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- Altmann's Tongue, Brian Evenson
- A collection of really gruesome and cold short stories. Some of the
best were "The Munich Widow," "The Evanescence of Marion Le Goff," and
"Her Other Bodies." "Eye" was too trite. Also, "The Sanza Affair" was
great, in an unfinished mystery way. (It almost reminded me of Perec's
53 Days.)Scary that he basically got fired from Brigham Young for
this.
- Orgy Bound, Daniel Clowes
- Some were great stories, some were so-so, but more were great than
so-so, so I enjoyed it overall. Clowes does creepy-but-sympathetic really
well.
- The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
- I got this book originally to use as a prop for my planned Halloween
costume, dead Sylvia Plath in an oven. But I never got to dress up,
because we skipped the parties this year due to coordination problems.
I read the book, though, and was surprised at how simple yet contemporary
the language was. It was also weird to read the book, given the other
books of similar themes it spawned. But it was nice to read (what I
think is) the progenitor of this semi-memoir-semi-fictional confessional
type of story.
- The Conformist, Alberto Moravia
- This book veered in more directions than the back cover led me to
believe. The first part of the novel was really about the
protagonist's childhood. The second part, about a sort-of test of
will. The third part, well, it's the third part. And it got me
kind of teary.
- Diary of a Teenage Girl, Phoebe Gloeckner
- Disturbing and funny all at once. But while the emotions conveyed
seem real, sometimes the dialogue does not. Like the protagonist's
language just sounds too perfect, and not slangy enough.
- The Vintage Book of Amnesia, Jonathan Lethem (ed.)
I borrowed this book from Frank. Alas, did not realize that many of
the stories were actually excerpts from books, which means that there's
now more for me to want to read. Like the rest of Lawrence
Shainberg's Memories of Amnesia. And Walker Percy's The Second
Coming. And more from Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of
Wonder, from which comes the Borgesian Geoffrey Sonnabend's
Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter. Also,
it's scary how many of the stories/excerpts in here I've already read.
Seven of them, I think. Man.
- A Heart So White, Javier Marias
- This book has one of the best passages on interpretation I've read.
There's this point where the narrator is relating the story about how he
and his wife met. They were both interpreters for international diplomats
(he distinguishes interpreters from translators in an amusing side
passage), and she was assigned to oversee his interpretation of a meeting
between a Spanish diplomat and a British diplomat. At some point, he
interjects a misinterpretation, partly because he was bored, but partly as
a way to flirt with his to-be wife. It leads to some interesting political
discussions (as prompted by the narrators misinterpretations) as well as
some lovely musings on the nature of interpretation.
- Also, Marias makes use of repeated phrases---ones that are almost
verbatim from earlier in the novel. It has the effect of a fugue, or of
batter being folded in on itself. It's quite nice.
- Tlooth, Harry Mathews
- Ooh what an enjoyable romp. Sure, some parts were kind of tedious,
but lots of it was just fab. Like Mathews got the whole
semi-spy-documentary tone right, even with the absurd situations he
created (like the beginning baseball scene in the prison camp, like the
strange animal-vehicle race to get out, like the weird blue film in the
middle).
- Things: A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep, Georges
Perec
- I liked Things much more than A Man Asleep, who I wanted
to slap. Things, in contrast, raised all sorts of fears in me,
fears of turning out like that. Fortunately, I think I was closer
to that once upon a time, but am now further away from it, the
identity-through-consumption type. But still. It described my
demographic a little too well, the hipsters patting themselves on the back
for being hipsters and scrimping but still being hipsters. A Man
was a little too inert, and not in a way that I got much out of. But
there was a reference to Bartleby the Scrivener that amused me.
- Therapy, David Lodge
- Funny and satiric as usual. I even enjoyed the ending, which was tidy
but not too tidy. The Kierkegaard bit just makes me like Lodge even more,
like he goes picking up new things and what the hey works them into his
book just out of the sheer joy of it all. Which I love.
- Boredom, Alberto Moravia
- Yet another insightful (and depressing) 1book by Moravia. But oh, so
good. Moravia nicely portrayed how Cecilia draws Dino in. But he was a
bit too repetitive about Cecilia's child/woman quality. Also, the way the
narrator, Dino, claims to be motivated by a desire to make this woman love
him again so that he can again become bored by her so that he can break up
with her and be free at last really reminded me of a former relationship
of mine. Weird.
- 4, Victor Pelevin
- Two short stories I'd read before ("Hermit and Six-Toes" and "Vera
Pavlovna's Ninth Dream") but were glad I read again, and two that I
hadn't. "The Life and Adventures of Shed XII" was sweet and uplifting
(and you know I like sweet and uplifting); "Tai Shou Chuan USSR (A Chinese
Folk Tale)" was so-so.
- Magnetic Fields, Ron Loewinsohn
- Whoa, what a beautiful set of three interlinked stories. Loewinsohn
does this thing where almost the exact same language is used to describe
slightly different things (or slightly different approaches to the same
things) in each of the three stories---one about a thief, another about a
musician, and yet another about a literature professor. It's really
pretty amazing, and I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this book earlier, it
was so delightfully put together.
- An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
- It's like Rashomon, but set in Oxford. And there's such detail! And
so many twists! And with such nice random philosophical/religious
digressions!
- The Fierce and Beautiful World, Andrei Platonov
- I think his stories are actually all pretty happy and optimistic, all
about people finding joy in horrible circumstances. And that makes me
smile. "Dzhan" is about people getting empowered to seek their own
happiness. "Fro" was about a woman coming to terms, but in a good way, in
a soul-filling way. And "The Potudan River"---that was so beautiful. It
is how I feel almost all the time about D, just getting used to this
incredible happiness.
- Contempt, Alberto Moravia
- I think the last time I felt this depressed from a work of fiction was
when I read Kureishi's Intimacy. But Intimacy was more like
brief, but chillingly-cold winter swim. There was a pinpoint of hope to
Intimacy. Moravia's Contempt, though, leaves no such hope
for the narrator (though it still leaves hope for a world in which the
narrator's fate is avoided, thereby being optimistic enough for me to find
it readable). And it leaves me feeling too empty even to cry.
The worst part is that I am tempted to read Moravia's Boredom,
because it's supposed to be even better-written than Contempt.
- After the Quake, Haruki Murakami
- How I adored these short stories! Especially "Thailand." I could
totally relate. I felt similarly after September 11. And it was
interesting reading "Landscape with Flatiron" right after reading Lodge's
Home Rules---I was fascinated how the theme of a threesome, in two
authors' hands, can be explored so differently.
- Home Rules, David Lodge
- Short and delightful. But definitely a novella, not a novel.
- The Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears
- Okay, so I was expecting more of a mystery, because of what I'd heard
about An Instance of the Fingerpost. But that disappointment
aside, wow, what a great book. The backwards and forwards storytelling,
the flashforwards and the flashbacks, the accuracies and the inaccuracies
(both intentional)---so well put together! Like a three-dimensional
jigsaw puzzle. Definitely one to re-read for Pears's narrative
skill.
- And so relevant to the main issue with which I'm dealing now: how long
does one stay in a system with which one is becoming more and more
frustrated, but for which one believes one can provide a moderating force?
Sigh.
- The Heart of a Dog, Mikhail Bulgakov
- So cute! I mean, the dog starts off so cute. Then he gets awful when
he becomes human. ("But funnier!" says David.) The back cover spoils the
plot, which is too bad. And there's a reference to dogs seeing colors,
which is just wrong, wrong, wrong. But the book is still a fun,
short read.
- The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Shultz
- Wow. Wow! This was great! I mean, it's really weird, the dreamy
descriptions. But not weird in an annoying, arbitrary French surrealist
way. It's weird in an outsider-fiction way, like this is really the
manner in which Shultz makes sense of the world. And that's beautiful.
"Cinnamon Shops," the chapter about the narrator going home from the opera
as a boy to fetch something for his dad, is strangely uplifting, in a
wintery hallucinatory way. And wow, the chapter called "The Street of
Crocodiles" is gorgeous too, like Borges but more emotional. And the
chapter about the puppy was cute. (Of course, as D would say. But
really! It's hard to capture the cuteness of dogs in books.) I want to
read it over and over again just to get inspiration for the final chapter
of my book, which, although it has little to do with Street, has a
similar tone.
- The Horned Man,
James Lasdun
- This is a book about my nightmare. I'm living life obliviously, with
the memory lapses that I am very used to having, and then I discover hints
that either I am a killer, or being set up to look like a killer. I have
always been afraid of this, and I will probably always be afraid of it.
This book gave me chills. Yet it was terse and crisp and beautifully put
together at the same time, with some insightful observations about
insecurity and relationships even. Which makes it highly recommended.
- Super Flat Times, Matthew Derby
- Pretty good, but not as good as I'd hoped! Here's the thing---it made
a little too much sense for something as derivative of Ben Marcus
(and yes, you could all-too-easily see the derivativeness, what with the
fixation on food and helmets and all) as it was. But I am nevertheless
partial to Ben Marcus styled stuff, so I still found it lovely.
- Changing Places, David Lodge
- Hilarious hilarious hilarious. I bet if I knew more about Berkeley,
it'd be even more hilarious. Nevertheless, it was still hilarious. And
beautiful, in parts, especially where Philip Swallow is watching
everything going on in Berkeley and realizes that yes, this is what
makes him understand American literature. This passage almost made me
weep with pleasure, really. (This, by the way, I obtained because it was
one of Jen and Nils's duplicate books. Hurrah for marriage!)
- Kissing the Beehive, Jonathan Carroll
- I like Sam Bayer, I like Frannie McCabe, I was creeped out by Veronica
Lake. So it worked.
- The Panic Hand, Jonathan Carroll
- Some lovely short stories (like "The Sadness of Detail" or "A Wheel in
the Desert, The Moon on Some Swings"), some not (like "Tired Angel" or
"The Dead Love You"). One very very sad, "A Flash in the Pants." Don't
try to think about them because you'll come up with awful inconsistencies,
though. Like in "A Black Cocktail."
- From the Teeth of Angels, Jonathan Carroll
- Creepy again. And I thought the three storylines were done all right.
Again, I realize Carroll can be pretty fluffy, but hey. I haven't read
supernatural thrillers in awhile, and these are nice and surreal. Though
the arches seemed lopsided to me---there was much more focus on Wyatt and
Arlen's storylines, I think.
- Bones of the Moon, Jonathan Carroll
- Reminds me of one of the story arches in Neil Gaiman's Sandman
really. The one about the girl and the dreams and her weird other world.
Cullen James's dreams of Pepsi and Rondua are like that. AND THERE'S A
REALLY SIMILAR TWIST. Honestly, I'm wondering whether Gaiman read this
before writing Sandman, or whether this is a freakish resemblance. I
would check the old Sandman issues just to make sure, but I lost them in a
breakup. :(
- Okay. I searched around the web and found out that Gaiman read
Bones before finishing his "A Story of You" arch, realized how
similar his story was to Carroll, wrote to Carroll asking "what should I
do?" and Carroll told him to write it anyway.
- Voice of Our Shadow, Jonathan Carroll
- Creepy. Creepy creepy creepy. Poor Joe Lennox, tormented by
something that really wasn't his fault.
- A Child Across the Sky, Jonathan Carroll
- Jonathan Carroll has made me join the public library! To access all
his out of print books, that is. This (a story about the friend of a
horror movie director who just died) is as close to horror as I'd read
in awhile, and I find I really do miss the genre. Though I have to say, I
liked this less than The Wooden Sea and The Land of Laughs,
if only because this seemed to fall more squarely within a genre, and I
tend to like that less than the multigenred stuff. Still. I do like how,
even within a genre piece, Carroll has some very nice observations, in
very plain language: "Sometimes it is the smallest thing that saves us:
the weather growing cold, a child's gesture, cups of excellent coffee."
Id. at 59.
- The Wooden Sea, Jonathan Carroll
- Moderately creepy, but with some more ethereal elements. Reminds me
of Philip K. Dick's Valis trilogy, in a way, what with the aliens and
religion and stuff. And I could feel the Frannie-the-protagonist's love
for his wife, Magda, which is a rarity, because tenderness (v. lust, v.
adoration, v. crushdom) as portrayed in fiction usually doesn't reach me
so easily.
- The Land of Laughs, Jonathan Carroll
- Creepy! Creepy creepy weirdness and creepy creepy bullterriers and
creepy creepy creepiness. It's been awhile since I'd been this creeped,
out, which meant that I thought the book was fabulous. And it was amazing
how well Carroll portrayed youthful obsession gone bad (and not in the
stereotypical way, either, the way of the obsessor turned evil, more like
the object of the obsession turned evil and betraying). Gosh oh gosh.
maybe
- Monday or Tuesday, Virginia Woolf
- I'm not sure what it is, but Woolf's writing style annoys me. I don't
think it's anything about her; rather, I think it's something about me
(similar to, for instance, the slight offputedness I feel when I see too
many ellipses.) That being said, I'm glad I read this collection of
stories, if only to reintroduce myself to Virginia Woolf.
- Perlman's Ordeal, Brooks Hansen
- What a strange book. See, I was reading it at the gym and couldn't
put it down at all, making for some extra-long workouts. But then once I
got two-thirds through, when the characters were putting on this
play/seance thing, Hanson sort of lost me. Like everything that was
engaging about it just dissipated. So quickly! I don't get it.
- Aiding and Abetting, Muriel Spark
- Hmm. For a short book, it certainly was repetitive on the "aiding and
abetting" theme. Perhaps that was to be expected, but really, I'd hoped
for more variation. That being said, I liked Spark's writing style---the
light coldness. Sure, the dialogue wasn't very natural, but then neither
are cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches. But they're still not that
great, either.
- Paris Peasant, Louis Aragorn
- For such a short book, this took me quite awhile to read. It's kind
of a surrealist tour guide of Paris, which is probably why it was so
difficult for me, given that I don't really like tour guides, and don't
seem to like surrealist writing (as opposed to visual arts). And Paris!
I've never been there. So I had nothing to hold onto, to grasp, while
reading this. Anyway.
- White Apples, Jonathan Carroll
- I'm not sure exactly what I think about this book. I mean, here's the
thing. The dialogue is silly. The people are silly. The
relationship---it just doesn't strike me as very authentic. And all of
the God stuff---silly. But some of the other imagery is nice, and some of
the plot twists are amusing. So.
- Face of Another, Kobo Abe
- On one hand, it had some interesting insights on faces and perception
and self-identification. On the other hand, these mullings really dragged
on too long. I dunno. Maybe I'm falling off the Kobo Abe bandwagon.
Plus some of the translation was weird (and perhaps dated? or just weird,
the way it comes from the Japanese.) Like the use of the phrase "erotic
feeling." And maybe it's that some of the ideas are dated. Or that
there's been a lot of developments in the meantime regarding manipulating
faces---developments that show that some of Kobo Abe's concerns didn't
come to pass. So.
- Short Cuts, Raymond Carver
- At least the stories were short! Seriously, it wasn't that bad. Not
amazing, but not terrible either. And it'd helped that I'd seen the
movie---it was nice to be able to think about how certain scenes were
linked together in ways that wasn't present in the short story collection,
etcetera etcetera. Murakami, who says he draws a lot of inspiration from
Carver, is a much better writer by far.
- Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino
- Josh lent this to me. It was okay, but not amazing. I mean, there
were some really high points---like the spoof rejection letters and the
spoof books and so forth. But I found the characters all really
unsympathetic. Which is weird, because I do like some books in which the
characters are unsympathetic. Will Self's books, for instance. But in
those, they were merely evil and jerky and unsympathetic, not pompous and
evil and jerky and unsympathetic. Lack of pompousness (in at least one
character), I think, is key for my enjoyment. In that way, the book
reminded me of A Confederacy of Dunces, which annoyed me for
similar reasons.
- On the other hand, I get the sense that Sorrentino is really really
smart.
- Sleeping in Flame, Jonathan Carroll
- I don't get the appeal of Maris, the gal that the protagonist Walker
falls in love with. And there seem to be some inconsistencies with the
love theme. And the end referential twist was kinda lame. But it was
still a fun read---i.e., I wouldn't be bored on an airplane if I saw a
movie of this.
- This Is Not a Novel, David Markson
- I thought I'd like this more than I did. But somehow I didn't enjoy
it as much as I did Wittgenstein's Mistress, even though that book
was in the same form as well (disjointed sentences, loosely connected by
a theme).
- The Human Country, Harry Mathews
- A mixed bag. Some stories I loved ("Country Cooking from Central
France" and "Their Words, For You"), other stories were just bleah. I'll
still probably buy Tlooth though.
no
- John Barth, Coming Soon!!!
- Man, it took me awhile to slog through this one. It's too bad,
because I really like John Barth, usually. But this was disjointed,
messy, gimmicky, and self-involved. Sigh. But I'm done! But if this is
his last book, then I'm a little sad.
- Kafka Americana, Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholtz
- I'm theoretically in support of joint writing experiments. But this
didn't work out. It was disjointed. And the metafictional aspects just
seemed forced. And the self-referential aspects seemed more forced.
Sorry.
- Outside the Dog Museum, Jonathan Carroll
- Eh, the two women the narrator was having the affairs with weren't all
that exciting. Saru seemed too caricature-ey. And the mythos was too
wobbly.
essays, memoirs, and rants
- Tests of Time, William Gass
- More essays. The addresses didn't hold up so well, because I think
those were intended for a specific audience. And the politics were
occasionally somewhat reactionary (I'm thinking of "There Was an Old Woman
Who"). But "Invisible Cities" and "The Test of Time" were wonderful
essays.
- Sore Sites, Will Self
- Did you know that Will Self wrote a bunch of essays for Building
Design? I didn't. The essays were great and ranty (and even paid
attention to transportation issues!) and they made me like Will Self all
the more. The cartoons were not, and didn't.
- Finding a Form, William Gass
- My god. William Gass is a genius. I mean really. From his first few
essays where he discusses philosophers and philosophy, but from a
distinctly literary standpoint (though he's trained in philosophy), to his
essays celebrating so many other authors, I was impressed. And the last
few essays, "The Story of the State of Nature," "The Baby or the
Botticelli," and "The Book as a Container of Consciousness" just made me
gasp from the awe of it all.
- Deadly Sins, New York Times Book Review
- A series of essays by authors including Thomas Pynchon and John
Updike. I especially liked Mary Gordon's take on anger.
- Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn, Flann O'Brien
- I had no idea what was going on for almost all the book. Teaches me
to read cuttings from a newspaper columnist (just because I like his
fiction) when I have no idea of the nuances of Irish events during that
time.
- When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Bin Laden, Bill Maher
- Christmas gift from Amy. Hilarious in some part, insightful and
incisive in other parts (mostly in re: conservation and sucking it up),
wrong in others (mostly his lack of understanding in re: what it's like to
be a minority group). Funny fake posters.
periodicals
- The Believer 9
- A small recap. Tom Bissell had an amusing (though all-too-worrisome,
given my situation) article on how-to-write books. Jim Shepard's
comparison of The Pianist and Schindler's List was pretty insightful. Amy
Benfer's article on Sweet Valley High novels makes me realize how far the
gap is between my girlhood and others'. Michael Atkinson's bit on
literary hoaxes was fun. Carl Elliott's essay on bioethics was great.
And Jim Crace's interview was surprisingly fresh.
- The Believer 8
- The interesting bits included Gustav Peebles' essay on Christian
utopian socialism and Smallville, the essay on Camp Trans by
Michelle Tea, Dave Eggers' interview with David Foster Wallace (covering
topics such as politics, democratic participation, and the value of
disciplinary cross-communication), and Sissela Bok's discussions about the
philosophy and ethics of lying. I really want to read Bok's stuff now, by
the way.
- The Green Bag, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn 2003)
- My favorite articles: Thomas C. Goldstein's "Supreme Court Rules"
(enlightening), Gregory F. Jacob's "The 25th Amendment" (fun, but would've
been more fun if I'd known anything about the television shows he was
discussing), Theodore B. Olson's "Remembering Marbury" (really
well-written), and John V. Orth's "The Rule in Shelly's Case" (which,
alas, made me recall how much I've forgotten from property class).
- The Green Bag, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer 2003)
- Vikram Amar's "The New 'New Federalism'" was a pretty enlightening
read (hmm, I hadn't read Guillen at all), as was Erwin
Chemerinsky's "October Term 2003". And Brian Leiter's "Law School
Observer" and Erik Jensen's "Taxation of Beards" were hilarious. Also the
review of O'Connor's book, Lazy B, makes the book look intriguing.
- The Green Bag, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Spring 2003)
- Man. Some amazing essays/articles in here. Like Certainty and
Doubt on the Supreme Court, which captures why I so like Breyer
(weirdly enough, less because of his minimalism, though I like that too,
and more because of his judicial modesty). Laurence Tribe's Public
Right, Private Rites, on his father's death and his first argument
before the Supreme Court was alternately navel-gazing and sympathetic.
And Geoffrey Stone's bit on Judicial Ideology and Balance on the
Courts is hilarious! And M.H. Hoeflich's Lawyers and the Science
of Character, on phrenologists' assessments of lawywers, is also
amusing. As is the book review on Sunstein et al.'s book on Punitive
Damages. Oh oh! And John E. Wallace's Unpublished Opinion
Twelve-Hundred is funny too! And I'm sure I talked to him when he was
a staff attorney on the Sixth Circuit, though I don't recall many details.
- The Green Bag, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter 2003)
- Two articles I really enjoyed: "Legal Lexicography," by Bryan
Garner (because I always like Bryan Garner) and "The Sale of Defective
Houses," by John Orth (portraying our changing attitude towards property
such as, well, houses).
- The Green Bag, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn 2002)
- Richard Epstein's "Standing in Law and Equity" (arguing for broad
standing for attempts to seek equitable relief) was surprisingly
persuasive, though I'm still not sure I buy it. Thomas B. Nachbar's
"Constructing Copyright's Mythology" argues that at least historically,
copyright wasn't intended to protect authors from the power of limited
concentrated presses. And Warner W. Gardner's "Dennis Hutchinson and
David Garro's The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox makes
Justice James McReynolds seem pretty horrible. Oh! And there's a weird
reprint of Samual Clemen's testimony to Congress arguing that copyrights
should be held in perpetuity. Oh my.
- The Green Bag, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Summer 2002)
- My favorite articles: Vikram David Amar and Alan
Brownstein, "Reasonable Accommodations and the ADA;" Stephen B. Cohen,
"Even Before Enron;" and John Hart Ely, "Ely's Wager" (great!). Also, the
dialogue on AIDS Denial in South Africa, Frankfurter on Ex parte
Quirin, and the book reviews of Remini's Jackson and His Indian
Wars and White's New Deal were really enlightening.
- The Green Bag, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Spring 2002)
- There are fun articles on "Unprecedented Precedent" and "Publishing
Unpublished Opinions" (which would have been more timely had I read this
a year ago.) And "A Modest Proposal for Bankruptcy Reform" by Marcus Cole
actually made bankruptcy law seem interesting to me. Also, I want to read
Becker and Murphy's Social Economics now.
- Granta 66 (Summer 1999), Truth and Lies
- The highlights: "The Man with Two Heads," by Elena Lappin (on Binjamin
Wilkormiski/Bruno Dossekker/Grosjean, author of Memories of a
Childhood, 1939-1948 on Nazi death camps---amazing!); Jillian
Edelstein's photonarrative on the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission; and "Goal 666," by Stacey Richter (a gem of hilarity. Really.
The best spoof ever on heavy metal culture.)
- The Believer 7
- Okay, I'm back to loving The Believer again. The review of
Joan Didion's writings was fascinating. The essay on detective fiction,
same. Oh and gosh I loved "Read the Book That You Are Reading" by Paul
Collins, which if I'd read before finishing my s-c.n. I'd revise it again
and maybe I still will. But I still don't get the appeal of Jerry Lewis.
- The Believer 6
- Yay, the magazine picked up again. I thought "The Ancient Roman
Reading Craze" by Tony Perrottet was pretty amusing. I also liked the
spread on choose your own adventures. Also, Joshuah Bearman redeemed
himself with his interview with Usama Fayyad on Total Information
Awareness.
- The Believer 5
- This issue felt a bit off---nothing resonated so much with me. Sure,
Mark Peranson's article, "The Mouthwash of the Past," made Guy Maddin's
movies seem intriguing, but not that much. I did, however, buy
A Heart So White because Vendela Vida's article on Javier Marias
was well-written. But other pieces, like "The Uninhabited Air Force," by
Joshuah Bearman, just seemed forcedly weird to me.
- The Believer 4
- The short segments (Mammal, Tool, Light, Child, Motel) started grating
on me this month, as I didn't get anything out of them individually, and
as they started feeling gimmicky. David is starting to read my old
issues, though, which is amusing. He's only reading the philosophy
interviews and the charts of novels, which also amuses me. As for this
month's articles, I found the ULA article fascinating. But
(surprisingly!) not so much Ben Marcus's article on John Haskell's
work---somehow he seemed to be trying too hard. Not to say that the core
of the article was bad, I just think it could've been a lot better. Like
the "Time Must Die" theme---so intriguingly titled---wasn't woven in
finely enough. Oh, and I thought Martin Short came across as pretty
annoying.
- The issue did leave me totally fascinated with Jan Potocki's book, the
Saragossa Manuscript, and with reading some Jamaica Kincaid.
- The Believer 3
- "The Language Plague" reminded me of my freshman seminar on plagues
and society. "The Dreamy Apocalypse" reminded me that I should read more
Steve Erickson, and that the McSweeney's/Believer crowd is really inbred
(Brian Evenson, who wrote the review, had his books covered in a previous
issue). I'm not sure I buy the argument about the Dune series being
prescient. I do like "Everything Falls Apart," because it raises
similar issues to stuff I tried to tackle in my book.
- The interview with Liz Phair was interesting. And Richard Rorty
doesn't seem as awful as David makes him out to be.
- The Believer 2
- I'm growing to like this magazine more and more. From this, I've
learned that gosh I really want to read something by Brian Evanson. I
loved reading about book thievery and and Pessoa's The Book of
Disquiet. And the chart about the history of children's literature
was fabulous.
- The Believer 1
- I finally read this! So okay, I have to say, while I like the goals
of the magazine, I'm worried it won't work. Sure, avoiding snarkiness is
great; I can buy that. But what if a reviewer has genuine criticisms
about a book---what then? How to criticize? Just by not being needlessly
mean? I just worry about the line, that's all. Because I'm a lawyer.
That being said, though, there's some great stuff in here, like the
context of the pre-Iraq-war protests in the whole scheme of protests, the
bit about the star-nosed mole, and the "short, loose history" of magic
realism. (Charts! I love them!) And the bits about what authors are
working on just makes me hanker to work on my own thing some more.
- Although I like Matthew Derby's Interpol article (talking about how
the re-"blooming of the Eighties" inside of us made Interpol what it is
and how popular it is), I'm also a little skeptical. I mean, I like the
idea, I like the idea that re-positionings (i.e., "collective
repositor[ies") can elicit certain responses in music trends. My
skepticism comes about because he also tries to draw leg-warmers into it,
too, as evidence of some eightiesness. Because I don't think that's why
leg-warmers are back (I think it has more to do with a geographical
(literally! and eastward!) cycling of fashion trends---I mean, after
spending a summer in Japan, I already predicted their return, and that was
well before Dubya took power), it makes me question the rest of the
reasoning. Still. That's not to say I didn't find the article
thoughtful.
- I will wait for David to read the Strawson article---he's the
philosopher, not me.
nonfiction
- What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What
Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley and Steven Ambrose
- Fairly fun--basically, it contained the thought games of various
historians about different events in military history. Enjoyable, but a
little dense for someone like me who doesn't generally like military
stuff but does like what-if games. It was a good refresher on history,
though. Now if only I manage to avoid confusing the counterfactuals from
the real thing.
- An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Ronald Wardhaugh (3d ed.)
- A fascinating and enlightening introduction to a subject matter I
always wanted to learn more about. (And coincidentally, a well-regarded
book in the field too! Me, I just picked it up because it was at the
used-book store. Anyway, cool stuff on dialects, pidgin, creole,
solidarity and politeness dynamics, language and gender and disadvantage,
and language planning.
- The Languages of the World, Kenneth Katzner
- I learned so much from this book! Like that in Chukchi (a form of
Russian), males and females pronounce the letter k differently. That many
languages have no capital letters. That there are some interesting pairs
in English that come from Old English or Old Norse (like "rear"---Old
English---and "raise"---Old Norse). Like our words for animals come from
Old English but our words for meats comes from French. Like the French
Academy has approved a few words from English, like "le pipeline," but
mandates that it be pronounced peep-LEEN. Like in Finnish there are 15
case forms for nouns. Like there are tons of languages without written
vowels. Like the fact that Oriya and Burmese have very circular scripts
so as not to split the palm leaves that the languages were originally
written in. Like Malay has numerical coefficients too, like Chinese.
Like in Malay and Indonesian, the plural is formed by repeating the noun.
Like in swahili, grammatical inflections come at the beginning of words,
and they carry over from the nouns to the verbs. Wow.
- Writing Systems of the World, Akira Nakanishi
- So fun! It's a total surface-level survey, of course. But did you
know that the vowels in Mongolian script can be of three genders
(feminine, masculine, and neuter)? And did you know that in ancient
Greek, letters were occasionally written backwards, in mirror image form,
in alternating lines? I didn't. (And I'm not even gonna list the things
I should've known but really didn't, except to mention that it never
really hit me until reading this book that numbers are ideograms.) So
fascinating!
- In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
- It's weird. This is the book that spawned a whole genre that I
like---that of true crime-type dramatizations---but I wasn't as into it as
I thought I would be. Part of it is that the book is a victim of its own
success---because the form has been borrowed so much, it doesn't feel new
and fresh to me, the way I'm sure it'd feel new and fresh had I
encountered it back when it was first published.
- Still, it was very educational. And it was weird to read about them
calling each other "honey" and about the homoerotic subtext beneath it
all---was it there, or was it Truman Capote's? Did Capote really have a
crush on Perry? And how could Perry be so sympathetic and yet so . . .
cold? Anyways. I hear Capote made a lot of the details up.
- The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
- What a great birthday present from Ed! It is everything I like---a
true story about Daniel Burnham, chief architect of the 1893 World's Fair,
and Henry Holmes, the serial killer who operated a killing hotel nearby
during that time. Neat tidbits about Pabst Blue Ribbon, the belly dance
song, the Ferris wheel, Columbus Day, the Pledge of Allegiance, and
Frederick Law Olmstead. The Fair must've been beautiful.
- Philosophy of Mind, Jaegwon Kim
- Seems like a decent---and neutral!---intro to philosophies of mind. I
won't recap this because (1) this is a book log!, and (2) there's too much
to recap. I'll just say that, despite David's skepticism, I think the
category I fit best in is neo-emergentism, with "neo" added to account for
whatever twist on emergentist philosophy I choose to add. It also
happens to help with some of the stuff I'm writing.
- Killers on the Loose, Antonio Mendoza
- A Christmas present from Ed. Horrible prose, in that net-tabloid
style of the Drudge Report and all that. The title exemplifies
everything. But. But. But it's about serial killers, so of course I was
transfixed. Thanks Ed.
- Free Markets and Social Justice, Cass Sunstein
- A multisided look at how economic analysis and social justice fit
together. It starts off with a critique of assumptions made by various
economic analysis of politics---especially how preferences are assessed
and incorporated into economic political models, and how social norms
(created by law and otherwise) affect preferences. (A side note: it led
me to think about the ways in which mainstream economists and
critical feminists actually mirror each other---the market into the
personal, the personal into the marketplace. But the development of this
thought is for another place.)
- Another thing Sunstein discusses with regard to the problems with
valuation is the incommesurability of certain experiences---i.e., the
weirdness of compensating a friend, in money, for missing lunch with her.
Metrics of well being cannot always be flattened into one scale. (Another
question I drew from this is why economists don't address the possibility
of markets for arkets. Again a thought that I'll eventually elaborate on
elsewhere.)
- Other concepts discussed in the "critique" section: people's desires
for consistent conceptions of selfhood, the damage that large-scale
catastrophies cause to social stabilities and trust, the flattening effect
of certain expert analyses.
- The latter half of the book is devoted to ways in which Sunstein
believes that markets can be used to effect greater social justice.
I had a few more disagreements with him there---mainly in regards to
whether courts should incorporate requirements of cost-effectiveness into
their rulings, or whether this should be addressed by Congress, or by
agencies. Sunstein sees room for the former, while I think these choices
should reside in the latter institutions.
- Overall, the book has a lot of thoughtful critiques and suggestions.
It suffers, however, from the problem that many academic texts have---that
it's all too easy for the reader to see that the chapters were written
separately, and then only later edited to be tied together into a book.
Very jarring, for someone who usually reads books as books and articles as
articles.