The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.
“In Essays of an Information Scientist (Vol. 10, 1987), Eugene Garfield reported the findings of a quantitative analysis of cited works in the Arts & Humanities index.” See also Most-cited authors of books in the humanities, 2007, which summarizes my ambivalence nicely: “What this says of modern scholarship is for the reader to decide – and it is imagined that judgments will vary from admiration to despair, depending on one’s view.” My nerd side is excited to see lists like this, my mildly-cynical/skeptical-about-academia side isn’t so sure.
The Fifty Twentieth-century Works Most Cited in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index
“Ragged Right Text. I’m going to pretend I don’t even have to mention this. There’s something sociopathic about major e-readers not including this option.”
I’m back for a second reading round-up (previously). With these out of the way, I can turn to a nice stack of fiction, and after that, I’m going to do a little overhaul and start prioritizing some of the recommendations I’ve gathered. As for these, I’d say #5, #6, and #8 were the best of the bunch:
1. The Jazz Ear. Ben Ratliff met with jazz musicians and listened to music with them. It sounds like such a great idea, but I think it fails in that people who play music aren’t always good at talking about it. (I should mention that I generally like Ratliff’s writing for the New York Times.) I thought the most interesting bit on creativity came from the interview with Maria Schneider, who uses one art to understand another:
When she composes, she often plays a sequence into a tape recorder, then gets up to play it back, and moves around the room to the phrases of the music, seeing how it feels when danced. “It helps me figure out where things are, and what needs to be longer.”
2. The Maltese Falcon. I loved the movie. I found the book didn’t have the snappy pace I was hoping for. Good story, though.
3. The Year of Living Biblically. Good ol’ DNF. I realized I wasn’t that interested, but I hear good things.
4. But Beautiful. Author Geoff Dyer calls it “imaginative criticism”. It’s a creative sort of nonfiction where he imagines vignettes based on the facts of some famous jazz people’s lives. More about the personalities and trials than the music. I couldn’t get in to it.
5. Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer. This is a good collection that’s particularly strong in the blues, but covers a really wide range. Many of the pieces are short ones written for newspaper, so you’ll find it easy to flip through. I liked it.
6. How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. The best part, which I do recommend checking out, is the first 1/3, which reviews the historic of economic thought with a special focus on theories of market efficiency and failure (e.g. Smith, Keynes, Hayek, Walras, Pareto, Fama, Arrow, etc). The rest of the book explores some recent thinkers and our current crisis/recession thing. I didn’t find it nearly as interesting as the first part, but maybe that’s because I’ve read so much about the crisis already.
7. Riders of the Purple Sage. DNF. Didn’t read enough to speak for it. I’m still interested in reading some westerns.
8. The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present. This was nice to read just before bedtime. Sleepiness and inattention kept me from diving into the longer ones, but I bookmarked a bunch of the shorter ones that I liked. Generally, I liked the ancient stuff much more than the old and the modern. Here are a few:
Written by Anacreon, translated by Barbara Hughes Fowler:
I boxed with a harsh opponent,
but now I look up, I raise my head,
and owe great thanks that I
have escaped in every respect
the bonds of Love
Aphrodite made tough.
Let someone bring me wine in a jar
and water that bubbles.
Written by Menander, translated by Philip Vellacott:
By Athene, gentlemen, I can’t find a metaphor
To illustrate what has happened—what’s demolishing me
All in a moment. I turn things over in my mind.
A tornado, now: the time it takes to wind itself up,
Get nearer, hit you, then tear off—why, it takes an age.
Or a gale at sea; but there, you’ve breathing-space to shout
“Zeus save us!” or “Hang on to those ropes!” or to wait
For the second monster wave, and then the third, or try
To get hold of a bit of wreckage. But with me—oh, no!
One touch, one single kiss—I’d had it, I was sunk.
Written by Callimachus, translated by Frank Nisetich:
There’s something hidden here, yes, by Pan,
by Dionysos, there’s fire under this ash.
Careful, now: don’t get too close! Often a river
eats away at a wall, bit by bit, invisibly.
Even so, Menexenos, I fear you’ll slip
under my skin and topple me into love.
I also liked several from Palladas. One translated by Edmund Keeley:
This is all the life there is.
It is good enough for me.
Worry won’t make another.
Or make this one last longer.
The flesh of man wastes in time.
Today there’s wine and dancing.
Today there’s flowers and women.
We might as well enjoy them.
Tomorrow—nobody knows.
Another from Palladas translated by Dudley Fitts:
Praise, of course, is best: plain speech breeds hate.
But, ah, the Attic honey
Of telling a man exactly what you think of him!
And one last one from Christophoros of Mytilene, translated by Peter Constantine:
How much better if an ox were to sit on your tongue
than for your poems to plod like oxen over fields.
9. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. This was okay. It is hard to write a great business book.
10. The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need. I like the efficiency of this one. It’s a nice kick in the pants/attitude adjustment. It doesn’t do much more than get a basic, broad message across in 20 or so minutes, and it that sense, probably is the last career guide you’ll need.
SYDNEY, Australia—An office worker on Pitt Street Mall reads a book during lunch hour, 1999.
Justin Wehr’s recent post about vocabulary highlighted four reasons why vocabulary matters. The final reason:
Linguistic vocabulary is synonymous with thinking vocabulary.
Sort of obvious and also sort of mind-blowing. It also reminded me of a couple things:
1. Some of the funniest/best storytellers I know are funny because, in part, they employ their vocabulary really well. Maybe I just respond well to wordplay because I am a word nerd, but still, I think there’s relationship between knowing how to describe things well, and making the sometimes oddball verbal connections and metaphors, that’s essential to the funny.
2. That fourth reason also reminded me of one of my favorite Phrases To Live By:
If you write like porridge you will think like it, and the other way around.
That’s from Don Watson in his book, Death Sentences. I read it a few years ago and haven’t forgotten that little bit. It’s also an important reminder about the words (read: ideas) I consume.
I had the—honestly, pretty disturbing—realization the other day that too much of my reading lately has been a bit content-thin. Not enough for my brain to chew on. My reading diet needs more raw, organic roughage, less HFCS. So to speak. I don’t mean it in a snobby way, or to fetishize difficulty for difficulty’s sake, but I could do a lot better. And it’s not that the stuff I’m reading isn’t interesting—just that sometimes entertaining ≠ illuminating, delightful ≠ insightful in a long-lasting way. It goes beyond books, too. I’m trying to be more picky about the magazines, essays, blog posts I invest my time in as well.
Some final reminders to myself:
“With Whispersync data from millions of Kindle readers Amazon can learn not just what we are reading but how we are reading.” Good ideas for Last.fm-style data slicing.
The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is this unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as irrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak warm coffee a really superior sort of ice.
“If you’re playing along at home, with the exception of the first, none of these criticisms are really iPad-specific.”
An adolescence of book stealing takes the author through the ancient, the modern, and the adult.
This Sotsgorodok was a bare field knee-deep in snow, and for a start you’d be digging holes, knocking in fence posts, and stringing barbed wire around them to stop yourself from running away. After that—get building.
I knew I would love this book when I came across those lines, about five pages in. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes about a labor-camp worker/political prisoner named Shukhov. It’s only one full day, from just before sunrise until lights-out. I love the restraint to focus on one day, one character, one setting. That aside, I think my favorite part of the book was a sort of underlying optimism. There’s plenty of bold, revolutionary exposé-type stuff about injustice, deprivation, dehumanizing treatment, etc. (It’s probably because I grew up after this devastating period that I can write it off with an “etc”…) But more interesting to me were the little glimmers of endurance and good humor in truly awful conditions.
“Call the gang.”
Gopchik ran off.
The great news was that the gruel was good today, the very best, oatmeal gruel. You don’t often get that. It’s usually magara or grits twice a day. The mushy stuff around the grains of oatmeal is filling, it’s precious.
Shukhov had fed any amount of oats to horses as a youngster and never thought that one day he’d be breaking his heart for a handful of the stuff.
“Bowls! Bowls!” came a shout from the serving hatch.
Another favorite bit is a sort of emotional shift that I found pretty remarkable. The oppression became sort of a background feature for me. With all that given, conscious sympathy sort of fades until you get about 90% finished…
Fetyukov passed down the hut, sobbing. He was bent double. His lips were smeared with blood. He must have been beaten up again for licking out bowls. He walked past the whole team without looking at anybody, not trying to hide his tears, climbed onto his bunk, and buried his face in his mattress.
You felt sorry for him, really. He wouldn’t see his time out. He didn’t know how to look after himself.
Very much a Literary Wow Moment for me. Our hero still manages feelings of pity for his fellow slave-laborer, while the reader has gotten kind of worn out. Just when you’ve gotten numb from reading about a full day of hardship, you feel the pang again because this one guy probably won’t make it. One last cool thing, also evident in the paragraph above, is that the third-person omniscient narration is peppered with asides and reactions from Shukhov himself:
The bosses were afraid the zeks would scatter and waste time in warming sheds. A zek’s day is a long one, though, and he can find time for everything. Every man entering the compound stooped to pick up a wood chip or two. Do nicely for our stove. Then quick as a flash into their shelters.
It’s a fairly short read. Totally worth it.
When to give up on a book (from Book Lust):
“Believe me, nobody is going to get any points in heaven by slogging their way through a book they aren’t enjoying but think they ought to read. I live by what I call ‘the rule of fifty,’ which acknowledges that time is short and the world of books is immense. If you’re fifty years old or younger, give every book about fifty pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100. The result is the number of pages you should read before deciding.
Heartily agree. This is why my reading log has so many DNFs. I still think I need to raise my standards, though.
I like the eclecticism here. Nice to see quite a few I hadn’t heard of, and interesting justification for some old-school books. (via my old library colleague and cool guy @cswarren)
https://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/mlarson/141479490/viX1Loqvtpw9u2o185vQT0qs?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
http://mlarson.tumblr.com/post/141479490/audio_player_iframe/mlarson/viX1Loqvtpw9u2o185vQT0qs?audio_file=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tumblr.com%2Faudio_file%2Fmlarson%2F141479490%2FviX1Loqvtpw9u2o185vQT0qs
David Foster Wallace reads Laughing with Kafka, which was later published in Consider the Lobster. Other speakers at the Metamorphosis: A New Kafka symposium included Paul Auster, E.L. Doctorow, Susan Sontag, and David Remnick. (via bibliokept)
Will Smith: The Keys to Life = Running & Reading. I’m totally set! (via)
“Join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace’s masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd.”
This could be good.
The title of Pierre Bayard‘s book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is a bit misleading. Don’t get your hopes up for any on-the-ground tactics for escaping awkward conversation. Bayard spends a couple hundred pages, illustrated mostly with stories and examples from his specialty in French literature, talking about why you shouldn’t feel awkward in the first place.
Assuming “cultivation” is a worthy goal, you have to remember that “being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others.”
It boils down like this: There are a lot of books out there. You can’t read them all. As soon as you begin to read, you begin to forget what you’re reading. What you actually remember is incomplete, anyway, and the way you remember it changes. Lastly, the way we actually use our incomplete, mutable memories of books varies from time to time, place to place, person to person, conversation to conversation.
In the end, Bayard says, “what we talk about is not the books themselves, but the substitute objects we create for the occasion.” This makes me think of the idea of social objects in marketing.
Hugh MacLeod: “The interesting thing about the Social Object is the not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them.”
Compare Bayard: “The books themselves are not at stake; they have been replaced by other intermediary objects that have no content in themselves, and which are defined solely by the unstable social and psychological forces that bombard them.”
There’s also the interesting idea of ambiguity when these discussions come up:
Like words, books, in representing us, also deform what we are. In talking about books, we find ourselves exchanging not so much cultural objects as the very parts of ourselves we need to shore up our coherence during these threats to our narcissistic selves. Our feelings of shame arise because our very identity is imperiled by these exchanges, whence the imperative that the virtual space in which we stage them remain marked by ambiguity and play.
Ambiguity and play comes out because most of our conversation isn’t about books per se, it’s about situating ourselves to each other. It’s about relating. This brings to mind a Chuck Klosterman essay on why we like the music we like:
When someone asks me what kind of music I like, he is (usually) attempting to use this information to deduce things about my personality… But here’s the problem: This premise is founded on the belief that the person you’re talking with consciously knows why he appreciates those specific things or harbors those specific feelings. It’s also predicated on the principle that you know why you like certain sounds or certain images, because that self-awareness is how we establish the internal relationship between a) what someone loves and b) who someone is.
Shakespeare in the Bush. “An American anthropologist set out to study the Tiv of West Africa and was taught the true meaning of Hamlet.”:
I decided to skip the soliloquy. Even if Claudius was here thought quite right to marry his brotherÄôs widow, there remained the poison motif, and I knew they would disapprove of fratricide. More hopefully I resumed, ÄúThat night Hamlet kept watch with the three who had seen his dead father. The dead chief again appeared, and although the others were afraid, Hamlet followed his dead father off to one side. When they were alone, HamletÄôs dead father spoke.Äù
ÄúOmens canÄôt talk!Äù The old man was emphatic.
ÄúHamletÄôs dead father wasnÄôt an omen. Seeing him might have been an omen, but he was not.Äù My audience looked as confused as I sounded. ÄúIt was HamletÄôs dead father. It was a thing we call a Äòghost.ÄôÄù I had to use the English word, for unlike many of the neighboring tribes, these people didnÄôt believe in the survival after death of any individuating part of the personality.
ÄúWhat is a Äòghost?Äô An omen?Äù
ÄúNo, a ÄòghostÄô is someone who is dead but who walks around and can talk, and people can hear him and see him but not touch him.Äù
They objected. ÄúOne can touch zombis.Äù
ÄúNo, no! It was not a dead body the witches had animated to sacrifice and eat. No one else made HamletÄôs dead father walk. He did it himself.Äù
ÄúDead men canÄôt walk,Äù protested my audience as one man.
I was quite willing to compromise.
ÄúA ÄòghostÄô is the dead manÄôs shadow.Äù
But again they objected. ÄúDead men cast no shadows.Äù
ÄúThey do in my country,Äù I snapped.
A recording of Tony Danza reading “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” a funny story from George Saunders‘ collection in Pastoralia. The book was quite good, but hearing a story like this makes it even better. [thanks, austin]
Mark Larson 