John Jr. > Recent Status Updates

“Literary fiction” means, inter alia: this novel talks about, without explaining, what happened between Merlin and Vivien, and I’ll have to look it up, because I don’t know.

Lovely to find Goethe’s Faust and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” quoted in a certain pivotal scene here.

Getting us to care about letters, invented ones no less, and between invented characters: there’s magic in this.

Oh, this is fun! Possession at night, English major’s delight.

I’m going to suspend my reading of this, though I expect I’ll return to it at some point. Maybe it’s me and maybe it’s Isaacson—or maybe a little of each—but this doesn’t feel like much fun.

I keep shaking my head over little things. I’m pretty certainly not part of the target audience for this book.

So far, I have two complementary but opposing views of this. One is that there’s essentially nothing new here; the other is that the differences in emphasis and detail make this worth reading.

I’m reading an ARC of this while I decide what I really ought to read next. Pleased to find a math expression included, though just barely—it’s in a footnote.

Another minor instance of weirdness: “Did you know that Toscanini used to sing along with the singers when he conducted an opera?” Joe said. “That in his recording of Traviata you can hear him during the aria ‘Sempre Libera’?”

A very minor example of the weirdness of the world in this novel:

“Five cents, please,” the door said as he seized its knob.

“Pay the door,” Joe said to G. G. Ashwood.

Reading Axel's Castle, which I probably should've read long ago.

“There were two or three years between their deaths, but still, after the long decades during which none of them had died, this frequency pattern felt very fast. So they got through those funerals as best they could, and meanwhile everything was getting darker” (634).

“They were specks in this universe, specks! But what ideas they had. People would do anything for the sake of an idea, anything” (504).

“It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, either logically or emotionally. But something had to be done. That life was past” (375).

Certain parts of my “Martian summer” are progressing slowly, among them the Martian part. Loving this novel, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if future inhabitants read KSR’s trilogy on a Martian beach in summer.

KSR may have been optimistic to write this trilogy. A work this substantial must call for a level of belief—that it can be done and is worth doing—on the scale of President Kennedy’s declaration about going to the Moon. Now that the trilogy, like the lunar missions, is done, it has the lasting value of conveying to readers some of the same optimism.

I’ve read one novel in the Mars trilogy in each of the past two summers, and now I’m happy to be reading the third. Looks like I’ll be here a while. Good!

Lewis has given me an inkling of many poets whose work I may not choose ever to encounter again, and some I may. It’s good to know these things. Pausing this for now.

When I started, I intended only to read (or reread) the first chapter, on courtly love. But literary history and criticism intrigue me, and I haven’t stopped reading yet.

Should have studied Latin longer and harder. Maybe I’ll try to pick up a little of it again. That sounds like a great idea. Unfortunately, Google Translate seems easier.

I’ve learned what Lovecraft is like (pretty much what I expected) and learned that Poe can be clever and funny. Each is present here via a story inspired or influenced by The 1,001 Nights.

TIL the word “palinode,” which Lewis uses to mean a book that reverses itself, one that espouses a stance and then retracts it. A medieval book of instruction by Andreas Capellanus, seemingly on the art of love, does this.

Always glad for a reason to look at a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This book gives me one, a painting of Parizade, from the jealous-sisters story. For good measure, the book also refers to Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” poem.

Reading this has prompted me to reread one story in Ted Chiang’s latest collection and to begin rereading an entire novel by G. Willow Wilson.

The surprises in this book are of many kinds. There’s a polyamorous household in “The Story of the Porter and the Three Women of Baghdad,” and a murder mystery in “The Story of the Three Apples.”

“Turn but a stone and start a wing” was how a poet described the pervasive presence of angels. “Turn a page, encounter a wonder” might describe the experience of reading this volume. The text itself, the illustrations, and even the marginal notes keep surprising me.

For me, this book is a memory prompt, among other things. Reading it sometimes gives me an eerie feeling.

It’s hard to get away from chatbots. Chapter 4 of this book, about a Firesign album from 1971, repeatedly discusses what it calls at one point “Joseph Weizenbaum’s foundational mid-1960s chatbot ELIZA” (131).

A cheap morning gag: “Ah, the 60s! I remember them well,” said no one ever.

On mistaken impressions and the like, the narrator says at one point, “What we remember of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; the things we had forgotten we had said, or even those we never did say, travel far off to provoke hilarity on another planet” (266). Is Proust misunderstood by aliens? Are we? Do we misunderstand them? Should I be thinking about such things in the midst of this novel?