Monday, June 04, 2007

Miscellany

(1) One of my work friends is in Verona, Italy, this week, and reported on one of the tourist attractions there: Juliet's balcony, the one where Romeo met her. More accurately, it's the Capulet family castle, with a balcony on it, on account of Juliet being fictional.

Tourists there honor their fictional heroine by sticking chewed pieces of gum to the wall. Whimsical, yet appalling.

You can't see the gum in this photo from the Internet, but it seems to capture a certain essence of the place.

(2) The other week Nate emailed a link to this story in Slate about the Helvetica font, which I agree is surprisingly interesting, even if you're not reading it at work.

(3) The movie Waitress looked like it would be oversweet and not very convincing, but I saw it last week and actually it's quite good. I'd recommend it. (Except for Pete. Decidedly not a Pete movie.) Endearing goes a long way: the clunky parts stay sympathetic, and the transcendent parts really shine. This establishes, I think, the chickmost boundary of the kind of movie I can enjoy wholeheartedly.

There's a pretty brutal real-life note to this movie, in that its writer/director (who also plays a touchingly frumpy side character) was murdered in her Manhattan apartment before it was released. Yikes.

(4) I finished my first freelance book-related project recently, an index for a short high-school-level book on the history of New Haven. Seemed to turn out satisfactorily, at least as far as the author's reaction went. Hoping to turn up more of this sort of thing as time goes on.

(5) Five days till college reunion! I'm going to have to write down a cheat-sheet positive-sounding reason I haven't gone to grad school.

In the meantime, walking to work in a significant rain under a huge umbrella, while listening to the middle movements of Mahler's Ninth Symphony on headphones, was a surprisingly strong start to the week.

Had the yearly (or, in my case, first) job evaluation hash-out with the boss this afternoon, and things are fine, fine fine fine. Hopefully some more substantial editing work eventually, like in the fall.

1 Comments:

Blogger Pete said...

Does that movie have gravelly French narration? If it does, I'm totally there.

6/05/2007 7:23 AM  

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