Katie > Recent Status Updates

Freaking long

This book is freaking impossible.

This book (1786) set the standard for Taste and Criticism and then directly affected the evolution of the novel as we know it. If you've read and written (in any way) about Lewis' Experiment in Criticism, Northrop Frye, Payne's Lively Art of Writing or Crider's book on the essay, you've also participated in the same centuries-long discussion without knowing it. What IS good taste? How do you criticize a book? Gold.

This is the most non-chemistry chemistry book ever. We've only read chapter 1 but I will NEVER IN MY LIFE forget that Argon is an inert gas. Why?

Because he digressed from Argon and started talking about his entire family line, goyims, diminutives, terms, hybrid collections of Yiddish and Italian. He stopped talking about Argon four sentences in. Extraordinary. We sat waiting for him to explain. He didn't.

I think if you read this while reading Mind of the Maker you might actually dance on a piece of Heaven in the comfort of your living room. This book is about the principles of theatre, theatre being that lively contrasting art set in juxtaposition to books , books which are not moved upon through performance. This book is the work of a thoughtful expert drawing inferences across several schools of thought.

I don't understand why this is the first time I've ever heard of this book.

SO painful. What he has to say about the craft of writing and the way he writes are both great! But his examples, his insistence on circling around humanist ideas and evolution are a dead weight. He uses loads of writing examples in every chapter and has mentioned something pertaining to evolution in almost every chapter. Fabre was the exception.

Got to Ch 7: Art and Artists. I'm happy again. Freaking Zinsser is just oof. Dude is a million times better than Adler but whyyyyy didn't anyone love him into mystery and sacraments? He could have been a missionary. It's like he's perpetually stuck in the grumpy and/or bitter lemon stage and never figured out forgiveness. Sigh

How do you know if you're a missionary? You're one everywhere you go from birth, of course. You listen to God, discover Him in the darkness of being blinded, receive new sight, and translate the gospel back to ppl in ways that they can receive. Translators look for patterns and principles. To understand yourself as a missionary you'll need to find other Storytellers. This guy is one, a hub of community, an apostolic

"HAVING DEPARTED THE prevailing “self-world view” and plunged into the scatological refuse pile—“the rag and bone shop of the heart”—one joins with all else that has been discarded and dropped, out of mind and out of sight: the wild dance of liminality, anti-structure, chaos, void, prima materia, undifferentiated flux, kaleidoscopic consciousness; the “ultimate and unknowable reality”

Reading this on Archive is painful. I need to see if it's on Gutenberg.

In one chapter he introduced Rilke, Lorca, and Rimbaud. Then he used pieces of their poetry to examine the idea of traveler energy. Deardorff's style is so esoteric his prose feels poetic to me. I have to look up words left and right only to find that instead of using circle, for instance, he used "curvaceous infinitely turning dome of globular meaning" and for me that's just fun ok? This book isn't for everybody.

I continue to have mixed feelings about Zinsser. This book began so strongly, but then he decided to begin referencing excellent humanist scientists to use as examples of great writing. That wasn't the bad part. It was when he carelessly mentioned Feynman's book as an example of poor writing while -in perfect snob fashion- complimenting Feynman's physics genius I started to feel icky. Writing books are perplexing.

Filet mignon and elk and jamón.. so good.

I've already cried, twice.