Tag: writing holidays

Wrapping it up

Today was my last writ­ing day here in Wilm­ing­ton. It been a pro­duc­tive cou­ple of weeks. Work­ing with the syn­tax data­base every­day has given me a much bet­ter “feel” for how queries work, how to find what I want and pointed up many ways in which the data­base needs improv­ing. I’ve also learned a lot that I didn’t know about … yes, about Hebrew syn­tax. In par­tic­u­lar, I’ve refined my under­stand­ing and views about Hebrew par­tici­ples. They’re tricky.

Not long ago I read William K. Zinsser Writ­ing to Learn. His the­sis is that in order to really learn some­thing, one has to do more than read about it. One needs to write about it. He argues that this rule applies to any sub­ject — not just the human­i­ties, but also the sci­ences and math­e­mat­ics. For the past two weeks I’ve been writ­ing and my knowl­edge of the nar­row areas I’ve been writ­ing about has become much more pro­found. It works. The book is worth the read.

The Log
I record here my progress accord­ing the met­rics of page and word count and pages read. The num­bers are cumulative.

Today’s PDF Page Count Word Count Pages Read
Click here 41 9124 1353

The Wizard of Oz as Monetary Allegory?

As an active investor I read a lot of books on eco­nom­ics and invest­ing. What I didn’t expect was to find lit­er­ary inter­pre­ta­tion of an Amer­i­can children’s clas­sic in Ken Fisher’s The Only Three Ques­tions That Count. Invest­ing by Know­ing What Oth­ers Don’t! Evi­dently, despite L. Frank Baum’s asser­tion that it is a story to enter­tain chil­dren, there have been per­sis­tent attempts to under­stand The Won­der­ful Wiz­ard of Oz as politco-​​economic alle­gory. Evi­dently, there’s been dis­cus­sion of this at least since the 1930s. Baum was polit­i­cally active in the 1890s and many read Oz as sid­ing with the silver-​​based mon­e­tary pol­icy against those want­ing a gold stan­dard. “Oz” is “ounce of Gold”, the yel­low brick road is gold, of course, Dorothy’s pow­er­ful shoes (con­tra MGM’s movie ver­sion of the story) were sil­ver. I’ll leave the details to those who want to read more about it.

The Log
I record here my progress accord­ing the met­rics of page and word count and pages read. The num­bers are cumulative.

Today’s PDF Page Count Word Count Pages Read
Click here. 39 8677 1300

Is there a doctor in the House?

For enter­tain­ment I’ve been watch­ing episodes of a TV show that orig­i­nally I dis­dained to watch: “House,” whose title char­ac­ter solves ever more com­plex and bizarre ill­nesses. Gre­gory House, MD, is a cur­mud­geon, and not well-​​liked. One rea­son is that he is rude and insen­si­tive to the feel­ings of oth­ers. But per­haps not so obvi­ously, he is also not well-​​liked because he is at heart (pun intended!) not a doc­tor in the first place: he is a sci­en­tist (the two over­lap but are not syn­ony­mous!). He rubs noses in real­ity. And peo­ple don’t like their vir­tual real­i­ties corrected.

I noticed this in House because it res­onated with some of my own expe­ri­ence. What I’m writ­ing is not tra­di­tional philol­ogy. And some don’t like it. In the past, I’ve been demon­stra­bly right; but instead of gain­ing cred­i­bil­ity, I’ve lost it; or, worse, I’ve been ignored. House sur­vives some­how because the show’s writ­ers want to make more money. I have no such guarantees.

The Log
I record here my progress accord­ing the met­rics of page and word count and pages read. The num­bers are cumulative.

Today’s PDF Page Count Word Count Pages Read
Click here 37 8477 1243

A unilateral ceasefire

Today Israel declared a cease­fire uni­lat­er­ally. It’s remain­ing in Gaza, and I’m sure there will be many inci­dents; Hamas will fire more rock­ets; Israel’s planes will strike more tar­gets; all at a reduced tempo.

I’m also declar­ing a uni­lat­eral cease­fire. Tomor­row I will do no writ­ing. It’s sup­posed to rain in the after­noon tomor­row. I may tour a mall, see a movie, even walk the beach (in the morn­ing). Some read­ing, some email. But no writ­ing. On the sev­enth day…

The Log
I record here my progress accord­ing the met­rics of page and word count and pages read. The num­bers are cumulative.

Today’s PDF Page Count Word Count Pages Read
Click here 35 8184 1116