here goes

Mind-stretching foo

So, today has been a mind-stretching one. First, I had to eat a bit of crow with a client because my subcontractor flaked out. My sense is my position is tenuous, but not lost. So that's good. In order to make right, I had to install Cygwin today. It has been years since I've compiled anything or fiddled around with software development. Learning about cygwin is probably a good career-enhancing move, so I can't be too glum about the extra work. So what if I work a couple of 60- or 80- hour weeks. I've done it before. I have until next Friday to pull things together. Plenty of time.

The other somewhat less mind-stretching activity reading a book I picked up to read on my 5-hour plane trip this week. I wanted something lighter than some of the books I brought, so I selected

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The Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl.

It's of so-so quality, a book that grabs the reader right away by an exceedingly gross introduction. I've been slogging my way through Dante's Divine Comedy, so I thought a fictional treatment of the first American English translation, the one done by Henry Wadworth Longfellow in the 1860s, would be amusing.

My main reaction to the book is that I would like it better if some of its claims had footnotes. That may not be great thing for a novel, really. There are some details about Dante's life -- like Dante's son distancing himself from Dante's poem -- that I would like to know where that knowledge comes from. Is it fictional? Doesn't seem to be. A very maddening kind of novel, these historical novels based on renowned people. I've not read anything quite like it (even though I've seen a few plays like that, such as Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Aaserud's Copenhagen).

Another thing that I wanted footnoted are some attributions of accomplishments to Oliver Wendall Holmes -- a 19th century poet, medical doctor and professor. For instance, he coined the word anasthesia. That's interesting. Where can I read about it? Matthew Pearl's avoidance of footnotes in a novel is no help at all.

About Holmes character/historical figure, the name was familar to me because Oliver Wendall Holmes was a character in Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County comic strip. Also, Holmes's son, Holmes Jr., figures prominently in Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club

I searched Google trying to find some justification why Breathed named one of his characters after a poet/doctor, but I had no success whatsoever. "Anasthesia" is not sufficiently interesting enough for a google search, though.

Zippy Comic Dreams

Strange dream to report. I dreamed about a comic strip. Bill Griffith might be amused because it was a dream about Zippy the Pinhead.

Zippy is sometimes inscrutable, especially when it is in a foreign language that uses a non-Roman alphabet.

In my dream, I got confused when I ran across a "new" comic strip named "Hmfehcq" but really it was Zippy. Sort of. The drawings were more primitive and rounded than usual and looked a bit like the Nancy strip (which is my namesake strip and which Bill Griffith dissed a couple weeks ago). In the dream, I wondered why the author would mess with the name of the thing after taking so many years to set up recognition for it? Was he mocking Prince or something? Huh? Why?

In this state of puzzlement, I woke up, convinced that Hmfehcq this was a memory and not a dream (which it is, I guess). When I read the comics that morning (as I do every morning probably to the detriment of all my simultaneous career paths), I realized my conviction was just a dream.

I read that Zippy for special significance, but couldn't find any more than usual.