the reader's mind. Dialog between the two main characters - the self-indulgent Mitchell and his pragmatic foil Price - develop the growing unease around the "mentigraph" invention. (The story would be a good example of the "out of the bottle" genre in STC vocabulary.) The story, first published in 1964, seems eerily prophetic. And Price's ominous question to Mitchell - "What's going to happen to the world if the brightest guys in it drop out of the baby-making business?" - stands as a stark warning to our present day.
Over Shabbat, I re-read Agnon's 'From Lodging to Lodging', enjoying it even better the second time round. The narrator, in pursuit of new lodgings for the sake of his physical and mental health, rents an apartment in Tel Aviv, but soon discovers that he is bothered by the city noise, and by the needy, clingy child of the landlady, who has a habit of poking him in the eyes. He finds an idyllic cottage a short distance away, which promises to offer him the peace he craves.
It's at exactly the moment when the narrator has resolved to leave this noisy apartment (at the beginning of section 6) that he no longer feels trapped there, so that "I paid no attention to the roar of the buses and the tumult of the street. And since I stopped thinking about them, sometimes I even slept." But it's only after his sudden business trip (which he does not elaborate on) that he walks up to the much-anticipated cottage - and then walks away from it. He returns to the noisy apartment. In the end he is forced to admit that he has grown fond of the neglected boy who pokes his eyes.
It occurred to me that the plot graph of 'From Lodging to Lodging' would closely follow the arc prescribed by Knight, with the tension rising in the beginning and middle sections, becoming acute at the climax near the end, and finally ebbing into resolution.
New in the mail is my print copy of Damon Knight's 'Creating Short Fiction', which I am reading and enjoying greatly. Knight was well known as a science fiction writer and editor, and he led creative writing workshops for years. The book itself is beautifully written and a model of clarity. DK includes one of his own stories, titled 'Semper Fi', with annotations explaining how he introduces various details at certain points to build the picture in the reader's mind. Dialog between the two main characters - the self-indulgent Mitchell and his pragmatic foil Price - develop the growing unease around the "mentigraph" invention. (The story would be a good example of the "out of the bottle" genre in STC vocabulary.) The story, first published in 1964, seems eerily prophetic. And Price's ominous question to Mitchell - "What's going to happen to the world if the brightest guys in it drop out of the baby-making business?" - stands as a stark warning to our present day.
Over Shabbat, I re-read Agnon's 'From Lodging to Lodging', enjoying it even better the second time round. The narrator, in pursuit of new lodgings for the sake of his physical and mental health, rents an apartment in Tel Aviv, but soon discovers that he is bothered by the city noise, and by the needy, clingy child of the landlady, who has a habit of poking him in the eyes. He finds an idyllic cottage a short distance away, which promises to offer him the peace he craves.
It's at exactly the moment when the narrator has resolved to leave this noisy apartment (at the beginning of section 6) that he no longer feels trapped there, so that "I paid no attention to the roar of the buses and the tumult of the street. And since I stopped thinking about them, sometimes I even slept." But it's only after his sudden business trip (which he does not elaborate on) that he walks up to the much-anticipated cottage - and then walks away from it. He returns to the noisy apartment. In the end he is forced to admit that he has grown fond of the neglected boy who pokes his eyes.
It occurred to me that the plot graph of 'From Lodging to Lodging' would closely follow the arc prescribed by Knight, with the tension rising in the beginning and middle sections, becoming acute at the climax near the end, and finally ebbing into resolution.
