August Wrapup

I was reading that AI companies have burned through their vast piles of cash and have started to borrow to keep constructing data centers. Fully a third of the all-time visits to my blog came last month. (I'm sure I'm not the only one seeing such statistics.) Silicon Valley is going into debt just to read my blog? This is a bubble whose finances are going to make 2000 and 2007 look like a church pancake breakfast. 

Literary Fiction

Roberto Bolaño/The Savage Detectives

Third time I've read it. Still has that air of sweet melancholic remembrance.  

Colson Whitehead/The Intuitionist

He came to Toronto promoting his most recent novel, the conclusion of his Harlem trilogy, Cool Machine. At some point the library will deliver it to me. In the meantime I read this, his first novel. Black passing as White and Black acceptance into a White job world in a somewhat surreal take on elevator inspection.

Virginia Woolf/Between the Acts

More here.

Genre Literature

Margery Allingham/The Crime at Black Dudley

The first Albert Campion story, just with less Campion. Pretty good, but not the best. More in the mode of thriller Campion than mystery-solving Campion.  (Which generally I don't mind.)

Robert Barnard/A Little Local Murder

Documentary radio program comes to town and everybody wants to be on it. One person won't... 

Lloyd Alexander/The Castle of Llyr 

High fantasy with a Welsh-ish setting for a younger audience. I've since finished the series (of five, then there's a volume of stories). More to come. 

Helen MacInnes/Prelude to Terror

More here. 

Poetry

Shakespeare/Othello

I saw a superb production of Othello in Stratford, Ontario, and reread the play in advance. No more of that...

Matsuo Bashō/Narrow Road to the Interior

The early Japanese travel writer and author of haiku.

Literary Criticism

Morten Høi Jensen/The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of the Magic Mountain

A biography of Mann during the years he was writing The Magic Mountain (1913-1924) together with criticism of that novel. Very good if you're interested.

Also...

I read about 800 pages of Montaigne's complete essays in M. A. Screech's translation  (roughly 2/3rds). I should finish it this coming month.

For the Commonplace Book

"I consider it immoral to avoid the discomforts of indolence by writing one bad book after another."

    -Thomas Mann, via Jensen. (He was thinking of his brother Heinrich.)

 

"It is time to begin thinking about a masterpiece."

    -Letter of Thomas Mann to Heinrich, via Jensen.

 

"And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of this book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain."

    -Montaigne, "To The Reader", tr. M. A. Screech.

 

"If it is to do us any good, learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech.

 

"I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning's sake, however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech.  

 

"My hand is so clumsy that I cannot even read my own writing."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech. (I can be Montaigne in that!)

 

"Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest!" [It's a bad plan that can't be changed!]

    -Publilius Syrus, my translation.

 

"Etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor." [Pain will compel even the innocent to lie.]

    -Publilius Syrus, my translation. (A statement against torture.) 

 

"Truth for us nowadays is not what is, but what others can be brought to accept."

    -Montaigne, tr. Screech. Things haven't changed that much. Sigh...

 

The books still around the house:

 

 

"Potare et spargere flores/Incipiam, patiarque vel inconsultus haberi." [I'm about to start drinking and scattering flowers, even though I admit I'll be considered a fool.]

    -Horace, Epistles, I.v.14, my translation.