Leigh > Recent Status Updates

Our time traveler has finally shown up!
My main observation so far is that Anton Moritz is CONSTANTLY obsessing about the penetrating gaze of various people who behold him

Hoping this will be an appropriate companion for a week at the beach!

I really like this cartooning but I really don’t care about these characters!

when you're in the "hot streak" portion of the showbiz memoir and everything they touch turns to gold, it can be easy to get monotonous — "then we had a hit! Then an even bigger hit!" but Rob and his ghostwriter are keeping it fairly balanced with touches of Black Country humility, wacky anecdotes, and the core tension of keeping in the closet.

"The two halves of 'Hey Jude' make each other better."
This guy's pretty good at ending a chapter

Yoko and Linda both lived in Scarsdale, NY during the 1950s!

Oh, well played, Ian. At the end of chapter 16 on “Eleanor Rigby,” after emphasizing the song’s use of consistent syllabic rhythms, and calling attention to the line “no one was saved,” he discusses the disputed authorship and the idea that Paul subconsciously got the name from a gravestone in a Liverpool church. “However deeply in his mind her name was buried, it had been saved.”

End of chapter 14 has a nice bit of analysis of the ways their songs seemed to express what they sought from each other

Good, but so far unfortunately there has been no reference to the “Beat the Meatles” incident

it really is such a psychological novel — making mountains out of such tiny molehills of individual experience

One quarter through this epic!

Wow he’s really rhapsodizing about some of these guys — Charles Ives in particular gets a very interesting portrait that motivates me to learn more. But that really reveals how perfunctory some of the other chapters are (even moderns like Britten).

lmao I think he spends more time lecturing the reader on why we should appreciate Schoenberg than he spent on the entire Renaissance

The structure of this book is lopsided, too. It’s fairly similar to Tommasini’s in some ways, but supposedly trying to be more comprehensive — although that is kind of hopeless and Swafford inevitably shows he’s more interested in some people/eras than others. Part I and Part II have two chapters each; Part III has four chapters, Part IV has 12 chapters, and Part V has 13!

Hell of a potboiler! It’s been ages since I read Tezuka but his energy is amazing

This narrator (Tom Perkins) is driving me crazy with mispronunciations 😑

Still inching forward!

Wow. Hans is having such an intense time! and Mann is really weaving all his elements together in a tight web of signification. And I get to feel like a genius because I think I’m catching some of what he’s up to, as it happens, and pat myself on the back when he takes another step along the path I noticed.

Settembrini is our first interesting character so far! Sleazy as he may be. The cousins are still pretty blank slates. Although maybe Settembrini is starting to rub off on Castorp, who has begun to philosophize about the nature of time…

Well, he did warn us in the foreword that this would be a book that takes its time! Just got through the section on Hans’ grandfather, which seemed both brief and lengthy at the same time — reflective and lingering on details but in a way that feels genuinely profound. And the prose of Lowe-Porter’s 1927 translation is a hearty meal. Buckling up for 700 more pages in that vein!

I found ch15 unsatisfying. Not clear when in the timeline this event happened, or really what happened at all, and why it matters. Some huge conspiracy is being revealed to Seivarden? …who doesn’t seem to care all that much, or to react in a way that explains the stakes. I’m used to being in the dark with this novel but this is presented as a big info dump, without a clear sense on how much info is being dumped