Finished reading: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker 📚

This is one of those books that is very much not for everyone but I enjoyed greatly.

The most basic version of the plot is: man rides up escalator

But it is written as a recounting of his thoughts during that time, full of tangents, digressions, and footnotes (what’s more fun that footnotes in fiction?)

And like many books I enjoy, the writing itself is a main character.

In response to plastic straws:

In this way the quality of life, through nobody’s fault, went down an eighth of a notch

The near simultaneity was very exciting—it made the variables of private life seem suddenly graspable and law-abiding.

On shoe tying:

it looked like a knot and functioned like a knot, but the whole thing was really an amazing interdependent pyramid scheme

With fewer total cells, but more connections between each cell, the quality of your knowledge undergoes a transformation: you begin to have a feel for situations, people fall into types, your past memories link together, and your life begins to seem, as it hadn’t when you were younger, an inevitable thing composed of a million small failures and successes, dependently intergrown, as opposed to a bright beadlike row of unaffiliated moments.

What is this static modernism that architects of the second tier have imposed upon us

Why should we need lots of nostalgia to license any pleasure taken in the discoveries that we carry over from childhood, when it is now so clearly an adult pleasure?

and suddenly all the squinting, cackling, cocktail-wickedness of a narrow gourmet jar of Spanish olives in the door shelf of your refrigerator inhabited the cheapest, most innocent, most childlike sandwich you can make.

But other things…have undergone disorienting changes, and the only way that we can understand the proportion and range and effect of those changes, which constitute the often undocumented daily texture of our lives (a rough, gravelly texture, like the shoulder of a road, which normally passes too fast for microscopy), is to sample early images of the objects in whatever form they take in kid-memories

You have to spot-check your likes and dislikes every so often in this way to see whether your reactions have altered, I think

was a significant change for people roughly my age—younger and you would have allied yourself completely with the novelty as your starting point and felt no loss; older and you would have already exhausted your faculties of regret on earlier minor transitions and shrugged at this change

Out of habit or a reverence for tradition, we continued

Predicting the app-based convenience economy?

they did not have home delivery and hence were not really members of society but loners and drifters.

the corporate bathroom is the one place in the whole office where you understand completely what is expected of you

People watch the news every night like robots, thinking they are learning about their lives, never paying attention to the far more immediate developments that arrive unreported

(blow up your tv, as John Prine says?)

Why do these images have to age before we can fond of them?

It is impossible to foresee the things that go wrong in these small innovations, and it takes time for them to be understood as evils and acted upon.

From this height, the height of sociology and statistics, foreshortened employees moved in visible patterns

That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.

They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of “ibid.’s” and “compare’s” and “see’s” that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind.

Finished reading: The Warm Hands of Ghosts A Novel by Katherine Arden 📚

Arden doesn’t miss. It’s her choice of phrases and poetic turns that does it for me. And the stories and plots, of course.

On with the highlighted passages…

This feels timely for a novel about WW1

Do not despair. Endings—they are beginnings too.

Try to understand them. Look at the world now. It’s terrifying, isn’t it? We have flying machines. Phonographs. Moving pictures, even. Everything is changing so fast. Mother’s frightened. In a way, it’s easier to imagine the world’s going to end. At least there’s a certainty to it. End—bam—done. But change—where does change stop?

Give people God’s power—to build ships like islands, or fly like birds, or set fire to the bowels of earth like the devil in his damned pit—it just writes their stupidity larger and larger until they drown the whole world. Our hands get bigger and our spirits shrink.

As does this

The whole world’s made up of systems now. Systems that are too big for any one person to understand or control, or stop. Like the timetables. Alliances. Philosophies. And so now we’re here, even though no one wanted to be.

What is God if not another system?

What happened when the celestial backers of one army encountered those of the other.

It was the poet’s alchemy , to seize the intangible or unspeakable and drag it, real, into the living world.

It was so much easier to hate a man than a system: vast, inhuman, bloodstained.

How do you go on from the end of everything?

Finished reading: Battle of the Round House by Tananarive Due 📚

Finished reading: The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious by Scott Lynch 📚

Knives Out: Wizard Edition

Like everything Scott Lynch does, it was great fun.

“A wizard is not defined merely by the spells he might cast, my colleague. Remember Estorion’s Great Law: Wizard, know the true names of all things, see all, understand all that is seen.”

It was the logic of little children, staring one another down on a playground, but it was also the logic of mighty sorcerers. To be seen flinching was a sort of death.

Finished reading: Transbluesency by Amiri Baraka 📚

Doesn’t matter the form, every poem sounds like Amiri.

“Books that broke everything wide open” for Maggie Smith.

showing me possibilities — in form, and in content — that I couldn’t access before

• C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining
• Lyn Hejinian’s My Life
• Carole Maso’s Break Every Rule
• Clarice Lispector’s The Stream of Life

Finished (a selective) reading: The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson 📚

Early breakthroughs in data visualization in pre-germ theory London mapping contagion and overthrowing the status quo. My kind of story.

Finished reading: The Parent’s Tao Te Ching Ancient Advice for Modern Parents by William Martin 📚

I loved this book. Has to be one of the best books on parenting.

Finished reading: Bluecrowne by Kate Milford 📚

Continuing to visit the Greenglass House universe with the kids.

nothing stays the same. Nothing can. Time works upon everything, and every morning we wake into a subtly different world than the one we fell asleep in the night before. Nothing stays the same. You have only to turn to the sea you love so much to know this is true.

Do I remain behind, hoping the things I love will stay unaltered although I know better, or do I become part of the change in the world and take the memory of what I love with me?

Those who are desperate to keep things from changing tend to do more damage than good.

A community has folks who are like pillars—they hold it together and shape its character. There’s almost always a smith, a keeper of lore, and a keeper of sanctuary, and then the others can vary.

Come, let us have a short cruise to shake the dust from my timbers. You have all the time in the world for prettying, but this day will only last until nightfall.

The tiller and the shabby sail translated those four marine dialects into a smooth-flowing poem of motion.

No one whose first response to an object is to remark upon how well it would tear out another’s throat is likely to seek a gentle-hearted collector for it.

Perfectly ordinary, I’m afraid, but ordinary has its uses as well.

Not all powers are magic.

I suspect as the daughter of a privateer, the girl herself would be the first to tell you that in a battle, tactics and strategy are as much of the fight as force. Watching for unexpected opportunities. Seeing that the ones firing the guns have what they need. And sometimes I imagine in the end the greatest victories come down to sheer, thickheaded courage.

But we ignore our instincts far too easily.

The saddest thing a mother or father must learn is that one cannot protect one’s children from hurt.

This is what a ship is for, she realized: first and foremost always, a thing for fighting with. No matter how much prettying was done to make it elegant. No matter how much it felt like home.

Instead of looking for instruction, they cultivate skills like creativity, independence, self-confidence, ingenuity, and the ability to problem solve.

A skill set that will only become more important as AI continues to unfold.

_ via The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday 📚_