ericbot

I have given up on long-form reviews for now, but want to track and comment on my reading and other pursuits.

[ericbot]

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Quite a while back, I read an excerpted chapter from this novel on my phone, and really enjoyed it: and oddly, didn't totally hate reading it on a device. So, when I was gifted a tablet recently, I thought that maybe this was the candidate to see if I could read a book on a device. (I actually have read a book on a Kobo eInk device, but I wasn't wild about that, and found the refresh speed took me out of the experience.) I purchased this from Google as an eBook  and started reading it on my Nexus tablet. After about 120 pages, and fussing with the settings all along the way, I gave up and got this from the library in hardcover. Now I realize that having read this book across three different media (phone, table, paper) I have different feelings about different parts, and it is hard to cast my impressions to a normalized form. Overall, though, I loved it. This is a story told about a loose cluster of intersecting lives, and about time, aging, and personal history. Each chapter is from a different perspective, voice, and time, though largely a consistent style - with the exception of an entire chapter brilliantly told in Powerpoint. I knew beforehand that this chapter existed, and I expected to find it cheap and dopey. But she creates a pair of great characters and provides closure for one of the key characters across five chapters all within the slide format. If the whole book was written this way, it would have been intolerable, but the chapter ended up being my favourite. Because most of the characters only get a chapter to establish themselves, they all seemed a little oversized, which I tend to be both charmed by and frustrated by. Fantastically inhabited, and with interesting (perhaps too interesting?) stories that shift and propel you forward. The title is goofy, and in places the book is a tad goofy and even exuberant and funny. Considering that this is on the surface a book about the ravages and charms of time, she made that lightness balance beautifully. Egan might be an eerie-good fit for me -- someone who loves Paul Auster but wishes the characters were a bit more relatable and immediate. I put her previous novel "The Keep" on hold, which has a plot that sounds more Auster than Auster. I’ll reserve my enthusiasm for Egan until I had read one more, perhaps. Which makes me wonder: Is it better to discover a great new-to-you author like this, with only a handful of novels? Or to stumble into a rich back-catalogue?

[ericbot]

Invisible by Paul Auster

Another rescued discard from the library. We were swimming in heaps of these for a while in the last round of weeding, and I am starting to pick through them. I am sort of wedged in most of my reading right now, but I tore through Invisible, and just loved it.

I love Paul Auster, and this is textbook Auster. The structure is gamesy, but he pulls it off - with narration shifting drastically and along multiple dimensions as the story progresses, and things revealing and clouding in waves. He has mastered the art of making you crave understanding, tumbling along in search of clarity - all the while knowing full well that the ending is likely to cast more in to doubt than satisfy.

Auster's trademarks are everywhere here - nested stories and nested writing and dubious narrators. Stories full of happening and happenstance, sex and love and alienation. A constant sense of place. But unlike some of his writing (and a blessing to a wedged and sleepless reader) this had a relentless and energizing pace to it. 

[ericbot]

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

Rescued from the discards from my wife's library, this is an enjoyable novella that suffers from being a literary fiction detective novel that undershoots at both. To be fair, this isn't actually a novel, it is a short story that was published in the Paris Review, republished as a novella.

Charmingly and beautifully overwritten in places, I kept expecting more from every dimension. The concepts are interesting, but the challenge with genre crossover is that you need to really deliver in the genre; you can't underwhelm there and gloss it with literary polish.

I ended up wishing that he had cut out everything except the bees, but of course I enjoyed this and I probably wouldn't have enjoyed that.

[ericbot]

Love-Lies-Bleeding by Don DeLillo

I've had a loaned copy of Don DeLillo's Underworld staring at me for months, and while I have been keen to read it, the girth is beyond me. I came across Love-Lies-Bleeding while looking for something else at the library. Perhaps it is cheating, but I got my entrée to DeLillo in a 112 page play, rather than an 800+ page novel.

I will eventually read the novel, though. Seriously.

Love-Lies-Bleeding is a spare play about death and remembrance and ambition and love, among other things. Three people connected with Alex, a 70 year old land artist, gather at his desert home to discuss his fate. Alex is in a persistent vegetative state after a second massive stroke. While a significant part of the play occupies itself with end-of-life issues, it also looks at life and relation. But the end-of-life discussion emerges from the personal rather than the political, making this a deeply human exploration rather than just duelling battering rams of ideas.

[ericbot]

Great essay on the early career of Tom Waits which oozes a sense of place: the dark L.A. of the 1970s. So many of his influences are fascinations of mine, but his immersion and inhabitation and blurring of character... well, very interesting to read.

Doesn't seem like it has any right to seem romantic, but there it is, roof cement and all.

[ericbot]

Driven by Lemons by Joshua Cotter

I stopped by the library to pick up a hold for my wife, and took a few minutes to shelf read the adult graphic novel section, and and was rewarded with Driven by Lemons by Joshua Cotter. This is a sketch-book style stream of consciousness, in a variety of styles and media. It reminded me of discovering a stranger's highly skilled napkin doodles; at once intuitively engaging and throbbing with a sense of personal urgency -- but it is also impenetrable, seemingly without any accessible narrative. Full of symbols and characters moving and shifting in a fluid and turbulent dreamlike environment, where objects might melt and collapse or explode into a sea of sumptuously beautiful noise. The artwork here is so varied and fresh, so interesting and vivid, that I completely forgive the lack of narrative clarity. Marker bleeds through the pages, pencil swims under the ink, style shifts from page to page. And while the visual language is that of dreams and hallucinations, the narrative (such as it is) feels to be about self-management and self-negotiation. When you capture a sense of the intent as it flows past, it does feel both visually compelling and emotionally honest. But the dark honesty is punctuated with relief through with humour and ironic clichés, so (to me, at least) it never felt bleak. A quick Google found this exhaustive review/thoughts from a reader sharing his interpretations, with lots of the artwork for the curious. I personally think the genius is overstated significantly -- while this is an interesting, exciting work, I do not think it is as singular, nor as successful, as this reviewer claims. The publisher also provides a PDF preview, though in my opinion both the preview and the review exclude some of the most exciting aspects.

[ericbot]

Having read authors like Flannery O'Connor and Graham Greene, the contrast with most contemporary fiction struck me, but I have to admit I didn't entirely think it through. Perhaps, as this essay suggests, it is that faith is something that might forge a character in a contemporary novel, but not something that has the power to sustain.

Both O'Connor and Greene were Catholics, of course, and there have been novels about other "marginal" American faiths all along, perhaps. American Christianity seems to now mean something hard, righteous, evangelical, conservative rather than the long tradition of liberal protestantism - has this shift in fact or perception made all Christian faith less palatable to the reader? 

I am deeply unqualified to answer, or frankly even to pose the question.

[ericbot]

Interesting short paper that I had bookmarked a while ago. Feels like one interesting thread in a long running conversation I (like to think I) am having about computing and interdisciplinary dialogue.

The term “narrative intelligence” originated when two students at the MIT Media Lab, from disparate backgrounds, formed an underground reading group to try and develop a common discourse. This group lasted many years and drew in an eclectic mix of students, faculty, and guests who were interested in pursuing interdisciplinary work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, literary theory, media studies, and human-computer interaction design. Here we describe the history of the group, some of the ideas and texts that formed our discourse, and the lessons learned.

This seminar started 20 years ago, and while I feel like these ideas have penetrated our field in a number of ways, they still feel unincorporated in the professional side. It might just be my perception, but I feel like there is a persistent resistance to treating code and algorithm as text, or as a medium.

But this is also very interesting simply because it outlines the sorts of concerns and challenges faced when trying to bridge disciplines. Even basic things, like what sorts of information a discipline conventionally produces and consumes, can be a massive challenge.

Though perhaps most interesting to me because I am a wannabe in many of these fields, and sometimes the play between multiple fields that are over your head generates sort of a common denominator space that actually invites the layperson.

[ericbot]

I've had a turbulent few weeks, and suddenly seemed unable to read long fiction. Perhaps now that I am off for over a week, though, I will recover. I have been getting caught up on interesting blogs, articles and papers I had bookmarked.

Of everything I have read, I enjoyed this the most. I read a lot of Ribbonfarm when I was on leave in late 2011/early 2012, and if you are patient with his terminology, I find it very engaging.

This piece is a compelling critique of futurism, among other things. Working as I do in an industry that is mostly focused on the future but almost never speaks coherently about the future, this was a very rewarding read. I've never read a more clear and believable explanation for why we never seem to register that our expected future keeps arriving, and nor that it arrives faster and faster. Nor for why futurists (and "edge-culturists") never seem to capture any sense of "rightness", even when they seem to technically capture rightness over and over.

These ideas are consequential. The way we incorporate rather than embody the future results in a present that is full of things we haven't bothered to understand in a meaningful way.

Worth reading, even if you discard some of the less substantiated claims along the way.

[ericbot]

While I enjoyed Angels in America, it wasn't really what I was looking for. AIDS in NYC in the 1980s was a loss of a secret community embedded in a strange time. Angels in America was a treatment of the broader culture coming apart at the seams, at the expense of some of the story I wanted to hear. I seem to want to hear it again, every few years.

A week or so later, this great interview showed up in my podcasts, and suddenly, near the end, was the conversation I was longing for in the Tony Kushner. Whether you agree with all of her statements or not, she was clearly a spectator of a lost world; a loss both personal and cultural. Worthwhile interview, startlingly timely for me.

I think that everyone must have periods that they want to grasp, that seem hugely relevant or historically unique to them. The reconstruction south? The space race? You want to grasp it, but like all of history it perpetually squirms away from you, all eyes some how peering through glass. This is one of mine.

[ericbot]

I completely forget when I added this to my InstaPaper, but there it was, on my phone, when I was stuck without my novel. Also a chapter of her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, here this stands alone as an excellent short story. The novel goes on my TBR.

[ericbot]

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

Eleanor Wachtel interviewed Tony Kushner about a year ago, and I added this to my TBR at that time. He appears to be doing a press tour right now, and got bumped up in my consciousness. I haven't read a play for several years, I forgot how different of an experience this is - a double indirection. You cast the text into a play and then you are an audience for that play.

My preconception of this was that it was a story about the height of the AIDS epidemic in the gay communities of NYC. It is enormously more broad than that, commenting on the culture of the mid/late-1980s and the narratives of the US in general. While I wish some of it held together a little better, I admire the daring to build something so ambitious that it feels impossible to hold together. Telling a moral, cultural and mythic story sucks a lot of the humanity out of a tight reading of this, but so much of it landed for me that I easily forgave.