Finished in 2025
There are 3 items here.
A Story
Author — Kim Stanley RobinsonFinished — 2025-03-16
KSR on Wolfe, including a detour through Proust!
What I mean is that after Wolfe read Proust, he understood he was free, free to become himself in any way he wanted, to become, like Proust, one of the great Modernist writers, all of whom make their own tradition, style, subject matter, and reality. After you’ve read a novel that contains a 240-page garden party, why should you fear anything? You can’t. Anything is possible.
A genius in Wolfe: and if there are any fellow postmodern materialists reading this and groaning at the idea of there being anything unusual inside an artist or anyone else, anything beyond the workings of the brain, I will agree immediately, but point out that the latest news from brain science makes it clearer and clearer that saying “only the brain” is not much of a delimiting statement. The brain is not a clockwork, nor a steam engine, nor a binary or digital computer, nor any of the machines we conceptualize it to be with our simple metaphors based on our own feeble handiwork, as if the brain could only be as complex as something we ourselves could make. Very much not the case. The brain is a kind of pocket universe. The mind is huge, and consciousness a small part of it. The unconscious may well be inhabited by “subroutines,” as the computer people would have it, processes that may actually be more like characters. Maybe they are like Jungian archetypes—a shadow seems likely, perhaps an anima or animus—but who knows. Very probably the brain consists of organizations even stranger and more various than that. It may be a kind of library of stories all telling themselves at once. And by way of stories written down, one unconscious mind communicates with other unconscious minds.
His stories usually are not allegories but events in themselves, something like dreams or vases.
Off Book 338: Mistake on a Plate
Author — Jessica McKenna & Zach ReinoFinished — 2025-03
Favorites:
- “All Are Welcome As Long As You Come Correct”
- Blake Sparkles' short jingle about the lemon drops
Notable for being Zroundbls’s early favorite during their induction into fandom. Feels like part of a little golden age for Off Book, along with “The Center of the Bullseye”, “The Names of Our Family”, etc.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Author — Walter M. Miller, Jr.Finished — 2025-01-01
Started — 2024-12-07
Late in high school I was sitting in the lobby of the administrative wing of my boys’ Catholic school. I cannot for the life of me remember what I was there for, but it has an equal chance of being because I was in big trouble for something, or because I was doing some sort of collaboration or meeting with someone important at the school. I was doing a reread of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps in the big Bible-looking edition I was proud to have. Someone’s mom was coming out from the school office and she stopped in her tracks, striking up a conversation with me about books. She was impressed to see a student her son’s age reading one of her favorites. I have no idea whose mom she was. We connected easily and she made several recommendations, including A Canticle for Leibowitz and the work of Tom Robbins. I ended up reading several Robbins books soon after, but never got around to Canticle. (At some point I think I started confuse it with Flowers for Algernon.)
There’s apparently a copyright issue keeping the book off of the US Kindle store, but I found a SF Masterworks edition on the JP store and stripped the DRM.
ChatGPT looked at my reading list and, based on what it knows about me, acted surprised that I hadn’t read it yet.
A warning of the fragility of humanity’s extraordinarily low-entropy state: all the intricate interconnections between systems of political order, prosocial culture, objective understanding of the world, and the transmission of that understanding. We take it for granted how far we’ve come since the dawn of the Enlightenment, but rather than taking us back to a time before we had it, this book takes us ahead to a future where we’ve destroyed it and rejected attempts to salvage it.
A portrait of the devotion of individuals to give their entire striving lifetime just to get one iota closer to a promise of a distant and unknown better state; or at least to minimize our backsliding away from it. The parallels between religious faith and the faith that we can make sense of the world and meaningfully better our state in it. The portrait of centuries of longing toward a world that’s actually meaningfully different and even better. The absurdity and the poignancy of individual fallible humans trying to assemble themselves together into less-fallible, anti-fragile, progress-making super-humans. The necessity of reverence (ever more vanishing since Miller’s time) for the success of such projects.
Hello from the Sikaku, where I’m glimpsing the Eternal in A Canticle for Leibowitz’s third part: Fiat Voluntas Tua. What’s grabbing me about this text is the explicit connection of religion, particularly the long and “unbroken” heritage of Catholicism as an organizing principle for reverence and devotion; the project of science as an effort to understand and make sense of truths about our physical universe; and the fate of humanity as an instantiation of self-aware consciousness and civilization. All of these are founded on the same longing to behold the Eternal.