read: 2024-08-13 through 2024-08-26

2024-09-03

sometimes reading a book, in my head, i note that the author must be "extremely online", a phrase which only means anything to people who spend too much time online, namely that the target of this phrase is even more online than whoever labels them it, so much so that it has warped them, the kettle calling the pot not black but rather a boiling implement, spending far too much time on the stove, to the point where your metal has probably started to warp, whereas mine in only stained with oil some

usually, when applied to a book, this means the author is caught up in online discourse, adding caveats that otherwise would just seem strange, or citing examples of a familiar, memetic sort (ie, only babies conceived through orgasm are ensouled. that has nothing to do with this point really, its just a tweet that will never leave my brain)

anyways, Helen DeWitt is extremely online in an incredibly different way. she is trolling stack overflow, or an obscure reddit. she has opinions on the right dialect of LaTex. one character, here, wears an xkcd shirt. and yet, despite surely knowing what's meant by meta-x, nowhere does this collection portray the expected belief in one's insurmountable implied by my stupid list of references. rather, its rather ridiculous, near humble. what does memorizing formulas and language give? in the end, the effects are neutral. no matter who you are you have to live

read: 2024-07-23 through 2024-08-01

this week, while reading the last chapters of this book, i went to see the Mountain Goats in concert. hour laters, after drinking some, i went to get pizza with friends. someone else there, by coincidence, had been to the show as well, and had stayed after to talk with John Darnielle, who'd remembered him from weeks ago, at a previous show in one of the carolinas. the kid (he was 19, i say this kindly) told us he had cried when the mountain goats played one of their songs, against pollution, caused he played it once live himself, at a guitar recital for his high school, and his favorite teacher had come to see it, a notoriously cagey man. he (the teacher), didn't stay after the show, but the kid had he email, and asked him why. days passed. there was no response. he emailed again. months passed. its been a year now. the kid who was telling this, he had had no dad, not even (referencing famous facts about the mountain goats) a shitty step dad, and his mother beat him some. so this teacher, this distant man, he wanted to be seen by him as a son. he said as much. but he couldn't email himself into feeling loved, even if he was loved. nothing is ever quite simple as that.

what i mean to say is The Last Samurai's silly, but its silly in a very emotionally heavy way. what if you could just approach a stranger you liked and ask him to be your dad? what if you read a book in order to like it?

the best book i've read this calendar year, so far