Online Journal of Author Jeffrey Dean Palmatier
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "jeffpalmatier" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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04:12 am
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Why the internet is neat, Part Two.
When I was reading Dombey and Son today, I came across a reference to Polyphemus. I recognized the name, but I couldn't remember who it was so I looked it up later on the internet. I read The Odyssey some years ago, but I had forgotten he was one of the Cyclops. Considering the other references the editor provided explanatory footnotes for, I'm surprised they didn't for this one.
I'll also use the internet to look up an actor's name or a name of a movie/TV series or when it was released. Years ago before the internet or the IMDB website, it could be really difficult to find out this information because you had to try to read this information as the credits whizzed by. Finding out the year of a movie or TV series was even harder because it used to be customary to list them as Roman numerals in small letters as the ending credits rolled quickly. In such a situation, it's a lot easier to spot Arabic numerals. For example, it was in the early eighties that I first saw Rod Serling's Night Gallery in syndication. I was always curious about when it was originally on, but it wasn't until recently that I was able to find this info out via the internet. I guess I could have found this information out back then if I had dug around, but it would have involved calling somebody (the library?) or writing snail mail. Surely a lot more labor intensive than just typing some keywords into a search engine. When I was a teenager, I hated having to call music and book stores for information about the various musicians and authors I was interested in because I was so incredibly shy. Although I've developed the social skills since then to interact with people with more confidence, I tend to prefer just being able to look up information myself rather than having to actually call and talk to somebody I don't know.
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03:52 am
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My Sharona!
Sometimes when you noodle around with a musical instrument you can stumble upon a riff that you recognize from somewhere else. To wit, last week I was playing around with an octave of the note B on the sixth and fourth strings when it dawned on me that it sounded like the song "My Sharona", so I hit the notes to the rhythm of the song. Then I played an A-shaped barred E chord followed by D on the seventh to fifth frets respectfully. I don't actually have a copy of this song so I don't know if I'm in the right key, but I think I have the interval relationships right. It could very well be that it's played lower down the neck. This is a riff that easily movable up and down the neck.
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08:05 pm
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Dombey and Son: on page 58 of 948 pages total.
Finished Chapter 4.
I started to make a list of the characters I've encountered in this novel so far. Sometimes it can be difficult to keep track of exactly who is who the first time through a long novel--especially if the author refers to them by different names at different times as Dickens sometimes does.
I thought about looking up a list of the characters in a given novel as I'm reading it but I've noticed that sometimes such lists give away important plot details. Part of the enjoyment during one's first read through a novel is the magic of the narrative drive aspect of storytelling: the promise that something will happen or a secret will be revealed, which is part of what keeps you turning the pages and makes people get addicted to soap operas where the use of narrative drive is so shamelessly blatant. I enjoy all aspects of a piece of writing as I'm reading it the first time through (characterization, theme, symbolism, prose, etc.) However, you're able to savor these other elements a lot better on subsequent readings when you don't have to devote as much of your energy to paying attention to the plotline since you're already familiar with it. On a related note, Frederick Forsythe's The Day of the Jackal has to be one of the most brilliant demonstrations of the use of narrative drive. Check it out if you've never read it.
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04:05 pm
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My experience with continuing to use a To Do List.
When I started keeping a To Do List again, I realized that I had to find a way to do in such a way that it helped make my life easier rather reinforcing certain Type A parts of my personality and behavior that I found the hard way are decidedly not healthy.
One advantage I found to keeping a To Do List is that I don't have to keep remembering stuff, whether it be to remember to do something, or remembering again what I think is a good idea. Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who would forget their head if it wasn't attached, so writing down stuff so I don't have to keep remembering it is a plus for me. Glancing over the list every day is helpful because airhead me will suddenly realize: "Hey! I can do that today because I have the time and am in the mood to do that."
Another advantage to keeping a To Do List is that it can help you logically formulate a strategy to accomplish a more complicated goal that will involved multiple smaller tasks that you have to do over time. This has helped me realize: "Well, wait a minute. I have do this before I can do this step in order to accomplish this large goal/task."
I can never tell from one day to the next how mentally "on" I will be. You know how it is: some days you might be more tired than usual or don't feel as well and this can in turn affect how clearly you are able to think. Writing stuff down whether it be simple tasks or larger multiple step goals helps me to function more consistently better from day to day.
However, like I said, I'm not keeping a To Do List to turn myself into a Type A machine who becomes obsessed with being productive every moment of the day or they feel guilty. Staying organized is fine up to a point, but planning every moment of your day is also absurd and unhealthy. You need to have the ability to take advantage of being able to do stuff when the opportunity arises because there is a lot of stuff that you can't and shouldn't expect to plan for. Not to mention how important down time is to your happiness. The irony is that working all the time actually ends up making you less productive because you do indeed need time to recharge, not that I think we should just perceive down time as a means to an end just to be productive or whatever. Oh, well: life is a balancing act. I find if I spend too much time working or just sitting on my butt, I go nuts, so the answer is to find the most healthy balance. For a lot of my life, leading a balanced life hasn't exactly been my forte. It seems like my default personality setting is to go whole hog at any goal to the exclusion of all else, which isn't exactly a healthy way to live.
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02:52 pm
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One example of why the internet is neat.
There are so many times that you think of something that you're curious about and doing an internet search will help find you the answer. Over the years I would think about that French song Frère Jacques that a lot of us learned as kids. For some reason every so often over the years I would think about this song, wondering if I remembered the lyrics correctly and what exactly the song was about. The other day this song was mentioned as an example of the use of a certain kind of musical interval, so that was what jogged my memory again about this song so I just did a Google search for it.
There are different times when I see footage of elementary school age kids using computers that are apparently just a normal part of their school day, nothing out of the ordinary. I'd probably come off like an old fogey, but I'd love to tell that generation how much the internet has revolutionized how easily and fast we can get information now. It used to be so damn hard to find out even silly trivial information such as this song, not to mention doing more serious stuff. I wonder if years from now whether the internet will be compared to what the Gutenburg type presses were to dissemination of knowledge.
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05:58 pm
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Dombey and Son: on page 45 of 948 pages total.
Finished Chapter 3.
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05:28 pm
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Dug out cassette recorder.
I did have a digital recorder that got stolen with my luggage. So I dug out a cassette recorder that I bought while I was in East Lansing. I bought a couple of blank cassettes today to use in my practicing my guitar playing. More specifically, I want to record myself playing various chord progressions so that I can practice playing solos over them. I'm trying to figure out why certain notes and scales sound good or don't when played with certain chords.
I bought this book to help me with the subject of improvising solos: Chord-Tone Soloing: A Guitarist's Guide to Melodic Improvising in Any Style. He suggested using a simple recorder to help you practice soloing over chord progressions. I tried recording my guitar direct into Garage Band on my Mac but for some reason it didn't record very loud. Maybe I need some sort of signal booster.
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01:06 pm
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How To Avoid the Hyper-Parenting Trap
Check this out.
In retrospect, I'm so glad that my parents let me and my brothers the freedom to be our own people and to discover stuff on our own instead of just reacting to stuff being thrust at us from all sides. My mom knew these parents where she worked who were running their kids to sports and other "enriching" activities all the time to where they were running the roads all the time. Yuck. I'd love to have kids, but if I do I'm not going to do this to them or try to live my life through my kids.
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11:55 am
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I might have to go back to lifting 30 pounds.
Lifting 40 pounds seems to put too much stress on my back. I thought I could handle it, but apparently not. I think I could bench press that much or even a lot more, but my back muscles don't seem to be able to handle 40 pounds when I lift that much bending over up to my waist, or standing the lifting it above my head. In any case, I'm just lifting weights to lose weight and have healthy-looking muscle tone. It's not like I'm doing it to look like Arnold Scharzenegger used to.
I'd like to get a treadmill so I could walk while in front of a TV so I could get some more cardio exercise.
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11:43 am
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Shave before or after taking your shower?
Different times I'll see commercials or TV shows or movies showing a guy standing in front of the mirror with a towel around his waist and with wet hair while he shaves. Or you'll see some guy with gross pieces of toilet paper on his face where he cut himself.
It wasn't until I was 17 when I started shaving. I don't exactly remember how long it was after I started shaving, but I learned pretty quickly that it actually made more sense to shave before stepping into the shower because the water would wash off all the shaving cream off your face. Sometimes you even see somebody with shaving wearing the shirt they're going to wear that day. I don't know about anybody else, but if did that I'd drip water and shaving cream all over myself, not to mention that it difficult to get all the residue of shaving cream and its smell if I tried to just wipe it off with a wet cloth--water from the shower is much more effective in doing this.
Another advantage to shaving beforehand is that if you did have the misfortune to cut yourself, by the time you got out of the shower, all the water pouring over the shaving nick would result in stopping it bleeding, not to mention washing any blood away. I think I might have tried the toilet paper-thing once or twice, but I quickly discovered that getting the paper off your face was really difficult, not to mention it would result in dried blood that I found really hard to scrub off my face. For that matter, it's been so long since I cut myself shaving that I can't even remember the last time I did so.
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08:05 pm
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Notes from North Korea
I'm in the first minutes of Christiane Amanpour's report on her trip to North Korea. I also saw the documentary Lisa Ling did of her trip to this goddamn hellhole.
When Amanpour and her crew first arrive, they have to turn in all their cellphones and Blackberries since it's the policy of this regime to allow nobody contact with the outside world from inside their socialist paradise.
The first segment just ended. They show one example after another of how they try to brainwash their population to worship their dorky leader and his dead father basically as a secular religion. If you think about it, North Korea is like a bigger version of Jim Jones' Jonestown with its brainwashing and paranoia.
Yep, Lenin: your model of government really brought lots o' happiness to millions around the world.
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03:04 am
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Great intellects at work.
Two Texas teens dig up 11-year-old's skull to use as a bong.
Beavis and Butt-head on TV is funny, but not so much in real life. Whatever sentence these two assholes get should include having to talk to any relatives this kid still has. He died in 1921 at age eleven, so I doubt anybody who directly knew him is still alive. However, there might be relatives who were told how devastated the older members of their family were by this kid's death. These two assholes should also have to talk to some parents who lost a child around this kid's age and how devastated they would feel if somebody desecrated their child's grave and remains.
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02:42 am
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Trying to use a To Do List again.
I've been toying with the idea of using a To Do List again when 28bytes mentioned using one himself.
I've come to realize that the trick to using a To Do List effectively is to make sure you're using it as a tool to help you rather than something you become a slave to. A To Do List can be helpful in that it helps to remind of stuff you'd like to accomplish, from minor tasks to even helping you map out the steps you need to do in order to accomplish a major goal.
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07:52 pm
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The importance of being able to recognize musical intervals.
"One of the most valuable (and overlooked) skills a guitarist can possess is the ability to recognize and play intervals on the fretboard. This becomes increasingly evident the more one grapples with mastering the instrument."
Music Theory: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But were Afraid to Ask by Tom Kolb.
Indeed. The importance of being able to recognize intervals started to dawn on me after a while. When you try to learn songs by ear, it is incredibly helpful and even absolutely essential to be able to recognize the distance between the notes in the single note melodies, or in chords where the intervals that make up the chord are played simultaneous.
Melodies whether in the vocal melody line or in a solo passage tend to be easier to hear intervals because notes are being played one at a time. However, in a chord you have a bunch of notes played at the same time, so it can be more difficult to recognize what sort of chord it is, although it's pretty easy to distinguish between a major or minor chord. The more complex the chord sounded, the harder it is to recognize by ear . . . especially if you're listen to very quick chord changes.
Anyway, the next goal on my agenda is to practice recognizing intervals both as single notes and as chords. I think this won't be difficult to do, but will take consistent practice over time to learn. The payoff for putting this effort in will not only result in being able to learn by ear the songs I want to learn, but to be able to better be able to play and improvise when playing original compositions or if I start playing with other musicians in the future.
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07:40 pm
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Dombey and Son. On page 21 of 948.
I read most of Chapter 1 yesterday and finished it today. It was only ten pages long but because of my gallbladder trouble I haven't been operating at full speed.
Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son is the next novel after Barnaby Rudge that I haven't read yet. This is one of Dickens' longer novels. Yesterday when I flipped to the back of the novel to see exactly how long it was, I groaned at the prospect of starting a novel this long. I don't why I feel this way because it really isn't rational in that sooner or later I'll eventually finish it. And no matter how short or long what I read is, I'll start another piece of fiction that I haven't read yet, so no matter what, I'll always be undergoing the discomfort of reading something new unless I want to just reread stuff I've already read. There's fun and comfort involved with rereading old favorites and doesn't take as much effort--always a plus for a lazy bastard like me. However, just rereading old favorites leads to boredom and doesn't help you broaden one's horizons, so I try to balance new reading with old favorites.
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07:34 pm
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Gallbladder-related fun.
Yesterday I had a fairly bad gallbladder attack. At first I wondered if I hurt my back lifting weights but then the pain moved to my stomach where I had some pretty scary and intense stabbing pains. Today I feel better but my stomach feels queasy as though it is filled with dishwater.
However, there might be good news. I have a doctor's appointment next Tuesday morning. Then hopefully after that I'll be able to finally schedule my surgery. I just want the damn thing cut out so I won't experience this pain any longer.
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04:41 pm
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1936 Olympics Redux?
Why in the hell are we holding the Olympics in a vicious totalitarian state such as communist China? Did we learn nothing from having the Olympics in Nazi Germany and then having to pull out of the 1980 Olympics in the USSR because of their invasion of Afghanistan?
I heard a story on the news detailing about how athletes are being warned by their governments about how the Chinese government is going to bug athletes' rooms, search them whenever they want, place internet filters on athletes' and journalists' computer access so they can't send out information and opinions that the Chinese commies don't like. I just heard that the British government told their athletes that they can't make public statements in China about anything or they will immediately be sent home.
And we going to accept this treatment of our athletes by these commie animals? What's wrong with the civilized world? Do we believe in human rights or not? Should we agree to kiss the Chinese commies' asses in other ways? Should we also agree to give them weapons to use against Taiwan and Tibet? Is there anything else we can do for you, you fucking animals? Stop oppressing, torturing, and murdering your population and maybe the rest of the world will treat you with respect.
You can't deal with a vicious regime that has no sense of decency or morality. When are we ever going to learn that?
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03:08 pm
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Headlines like this must be intentional.
http://community.livejournal.com/cranky_editors/631403.html
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08:14 pm
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Harmony by Walter Piston.
I ordered a fairly inexpensive copy of this book from Amazon. Apparently it's considered a classic work about music theory. Most books I have about music theory are guitar-centric, which is usually helpful since that's the instrument I play. However, I wanted to get a work from another point of view that hopefully would be more in-depth that might cover some topics that the books I have don't. I read the first couple of chapters and at first glance it looks like it's a good book. It's written clearly and appears to be comprehensive in its coverage.
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08:02 pm
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Barnaby Rudge: on page 688 of 688 pages total.
Finished!
Actually, I finished it yesterday. Then I started reading the editor's introduction that I still haven't finished. I almost always wait to read the editor's introduction as a postscript since I want to be surprised as much as possible when reading a classic work for the first time. Reading the editor's introduction can also help you make sense of some of the plot details that you might still be unclear about. The editor's introduction, of course, also helps you understand the novel on much deeper level in terms of theme and symbolism as this intro does quite well. This editor also provides a fascinating discussion of the historical novel, and how and why this novel was received through the years.
I any case, I really enjoyed this novel and I'll probably read it again. You really need to read a novel more than once to really get the most out of it.
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