John Jr. > Recent Status Updates

“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?

From a meditation on sleep: “Not far from this point is the private garden in which various kinds of sleep, so different from one another, grow like unknown flowers: sleep induced by datura, by Indian hemp, by the multiple extracts of ether, the sleep of belladonna, of opium, of valerian” (80).

The narrator is as fascinated with the beach girls he meets in Balbec as an American surf band from the 1960s would be. He writes about them at much greater length, and less catchily, but it’s cute, often even charming.

If I had world enough and time, I’d read Pamela (thanks largely to Ian Watt), and I’d happily read all of this novel, about which someone wrote an entire book called The Year of Reading Proust. But a year sounds like a lot. For now, like the Energizer bunny, I’m still going…

This translation is sometimes so contemporary that it distracts me. Did Proust use an expression in French that corresponds to our idiom “in real life”? Did he write of avoiding someone “like the plague”?

It’s amusing to see modernity creeping in on little cat’s feet. “I don’t think I’d like having a telephone about the house. Once the novelty of it wears off, it must be a definite nuisance,” says Mme. Cottard (183).

I decided to reread this because Swann’s Way, which I was in the middle of, was rather heavy. This is the opposite of heavy.

An amusing remark says, “Other people are, as a rule, … immaterial to us” (143). That strikes me as true, but so does the rest of the sentence, which describes, without using the word “love,” the way certain people seem “to belong to a different universe” (143).

The narrator describes the church at Combray as “a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—the name of the fourth being Time—which had sailed the centuries with that old nave…” (36–7).

Years ago, I learned of a Harvard course on masters of the Modernist novel, which dealt with Joyce, Proust, and Mann. I’ve read Mann and Joyce and am now remedying my final shortcoming in this regard by reading Proust. (BTW, the current version of that course covers Joyce, Proust, and Woolf—fine with me, since I’ve read her too.)

On Amazon, I found this public-domain, seemingly print-on-demand edition of the first volume of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation. If I go on to other volumes, I plan to read other translators, but this one is still a standard, I believe.

A tasty little bit from DFW’s year-2000 assessment of then-current politicians: “Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as ‘amazingly lifelike’” (187).