Picocosmographia by William Van Hecke

Finished in 2025

There are 9 items here.

スピリット　サークル 2

Author — 水上悟志
Finished — 2025-04-15
Started — 2025-03

This volume deepens the sense of what it might really be like to become aware of one’s past lives, if such a thing were true. It successfully made me feel the gravity of waking up having witnessed your own entire lifespan in a medieval Europe or an ancient Egypt.

スピリット　サークル 1

Author — 水上悟志
Finished — 2025-03
Started — 2025-03

I’d worked my way through a couple of volumes of 惑星のさみだれ from the big Mizukami pile that my brother-in-law lent me, but set it aside for its unremitting shounenness. This series, he assured me, is more “spiritual”. So far I’m quite enjoying the admixture of the everyday modern Japanese setting and historically-inspired past societies.

ファイブスター物語 14

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2025-04-15
Started — 2021-02-07

Four years trying to get through this; the hardest volume for me, on account of how much of it is just military operations conveyed by close-ups of characters talking from inside GTM cockpits or vague “outside” locations, with minimal detail in the way of environments, objects, culture, or general sense of flavor. Every now and then you get to look at a GTM from the outside.

But even Nagano advises that folks skip ahead whenever they find they’re not enjoying an FSS story, and in the spirit of tadoku I finally took him up on it. I dashed through to the end and into Volume XV, already bringing me back to what I love about this series.

Off Book 340: The Center of the Bullseye

Author — Jessica McKenna & Zach Reino
Finished — 2025-03

All-time favorite Off Book song: “Keeping it Plain”. I’d like to analyze this one line by line, rhyme by rhyme.

Off Book 340: Spark of Salvador Dali

Author — Jessica McKenna & Zach Reino
Finished — 2025-04

It may be my favorite Jessica McKenna fact that she of course always built Lego sets exactly according to the instructions and then left them in that perfectly constructed state. The childhood version of me who did that, displaying them all on a shelf, appreciates her for that. (It also seems significant that later dumped all the Legos in a huge bin and invited the neighborhood over to create their own domains all across my room for a summer.)

Off Book 339: A Club for You

Author — Jessica McKenna & Zach Reino
Finished — 2025-03

Favorites:

A Story

Author — Kim Stanley Robinson
Finished — 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 Reino
Finished — 2025-03

Favorites:

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.