by Marc Levy

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A frothy but good humored romance that takes its characters seriously, in which even minor characters have ideas. Chloe is a girl on wheels. Sanji is a wealthy young businessman from Mumbai, a fellow with a plan to chip away at caste restrictions through social media. They meet cute on a bench in Washington Square in Manhattan. Chloe lives in a nearby apartment building, a building in which Sanji’s uncle works as an elevator operator. It’s that sort of movie.

French is still a hard slog, but perhaps it’s gradually coming together.

Yesterday’s Tinderbox meetup was, I think, a true landmark.

As usual, there were lots of topics. Andreas Busch discussed his recent use of Tinderbox to examine how the membership of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen has changed over the years. Art Currim touched on the relationship between poetry and code (and the vexations a writer sometimes experiences when confronting the system’s esoteric demands). Michael Becker demonstrated his emerging doctoral work, and I talked a bit about sentiment analysis in the upcoming Tinderbox 9.

But the revelation for me was the discussion by Anthony Caldwell (Digital Research Consortium, UCLA) of his studies of Los Angeles movie theaters from the early 20th century. Many of these downtown movie palaces have survived, lots of oral history (some of it apocryphal) surround them, and their theaters — some sealed up for decades — have sculptures and murals by artists whom we now know to appreciate. It’s an interesting project!

Lots of contemporary sources exist: he’s got the literature references in Zotero from various online libraries and archives. Zotero, it turns out, downloads the pdfs when available, and he lets DEVONthink index these, giving him a full-text index into this specialized corpus. From that, he develops in Tinderbox some lovely and informative maps of stylistic and artistic influences.

Twenty or thirty years ago, I went to conferences where people speculated about the scholarly workbench of the future. (I wrote a hypertext for this symposium; I don’t know whether it holds up.) But my sense is that Prof. Caldwell wasn’t doing this to speculate on future technologies or to test digital humanities; this was just the best way to gather information about these interesting buildings. Yet, here we have pretty much everything we wanted back then, and it’s all off the shelf!

2021-Mar-20 Tinderbox Meetup from Tinderbox Meetups on Vimeo.

by Antoine Laurain

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This is the first book I have read in another language that I have not read before in English. It goes slowly, but it goes: six weeks ago, I could barely make my way through the sly fox and the vain crow.

Like the other Antoine Laurain novels I have read, this is a sunny book that, for all its sunshine, is not entirely without shadows. Violaine Lepage is a publisher, in charge of her firm’s slush pile. This is an intimate portrait of a publishing industry that is somewhat removed from reality as I understand it today, and is perhaps intended to be read as a portrait of how the world ought to be rather than how it is. Indeed, the book opens with Violaine waking up in a hospital room in the aftermath of a terrible plane crash, and finding that her visitors include Marcel Proust, Michel Hoellebecq, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, and Virginia Woolf.

It’s really a lot of serious fun.

At last!

The vaccine center (at Beth Israel) clearly suffers from a shortage of supply, is not operating anywhere close to capacity, and its capacity seems well below what the facility could accommodate.

by Jo Walton, trans. Luc Varissimo

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This is the first book I have read in French. Le Petit Prince preceded it, but that’s not much of a book. Among Others is about children, in a way, but it’s not for children. It took a long time, I made a steady stream of blunders, I relied too much on the dictionary and on Bing Translate for help. But I made it.

I was surprised to find how intensely reading Morwenna in French recalled to me the experience of learning to read English. My dyslexia made that a long struggle. I remember one first-grade morning when Mrs. Boardman had us each reading our own copy of Fat Sam and Thin Anne, and I found myself pausing after a particularly difficult decipherment to say to myself, “I can manage this, but it’s very hard and it goes very slowly.” Adults I knew could do this instantly and without apparent effort, but for me to learn that seemed as distant and as improbable as learning to play second base like Don Buford.

Being forced to read at the pace of a hobbled first grader has some benefits. I’ve read this twice in English and had never noticed that Morwenna recalls playing dolls with her sister, and how they would invent stories of rescuing dragons from evil princesses. It’s easy to miss that sort of thing. The end, too, benefits from taking it slowly, which was necessary since “flaming javelin,” “extra-terrestrial space turtle” and “dagger” were not really part of my introductory vocabulary.