There’s dark and then there’s dark: this is the latter. Damn.
(Seriously: if you are having a rough week, go ahead and skip this.)
Made this one to for a Twitter thread, but obviously it’s for @tiffehr really. 😎
With just the books on my side table, I’m on track to blow right past my yearly average (24) before the end of October (I’m at 23 now), so that’s kind of fun. (:
My copy of Hair Story is, section-by-section, gaining underlines and marginalia at what some people might consider an alarming rate. But it’s so full of (a) things I didn’t know and (b) things I’ve said about my own hair that I can’t really help it. It’s definitely going to end up on my shelves as reference material.
Oh, on my side table in addition to Hair Story:
- Thanks for the Feedback, Douglas Stone & Shelia Heen
- Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (via Seattle Review of Books’ review)
- The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore
- 3-4 issues of Ms. Marvel
- 2 issues of Bitch Planet
- Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
“From [the Romantic period], it’s just a short leap to the poker-faced heroes of Ernest Hemingway, who, despite their poetic leanings, cannot express grief by any means but tippling and shooting the occasional buffalo.”
—
Man, weeping by Sandra Newman
I think “men crying demonstratively at every turn” will be the name of my next anthology.
“Andrew Carnegie first articulated his commitment to philanthropy in 1868, in a letter he wrote to himself. ‘The amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry,’ he wrote.”
—
Off the Books by Jacqui Shine, Lapham’s Quarterly
What a fantastic pair of sentences. I’m still chuckling (and applauding Ms Shine).
This is the first time I’ve ever wished I hadn’t borrowed a book from the library but instead bought it. I want to write in the margins and underline turns of phrase every 3 pages and not feel bad about resting a cup of tea on the cover and staining it and making it mine. Joan Didion: so good; damn.
(New) Books read count: 2011, 24; 2012, 26; 2013, 24; 2014: 24.
(:
2015? You’re up!
In the zone
The last 3 months have been the busiest all year. And the last 2 weeks the busiest of those months. I don’t know about y'all, but after a couple of days, my ability to drop into the zone begins to deteriorate rapidly. I don’t have the option of easing off the accelerator for a couple more days, though, so I’ve had to find a way to keep myself from slacking.
Surprising no one: that way is music!
In particular!
- Basic Channel’s “Quadrant Dub” (spotify, rdio, amazon, iTunes)
- Burial’s “Truant”
- Poliça’s “Give You The Ghost”
- My own “in the zone” playlist on Spotify
I start any one of these and within a minute or two, I have no trouble focusing on bugs, design updates, and javascript challenges.
“Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.”
—
In Conversation: Chris Rock by Frank Rich
Obviously the above isn’t the only topic of conversation, it meanders a little, but that last sentence is everything.
Books in progress:
- Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell
- Moby Dick, Herman Melville
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Movies/tv recently watched (& enjoyed!):
- Big Hero 6
- How to Train Your Dragon 2
- “Death Comes to Pemberley”
Recent milestones:
- ran my 6th half-marathon
- added actual plates to the empty bar for bench press
“While I admired her understanding and fancy, I loved to tend on her, as I should on a favourite animal…”
—
Och. Et tu, Mary? (Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
That’s Victor describing to Walton his cousin Elizabeth (with whom he was raised and who his mother [a woman plucked from destitution by his father just after her father died] wants him to marry).
Blah blah of its time; it still rankles. A favourite animal, indeed.
“—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling.”
— in “The First Lowering”, _Moby Dick_, Herman Melville
“There were additional impediments to seeing [Judy] Malloy as the originator of hypertext that [Robert] Coover does not name: to look to the west coast for literary origin; to esteem comedy more than tragedy; to recognize coterie distribution over a press; to praise a single mom with a Bachelor’s degree over a young male novelist with a print novel and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Such are the human judgments that launch a million clicks.”
—
Judy Malloy’s seat at the (database) table: A feminist reception history of early hypertext literature by Kathi Inman Berens (via Alexis Madrigal)
“…to praise a single mom with a Bachelor’s degree over a young male novelist with a print novel and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.”
!!
“I would like to say in my defense that I don’t really get the appeal of YOLO. I live many times over. Hypothetical, subterranean lives that run beneath the relative tedium of my own and have the power to occasionally penetrate or even derail it.”
—
Zadie Smith, “What to Read This Summer” in O Magazine.
Word!