Review - Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland

rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book traces the ownership of an undiscovered Vermeer painting back through a few centuries, beginning with the most recent owner, Cornelius, the son of a man who stole it from a Jewish household while working for the nazis. Cornelius is convinced that the painting is a Vermeer, although he has no proof of its origins.

I had trouble getting into the book at first because I didn't like Cornelius--he was kind of creepy. There were also a couple of paragraphs in the first two stories that confused me as to which character was speaking, so it could have stood more editing, although from what I understand the stories were all written at different times. It was only when the author had four of them that she realized she wanted to fill in the painting's story even more and make it into a novel. She chose to write it in reverse-chronological format to preserve the mystery of whether the painting is actually a Vermeer.

Despite the clunkiness in the beginning, I really enjoyed the novel. I liked most of the stories about the painting's owners, especially "Adagia," in which a man who bought the painting as a memento of a lost love learns to focus on the present and gains forgiveness from his wife, the cycle of two stories about a man who has to give up his illegitimate son and the woman he gives him to ("Morningshine" and "From the Personal Papers of Adriaan Kuypers"), and "Magdalena Looking," in which we learn about the girl in the painting who has inspired so many over the centuries.

This book didn't tug at my heart as much as some (although "Adagia" made me tear up a bit), but the most important thing that I got out of it was that work isn't everything--we need some beauty in life too. Everyone who owned the painting had a special connection to it. Art brought something to their lives. The affirmation that art is important brought something to my own life as a writer, and I appreciated the author's statements in the interview at the back that even if we feel like something has been written/drawn/painted before, anything that causes us to slow down, reflect and appreciate God's world and share that beauty with others is worth doing and worth the time we sacrifice to accomplish it.

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Questions

Our assignment in class for this week is to do a search for a question in both a regular search engine (like Google) and a natural language engine (like START), then compare the two and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of natural language processing.

I really, really want to use the question "How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?" . . . but I'd like to find something that an NLP engine can actually answer, thus proving that NLP is awesome, which is the topic of my final paper.

Music Information Retrieval Systems

This week, I wish I had more time to devote to what we're studying in class. It's one of the most interesting things we've talked about so far: cross-linguistic and multimedia information retrieval systems.

Many of you are probably familiar with cross-linguistic IR systems--just go to Google and play with its ability to translate foreign web pages into English, or head over to Babelfish and experiment with its machine translation.

Multimedia IR systems are another matter, though. How can we search for things that aren't expressed in text? Image IR systems have ways of analyzing color and shape in pictures. And music IR systems can analyze things like pitch, melody, etc.

Part of our assignment this week was to choose a multimedia IR system and try a search in it, then report what we did and what we found.

These are the three music IR systems we were given as examples. Play around with them; they're fun! The technology allows users to search by tune rather than by song title or artist.

Tunespotting lets you search by arranging the notes yourself, playing the tune on your computer keyboard (which I found difficult), and also by the regular method of text relating to the tune.

This one is based more around pop music: Midomi. It boasts of being the "ultimate music search"--I wouldn't exactly agree since most of what it has is popular, but if you're looking for a tune like that, I've found it to be spot on so far.

Musipedia is very cool. Probably my favorite of these three, it allows searching by singing the tune (as in Midomi), playing it on a virtual keyboard, contour, or rhythm.

Enjoy!

Slowing Down

Had a chat with my husband the other day about what I'm doing, and decided that what I need to do is slow down.

I'm working full-time AND I'm in grad. school AND I just got married AND we're trying to buy a house AND I still want time to relax and spend with the people I love. Something had to give, and right now that thing is grad. school.

My grand plan was to finish next year, which would require summer classes, two each in the fall and spring, etc., and no breaks. A lot has happened in the past year, though, and I'm just a human being.

Lately I've felt a bit frantic, like I have to finish school as soon as possible so that I can still have kids before 30, if we decide that's definitely where our life is headed. But it wouldn't be the end of the world if I started at 30, or even 31.

What have I been thinking? With work and school combined, my load has almost been heavier than my friend who's in a fairly intense Masters in counseling program, and rivals what one of my co-workers did working thirty hours a week with one class at a time and kids. My very first semester in fall of '07, I took two classes. I was so stressed out that I started getting paranoid about lending tupperware to people, of all things.

I am what you would call a "Type A" person--I really hate saying "I can't." The truth is, though, that I can't do this to myself if I want to stay mentally healthy.

So, I'm taking this summer off, and I may do this one class at a time from now on. It would take me three more years to graduate, for a total of five years from the time I started. That's a long haul . . . but breaking my mind to do it in a shorter period could end up being a longer one.

Review - Watchmen

Watchmen by Alan Moore

rating: 4 of 5 stars

What can I say about Watchmen that hasn't already been said? As with anything that's so enormously popular, most people either like it or hate it. I liked it. It probes some deep issues, and it made me think.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Watchmen is the 1986 comic book (or "graphic novel" as they are called these days) that turned the industry on its head. It features superheroes who are very human, often not so super. They exist in an alternate 1985 in which America won the Vietnam War--due to their participation--and Nixon was subsequently reelected multiple times.

Some people are turned off by what they see as the writer's endorsement of an extreme leftist political ideology, but I believe the writer has also said that one of the goals of the story was to set up a group of characters with highly different worldviews and let the reader choose which they agreed with. In that sense, the story is a huge success. It shows us multiple interpretations of a desperate, cruel, gray world and forces us to choose our own.

What I got out of the tale with its morally questionable "heroes" and the catastrophic outcomes of their decisions was this: we all want heroes. We all want to be saved. Especially in times like these of economic misery and war, we want to hear happy stories of perfect beings like Superman who believe in the good of all mankind and stand by their principles. Watchmen is not such a story. It is a story of what would happen if normal people (yes, "normal"--most of us are at least half this messed up, we just don't want to look at it) were given extraordinary powers (in the case of Dr. Manhattan) and extraordinary responsibility. It's a story of people who question everything about the meaning of life and the nature of existence, coming to some rather amazing and beautiful conclusions--and then still make mistakes.

These flawed vigilantes draw lines in different places, proving that human beings are not the best judges of good and evil, that even giving a human God-like powers does not make him God, and ultimately, that truth has a chance at prevailing somehow even if its suppression is attempted in the name of false justice.

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Review - Waters Luminous and Deep

Waters Luminous and Deep by Meredith Ann Pierce

rating: 3 of 5 stars

There were two stories I loved in this anthology and six that ranged from "ugh" to "eh." The author penned some of them when she was still in her teens. Although her age as a writer shows, what she was capable of at a young age impressed me (one of the stories I really enjoyed, Rafiddilee, was written when she was fourteen and never much revised).

These are all fantasy stories in some way related to water. Here are some that stood out to me in one way or another:

The Fall of Ys didn't really do anything for me. Maybe it's because I don't know the original legend off of which it was based, but it struck me as a very anti-man story (girl wants to go live with celibate priestesses across the sea rather than marry, which her father tries to prevent her from doing. Father is portrayed as a horrid woman-hater). After reading this story, I was cringing at the prospect of the rest of the book being more of the same. Mercifully, it wasn't.

Icerose seemed to me like a cheap knockoff of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe combined with The Snow Queen. Two children seek the Ice Witch in order to defeat her and revive the frozen ice rose, bringing summer to the land again.

Rafiddilee is a fantastic story. If the whole book had been like this, I would have given it at least four stars. An entertaining, mute, illiterate dwarf man named Rafiddilee becomes a queen's fool, and in the end the queen learns a lesson of the heart from him. Contains well-rounded characters and the only main male character in the whole book who isn't either a buffoon or a handsome, perfect hero. Two thumbs up.

The Frogskin Slippers is my other favorite story in the book. A delightful and original fairy tale that combines elements of The Frog Prince with The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The baron has died, and his daughter, Rose is the victim of a crazed, gambling mother (not a "step" in sight) who makes her work her fingers to the bone cleaning the castle. She saves a frog from her mother's cat, and discovers that he is actually Prince Rane (begin the swooning), a prince in an enchanted forest kingdom. Rane gives her the frogskin slippers (note: made of shed frogskin), enabling her to dance with him in his kingdom every night. They fall in love and he proposes to her, but if she doesn't respond by May Eve, he will not be able to come back for another year. And her mother has other nuptial plans for her.

All in all, a good collection of stories and a fun read, if a bit obvious that the author hasn't had great experiences with men and if she had, wouldn't want anything less than a prince on a white horse.

Say what?

All through the ordering process, I've been staring at this book title. If you're not an evolutionary biologist, this is one that will definitely cause you to fall on your face in confusion. I'm not sure why we ordered it for our community college library.

The title is: The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal? edited by Simon Conway Morris.

It could be that I'm just terribly ignorant, but I suspect that this title would elicit a "huh?" and a furrowed brow in many a learned soul.

Review - 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might

78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might by Pat Walsh

rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a three-star ("liked it") book for me mainly because it didn't suck me in . . . but that is not to say that it isn't a very important book. It's time to take all of the feel-good compliments that the people who love you give about your writing and wake up to the real world.

The number one reason that Pat Walsh, an editor at MacAdam/Cage, gives that your book will never be published is that you have not written it. Talk is cheap, and writing is very difficult.

Throughout the book, Mr. Walsh gives great advice on avoiding the pitfalls of the publishing industry (and the ones that we writers create in our own heads). The most valuable tidbits I got from it are: write as though you are writing to a stranger (if you're constantly worrying about what your family will think of your story, there's no way it will be honest), revise your book before you try to get it published (even if you have to re-write the whole thing), and take yourself and your work seriously (but not so seriously that you think your writing makes you the King of the Universe).

Sometimes negative feedback is the best feedback you can get about your writing, because it's the only feedback that is going to help you improve it. You have to be willing to step back and experience rejection for what it is--an opportunity to do better.

That said, he ends the book on a positive note, saying that no matter how hard writing and getting published is, it is definitely worth it.

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