{"id":222,"date":"2007-10-21T20:35:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-22T03:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gen-o.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/21\/weekend-notes\/"},"modified":"2007-10-21T22:22:38","modified_gmt":"2007-10-22T05:22:38","slug":"weekend-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/21\/weekend-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekend notes"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Conversational reading has a fairly sharp piece about one of my favorite literary critics, James Wood.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p>I don&#8217;t think <span class=\"highlighted1\">Wood<\/span> believes there is much value in metaphors like Flaubert&#8217;s because as a reader he doesn&#8217;t appreciate what use they have in a novel. <span class=\"highlighted1\">Wood<\/span> is comfortable dissecting how an author attaches character traits to realistic people, but when an author tosses in an enigmatic metaphor, <span class=\"highlighted1\">Wood<\/span> finds it too fuzzy, and therefore meaningless. I think, perhaps, if he were better at imagining his way into the psychology of a work, he might better understand the value of metaphors like Flaubert&#8217;s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Esposito seems to go a little over the top to make his point, for, after all, enigmatic metaphor and social commentary doesn&#8217;t really matter much without the existing creation in the novel of one real human being.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Prompted in part by <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/09\/16\/health\/16gene.html\">this<\/a> New York Times article, I&#8217;ve been reading up on recent cancer research. Most articles I&#8217;ve read, are, unfortunately, unlinkable (like <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/content.nejm.org\/cgi\/content\/extract\/357\/2\/154\">this one<\/a>), having come from ridiculously expensive medical journals. One of the recommendations I encountered in the Times is essentially to spend more resources on soi-disant <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/masshightech.bizjournals.com\/masshightech\/stories\/2002\/02\/18\/daily98.html\">&#8220;blue sky&#8221; research<\/a>. One of the places that I became aware of at the beginning of this decade that actually works on this sort of stuff is the <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.uchsc.edu\/sm\/waring\/webpages\/\">Webb-Waring Institute,<\/a> which operates free of commercial interests.<\/li>\n<li>An era ended in New York last week with Joe Torre&#8217;s departure from the New York Yankees. The teams from 1996 through 2001 played an essential part in my sense of who I am as an individual\u2014Mo; Jeter; Posada; waking up at obscene hours in France to listen to the 2000 Subway Series; the 2001 playoff games that started on one day and finished the next, ending in October\u2014and I&#8217;m rather sad about the end of things for Torre. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/10\/21\/sports\/baseball\/21inbox.html\">These letters<\/a> to the Times sports section express that sadness better than I can right now.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Conversational reading has a fairly sharp piece about one of my favorite literary critics, James Wood. I don&#8217;t think Wood believes there is much value in metaphors like Flaubert&#8217;s because as a reader he doesn&#8217;t appreciate what use they have in a novel. Wood is comfortable dissecting how an author attaches character traits to realistic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2,1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gen-o.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}