My life as a boomerang.

I worked a pretty long day today, and I'm back online at home now, working some more. Well, except for right now. I would have stayed in my office longer but some nitwit decided to turn the a/c on... and seeing how the vent points directly at my office chair, and seeing how I couldn't stop coughing, I decided to head home. It's been a pretty productive, learning kind of day, though. Good.

So I finished Jitterbug Perfume. My final estimation is that the book was... okay. I didn't love it. Before Jake loaned it to me I had a vague idea that Tom Robbins wrote kinda generic mass markety pulpy fiction, and it turns out I wasn't quite right about that. Now I think (on the basis of just this one book, which I know is a small fraction of what he's produced) that he writes kinda generic postmodernist pulpy fiction. I can't decide if that's better or worse. I actually think the book was well done of the level of story and structure. In the end, though, I think he's sloppy with his prose: the book was okay on the level of the book, but not on the level of the sentence. Still, I'm glad I read it. Now I'm moving on to one of the many good-looking books I got for Christmas, maybe some non-fiction. Probably either this collection of science writing edited by Dava Sobel or this The Know-It-All memoir that Jay gave me.

I started thinking about an interesting topic for a new linguistics paper today by accident when someone forwarded me a question from a distribution list he's on. I looked into it peripherally this morning and saw that there's not a lot out there on it, so I think I might have something to talk about when I go back for my adviser's retirement fest later this spring. It's the most enthusiastic I've been about working on a purely theoretical linguistics paper in some time. By accident.