Tag: Difficulty
-
Authenticity/”Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”/Other ephemera
I- Moaning, the ukulele, and podcasts The reason I haven’t written anything in a moment is because, well, I haven’t been inspired to. It’s a kind of failure: if you’re writing, you should write. I play the ukulele, an instrument that gets a lot of crap for no particularly good reason. I’m an intermediate player,…
-
Firing the Engines.
Ok, so, it’s been a minute. There are a few reasons for this: 1) I got a dog. She has taken up a fair bit of my time– walkies and training and just generally vibing are things that the dog life has given me. I read, and started work on an entry on “Hell Hound”…
-
More about Long Works/”Bubblegum”/”ducks, newburyport”
According to Storygraph, the service I use to track my reading and occasionally provide recommendations, just over half of the books I have read this year are over 300 pages long. A quick google shows me that 300-350 pages are in the ‘safe zone’– the length that’s considered more or less ideal for a novel…
-
Falling Behind/What I am Reading/Future Plans/Back on the Horse
I have fallen behind in my reading, which happens from time to time. My band had a gig opening for surf-punks Daikaiju, which I enjoyed a great deal. The book I am reading “the most”, “Bubblegum” is kind of a weird slog– I’m enjoying it, and the story, but it seems overlong. I like long…
-
Religion Nerd/50% of “Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials”
For a long time, I have been a religion nerd– I have traveled through two different denominations of Buddhism, three or four (depending on how you count it) of Christianity, at one point considering becoming a clergyman (that lasted a few months, so don’t get too excited), and a few other random things. I’ve read…
-
Illness/”Moby Dick”/Cough/No List This Week
I have had a rotten cold for three weeks or so, which has slowed down my reading pace somewhat; I have advanced to chapter 23 in my Moby Dick re-read, so we’re onboard the ship, Starbuck has appeared, and the narration has done one of the weird shifts it does. Melville does not use a…
-
Milton Babbit/Gertrude Stein/”The Making of Americans”/”The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”
Milton Babbitt was a composer who is probably more famous for writing an essay called “Who Cares if you Listen?” than for any of his actual compositions. It’s not particularly surprising, if you sit and listen to one of them. Babbitt, for quite a bit of his career as a composer, was fond of ‘serialism’.…
-
30% of “The Recognitions”/“Book of the New Sun”/Rereading/‘Difficult’ Reading in General
“To Mrs. M—, I was “a pompous snob, and a real ass-hole.” -Johnathan Franzen According to my kindle, I am 30 percent of the way through William Gaddis’ “The Recognitions”, which is a book that has a reputation of being a ‘difficult read’. Some of this reputation comes from Johnathan Franzen’s essay called “Mr. Difficult”,…
The Lithole 