At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Afternoon trio for … a trio of electric vehicles (two autonomous, one driven by a device called a human) whirring by at once
▰ I’m with Milchik on this one topic. “The theremin works best in moderation.”
▰ I watched and liked a video of a saxophone quartet doing what was originally a string quartet, composed by Philip Glass. Now I’m getting solo guitar versions, guitar quartet versions, solo piano versions, theremin versions. YouTube radicalization is real. 🙂
▰ Your writing job is to write to best explore and express what you’re thinking, not to tweak until all the little blue underlines magically disappear
▰ One of my favorite current comic book illustrators, Declan Shalvey, draws MF Doom for just over 40 minutes:
▰ I am sitting in a gulf different from the one you are in now …
▰ I am almost done reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (I’ll be done by the end of next week), but have really fallen behind in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, perhaps (ha, no — certainly) because as with the two previous novels I have completed this year (C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Jakob Kerr’s Dead Money), I started another in search of some closure: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. As with Cryptonomicon, it’s a book I’ve read before, in this case back when I was a teenager.
That prior reading provides a funny story. There was a “great books” book club being formed at the local library in the town where I grew up, and I was easily a quarter of the age of the next youngest member. I didn’t understand at the time that “great books” was a category, not a general descriptor, so I was confused by the proposed reading list. I didn’t understand why, for example, Frank Herbert’s Dune wasn’t on it (I didn’t even love Dune; I just thought it was a “great” science fiction book in that it was pretty well written and, you know, epic, which both seems like “great” things — look, I was young). Anyhow, reading The Good Soldier now, I’m amazed I even got through it as a teen, because I would have had no idea what was going on in the intertwined relationships at any emotional level, even as plainly as they’re laid out by the narrator.
Somewhat ironically, given my long-ago youthful confusion about what makes a “great book,” the author himself asks such a question about halfway through, when he has the narrator comment: “But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist.—Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly.” And please note that the “fellow” here is a vile individual, and yet he is the person with whom the book’s narrator and, thus, author associate with the word “novelist.” And then, should the self-reflexivity of the statement not have been sufficiently self-evident, Ford aims the interrogation regarding literary quality directly at himself: “It is melodrama; but I can’t help it.” This moment is, in addition, the only point in the entire novel when Ford uses the word “novelist,” so I believe the low-level vexation carries some inferential weight. Weirdly, this bit popped up just after I had begun to wonder, myself, what sort of book this is. For a long time, during my current re-reading, I thought of The Good Soldier as a worldly literary romance with some existential heft — or, once the dead bodies began to stack up, more of well-written psychological thriller: so, maybe less Virginia Woolf and more Patricia Highsmith. And then, just as I had shelved my categorical considerations and returned to the book, the author himself put the exact same question right on the page. It was sort of eerie.
I also read a few graphic novels this week, two of which I completed. Those would be the first two volumes of writer Tom King’s run on Wonder Woman: Outlaw and Sacrifice. I dug Outlaw quite a bit, especially how it dialed back the highly structured format that King has employed with other characters. Perhaps due to the switch in illustrators (Daniel Sampere for volume one, and both Sampere and Tony S. Daniel for volume two) and the broader array of superpowered characters and the absence of a central villain, the second volume didn’t seem to hold together as well, I felt.
