A Room with a View

I hadn't seen the movie in many years. It's every bit as good as I remember. After having watched her chewing up the scenery in a Harry Potter movie this week, it's nice to see Helena Bonham Carter at her most engaging. Granted she also makes a fine, fine villain. Now streaming on Netflix!

No. 300

Nothing to say, but I just had to make sure I made it to my 300th post of 2015 before 12am 1/1/16. Happy New Year!

Minimum wage and poverty reduction

Raising the legal minimum wage involves tradeoffs, but my reading of the evidence and analysis is that there will be more gains than losses for low-income workers and their families under most of the proposed increases. The logic of setting different state and local minimums is nicely argued by Arindrajit Dube here. Still, it's worth remembering that raising the minimum wage is not a very well-targeted policy for poverty reduction, compared with, say, increased generosity of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). David Neumark makes the point here. As he notes, the two policies can be complementary, so progressives should push for more on both fronts.

Plugable Digital Microscope

For $40 on Amazon you can get this nifty little device. It's basically an inexpensive close-up USB camera with built-in LED lights and a clever gooseneck stand. If you stick the scope right up to your specimen, you can focus it to something like 250x and, using their software, snap photos of whatever you are looking at.

There are limitations. I presume it's not the best lens in the world, and to focus you have to use the ring on the body of the camera, which at high magnification means you are bound to move it around. But c'mon! Forty bucks to take pictures of whatever tiny things are growing or creeping around in your yard. Such as the moss and lichens below. Also, their customer service is excellent.

These are unaltered photos from my first try with the 'scope.

Lemmy, RIP

Not a metal fan by any stretch. But every once in a while I do find this therapeutic. As metal goes, it's low on bombast, high on noise and energy. And played with some virtuosity. And a rock'n'roll voice as indelible as Neil Young's or Roger Daltrey's.

Ellsworth Kelly, RIP

His Red White is just about my favorite painting at SF MOMA—the scale of the piece (very big) and the mass of deeply saturated red call out from across the gallery, and then the off-kilter mix of curves and angles holds your attention. I presume it will still be there when they reopen next year. I also blogged his plant drawings a while back.

The Gate

I finally finished Natsume Sōseki's The Gate (1910) a few weeks ago, and for the first time since college (I think), I turned right around and read a book over again. Partly this is because the novel is that good. In fact it is exquisite. But to confess, another reason is that it took me a long time to make my way through the books's humble 214 pages the first time and give it the attention it requires and rewards. It kept putting me to sleep. Granted I had a very busy fall term and was pretty sleepy by the time a got into bed every night and picked up The Gate. I felt the book deserved another go-round, and I was right.

"Sōseki and the Art of Nothing Happening" is the title of Pico Iyer's introduction to the NYRB Classics translation by William F. Sibley, and (spoiler alert?) it's quite true that not much happens from a dramatic point of view as the story unfolds. We follow the quiet lives of the main characters, the couple Sōsuke and Oyone, as the events of their past quietly haunt them and potential new crises loom but never materialize. In the book's climactic final chapters, Sōsuke's quest to "find a way to attain serenity in life" leads him to a Zen retreat. But enlightenment seems to elude him entirely, unless you count the lovely, funny, and ambiguous, epiphany(?) of the novel's final line.

Iyer asserts that much of the narrative and psychological action takes place in the novel's elisions, and also its physical descriptions, as if the "external details.... are in fact the emotional heart of the story." I can't agree: Sōseki often takes us inside the minds of the characters, in particular Sōsuke, and his inner turmoil is what the book is about. But it is also true that The Gate relies on fine descriptive writing to set the tone. Sōsuke's deep unease, for example, becomes tangible as he is led by the monk Gidō across the dark monastery grounds to an audience with the Zen Master: "Dark as it was, the green of the leaves was still visible. It all but soaked into the weave of their clothing and sent a chill through Sōsuke." Sibley's excellent translation reads as if the book were originally written in English by a master of the period.

The Gate is, simply put, a great work of art. It is also a gentle, unconventional, and powerful love story. I'm tempted to go for round three.

What the hell is that?

Dunno. Moisture brings out all manner of slimy growing things...