Literacy is the path to communism
Some odds and ends from times recent...
My parents' ISP, Adelphia, sucks. For the past several days, our Internet access has been nonexistent in the mornings. Or it has the habit, like today, of returning for a brief time, then going down again before I've had a chance to get online and check mail. Cable Internet is great because of the speed, but my experience is that all the companies that offer it leave much to be desired in terms of how often the service goes down without warning and how lousy customer service is. I didn't think anyone could be worse than Comcast, my ISP in Chicago, but Adelphia has proven me wrong. And let's not even get started on DSL....
Efforts to revise my thesis to fit criteria for publication are proving much more difficult than expected. Principally, the challenge is to take my original work, which was very insightful and thorough and engaging, and more or less cut it in half to get it under the 35- to 40-page upper limit for the journal where I want it published, the Radical History Review. So far I've concentrated mainly on retyping it and editing it as I go, since I originally wrote it in AppleWorks as I didn't have Microsoft Word at the time. It was about 46 pages in AppleWorks, with 2.5 spacing and notes, excluding the pictures, bibliography and other parts not in the core text. Converted to Word, with double spacing (including notes, which are also unfortunately 12-point font) and the stingy 1.5-inch left and right margins, I'm running 62 pages. It's only 48 pages of text, which is good, but I can't exactly excise the notes. My plan of attack now is to construct a new outline and attempt to rewrite it, cutting out as much background as possible (I'm not sure how I'll swing that), in the hopes that I can pare it down to something that better approximates the page limit. Thus it looks like I'll be working on this beyond vacation, which might at least give me something to occupy my time while I continue to look for work back in Chicago....
Another long-range goal I've set for myself is to read. A whole lot. Ideally, I'd like to tackle pretty much everything on my roommate's bookcase between now and whenever I leave Chicago, presumably sometime this summer when I move to grad school. Oh, and that's in addition to the large collection of books on journalism and communism we've inherited from our mentor, the dearly departed Dick "Naughy Shirley" Schwarzlose. Not to mention the handful of unread books of my own lying around the apartment. It's no small task and will be no mean feat if I pull it off. Of course, to do that, I'd realistically have to read close to one book every day or two for the next couple of months, which seems somewhat unlikely. Especially if I'm to keep to my New Year's Resolutions: 1) study Czech and German a minimum of five hours and at least three days a week, 2) to write at least five substantial entries in my blog each week and 3) to cease buying soda to keep in my apartment. But it's good to set such lofty goals....
On the subject of books, I really need to get my site set up so I can provide a picture and link of what I'm currently reading. Or develop some side section of current and recent reads that I update with regularity. (Something along those lines might actually be better if I prove fairly industrious and read several books a week.) In the meantime, I'll have to content myself with making a point of regularly mentioning my current reading list in these pages....
To bring you up to speed on that, here's where I stand:
At the moment I'm working on two books by the Dutch author Harry Mulisch. One of them, I should say, I read half of it at a Borders in Evanston about two weeks ago and plan to read the second half whenever I can steal away to a chain bookstore for a couple of hours to finish the second half. That book would be The Assault.
The second Mulisch novel, The Discovery of Heaven, is a bit lighter and more frivolous, at least if the first 140 pages are an accurate indication. (It's 730 pages in all, so quite a lot could happen between where I am now and the end of the book.) That book I checked out from the Anaheim Public Library, having to pick it up as the library didn't have The Assault and this was its only Mulisch novel.
On that same library jaunt, I picked up three novels by Milan Kundera, who's rapidly becoming my favorite author, though I can't quite place my finger on what it is about him that merits such an honor. Perhaps it's just how engaging his novels are. Whatever it is, I'm yet to read a work by him that didn't completely draw me in and want to not put the book down until I had finished. That was certainly the case with the first three Kundera novels I read, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Joke and Ignorance. Also true of the first of the three I got from the library, The Farewell Party. Once I finish my current book, I'll start in on Life is Elsewhere and then Slowness.
After that, I'll read Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which my parents have. And I'd like to give Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago a second read so I won't have to haul my copy back to Chicago. In the unlikely event I still have time before I go, I'll pick up with where I left off in Patrick Brogan's Captive Nations: Eastern Europe: 1945-1990, From the Defeat of Hitler to the Fall of Communism. It's an interesting read, a summary of the Communist era in each of the Eastern bloc countries, from the takeover through the fall. And it's also interesting to read as a historical document itself, since Brogan writes in 1990 and speculates on the effects of 1989 will have for the Soviet Union....
I must say, I rather enjoy the CD channels on our satellite provider. Or at least the one with classical music. It's relaxing, creates a nice ambience for when I want to read or do work, and exposes me to more fine classical music. I will definitely miss this when I return to Chicago and am forced to seek something comparable over the Web, though it will likely be of lesser quality....
Class dismissed.
My parents' ISP, Adelphia, sucks. For the past several days, our Internet access has been nonexistent in the mornings. Or it has the habit, like today, of returning for a brief time, then going down again before I've had a chance to get online and check mail. Cable Internet is great because of the speed, but my experience is that all the companies that offer it leave much to be desired in terms of how often the service goes down without warning and how lousy customer service is. I didn't think anyone could be worse than Comcast, my ISP in Chicago, but Adelphia has proven me wrong. And let's not even get started on DSL....
Efforts to revise my thesis to fit criteria for publication are proving much more difficult than expected. Principally, the challenge is to take my original work, which was very insightful and thorough and engaging, and more or less cut it in half to get it under the 35- to 40-page upper limit for the journal where I want it published, the Radical History Review. So far I've concentrated mainly on retyping it and editing it as I go, since I originally wrote it in AppleWorks as I didn't have Microsoft Word at the time. It was about 46 pages in AppleWorks, with 2.5 spacing and notes, excluding the pictures, bibliography and other parts not in the core text. Converted to Word, with double spacing (including notes, which are also unfortunately 12-point font) and the stingy 1.5-inch left and right margins, I'm running 62 pages. It's only 48 pages of text, which is good, but I can't exactly excise the notes. My plan of attack now is to construct a new outline and attempt to rewrite it, cutting out as much background as possible (I'm not sure how I'll swing that), in the hopes that I can pare it down to something that better approximates the page limit. Thus it looks like I'll be working on this beyond vacation, which might at least give me something to occupy my time while I continue to look for work back in Chicago....
Another long-range goal I've set for myself is to read. A whole lot. Ideally, I'd like to tackle pretty much everything on my roommate's bookcase between now and whenever I leave Chicago, presumably sometime this summer when I move to grad school. Oh, and that's in addition to the large collection of books on journalism and communism we've inherited from our mentor, the dearly departed Dick "Naughy Shirley" Schwarzlose. Not to mention the handful of unread books of my own lying around the apartment. It's no small task and will be no mean feat if I pull it off. Of course, to do that, I'd realistically have to read close to one book every day or two for the next couple of months, which seems somewhat unlikely. Especially if I'm to keep to my New Year's Resolutions: 1) study Czech and German a minimum of five hours and at least three days a week, 2) to write at least five substantial entries in my blog each week and 3) to cease buying soda to keep in my apartment. But it's good to set such lofty goals....
On the subject of books, I really need to get my site set up so I can provide a picture and link of what I'm currently reading. Or develop some side section of current and recent reads that I update with regularity. (Something along those lines might actually be better if I prove fairly industrious and read several books a week.) In the meantime, I'll have to content myself with making a point of regularly mentioning my current reading list in these pages....
To bring you up to speed on that, here's where I stand:
At the moment I'm working on two books by the Dutch author Harry Mulisch. One of them, I should say, I read half of it at a Borders in Evanston about two weeks ago and plan to read the second half whenever I can steal away to a chain bookstore for a couple of hours to finish the second half. That book would be The Assault.
The second Mulisch novel, The Discovery of Heaven, is a bit lighter and more frivolous, at least if the first 140 pages are an accurate indication. (It's 730 pages in all, so quite a lot could happen between where I am now and the end of the book.) That book I checked out from the Anaheim Public Library, having to pick it up as the library didn't have The Assault and this was its only Mulisch novel.
On that same library jaunt, I picked up three novels by Milan Kundera, who's rapidly becoming my favorite author, though I can't quite place my finger on what it is about him that merits such an honor. Perhaps it's just how engaging his novels are. Whatever it is, I'm yet to read a work by him that didn't completely draw me in and want to not put the book down until I had finished. That was certainly the case with the first three Kundera novels I read, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Joke and Ignorance. Also true of the first of the three I got from the library, The Farewell Party. Once I finish my current book, I'll start in on Life is Elsewhere and then Slowness.
After that, I'll read Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which my parents have. And I'd like to give Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago a second read so I won't have to haul my copy back to Chicago. In the unlikely event I still have time before I go, I'll pick up with where I left off in Patrick Brogan's Captive Nations: Eastern Europe: 1945-1990, From the Defeat of Hitler to the Fall of Communism. It's an interesting read, a summary of the Communist era in each of the Eastern bloc countries, from the takeover through the fall. And it's also interesting to read as a historical document itself, since Brogan writes in 1990 and speculates on the effects of 1989 will have for the Soviet Union....
I must say, I rather enjoy the CD channels on our satellite provider. Or at least the one with classical music. It's relaxing, creates a nice ambience for when I want to read or do work, and exposes me to more fine classical music. I will definitely miss this when I return to Chicago and am forced to seek something comparable over the Web, though it will likely be of lesser quality....
Class dismissed.
posted by Alexander Dubcek | 00:10
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