Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

love’s work is utterly wonderful.

xp never heard of it, going to read it just to spite you oppose this attitude

i have the overstory out of the library on recommendation from my brother but yeah i'm a bit skeptical, more so now because i don't usually like new yorker essays. i didn't start yet because i am reading the jakarta method. but i only have 21 days to finish the overstory so i guess i should start.

The Jakarta Method, a table recommendation, is terrific.

yes, i like it a lot. surprisingly fast and easy read given the subject matter, too.

xps

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is so damn good. Psychedelic is a great way to describe it. It's so freewheeling and euphoric. She sees into the heart of things. Her faith is kind of incidental, I think? It never gets in the way for me, at least.

I really love this woman's explanation of her thesis, which was a visual study of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Really amazing details about blood!! http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03/08/a-visual-approach-to-syntactical-and-image-patterns-in-annie-dillards-pilgrim-at-tinker-creek-essay-images-anna-maria-johnson/

I'm about two-thirds through Hindoo Holiday, but that's easily enough to allow me to evaluate its merits. It is excellent, in its own remarkably low key way. The entire book is a series of short vignettes, wherein he meets and converses with various people who are connected to his position as a maharajah's 'personal secretary', but actually he is a kind of mascot, having no defined duties but to live in a guest house and be a companion to the maharajah.

What makes the book special is partly the peculiarity of the people and events which are his subject matter, but mostly it rests on the great care Ackerly takes to avoid treating those people and events as exotic. They are just people, doing and saying things which are entirely natural to them, and his success in stripping away all hints of patronizing and exoticizing from his prose adds up to a kind of genius. Quite enjoyable!

Finished 'Golden Gulag' (highly recommended!)

Now onto poet kari edwards' 'having been blue for charity,' one of hers I haven't read.

I should read Annie Dillard but she has terrible white person dreads and I think to myself "how can someone with hair so terrible have any insight into anything?" which I realise is incredibly stupid.

Oh, shit, I'm wrong, I'm thinking of Anne Lamott; as you were.

ha, the overstory was one of those things that has been recommended so many times (often in quite annoying ways) and i’ve seen so many people reading (often in quite annoying ways) that i now absolutely refuse to read it.

I should read Annie Dillard but she has terrible white person dreads and I think to myself "how can someone with hair so terrible have any insight into anything?" which I realise is incredibly stupid.

...

Oh, shit, I'm wrong, I'm thinking of Anne Lamott; as you were.

this is the content i crave

i was reading table's favourite writer alexander chee on being in annie dillard's writing class and this was enough for me to get her book the writing life, which now I am reading*

*i read the epigraph from goethe and now it is in my reading queue, but it looks great. that's this 'reading' that you talk of, right? good enough for goodreads.

I started Anna Karenina. I thought I was on a role with my 19th century doorstops so may as well give this a go.

There are some great passages, but in the last third I couldn't wait for the inevitable.

I'm reading Symbols, Signals and Noise by JR Pierce, a gentle introduction to Claude Shannon's seminal work in information theory.

Price of salt by Patricia highsmith

not enough murders

I'm reading _Symbols, Signals and Noise_ by JR Pierce, a gentle introduction to Claude Shannon's seminal work in information theory.

That's interesting.

I finished rereading THE FERAL DETECTIVE. It's a good exciting story, and curiously original and distinctive. My doubt about it is the depth of admiration and desire that the narrator experiences for the title character. He is never made to seem interesting or attractive enough for that. Their whole relationship seems empty, in fact. The book would be better without it.

Back to MANHATTAN BEACH with a long way to go. She's just worn a diving suit for the first time.

I'm missing the wilderness, so I am re-reading the memoir of a wilderness guide who grew up in Alberta and guided in the Rockies: Tales of a Wilderness Wanderer, Andy Russell, published 1970. He knows how to tell an entertaining story/anecdote and has a deep fund of them.

Cool! Didn't you write a book about hiking?

I didn't know this, and am now very curious.

Download a book written by Aimless

You can d/l an epub of it from dropbox, but I disclaim any pretense to it being perfectly formatted. It should be readable enough, if you desire to read it.

Got it, thanks! Now I'm going out to walk much less challenging terrain.

Me, too.

thanks Aimless!

brian! crazy <3

I really love this woman's explanation of her thesis, which was a visual study of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Really amazing details about blood!! http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03/08/a-visual-approach-to-syntactical-and-image-patterns-in-annie-dillards-pilgrim-at-tinker-creek-essay-images-anna-maria-johnson/

This is fabulous. Nicked a bunch of ideas for a lesson I'm going to teach on writing and motif metaphor at some point!

I have also utilized it in the classroom, Chinaski. It's really great.

wd also recommend the v accessible introduction to said seminal work (the mathematical theory of communication) by warren weaver under the chapter title RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION and shannon’s intro itself.

Thanks, I'll take a look at those. Pierce is an interesting writer and thinker in his own right. He's good at finding interesting angles and deciding what is the right amount of mathematical depth to capture a bit of the flavor of the work, without bogging down the non-specialist reader, and he seems to regard Shannon with something approaching awe. For instance, he uses the word "ingenious" to describe Shannon's experiment in which he determined that each letter in written English contains approximately one bit of information, although no one knows how English could actually be encoded that compactly.

keen to read the pierce myself.

this is a great bit from the weaver intro:

It is most interesting to note that the redundancy of English is just about 50 per cent, so that about half of the letters or words we choose in writing or speaking are under our free choice, and about half (although we are not ordinarily aware of it) are really controlled by the statistical structure of the language. Apart from more serious implications, which again we will postpone to our final discussion, it is interesting to note that a language must have at least 50 per cent of real freedom (or relative entropy) in the choice of letters if one is to be able to construct satisfactory crossword puzzles. If it has complete freedom, then every array of letters is a crossword puzzle. If it has only 20 per cent of freedom, then it would be impossible to construct crossword puzzles in such complexity and number as would make the game popular. Shannon has estimated that if the English language had only about 30 per cent redundancy, then it would be possible to construct three-dimensional crossword puzzles.

I began Danielle Collobert's Murder, translated by Nathanaël. Poetic micro-fictions, it seems, with Collobert's trademark bleakness intact— quite good so far.

I discovered Natasha Ginzberg. I finished Happiness, As Such and two of her novellas collected by NYRB.

Because I can't leave her alone, I started Spark's The Comforters, predictably insane and hilarious.

I want to take another shot at (this time succinctly as I can manage) describing The Professor's House: The Professor actually has two houses (subdividing in his head: "In my father's house are many mansions). In one, the old family home, he still comes to ruminate, perched way up in the study, where he finished his masterwork. He's always been isolated in his core, ripped from beloved backcountry to Civilization, but he went off to study and found a position in a small, insular college near enough to beloved lake. In Europe, he the intellectual aristo early glimpsed the cliffs of lifework, which he came back to the US West to write: a history of European adventures in said West, unflattering enough to further isolate him academically, although he has become marginally aware of younger historians here and there, beginning to glimpse their own ways forward in his.

But meanwhile, he also thinks about his other house, the new one built from masterworks proceeds and social ambitions of wife and daughter--daughter, the older one, has also inherited royalties from a marvelous invention, bequeathed to her by Tom, the Professor's best student ever, who then volunteered for and died in The Great War. The professor is increasingly troubled in mind about subsequent implications and developments, troubled also by interactions with increasing pressures of heiress daughter, who is pressured as well, in various ways (possible legal challenges ahead, by Tom's tech mentor etc, also some see son-in-law/business partner-regent as uppity Jew)
The professor also draws out the minimal editing and writing intro for Tom's memoir of finding an abandoned cliff-dwellers' city much farther Southwest, and how that went over in D.C.
Many mansions, much room, much echo, waves coming back.
Style: wicked wit, sunset sorrows and beauty upside head.

Also, all this $ocial jockeying etc, and woolgathering, for that matter, will have been headed for the Crash of '29, something the author couldn't have known any more than her characters did in the early-to-mid 20s, but which makes it even better in hindsight, as she prob came to think (such a thought suits her persona)

The novel was published in 1925.

Of course everybody's always headed for a fall, but can be fun to see others headed that way.

Ultimately, while it's being read, gets very sad, though!

I picked up Crampton Hodnet, written by Barbara Pym in 1940 and published posthumously in 1985. It's not reaching her top of the line work so far, but it's not below her standard, as so many posthumous works tend to be.

I just finished Jennifer Egan: MANHATTAN BEACH (2017).

A long historical novel that could be called old-fashioned - deliberately so. It feels as though Egan is trying to write a 1940s film in the form of a contemporary novel, though her long Acknowledgements mention texts but not film at all.

I'm enjoying Muriel Spark's 'A Far Cry From Kensington'. pisseur de copie.

Stanislaus Joyce: MY BROTHER'S KEEPER.

If you're interested in James Joyce, this is fascinating. Crazy that I didn't read it till now.

I enjoy the brother's truculent refusal to compromise: decades later, he's not sentimental about his father and condemns him as an awful, violent husband. Ditto 'Dante', the woman who lived with them, 'the most bigoted woman I have ever met'. Ditto Catholicism, which he starts to see through and tear apart from his teens (while being educated by Jesuits and reading around in theology), and still talks of with massive disdain in his sixties. The way he doesn't let a fake warm glow settle on the past, but insists on cool truth as he understands it, is very refreshing.

Can’t remember reading it either, had the impression it was just sour grapes.

Preface by T.S. Eliot!

i spent the better part of last year only reading dhalgren, which wasn't the plan, but my attention was so shot that... that's what happened. it was wonderful and i just finished reading, on table's recommendation, delany's heavenly breakfast, which functions as a short lovely memoir of commune living and a fascinating appendix to dhalgren itself; i lost it when the irl "scorpions" appeared

Preface by Eliot, Introduction by Ellmann. I highly recommend the book.

Yeah, saw that about Ellmann. Intro and notes, I think.

Brad, I'm glad you got something out of Heavenly Breakfast!

I finished Collobert's 'Murder,' and it was something else.

Now onto Kevin Davies' 'FPO.' Davies is a poet's poet, a sort of legend among followers of innovative poetry in North America, and it's been twelve years since his last book. This one sort of continues with what he does, but seems to lack an underlying purpose. As my friend put it, "it's still incisive and funny as hell, but seems directionless," and I'd agree. I'm still enjoying myself immensely, though.

I have about 80 pgs to go in Hari Kunzru's 'Red Pill', after a few friends raved about it. The first hundred pages have a "writer writing about writers (not) writing" vibe that grates, but it's picking up as a metaphor for alt-right internet trolls & black holes played out irl, or something.

Also reading Robin Kelley's very long bio of Thelonious Monk on an ilx recommendation, it's a little on the dry side but thorough, and there's a lot of good historical detail aside from the jazz stuff.