Everything Unfinished

Blogger turned off support for FTP publishing last night. Another vanishing technology – serve me right for getting nostalgic about mailboxes.

Paul Auster’s The Locked Room brilliantly evokes a writer’s relationship with his mailbox:“Eleven-thirty rolled around – the hour of the mail – and I made my ritual excursion down the elevator to see if there was anything in my box. This was always a crucial moment of the day for me, and I found it [...]

This is the first book I’ve read for a while that reminds me of James Blish’s A Case of Conscience. Both books try to figure out through story the theological implications of intelligent life on other planets or in other dimensions.A family from Lémabantunk are exiled to Nevada. The people of Lémabantunk have a beautiful [...]

I had a shot at rereading this circa 2005, with the aim of trying to understand the powerful effect it had on me when I first read it circa 1990. In 2005, I came away with a frustrating and paradoxical feeling that analyzing this novel’s structure is actually somewhat futile as a means to understanding [...]

Hard to beat this one from Mary Karr’s Lit –“He tells me the story of a writer who – on finding his own first book remaindered in a used bookstore – opened to the flyleaf only to discover his own signature above the note To Mum and Dad…”OK so this is sadder, about a first [...]

To Californians, England is a culture of understatement. To the English, California is a culture of overstatement. But from a more global perspective, both cultures are rather on the understated side of things.Anna Wierzicka’s English: Meaning and Culture quotes Syrian author Abraham Rihbany’s The Syrian Christ, published in 1920, on the differences between Anglo-American and [...]

In Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene asks “What does a macaque do with the brain areas that we now devote to reading?” His answer: object recognition. Experimental evidence shows that the kinds of symbols that crop up in human writing systems are the same kinds of symbols that primates are good at recognizing.Dehaene — [...]

Structurally this novel resembles Milan Kundera’s Immortality. It’s a book with huge spaces left in it, that make it feel more spacious. Instead of a linear plot, there’s an array of scenes, views of a woman from various perspectives – including a view from an afterlife — a woman who has both ideas and a [...]

I just read Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, a book by Daniel L. Everett about his time with the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. The Pirahãs have no grammatical terms for single or plural, and no words for numbers. According to Everett they cannot even be taught to count or do simple [...]

Some tax day humor from Nathaniel Missildine.For the breakdown on book publishing in 2009, see this Huffington Post article on the latest report from Bowker. Fiction’s 2009 decline prevented overall growth in production, yada yada yada. Huge growth in on-demand web-marketed titles, you know the drill.Back to San Francisco, city of many readings! Tonight (Thursday [...]

More on happy endings — I just read in “Lapham’s Quarterly” this excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s “This is a Lesson in Creative Writing.”Vonnegut offers a “marketing tip” — in commercial fiction, heroes start out quite fortunate, become unfortunate, and wind up more fortunate than they began.He reports that “after the war I went to the [...]

There are TV shows that, if you just watch whatever episode happens to be on the air right now, might strike you as kind of gratuitous — but if you watch the episodes in sequence and in the right spirit, turn out to have literary depth. E.g. there are scenes in the seventh episode whose [...]

Anna Karenina’s last morning –“’Who’s that?’ she thought, gazing in the mirror at the feverish, scarred face with the strangely glittering eyes looking out at her. ‘Why, it’s I!’ she realized all at once, and looking at herself full length she suddenly seemed to feel his kisses on her, give a shiver and moved her [...]

Story here. There’s always terror at the edge of Wells’s vision, linked to his awareness of how much humanity has to lose. A line that delivers a characteristic Wellsian frisson –“The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noticed their loss.”Wells wrote elsewhere that “history is a race between education and catastrophe.” In [...]

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence is one of my favorite non-fiction books. Published in 1976, it draws on psychology research to try and explain various great military disasters, mostly British. Parallels with Vietnam are barely touched on, but would have jumped out at the book’s original readership as clearly as parallels with Iraq do [...]

Farthing is a country house murder mystery, set in an alternate time-line where Britain and Nazi Germany have made peace some time after the fall of Dunkirk. Germany and the Soviet Union are waging a protracted war, while an isolationist U.S. remains at peace with an imperialist Japan. England is presented as a rigidly class-bound [...]

From Richard Todd’s The Thing Itself –“Dean MacCannell has some pointed things to say on the subject of preservation. He argues that it is a characteristic gesture of modernism. In the act of trying to save the old from destruction, we are asserting our lack of connection to that world. The antipreservationists in town don’t [...]

Lewis Hyde in The Gift says this about Warren Hagstrom’s work on the organization of science — “He begins his discussion of the commerce of ideas in science by pointing out that ‘manuscripts submitted to scientific periodicals are often called ‘contributions,’ and they are, in fact, gifts.’ It is unusual for the periodicals that print [...]

Psychologists James Pennebaker and Shannon Wiltsey Stirman published some research on poet suicide in a 2001 “Psychosomatic Medicine” article you can read here.Comparing the texts of suicidal and non-suicidal poets, they found the work of suicidal poets “contained more first-person singular self-references throughout their careers. That self-references do not increase over time indicates that the [...]

Thomas M. Disch wrote in The Castle of Indolence –“Poets who have endorsed the public’s estimate of their art by their own suicides, after long threatening such a stroke of poetic justice in their writing, generally seem to have made the most significant dent on the Collective Consciousness.”This line became even more depressing to read [...]

From Norman F. Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence — “There are grounds for thinking that incompetent commanders tend to be those in whom the need to avoid failure exceeds the urge to succeed.” “… the person who fears failure prefers tasks which are either very easy or very difficult. If they are easy [...]

Henry James in The American Scene thought the new buildings of New York ugly, with too many windows — “a condition never to be reconciled with any grace of building.”Elsewhere he wrote of Compton Wyngate‘s “ivy-smothered brickwork and weather-beaten gables, conscious old windows and clustered mossy roofs.”This idea of windows as conscious is strikingly Jamesisan, [...]

From Diana Athill’s memoir Somewhere Towards the End –“Once we at André Deutsch brought out a coffee-table book about beds prefaced by an oddly inappropriate essay by Anthony Burgess. The book was supposed to be in praise of beds, but Burgess said he loathed them because he was afraid of going to sleep and needed [...]

There’s a scene in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden Caulfield persuades a suspicious elevator boy to take him to the floor his parents live on. The boy tells him “You better wait in the lobby, fella,” but Holden replies “I’d like to – I really would. But I have a bad leg. I [...]

In English: Meaning and Culture, Wierzbicka argues that such words as “fair,” “reasonable” and “right” are so specific to Anglophone culture that they can’t be adequately translated into other languages. An example she gives from personal experience –“… my daughters, growing up in Australia, used to say to me (in Polish), to nie fair (‘that’s [...]

“The Onion” reports — “Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text.”In other news, quantum entanglement is a property of a quantum mechanical state of a system of two or more objects in which the quantum states of the constituting objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without [...]

This is the one-year anniversary of my first ever blog post.As Tamim Ansary wrote a few years back, “At last count (about a year ago) there were some 64 million blogs… I have to wonder: what do these 64 million people do for day jobs?”Who knows how many blogs there are now? Mark Helprin in [...]

“Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in a letter. “But it is true.” See Helge Kåre Fauskanger’s site on Tolkien’s art-languages.Maybe I do believe him… In his [...]

This novel was first recommended to me by a stranger at a party in the early 1990s. It’s probably best to learn about this book in as random a way as possible, since it’s kind of a paean to randomness.It opens with incredible speed. A terrifying psychological transformation is compressed into the first few paragraphs [...]

This is from an essay called “The Politics of Gentleness” by theologian Stanley Hauerwas:”… we live in a time when people believe they have no story except the story they chose when they thought they had no story. That’s ‘freedom’ in a society shaped by liberal political theory. If you don’t believe that’s true of [...]