Chronicle of a Wednesday Foretold
Jan. 12th, 2022 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bIt's always a bad sign for the life of a blog (or whatever this is) when the increasingly infrequent entries all begin with some version of "I didn't die!" Nevertheless, I am still alive and not intentionally winding this thing down, though I guess it depends on what you mean by "intentionally." If you believe that intention is the flower and not the root of action, then I guess I am. But that's not what my conscious mind thinks it wants.
What I Think I Want
I made exactly one New Year's resolution for 2022, and it's "actually read The History of the Peloponnesian War." This allegedly rewarding ancient analysis of a grinding series of Greek conflicts has been on my "currently reading" list since April 2019, and what happens is I read a paragraph, think I've understood it, read three more paragraphs, and realize I have no idea who these people are or what they're doing. This is because it's a densely-written book about a lot of similarly-named people and groups that requires more attention than I'm used to giving to a book. In that sense, it's a little like my old friend Gravity's Rainbow. Unlike Gravity's Rainbow, reading it aloud doesn't help at all and probably makes the problem worse. However, I'm taking notes and it seems to be helping, though the going is slow. Also unlike Gravity's Rainbow, Thucydides clearly isn't trying to provoke the reading brain into producing a hallucinatory nightmare experience; he just has a very specific rhetorical style where all the clauses are made to do complicated Regency-style dances with one another, which he probably genuinely believes is the most compact way of describing the morass. As with Gravity's Rainbow, I had to start over from the beginning. I am now two crises into the pre-war period, three if you count T.'s introduction about how ancient wars were probably pretty weak tea compared to this one.
One Book I Read Recently
I was thrilled to find a gem from my childhood, This Place Has No Atmosphere, at John K. King Books in Detroit. I read this book only once, in the vague stew of time between about 7-10, but little pieces of it have stuck in my head for decades. This is a Paula Danziger book about a normal teen who reluctantly moves to the new moon colony with her parents in 2057, misses her old crew, puts on a community theater production of Our Town, and develops valuable inner resources. If you love retro futurism from the golden age of the shopping mall, there is a lot to love here, and the small moon school is both cozy and convincing. About the only thing that didn't work for me as an adult is the character of the lunar poet in residence, whose bad poetry was probably hilarious to me in elementary school. But as an adult I just wonder what happened to all the other poets.
Two Books I'm Reading Now
Joy Williams is a magnificent weirdo and I can't decide if her weird-ass dialogue (most recently in Harrow, which I've just started) is crookedly resonant or bullshit. There is always the chance that it's both. Everyone in Joy Williamsworld talks like an AI fed exclusively on 1980s litfic. She also has a tendency to just lean eight or nine scraps of grotesque Floridian detritus and deliberately mis-explained fragments from Harper's Findings together in a junkyard pyramid and call it a chapter. For some reason, this works. I blame the junkyard zeitgeist, and talent. Harrow so far is about a young girl whose mother thinks she has a destiny, so she's been sent to a kind of monastery for teens amid a series of cascading environmental disasters. Whether it's supposed to be the present or the future isn't totally clear, but the crowded cross-country train suggests it's not quite now.
I am also deep in The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, which is the probably mostly true story of a guy who really really wanted to build things without anyone telling him how things should be built. So far he has succeeded through a fantastic combination of bullying and sneakiness.
One Thing I Plan to Read Next
Along with This Place Has No Atmosphere, I found a new-to-me YA book from 1987 - Credit Card Carol, addressing the difficult but important subject of shopaholism. I'm looking forward to it, not least because it's very short.
What I Think I Want
I made exactly one New Year's resolution for 2022, and it's "actually read The History of the Peloponnesian War." This allegedly rewarding ancient analysis of a grinding series of Greek conflicts has been on my "currently reading" list since April 2019, and what happens is I read a paragraph, think I've understood it, read three more paragraphs, and realize I have no idea who these people are or what they're doing. This is because it's a densely-written book about a lot of similarly-named people and groups that requires more attention than I'm used to giving to a book. In that sense, it's a little like my old friend Gravity's Rainbow. Unlike Gravity's Rainbow, reading it aloud doesn't help at all and probably makes the problem worse. However, I'm taking notes and it seems to be helping, though the going is slow. Also unlike Gravity's Rainbow, Thucydides clearly isn't trying to provoke the reading brain into producing a hallucinatory nightmare experience; he just has a very specific rhetorical style where all the clauses are made to do complicated Regency-style dances with one another, which he probably genuinely believes is the most compact way of describing the morass. As with Gravity's Rainbow, I had to start over from the beginning. I am now two crises into the pre-war period, three if you count T.'s introduction about how ancient wars were probably pretty weak tea compared to this one.
One Book I Read Recently
I was thrilled to find a gem from my childhood, This Place Has No Atmosphere, at John K. King Books in Detroit. I read this book only once, in the vague stew of time between about 7-10, but little pieces of it have stuck in my head for decades. This is a Paula Danziger book about a normal teen who reluctantly moves to the new moon colony with her parents in 2057, misses her old crew, puts on a community theater production of Our Town, and develops valuable inner resources. If you love retro futurism from the golden age of the shopping mall, there is a lot to love here, and the small moon school is both cozy and convincing. About the only thing that didn't work for me as an adult is the character of the lunar poet in residence, whose bad poetry was probably hilarious to me in elementary school. But as an adult I just wonder what happened to all the other poets.
Two Books I'm Reading Now
Joy Williams is a magnificent weirdo and I can't decide if her weird-ass dialogue (most recently in Harrow, which I've just started) is crookedly resonant or bullshit. There is always the chance that it's both. Everyone in Joy Williamsworld talks like an AI fed exclusively on 1980s litfic. She also has a tendency to just lean eight or nine scraps of grotesque Floridian detritus and deliberately mis-explained fragments from Harper's Findings together in a junkyard pyramid and call it a chapter. For some reason, this works. I blame the junkyard zeitgeist, and talent. Harrow so far is about a young girl whose mother thinks she has a destiny, so she's been sent to a kind of monastery for teens amid a series of cascading environmental disasters. Whether it's supposed to be the present or the future isn't totally clear, but the crowded cross-country train suggests it's not quite now.
I am also deep in The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, which is the probably mostly true story of a guy who really really wanted to build things without anyone telling him how things should be built. So far he has succeeded through a fantastic combination of bullying and sneakiness.
One Thing I Plan to Read Next
Along with This Place Has No Atmosphere, I found a new-to-me YA book from 1987 - Credit Card Carol, addressing the difficult but important subject of shopaholism. I'm looking forward to it, not least because it's very short.
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