I picked up this book in the store for the USS Pampinito on Mechanicrawl02008. My grandfather sailed in subs in the Pacific theater in WWII. I was interested in learning more about what his day to day life on the sub must have been like, as he was never one to tell sea tales. This memoir, enriched with the stories of other men serving on the USS Guardfish and USS Extractor gives an idea of the rhythm of difficulty and threat to which the men who served lived and worked.

From the US Naval Institute webpage for the book:

Claude Conner weaves a compelling tale of his experiences in the Pacific aboard the USS Guardfish, one of the Navy’s top-scoring World War II submarines. Tragically, the Guardfish also was the only submarine to sink another American warship in a little-known friendly-fire accident against the USS Extractor. This well-documented memoir chronicles Guardfish’s Hollywood-like war actions, including her perilous forays into Japanese-controlled harbors, daring rescue of personnel from a Japanese-held island, near catastrophic flooding of the submarine’s conning tower, depth-charge attacks, and much more.

The author includes rare firsthand accounts by a dozen Extractor survivors who describe actions leading up to their encounter with the submarine, the actual sinking of the ship, their rescue, and their subsequent treatment by Navy officials. Conner examines the chain of events that led to the regrettable sinking and offers details of the Court of Inquiry that followed and for which he testified as a witness. This book was highly recommended by World War II historian Clay Blair when first published in 1999.

For me, this seemed worthy of a skim but not much more. I took notes on some of the outlined process concepts. In brief, Roam has taken the list of the “6 Ws”—a slightly different list of “Who what where…”—and mapped those to diagram types. EG: for who or what, you are drawing a portrait; for when, a timeline. He presents five different aspects one should consider in a diagram. EG: are you showing a change or how things are at the moment?. This systematic process of reflection before one begins drawing a diagram is appears quite useful.

He notes that there are many different comfort levels on using diagrams, and so if you aren’t used to simple diagrams in you meetings and communications, he has extensive explanations on how the process will enhance communication and help address the challenge of solving problems.

I finished this ages ago. And i seem to be locked into choosing worth or not worth consuming: no “unstated.” I’ll choose “worth consuming” as a pleasant SF diversion. I find Laumer entertaining.

She’s fascinating: a magical horrific tragic beautiful person.

I don’t often read biographies, but i had read some of Isak Dinesen’s stories and felt they addressed dilemmas and problems of a totally different cultural reality. And, in fact, they might, as her childhood might be considered a romantic rebellion against her bourgeois maternal family with in preference to her father’s aristocratic line, yet smack in the middle of the early Bohemian lifestyle of fin de siecle Denmark. Her stories are seeded then, and then she goes through another lifetime between 1913 and 1931: her life in Africa. When she returns to Europe, lover and farm torn from her, syphilitic, she creates something else out of herself.

A few notes from reading:

A mention of “Orm og tyr” by Martin Alfred Hansen in the book made me want to read it—“a history of Scandinavian religious literature and the relationship between pagan and Christian cultures”—but it seems to be only available in Danish.

Another marked page was about a challenge to write for the American magazine market. An English friend of hers, Geoffrey Gorer, advised her “Write about food. Americans are obsessed with food.” Thus, “Babette’s Feast”

Finally, through a struggle she learned, as she related to Marianne Moore, “When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, without faith and without hope . . . suddenly the work will find itself.”

Beautifully shot. The characters only slowly let themselves become known to the viewer, but the plot isn’t not the film. It is the visual meditation on distance, visual and emotional.

I think this would have been better as a short story. Over half the novel is a slow reflective narrative about the main character’s childhood and involvement with several women. I was never engaged as Hajime shares this back story with a flat sense of self-recrimination and self-pity. Once the story catches up to the present and the choices he must make as an adult do i find myself caring about the struggles.

When the women come back into his life decades later, the story begins. The character Hajime revisits the backstory—his childhood, his regrets—as he reconnects with a classmate and with the woman who was his childhood best friend. In his adult context, i can care about the self recrimination and regrets.

I will likely reread Kazo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World for contrast as another reflection on regret and choices.

I suspect this ended up on our Netflix list at one point because of Liam Neeson and Orlando Bloom. At a later point we watched a trailer and were not impressed. I’m surprised we didn’t yank it. So, the recent batch of Netflix came without careful selection and this movie arrived. We sat down to watch last night with the lowest of expectations, and we were delightedly surprised. An entertaining and engaging story, which had me immediately turn to reading up on the time depicted.

The character played by Orlando Bloom is highly fictionalized compared to the historic person of Balian of Ibelin but provides a nice canvas on which to paint an ideal of a war leader, one who cares about the less powerful, one who makes intelligent use of his forces in defensive contexts. I regret to read the actual Balian did not quite win free passage for all the citizens of the surrendered city, but it was close enough.

I am struck by the speech given by Liam Neeson in the early part of the film, of the East being a new world where one could find opportunity. Apparently, the Ibelin family had achieved nobility rather quickly in the East. I contrast this with the social effects of the Conquistadors leaving Spain, ponder the origins of the United States, “The American Dream”....

What’s struck me so far is the work of Ishu Patel. “Paradise” and “Bead Game” are included.
http://www.nfb.ca/animation/objanim/en/filmmakers/filmmaker/overview.php?id=12772

This legacy must be part of why Christine and I are delighted whenever we see “Vancouver Film School” on a Channel Frederator short.

We’ve watched this slowly and found it absolutely wonderful. I find Bill Murray’s Polonious captures the pendantic pomposity and political posturing i associated with the character more powerfully than i’ve seen.

The movement of the setting and characters into year 2000 while keeping the language of Shakespeare provide wonderful ways to invite more commentary on the well known text. When Hamlet delivers the soliloquy in Block Buster, the repetition of the signs saying “ACTION” “ACTION” “ACTION” “ACTION” give a wonderful urgency to the familiar words.