Tungsten's 2023

Just lit on this group accidentally. What a lovely idea.

I have tried to join in some other groups but have decided I am either 1) lousy at the whole social media thing or simply 2) insufficiently ... chatty.

Anyway.

I have currently moved (for now anyway) to a more 'serial' as opposed to 'parallel' style of reading. There are seven books in my 'Currently Reading' collection, and my practice has for a long time been to swap and swap and swap. I've decided to not do that for a while, and concentrate on one book at a time.

There is one exception to this: Gardner's Art Through the Ages is so Brobdingnagian that I can't feature lugging it around for an extended period ... so I will be leaving that monstrous tome where it is (next to the coffee table) and dipping into it when I am near it. I don't think that thing can be read in bed ... it'd leave a permanent corner-shaped dent in my thorax.

Otherwise, am concentrating now on Jacques Gernet's A History of Chinese Civilization.

>1 tungsten_peerts: **whispering** Welcome Glenn.

... after posting about focusing on Gernet, I picked up a book I'd requested from the Minuteman Library System, a collection of short stories by Brian Evenson called Song for the Unraveling of the World.

I'm a 'horror' fan, I guess, as long as it's well-written ... and I mean well-written. I'd read that Evenson was sort of a literary descendant of Robert Aickman, and for me there can be no higher recommendation. So we'll see. The first story, a bare 2 pages long, was a knockout ... we'll see if he can keep that up!

In short: Evenson kept it going. A great collection, if you like well-written horror (some of the stories were actually in a science fiction context, which surprised me).

Over the long weekend, I finished Gernet. My overall judgment: at 681 pages of text, it's not long enough! Gernet is capable of vivid prose, but the subject here is so titanic that he could take few opportunities to get detailed/specific about people and events ... so things remained very high level and general for the most part. I think a *great* one volume history of China might be an impossibility.

Now I have moved on to George Gheverghese Joseph's The Crest of the Peacock, a study of the non-European roots of mathematics.

I am unsure whether this is some sort of ... result of my altering my reading habits, or simply a reflection of deepening disconnection from humanity, but I find I'm spending much less time on things like Facebook (which in and of itself isn't a bad thing).

I like the increased focus. I do have to frequently bat away the temptation to pick up other things. The Crest of the Peacock is not light reading.

... and now ... I have to decide what to read next. :^) This is of course always a pleasure. I'm tempted to choose something significantly less intense (though I simply don't have much use for fluff), in order to let my brain 'recover': not that it's made of rubber.

I will go home tonight, and wander the shelves. I'll post some candidates, as well, just for fun.

I remembered I have The Man Who Caught the Storm waiting for me at the local library, so I guess I should just hold on until I can pick it up tomorrow. Or ... I also have H is for Hawk, which was a gift from a friend years ago and which I haven't yet read.

And there's also Faulkner's The Mansion which should be arriving at the library before too long (I've read the other two Snopes books but haven't gotten to this one, yet).

Well, I devoured The Man Who Caught the Storm in two days, so I have no problem describing it as "compulsively readable." The lack of photos (except for the cover photo, which doesn't even have a tornado in it) is, however, a real downside -- especially for a biography. The writing is quite capable -- journalistic but not obnoxiously breezy. I did get a good sense of Tim Samaras's personality, of what 'made him tick.'

I recommend the book if you have even the faintest interest in extreme weather and/or the community that swirls around it.

Reading H is for Hawk. What writing!

Coming to the end of H is for Hawk. It's a great, great book -- but oddly, one that I think I will not want to read again. It's painful writing ... the sort of pain I don't know that I'll wish to re-experience.

Plus, y'know, it's a book about training a raptor, so there's plenty of small- (and not-so-small: pheasants) creature death -- enough to last me for a good while. Sometimes I wish I wasn't so squeamish about this sort of thing.

Up next, I suppose, will be Faulkner, but it still hasn't arrived at my library branch ... so I may get impatient and start something else, or sit here on the couch doing curls with Gardner.

The Mansion is in ... so if I can rouse my sorry a** to drive to the library and pick it up, I can have a Faulkner Fourth of July.

I love Faulkner. I really do. IMHO The Sound and the Fury is as close as anything else to the Great American Novel.

Criminy, Faulkner. :^)

Past the halfway point in The Mansion. It's great stuff, though as I told my ex (who is also a Faulkner fan) I'm really beginning to see just how "backstory database" some of his characters can be. In order to illustrate my point I penned my first-ever faux Faulkner: "You know, that there hat what Eula's father done won from that injun chile what run over Vardamon's dog with a little red wagon -- the one Flem waved from the kitchen winder after he won the lottery."

So now I gotta decide what's next, again. I'm thinking it might be John Richardson's book on Heidegger. I love some light diversion.

Or maybe something in the physical sciences -- that'd be a nice turn.

Oh, okay, dammit, I just requested Joseph Blotner's biography of Faulkner (the later, slimmed, one-volume one) from the library. I figure I can pick it up as soon as I finish The Mansion.

I'm battling any and all impulses to buy more books. I mean, I love books. I love anticipating and then receiving books in the mail. But I need to concentrate on slimming down my library, not adding to it.

... and one of the last books I bought, John Dryden: The Major Works, was on my doorstep this afternoon when I got home from work. It's a huge chunky thing but I was surprised to see that it was comprised of almost 100% poetry ... I had expected at least to see one of Dryden's plays (probably All for Love -- I remember it as marvelous) included. Not a big deal ... I like poetry.

After that I'm supposed to receive part 2 of the Lingua Latina per se illustrata series. Yeah, I'm'a learn Latin ... one day.

I'm really feeling the eternal battle between my science side and my humanities side right now.

Started Faulkner: A Biography today. See you on the other side! ...

Blotner's biography of Faulkner really is exceptional. There are also a good number of photos. It's a commitment (718 pages in the main text) but imho the subject very much deserves the close treatment.

Turned over the last page of Blotner this morning. Whew! Near tears at the end: WF would likely have lived at least another 20 years if he'd been able to keep off horses (several very bad falls -- the last one likely the one that caused his death) ... despite the numerous (holy moley) hospitalizations for alcohol abuse, he seemed sort of impervious to it.

The bio was excellent, with some odd factual errors here and there. Not enough to really dock the book for, but they always bug me (example: Tod Browning directed a film called "Freaks," not "The Freaks," and it did not star Lon Chaney. It also ruined Browning's career).

Now reading Rolfe Humphries' translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Because I don't know Latin I can't comment on the accuracy of the translation, but it reads wonderfully: lots of energy and spirit. I like it a lot.

I have to point out, however, that this constitutes a cul-de-sac (?) from my stupidly large project of reading all the volumes of the Loeb Classical Library .... Oh well.

There is a tornado watch until 3pm. Here. In Eastern Massachusetts. :^O I know there have been tornadoes in the region, but ... they're relatively rare. This is kinda nuts.

One of the better bits in the Ovid was a strange extended speech from ... who else? PYTHAGORAS. It comes very close to the end and is pretty weird.

Moving on to The Century of Artists' Books. I've had this forever. I think I got it because I am a big fan of Tom Phillips's A Humument, and am hopeful I can find more weird reading via this. I hope it isn't too dry/academic.

I think I will open up my reading schema to include books that I'm using to ... learn things. For example, The Little Schemer, or Basic Mathematics.

I'm typically ... usually trying to learn something or other.

Yesterday morning I had a positively disastrous job interview. It was so bad that my main memory of it is of sitting there hemming and hawing and sweating, not knowing the answers to the questions that were being posed. Just horrible.

I *have* a job -- in fact I've had the same job for fifteen years -- but I've long wanted to try something else. Oh well, not this time.

Hmm. I dunno. The writing in The Century of Artists' Books is pretty ... academic -- that is, it's kind of like chewing on a big hunk of modeling clay.

POSTNOTE: OK, it's not *that* bad.

I've moved on to Childhood and Society. Kind of a sharp turn! This book has been on my to-read pile for aeons ... I started it years ago and bounced off the first few descriptions of Erikson's sessions with children. They make more 'sense' now, but again I'm tempted to attribute this to my less-scattered reading style.

A further advantage to my reading one book at a time is that I find myself paying more attention to reading start and end dates -- surely they make more sense now than they did when I was (let's not mince words) *pretending* to read 6 things at once. After all, the start and end dates when I was reading in that fashion didn't really reflect much of anything. And now they do.

NB I'm not accusing others who read "massively in parallel" of "pretending" ... just myself.

I think up next will be Paul Theroux's Deep South. It kinda follows on from the Faulkner bio. Kinda. I have a rural / southern sort of jones which is hard to explain given that I was born in MA and grew up in OH ... I think it comes in via my Mom, who was born in IN and grew up in LA.

I've been trying to concentrate on 'reading down' my own over-full shelves, but the Theroux will come from the library ... so ... oh, well.

So while I was waiting for Deep South to show up at the library, I pulled down my The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Bevington, ed.) and started reading The Merry Wives of Windsor ... much more fun than I was led to believe. I mean, no, it's probably not WS's crowning achievement, but it's a lot of fun, and gosh, you can at least expect quality writing from that guy, can't ya?

The Theroux book is, wow, really really good (I've read The Mosquito Coast and The Lower River but not any of his travel writing. This one is gooood.

I guess it's a reflection of how absorbing Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads is that I started it yesterday, it's 441 pages long and I am about 70 pages from the end today (~ 1:45pm).

Severe thunderstorm watch here until 9pm.

What next?

OK. So it's The Harvest of Hellenism. It's a big ol' book, but 50 pages in I'm already addicted. Lots of history I barely know anything about.

Yeah, this Hellenism book is great stuff but it is -- necessarily, I guess -- one of those "avalanches of names" sort of narratives where (unless you can truly steel-trap the names as they come) you're doing quite a bit of flipping pages back and forth silently (or not) muttering "OK, so Whoozisius II was *whose* son, again?"

Happily although it starts with the exploits of the almost-unbelievable Alexander (and the "jeepers who is who again?" mega-name-avalanche of the years following Alexander's death, with all the back and forth regarding succession), Peters is not restricting himself to kings and battles, here.

So I am in the grip of a real (?) effort to "read down" my library, that is, shrink its size: read books and sell them/donate them, etc. There are a number of reasons why.

The present phase is almost completely arbitrary: I'd like to no longer have any books on the floor, on non-bookshelf surfaces, or sitting horizontal on bookshelves in front of properly-shelved books -- everything should fit on a shelf, oriented properly. This is arbitrary, because you'd be forgiven for asking "hey Glenn, why not just buy a sixth bookshelf? problem solved!" or "why these five sets of bookshelves? what makes that exact number of volumes magic?" these are valid points and don't really have answers.

The ultimate goal is to decrease the library to the size of my LT collection "The Cube of Essentials," which constitutes that which I'd ship to myself in a large box if I ever moved abroad. Getting to that point will take many years, however, and I'm 62 years old ... I don't want to wait *that* long if I *do* move abroad.

Oh life is complicated.

Might start in on As You Like It: Bevington's Shakespeare follows that all-too-common Comedies - Histories - Tragedies format. I don't much care for it & prefer something that is as chronological as can be had ... partly because I am in some ways utterly hidebound and unimaginative and have a hard time considering any reading plan, even in a gargantuan book like WS's complete works, other than straight on through ... the result being that one gets a glut of comedies, then a glut of histories, then a glut of tragedies.

One can be enriched by reading in unexpected ways. For example, early on in The Harvest of Hellenism one reads of the famous argument between Alexander and Cleitus -- which ended with the former spearing the latter. And having read this I at last understand what's going on in John Berryman's Dream Song #33, "An apple arc'd toward Kleitos; whose great King ..." etc.

Fun. I only wish more of these would stick in my head, stick that is usefully, so I could call upon them. This one now will.

I should add that The Dream Songs is one of the books of 'modern poetry' (so-called) that I have always about me. It's one book I'll be clutching on my deathbed. I have enough of Berryman's psychic stomach-ache to have always felt he was a fellow-traveler ... thankfully I don't have enough of it that I have done myself in.

Another one of these is The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan.

Done with As You Like It, on to Twelfth Night ... which I was in a couple of times: once as Malvolio, the second time as Sir Andrew ... neither time to great moment, alas.

I'm not sure I have room in my head for missing theatre. :(

Just finished Twelfth Night which was, of course, great fun. On to All's Well That Ends Well, which I have never read.

The Harvest of Hellenism of course mentions the famous -- and for me so incredibly creepy -- anecdote from Plutarch re: the death of Pan. I don't know why that episode is so haunting, but apparently I'm not the only one who has found it so.

I should go back to Plutarch. The next volume of Plutarch's Moralia up in my Loeb Classics read-through is volume 5, which is the one containing "The Obsolescence of Oracles," in which the Pan anecdote appears. I'm drilling both ancient Greek and Latin vocabulary because I do plan to learn both well enough to read them before I kick the bucket.

Spent some time today trying to get ALL the books at least off the floor. I didn't quite make it. Jeepers, I have too many flippin' books. My place is so disordered and dusty. Sometimes (like now) it really gets me down.

50 pages from the end of The Harvest of Hellenism -- trying not to rush.

Yes so my library, the problem of my library, the prison the coffin of my library gave me a headache today. Or a stomachache.

So I guess I'm moving on to Palace Walk.

Today I finished watching Mean Streets (1973) which is kind of a miracle of a movie. Really astonishing, and the best NYC movie this side of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3.

I want to add another "currently reading" book that would be ... something I'm studying. I don't know whether to go for something work-related (e.g. Python programming) or ... math. Hmm.

On the one hand I don't want to smear my new focus by adding another book, but on the other I *do* need to be learning stuff, and if I can share some of my new focus with the realm of learning needs (with this as with everything else I have an unfortunate tendency to hop around a lot) ... good!

Adding Math for Programmers. The book was sitting next to me, and hey, it's programming AND math!

So, All's Well That Ends Well ... whuff, what an odd play! I think I like it the better for its oddness, though I suppose I can see why it isn't a favorite ... it's too weird.

I have to say that I've kind of fallen in love with pretty much all the characters in Palace Walk -- even the difficult, fractious ones! Unexpected, to say the least. I think it's a reflection of Mahfouz's talent as a writer that his characters are *all* multidimensional and deserving of attention. Yes, it's a culture that is difficult for someone like me to appreciate -- but again, I think the writer brings one in. Great novel.

Oh, and on to Measure for Measure, which I've both seen and read before (though not in years).

Finished Palace Walk. Not sure what is next, though I am thinking about Nocturne.

Started Heidegger.

I haven't mentioned how Heidegger is going. Ha ha ha. I'm reading it. I understand in engaging flickers, which sort of mimics what actually reading Heidegger (what small experience of it I have) is like -- oh, that's probably not fair. Richardson's writing is pretty clear a lot of the time. He explicates some of H's 'special' terms so clearly that I am a bit glum that he hasn't' truly done this with *all* of them, but perhaps I'm just not as swift as I sometimes pretend to be.

I can't think of Heidegger without remembering my dissertation chair Bert States, a wonderful man and scholar who I typically describe as having been a mix of Heidegger and Jimmy Stewart: ferociously brilliant with no visible pretension whatsoever. Bert liked my writing, for which I will be forever grateful. One Bert sentence I recall (I hope this isn't too terribly apocryphal) is that he would say, gesturing toward the big oval seminar table "Heidegger would say 'the table is table-ing'".

Finished Heidegger. I think it was better on late(r) MH than early -- but then 'early' is pretty much Being and Time and that work is ferociously, well ... ferocious, and full of German neologisms that English translations (in)famously fail to quite catch. Late MH is ... loopy but in a way easier to approach.

So on to some modern poetry, Ronald Johnson's Ark.

A third of the way "through" Ark, that is, I have "read" nearly a third of it ... but "reading" is a somewhat different act with poetry, isn't it -- especially a poem as crunchy as this one. So far I love it: it is functionally luminous. It has a sparkle that is akin to the sparkle I would like my own poetry, or my own poem, to have ... but I don't yet know how to achieve this starry poem without dragging in a load of corniness.

Not sure where to go next. Ark was engaging, though -- how dare I so sum a life-work? -- it mainly just seemed to leap about in the air, ecstatic, a lot. Not that there's anything wrong with *that* ... it just ... ::poof::

I tripped over The Great Devonian Controversy here on LT, so just requested it from the Minuteman Library Network. Huzzah!

Since my ex published a memoir with W. W. Norton, and she recommended this book: I'm starting The Situation and the Story.

Loud in the House of Myself is the book by my ex-wife I referenced above. She is still my best friend.

Last night started Robotic Exploration of the Solar System for a change of pace.

Although I'm not far into the Robotic Exploration book, I can already confirm that it conforms to the usual Springer Praxis MO, and by that I mean "lots and lots of words, with nary an editor in sight." The Introduction is a lengthy coverage of pre-mission knowledge of Solar System bodies -- lots of summaries of what Galileo, et al thought about Jupiter and that sort of thing. Strictly speaking, it's kinda unnecessary. The text isn't so much written as, well, cobbled together. There's lots of information here, there's no doubt about it, but Springer books almost inevitably leave me wondering what they could have been had someone really cared or exercised any sort of vision or control. Their amateur astronomy series is a mess -- some of the books are great, but you get the sense it's an accident when it happens.

Finished Measure for Measure, on to Troilus and Cressida, which I haven't read in over 40 years.

OK, *good* things about Robotic Exploration of the Solar System: just loads of images you might not find anywhere else; lots of information about the efforts of the Soviet Union, about which you might not have heard so much (even as a citizen of the US, it's hard -- for me -- not to root for the underdog at times).

I often think of the tortoises aboard Zond 5, the first craft to carry life from Earth to lunar orbit: did they look up and see the far side of the Moon (I've no idea whether there were windows/portholes to allow them to do this, but I like to think about it)? Did this piss off Frank Borman?

These are very good things. The book consists of three (3) incredibly long chapters, the last of which covers the bodacious Voyager "Grand Tours" of the outer Solar System.

So even if the writing is somewhat pedestrian, there's a lot to like here if, like me, you are a Solar System dweeb.

On the downside for the Robotic Exploration book is -- predictably? -- the fact that people really don't figure in it much at all. Oh sure, I know, it's about unmanned probes and orbiters and such, but you don't even get much sense of the people behind these projects. The closest thing you get to anything, well, personal, is when the author notes the death of Sergei Korolev. There are a few human figures in some of the photos, esp. the photos of various clean rooms on Earth, but ...

... and, although I know it would add a lot of pages to an already-big book, it's kind of a shame. I remember some years ago reading a brief book about the Pioneer X and XI probes. I don't recall the name of the scientist who headed up those missions, but I've never forgotten the account of how he used to run meetings "stand up" so that people would be encouraged to be succinct. There was a vivid sense of the person behind the project. That's all but completely absent here.

But dayamn, lots of info. And like I said above, the three chapters are reallllly long. Chapter 2 has 755 footnotes. Yipes!

Jumping ahead, I know, but next up is The Great Devonian Controversy. So more science history ... but I *love* science history!

One thing that stinks about pledging myself to buy no more books ... I *still get obsessed with things* and, consequently, want books about those things! Like, right now (thanks loads, Robotic Exploration of the Solar System!) I'm obsessed with planetary ring systems. Obviously Saturn is the big star, here, but Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune all have rings systems ... and there may be examples I'm forgetting.

Obvs for "Saturn is the big star" read "Saturn is the big PLANET." And yes, I could have edited the post, but then I would have squelched the fun of posting ... this. :^)

The Great Devonian Controversy is all about a kind of rock known as "greywacke." Talk amongst yourselves.

You know what might be next? How to Prove It. I've been putting off the math for far too long, and I think getting a little proof instruction first off would be good. I could also try Lang's Basic Mathematics, since he gently introduces the issue of 'demonstrating' or 'showing' things to be the case (I may be recalling incorrectly but I don't think he goes in, at least at the beginning which is as far as I got, for complete 'proof').

But so many of the math books I have on my shelves immediately start asking (in the exercises) for the reader to 'prove' things, and I just don't know how to do this. Or I don't remember how.

A couple of posts above I suppose it looked like I was dissing The Great Devonian Controversy and if that is the case, well, I misled anyone who may have read it and thought I was indeed doing so. It's a very good book. It's a book that is better than it looks (Stephen Jay Gould's blurb on the back cover essentially says "interested people might look at this book and judge it too much about too little ... they'd be wrong" and I agree). Do you need to be interested in geology for it to keep your interest? Damn, Sam, I dunno! I'm interested in geology so I can have little appreciation of what it must be like to own a brain that isn't.

Another candidate for next is Celestial Calculations.

I said above that The Great Devonian Controversy was a good book. I stand by this, but there is something ... non-propulsive about it, something (in the writing, perhaps) that is making it a little sloggy instead of exciting. And in my current depressed mood this has been somewhat deadly. I'm going to power through to the finish, but it's been hard.

This is, I suppose, a downside to my switch to serial reading. There is no escape hatch (or there is less of one) when a book isn't holding me.

I decided I needed something a little less ... intense before embarking on mathematics, so I'm gonna enjoy the apparent visual feast that is The Elements (not Euclid's -- not yet) before hitting How to Prove It.

Wow, Troilus and Cressida ... what a weird play. And to have it stuffed in with the "Comedies" ... whut th' hell? But where else would you put it?

It has strange formal interludes, spots where characters promenade across the stage and other characters react to this ... reminiscent of *much earlier* plays by Shakespeare -- and the verse itself is a melange of weird formal passages mixed liberally with Shakespeare's looping, elliptical late style. Very strange. A real reminder that WS was such a complete ... genius ... that at some point he just did whatever the hell he wanted to do (this, at least, is how it feels).

Now I transition to "The Histories," beginning with the Henry VI trilogy, which I have never read. I'm a little nervous about this, because I've always thought of them as real journeyman work, from the very beginning of Shakespeare's career. His early plays that I have read (Richard III, Titus Andronicus) have been clanky but fascinating. There's a lot of that formal, rhetorically-patterned stuff, punctuated by moments of serious power -- these latter 'feel like' the genius (I overuse that word, but in this case can one help it?) bursting the bonds of the rhetorical draperies, to flame out in a kind of defiance.

Oh, what am I talking about?

The Elements was fun and great to look at, of course. The author has a lively sense of humor, though at times I got a whiff of something that made me think he might not be such a nice person. That's very, VERY subjective of course.

WHY I SAID THAT: there was just a tinge of "I'm much smarter than you" snark at times, I thought. Also, he conflates hippies and new-agers, and I think that's ... not quite right, since I'm fairly certain there are some scientists who were hippies. Or are hippies. Also: he obviously thinks piercings are stupid. He's entitled to his opinion. I don't have any piercings (I had earlobe piercings at one time but they've closed) but I do have tattoos and have known some ... cough, extensively pierced people who were perfectly lovely as human beings go.

On to How to Prove It. I'm nervous. :^)

Not buying books is ... difficult for me.

Well, I got through the Introduction of How to Prove It. Even did all of the exercises (but one).

OK. So I don't think How to Prove It works as a book to, well, carry around and read; therefore, this morning I used it as an excuse to clear off my kitchen table (piles of mail, etc) and am ensconcing it there along with a notebook so I can actually sit down, work on and study it. We'll see how this goes. I am already feeling a bit overwhelmed with stuff.

Started James Attlee's Nocturne.

Well, the Henry VI plays are superficially exciting, anyway ... if you can keep the characters straight, as they are (of course) of the 'Mortimer Warwick Plantagenet blah blah' variety of figures. Characterization is pretty rudimentary here. The plays do -- or Part I does, anyway -- sort of open a window onto how the staging worked, especially in scenes where you have the French in a besieged town shooting at English soldiers on ramparts elsewhere, and so on. The theatrical/dramatic exigencies are kind of brought to the fore in ways not done in a play like, say, Othello.

That didn't come out right.

Nocturne is really quite good.

Not sure where I'm turning next. I'm not ready to completely throw in the towel on doing some math on the side; however, I'm currently drilling vocabulary in 1) Chinese 2) Latin 3) Classical Greek, so that's taking some of my time. And of course I'm trying to keep up with my piano.

Maybe I need to cut myself some slack. I've really never succeeded in doing so.

I restarted Democracy in America yesterday. Not sure of my feelings. It's not precisely propulsive reading (though there are surely moments where I think "whoa" at the observations of this 20something Frenchman on 1830s America) and it runs to 900 pages. I flounder back and forth between trying to 'read down' my library by, to an extent, deliberately reading things I think I will probably give away/donate/etc. and just ... uh ... wanting to read something I am relatively certain I will find enthralling (this opens me up to the question: if it's something that you *don't* find enthralling, a) why did you buy it and b) why read it at all? well, there's this matter of ... duty, if I can call it that ... and also wanting to be as well-read as possible, blah blah).

I wonder, with Democracy in America, if it's the ... translation that's at fault for what feels like ... I don't know. A great malaise. The prose is murky somehow.

Taking a side trip into aesthetic disagreements with A Pot of Paint, which has actually been on my list for a long time. Glad to be finally getting around to it.

Guess I'm avoiding de Tocqueville. Now reading The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington: dark, weird and wonderful.

Leonora Carrington's stories live up to the hype, I have to say. This is not for everyone, but it's definitely for me. Inspiring.

RIP Michael Gambon. As a bitter old ex-actor I don't often talk about people who I think were great in this art ... but Gambon was great. I particularly liked him as Hamm in Beckett's Endgame, which one can find on Youtube.

On Henry VI, Part III. The Henry VI plays are -- compared to more mature Shakespeare -- rather crudely put together and stiff, but all of them have moments of great power ... as you'd expect. :)

I tried getting excited about The Lure of the East, but for some reason it just didn't take. Read A Little Larger than the Entire Universe instead. This latter wasn't as mindblowing (to me) as The Book of Disquiet was, but boy, do I love Pessoa.

Have been more quiet than usual because I'm white-knuckling through a bad bout of anxiety.

I started Pages from the Goncourt Journal and, while it constitutes wonderful (and snarky) portraiture of the time, I sure would hesitate before recommending it to a female friend. The Bros Goncourt are at their MOST scabrous when discussing women. I'm trying to not let this ruin the rest of it for me.

King John is not much fun, alas. Apart from the character of the "Bastard," it feels stiff and formal, with little life to the verse.

I don't know whether King John grew on me, or has a better second half ... at any rate, there's some sterling poetry and action in there. I move on now to Richard II.

Also am 100+ pages into Literary Criticism: A Short History, which hot damn, is so well done. I think I found this copy somewhere for a $1 ... perhaps at a Goodwill store -- I don't recall.

Finishing up the litcrit book and Richard II. Been a weird couple weeks: car problems and health scares and debit card hijacking, oh my!

Here I am again at the what-to-read-next crossroads. Typically at junctures like this I will stand silent, gazing at one of my sets of bookshelves, trying to decide what to tackle next. Although no one can see me doing this, it is a state in which I feel, paradoxically I suppose, exposed and vulnerable. I think this is because I always have in my half-memory (the half-ness of which sort of ensures it is at least partly inaccurate) a passage I read somewhere concerning the once-famous poet Robert Southey, who in his dotage would wander his library, taking down volumes and leafing through them without understanding what he was looking at.

I'm also at those moments more than usually susceptible to my own (and remembered others') view of myself as an impostor, a 'pseudo-intellectual' as one former professor apparently had it. Watch Glenn pick something that he thinks he is 'supposed to' read because it will in some way marinate his burgeoning but long-delayed genius.

The problem is an abundance of variables. I am always at least partly motivated by a desire to 'read down' my library so it can become more manageable and, well, move-able -- there are a lot of volumes on my shelves I have provisionally tagged as things I will probably read only once and have no qualms about parting with, and there are other volumes I have provisionally tagged as things that will (probably) stick around longer. Do I labor in the direction of 'reading down,' possibly grinding through something that I at one time thought essential but have since 'downgraded,' or do I take on now something that might be ... this is getting laborious so I will only write "more"?

I have (above) painted a picture of helplessness. How silly. I am always free to say "this book stinks" and toss it aside. I am just as free to say "I don't want so big a library any more," and go and sell most of it ... or "I don't want any books but these three," or ... anything.

I read The Origins of Totalitarianism by Arendt. Damn. It was kind of a slog, but worth it.