Mining novels

This is a great story by John Markoff in the NY Times. I'm not a lawyer though, or I'm sure I'd see it differently. Legal discovery has been automated, and the sophistication of the software is mind-boggling. The sweetest part is the Enron Corpus, a public database of Enron email and documents seized by the government during the criminal proceedings, which has proven invaluable to researchers trying to understand corporate language and social networks. Future Enrons will be plagued and prosecuted, not by lawyers, because there won't be any, but by software developed with the Enron Corpus.

A novel could be written with this data-mining software. There must be a million stories in the Enron Corpus. Obviously plenty of slimy, criminal tales, but also romance, misunderstandings, jokes, lies. Happy families, miserable ones, duck hunting, moving children to college, crazy drives across country to look up people who died years ago. No more writing novels - we'd just start our software and make coffee. It's 100% accurate, while humans are barely more accurate than flipping a coin.

The Illusionist

We watched Silvain Chomet's The Illusionist this weekend. It was full of beautiful, precise pictures. The landscapes of Edinburgh and the hinterlands up the loch were gorgeous, with the detail and precision of scientific illustrations. They made me think of the Colorado landscape drawings of William Henry Holmes.

I don't know what the end of the movie means, but I love not having everything spelled out. It takes a lot of guts to leave key parts of the story up to your viewers or readers. Try to imagine a mainstream Hollywood movie showing a character looking at a snapshot, but not showing us the snapshot. They would never trust us to come to our own conclusions.

Eagles

It's been eagley this last week. We saw a juvenile bald eagle in the trees by the apartment ponds. It was being shouted at by a hundred crows, who were careful to keep their distance. Crows will dive at an owl, but apparently not at an eagle. It may not even have been aware of them. I thought it was looking very closely at the mallard and ring-neck ducks below. Its head and tail weren't white, but there seemed to be white below the brown feathers on its head. When it turned its head, white showed through. Later it flew over us, making for the river. Then yesterday we saw a pair, very high up, turning closely together. At intervals, one would plunge at the other feet first. The other would elegantly curve away. There was some uncertainty about identification, but not with the final bird we saw, at the wetlands, with a very bright white head and tail.

Goose

I'm not sure if I haven't been writing because of the frazzling effects of the holidays, or the lazy mood I got into over the two weeks off from work. If I had to pick just one excuse? Lazy mood. I haven't made beer in weeks either, but that's because I'm out of vessels. If I made more beer now, it would just pour out on the ground.

I did finally go paddling on the river yesterday though - again, like everything else, it's been weeks. What have I been doing over all these weeks? Reading, listening to music, riding Amtrak, running with the dog in the morning. Anyway, yesterday it was pouring down and I got pretty wet, but it isn't particularly cold, especially if you're paddling hard, and it was fun. The strangest thing I saw was an apparently dead swan, flat at the edge of the water with its neck stretched out along the ground. By the time I got the boat turned around and worked my way back up to it, it was miraculously alive and waddling away. Looked more like a domestic goose from the back.

Bread

About that bread - it's the Jim Lahey no-knead bread that Mark Bittman wrote up in the New York Times a couple of years ago. It's the greatest thing ever, of course, especially since I lost the recipe. You don't need the sheet music to whistle 'Summertime' either. This bread is chewy with a great crisp crust, and the longer you let it sit before baking, the more sour it gets.

Here's the recipe in my head - possibly, probably different from the original. Mix flour, salt, and yeast, then warm water - half as much water as flour by volume. Make sure it's evenly wet, but don't worry much after that, then cover it somehow - I have a bowl with a snap-on plastic lid that is pretty airtight. You could just wrap it in plastic, but somehow you need to keep it from drying out over the next 12 hours or so. Let it sit overnight, then preheat the oven and a heavy casserole with a lid to 450 degrees. Flop the dough out and knead - no, sorry, don't knead it - roll it about a little and get it kind of round, then drop it into the hot casserole. You can rub the top with olive oil if you want. You can sprinkle it with salt. You can sprinkle it with rosemary. Cook it with the lid on for half an hour, then with the lid off for another fifteen minutes. Make everybody wait while it cools for 15 or 20 minutes on a rack - luxuriate in the power of making everybody wait. I wouldn't advise sticking too closely to this recipe - certainly not after you've made it once - it's more fun to figure out just how hard it is to screw it up. Don't let it cool too long.

Radio

Here's a good thing not to do again. I was listening to NPR Saturday morning and got angry during a segment where Scott Simon interviewed Judd Gregg, Republican US senator. The senator, a clever and determined liar, made a number of statements that Simon let pass without comment. I don't know why I was so much angrier at Simon than the senator - I think because the job of a GOP senator is to lie, which Gregg was doing perfectly well. Simon's job is to ask questions, which he was not doing so well. My opinion only.

Anyway, I found myself yelling at the radio, and then a bit later writing an email to NPR with the subject line "Tell Scott Simon to pull his head out of his ass". It was quite personal. I had a great time writing it, clicked Send and then took the dog for a walk in this frosty weather we've been having lately. Glorious walk! When I got home and checked my email, maybe an hour and a half or two hours later, there was a reply from Scott Simon.

It sure wasn't a form letter. He replied to my substantive points, alluded to my insults in that way people do when they receive a rabid attack from a stranger, and ended by making me feel about three inches tall. So I have decided not to do that again. I think and read a lot about politics, and while I don't want to renounce my citizenship or stop voting or anything, I know it would be better for my mental equilibrium if I cut back on the blind rage aspect of it. Another thing that I think would be good for the old brain and soul is to avoid insulting people I don't know - maybe even people I do know.

On the plus side - I made a great loaf of bread last night.

Dark Room

I suppose this blog is going the way of most - I haven't posted anything in a week. I've actually made two batches of beer since I last posted, and another sign of progress - I've finally broken (temporarily, I'm sure) the fatal hold P.G Wodehouse had exerted and now have a new obsession - R.K. Narayan. I came across him at random at the library, where somebody sharp and kind had turned a collection of his short novels face out at the end of the aisle. Narayan is one of these kooks who seem set on recreating a particular patch of the world, with all its inhabitants, in fictional form. This is a funny thing to do - I have no idea how it benefited James Joyce to make somebody like me feel I understand an entire city-full of 1904 people, or what advantage Narayan derives from my delight in Malgudi, but I'm happy he bothered.

"Swami and Friends" is a great classic schoolboy story of friendship, jealousy, hatred, daring, despair, bravery, all on the 12-year-old scale (i.e., about 10 times life-size). "The Bachelor of Arts" revolves around a young man's obsession with a young girl, but the relationship that killed me most dead in this book was that between the boy and his father. "The Dark Room" is about a painful situation - the abject slavery of a woman in her marriage with a callous husband - and ends in despair, more or less, but is so vivid that tragedy is eclipsed by pragmatic considerations, such as how to commit suicide; failing that, how to avoid entanglements; failing that, how to find a place outside of the home of her marriage; failing that, how to find enough rice to live. And how to leave young children in the care of an uncaring man; failing that, how to surrender. It's a great book! Still, I didn't name either of the last two beers 'Dark Room' - that would certainly have made them too bitter. Instead I made Swami IPA last weekend and Bachelor of Arts IPA today, and named this post Dark Room. I am unlikely to make an English Teacher ale next weekend, but only because all my carboys are full.