Finished in 2025

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In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

I’ll forever treasure the ritual of gasping at a passage (usually encountered at the Katsushika Central Public Library while waiting for my kids to finish some activity in the neighborhood) pulling out my phone, capturing it with Apple’s OCR, then pasting it into Ulysses and into my iMessage thread with Sben, to kick off a little discussion about it.

This is also the first volume I intentionally read in multiple translations at once, depending on the situation: the Penguin Grieve when I had the library book handy, and the Yale Carter on the Kobo otherwise.

The dogs bark, the caravan moves on Arab proverb

Marcel is invited to tea by Gilberte It’s curious and foreign to me that Marcel never seems to doubt whether he’s worthy of the affections he craves He just craves ’em I would have been miserably stewing

Reading Proust in the ball pit

something that would last forever, like oil lamps and horse trolleys. But after the manner of kaleidoscopes, which are turned from time to time, society composes new designs by jumbling the order of elements that once seemed immutable.

I think I can see Grieve’s personality and style in this volume Especially his opinionatedness and, yes, his grievance Even against Proust’s own flaws In contrast I also sense a transparency, a nativeness? In Davis, retroactively Grieve makes me think about the work of writing and of translation, for better or for worse I can also sense the ghost of Moncrieff, even having not read him, as the personality who fully put his own artistry on the page, a bolder, unreverential stroke

In wit or delicacy of mind, these young Bergottes, the future writer and his brothers and sisters, were no doubt not the equals of other young people, who thought them very rowdy, and actually rather vulgar, with their irritating jokes, which were typical of the household’s partly pretentious, partly puerile style. But genius, or even great talent, lies less in elements of mind and social refinement superior to those of others than in the ability to transform and transpose them. To heat a liquid with a flashlight, what is required is not the strongest possible torch, but one in which the current can be diverted from the production of light and adapted to the production of heat. To fly through the air, it is not necessary to have the most powerful motorcar, but a motor which, by turning its earthbound horizontal line into a vertical, can convert its speed along the ground into ascent. Likewise, those who produce works of genius are not those who spend their days in the most refined company, whose conversation is the most brilliant, or whose culture is the broadest; they are those who have the ability to stop living for themselves and make a mirror of their personality, so that their lives, however nondescript they may be socially, or even in a way intellectually, are reflected in it. For genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. It was when the young Bergotte became capable of showing to the world of his readers the tasteless drawing room where he had spent his childhood, and the rather unamusing exchanges it had witnessed between himself and his brothers, that he rose above his wittier and more distinguished family friends. They could be driven home in their fine Rolls-Royces, sneering a little at the Bergottes and their vulgarities. But he, with his much less impressive flying machine, had at last taken off and soared over their heads.

When Bergotte’s view on something differed in this way from my own, it never reduced me to silence, or deprived me of a possible rejoinder, as M. de Norpois’s opinion would have done. Not that Bergotte’s opinions were any less valid than the former ambassador’s. The fact is that a sound idea transmits some of its force even to its contradictor. With its share of the universal value of all mind, it takes root among other adjacent ideas, growing like a graft even in the mind of someone whose own idea it rebuts; and this latter person, drawing some advantage from the new juxtaposition, may round the idea out or adapt it, so that the final judgment on a matter is in some measure the work of the two people who were in disagreement. But the ideas that leave no possibility of a rejoinder are those that are not properly speaking ideas, those that, by being supported by nothing, find nothing to attach to in the other’s mind: on the one side, no brotherly branch is held out, and on the other, there is nothing but a vacuum. The arguments advanced by M. de Norpois (on questions of art) were indisputable because they were devoid of reality.

In those days, in that part of Paris, which was seen as rather remote (indeed, the whole city was darker then than nowadays, none of the streets, even in the center of town, being lit by electricity, and very few of the houses), lamps glowing inside a drawing room on a ground floor or a mezzanine, which was where Mme Swann’s receiving rooms were, could light up the street and draw the glance of passersby, who saw in these illuminations a manifest but veiled relation to the handsome horses and carriages waiting outside the front doors. The passerby, seeing one of these carriages move off, might think, not without a certain thrill, that there had been a change in this mysterious relation; but it would only be because a coachman, fearing his horses might catch a chill, was taking them for a turn around the block, their hooves striking sharp and clear against the background of silence laid down by the rubber-rimmed wheels.

“Now the memories of love present no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we had therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, in a damp breeze, in the odor of an unaired room or in the odor of the first crackling fire in a cold grate: wherever we find again of ourselves what our intellect, having no use for it, had disdained, the last reserve that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside ourselves? Rather within ourselves, but hidden from our own eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves face to face with past events as that person had to face them, suffer again because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. In the broad daylight of our habitual memory the images of the past gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we will never recapture the past again. Or rather we would never recapture it again had not a few words (such as “secretary to the Ministry of Posts”) been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as is deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale a copy of a book that might otherwise become unobtainable.

the tyranny of the Particular as a counterpart to the Eternal in a scene describing the disillusionment of breaking open an eternal-seeming place-name to find the actual particular place

First mention of class conflict of any kind?

In the evenings, they never dined in the hotel, where the electric fountains gushed their light into the spacious dining room, turning it into an immense and wonderful aquarium, while, invisible in the outer shadows beyond the glass wall, the working classes of Balbec, the fishermen, and even middle-class families pressed against the windows, in an attempt to see the luxurious life of these denizens, glowing amid the golden sway of the eddies, all of it as weird and fascinating for the poor as the existence of strange fish and mollusks (but whether the glass barrier will go on protecting forever the feeding of the marvelous creatures, or whether the obscure onlookers gloating toward them from the outer dark will break into their aquarium and hook them for the pot, therein lies a great social question).

It was just three trees that I had noticed, set back a little from the steeply cambered road we were on, looking as though they stood at the entrance to a covered drive, and making a pattern that I knew I had seen somewhere before. I could not manage to recognize the place they had, as it were, been separated from; but I sensed that it must have been somewhere familiar to me, long ago; and as my mind stumbled about between a former year and the present moment, the countryside around Balbec shifted and faltered, and I had to ask myself whether this whole outing was not just some figment, Balbec merely a place where I might once have been in my imagination, Mme de Villeparisis someone out of a novel, and the three old trees nothing but the solid reality that meets the eye of a reader who glances up from a book, his mind still held by the spell of a fictional setting.

I sat there for a moment thinking of nothing; then, with the fresher impetus of pent-up consciousness, I managed to leap farther in the direction of the trees, or, rather, toward the inner part of me where I could see them. Once again I could detect, just behind them, the same familiar but imprecise object, which I could not quite take hold of. Meanwhile, as the carrage rolled on, 1 could see them coming nearer. Where had I set eyes on them before? In the countryside near Combray, there was no such place with an opening to a drive. Nor did the place they reminded me of fit anywhere into the countryside around a German spa where I had gone one year with my grandmother. Did this mean they belonged to years of my past life which were so distant that the landscape surrounding them had been utterly wiped out, and that, like those passages one recognizes with sudden excitement in a text one fancied one had never read, they were the only scrap left from the forgotten storybook of my early childhood? Or did they belong to one of those places one glimpses in dreams, always the same places, or so they were in my dreams, where their strange aspect was only sleep’s translation of the efforts I kept making while awake, either to see through the appearance of a place to a mystery which I sensed lay beyond it (which had so often happened along the Guermantes way), or to restore mystery to a place that I had longed to see and which, once I had been there, had turned into something quite superficial, as Balbec had? Were they perhaps a very recent image, a small fragment from a dream of only the night before, but already so faded that it seemed to derive from much longer ago? Or perhaps I had never seen them anywhere; and though I thought they were a memory to be recalled, were they in fact only an invitation to comprehend an idea, concealing behind them-selves, like certain trees or clumps of grass glimpsed along the Guer-mantes way, a meaning that was every bit as obscure and ungraspable as a distant past? Or else might it actually be that they concealed no idea at all, and that it was only an impairment of my eyesight, making me see double in time as one can see double in space? I could not tell. Still coming toward me, they might have been some mythological apparition, a coven of witches, a group of Norns propounding oracles. But I saw them as ghosts from my past, beloved companions from child-hood, sometime friends reminding me of shared moments. Like risen shades, they seemed to be asking me to take them with me, to bring them back to the realm of the living. In their naive and passionate ges-ticulations, I read the impotent regret of a loved one who, having lost the power of speech, knows that he will never be able to let us know what he wants, and that we can never deduce his meaning. Soon, at a crossroads, the carriage left them behind. Like my life itself, it was carrying me away from what seemed the only truth, from what would have made me truly happy. I watched the trees as they disappeared, waving at me in despair and seeming to say, “Whatever you fail to learn from us today you will never learn. If you let us fall by this wayside where we stood striving to reach you, a whole part of your self that we brought for you will return forever to nothing.” And it is true that, though the same mode of pleasure and disquiet that I had just experienced once more was to come back to me in later years, though I did attend to it at last one evening—too late, but forever—I never did find out what it was these particular trees had attempted to convey to me, or where it was that I had once seen them. When the carriage went around a corner, I lost sight of them somewhere behind me; and when Mme de Villeparisis asked me why I looked so forlorn, I was as sad as though I had just lost a friend or felt something die in myself, as though I had broken a promise to a dead man or failed to recognize a god.

Synopsis says: “Three trees near Hudimesnil: an unsolved mystery of memory.”

This book speaks to my soul like nothing else has

“Anyway—doesn’t matter.” One may hear this statement, which is analogous to a reflex, spoken by all who have a touch of self-esteem, in circumstances which can vary from the trivial to the tragic, and which reveals, as it did on the present occasion, how much the thing that is said not to matter does matter to the speaker; and in the tragic vein, the first thing to come to the lips of any man who takes a certain pride in himself, if his last hope has just been dashed by someone’s refusal to help him out, may well be the brave, forlorn words, “Oh well, it doesn’t matter, not to worry-I’ll think of something else,” the something else that is the alternative to what “doesn’t matter” being sometimes the last resort of suicide.

In later life, whenever I read historical texts that contained this name, a fine medallion of the Renaissance—some said a genuine antique—a name borne by some podestà or prince of the Church, which had always remained in the family, being handed on from descendant to descendant, from the chancellery of the Vatican right down to my friend’s uncle, I would experience the special pleasure savored by those who, in their inability to afford a collection of medals or to constitute a private gallery of art-works, cultivate instead a passion for old names (place-names, as documentary and picturesque as an out-of-date map or isometric projection, a tradesman’s sign, or a customary; and baptismal names, with their fine French final syllables, in which one still hears the ring of the longstanding mutilations that our ancestors, by speech defects, the intonation of some ethnic vulgarity, or mispronunciation, inflicted on Latin and Saxon words, in a way that later elevated them into the grammarians' noble statutes), repertoires of antique sonorities that enable them to enjoy private concerts, like those people who acquire a viola da gamba or viola d’amore so as to play ancient music on period instruments.

In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passersby, or even the coachman halted at the comer, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities that would make it necessary for him to leave the house.

“First appearance of the little gang of girls” is vivid stuff, summoning the aesthetics of early manga encounters for me: Fujishima, Katsura, et al. Even GTO

If we believed that the eyes of such a girl were nothing but shiny little disks of mica, we would not be eager to enter her life and link it to our own. But we are well aware that whatever it is that shines in those reflective discs is not reducible to their material composition; that flitting about behind them are the black incognizable shadows of the ideas she forms about the people and places she knows—the paddocks at race-courses, the sandy paths along which she might have pedaled, drawing me after her, over hill and meadow, like a little Peri more seductive than the sprite from the Persian paradise—the dimness of the house into which she will disappear, her own impenetrable projects, and the designs of others upon her; and what we are most aware of is that she herself lies behind them, with her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will. I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore, and which was composed of the lives led by these young girls, because what was laid out now before my eyes was that extension and potential multiplication of self that we know as happiness. The fact that they and I shared nothing, no habit, no idea, was surely bound to make it more difficult for me to make their acquaintance and meet with their approval. But perhaps it was my very awareness of these differences between us, my knowledge that, in the nature of the girls as in their every action, there was not one iota of an element that was known to me or that I could have access to, which had replaced my satiety of life by a thirst, akin to that of a drought-stricken land, for a life which my soul, having gone forever without a single drop of it, would now absorb in great greedy drafts, letting it soak me to the roots.

Then the days grew shorter; and when I went to my room, the violet sky, which seemed to have been branded by the rigid, geometrical, fleeting, flashing iron of the sun (as though in representation of some miraculous sign or mystical apparition), hung down over the sea at the juncture of the horizon like a religious canvas above a high altar, while the different parts of the sunset, exhibited in the glass doors of the low mahogany bookcases running around the walls, and which I mentally compared to the marvelous painting from which they had been de-tached, were like the different scenes with which an old master once decorated a shrine for a religious house, now divided into separate panels, for display in a museum, where only the imagination of a visitor to the exhibition can reassemble them on the predellas of the altarpiece. Some weeks later, when I went up, the sun would have already set. Lying above the sea, there would be a band of red, as dense and fine-edged as a slab of aspic, similar to the red that striped the sky at Combray, above the wayside cross, on evenings when I was nearing home after a walk and intended to go down to the kitchen betore dinner; and before long, right on top of the water, which had the coldness and the color of the fish known as gray mullet, there would be another sky, of the same pink as one of the salmon we would soon order at Rivebelle; and these shades whetted my expectation of the pleasure of changing into evening clothes to go out to dine. Very close to the shore, trying to rise over the sea, in tiers that spread ever wider, its layers superimposed upon one an-other, there was a haze as black as soot, but also with the smooth sheen and consistency of agate, its highest parts, visibly top-heavy, beginning to tilt above their deformed support, leaning away from the center of gravity of those that had hitherto underpinned them, and seeming about to crumble and collapse into the sea, dragging down with them from halfway up the sky the whole precarious edifice. The sight of a ship leaving, like a night traveler, gave me the impression I had once had in the train, of being freed of the restrictions of sleeping and staying closed up in a room. Not that I felt hemmed in by this room, since within the hour I was going to walk out of it and go off in a carriage. I lay down on the bed; and, as though I were on a bunk aboard one of the boats I could see not far away, which after nightfall people might be surprised to see moving slowly through the darkness, like dim, silent swans that never sleep, I was surrounded on all sides by images of the sea.

Marcel looking around Balbec for the girls is like Sakura Taisen’s after-hours sections

The blinds being down on most sides, the studio was rather cool; and, except for one part where daylight’s fleeting decoration dazzled the wall, it was dim; the only window open was a small rectangle framed in honeysuckle, looking out on a strip of garden, then a road; so most of the studio was in half-darkness, transparent and compact in its mass, but moist and glistening at the angles where the light edged it, like a block of rock crystal with one of its sides already cut and polished in patches, so that it shines like a mirror and gives off an iridescent glow. While Elstir, at my request, went on with his painting, I wandered through this chiaroscuro, stopping here and there in front of a picture.

Almost all of the works I could see around me in the studio were, of course, seascapes done recently here in Balbec. But I could see that their charm lay in a kind of metamorphosis of the things depicted, analogous to the poetical device known as metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, Elstir re-created them by removing their names, or by giving them other names. The names of things always express a view of the mind, which is foreign to our genuine impressions of them, and which forces us to eliminate from them whatever does not correspond to that view.

“I was once told,” I said, recalling the conversation with Legrandin at Combray, and thinking it would be interesting to know Elstir’s view, “to stay away from Brittany. It was supposed to be bad for someone inclined to wistfulness.” “Not at all,” he replied. “When the soul of a man inclines to the wistful, he mustn’t be kept away from it, he mustn’t have it rationed. If you keep your mind off it, your mind will never know what’s in it. And you’ll be the plaything of all sorts of appearances, because you’ll never have managed to understand the nature of them. If a little wistfulness is a dangerous thing, what cures a man of it is not less of it, it’s more of it, it’s all of it! Whatever dreams one may have, it is important to have a thorough acquaintance with them, so as to have done with suffering from them. A certain divorce between dreaming and daily life is so often useful to us that I wonder whether one should not take the precaution of practicing it preventively, so to speak, in the way some surgeons recommend appendectomy for all children, so as to avoid the possibility of future appendicitis.”

Every day since I had first seen Albertine, I had entertained thousands of thoughts about her, I had carried on, with what I called “her,” an extended interior conversation, in which I had questions put to her and had her answer them, think, and act; and in the endless series of imagined Albertines who occupied my head one after another, for hours on end, the real Albertine, the one glimpsed down at the esplanade, was merely the forerunner, like an actress, the star who, having created a part, hands it over after the very first performances to others.

At the end of lunch, I was inclined now to stay on as the tables were being cleared; and if it was a moment at which the little gang of girls could not be expected to pass, my eyes looked on things other than the sea. Since seeing such things in the watercolors of Elstir, I enjoyed noticing them in reality, glimpses of poetry as they seemed: knives lying askew in halted gestures; the tent of a used napkin, within which the sun has secreted its yellow velvet; the half-emptied glass showing better the noble widening of its lines, the undrunk wine darkening it, but glinting with lights, inside the translucent glaze seemingly made from condensed daylight; volumes displaced, and liquids transmuted, by angles of illumination; the deterioration of the plums, green to blue, blue to gold, in the fruit dish already half plundered; the wandering of the old-fashioned chairs, which twice a day take their places again around the cloth draping the table as though it is an altar for the celebration of the sanctity of appetite, with a few drops of lustral water left in oyster shells like little stone fonts; I tried to find beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary things, in the profound life of “still life.” Kudos to the translator: Grieve. I’m excited to check this passage in the Carter too.

At the moment when Elstir suggested I go with him and be introduced to Albertine, who was sitting a little way away, I finished a coffee éclair and inquired with interest of an old gentleman, whom I had just met, and to whom I saw fit to offer the rose he had admired in my buttonhole, about certain agricultural shows in Normandy. This is not to say that the introduction that followed gave me no pleasure, or that it did not have a character of some gravity in my eyes. The pleasure, of course, I did not experience till a little later, back at the hotel, when, having been alone for a while, I was myself again. Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

for, at those moments in my life when I was not in love but wished I was, the ideal of physical beauty I carried about with me—which, as has been seen, I could recognize in a distant glimpse of any passing stranger who was far enough away for the imprecision of her features not to impede that recognition—was partnered by the emotional shadow, ever ready to be brought to real life, of the woman who was going to fall in love with me and step straight into the part already written for her in the comedy of fondness and passion that had been awaiting her since my childhood, and for which every young girl I met, as long as she had a pleasant disposition and some of the physical characteristics required by the role, appeared eager to be auditioned. In this play, whoever it was I cast as the new star or her understudy for this part of leading lady, the outline of the plot, the main scenes, and even the words to be spoken had long since taken the form of a definitive edition.

Elstir spoke even more lyrically about yachting events than about horseracing, which made me realize that for a modern artist regattas and gatherings of sportsmen, where women are suffused by the glaucous glow of a seaside racecourse, could be a study fully as captivating as the ceremonial celebrations that Veronese and Carpaccio so liked to depict. “Your comparison is especially apt,” Elstir said, “given that, in the city where they painted, those celebrations were partly nautical. Except that the beauty of the vessels of that period lay often in their cumbersomeness and intricacy. As is also done here at Balbec, they held jousting on the water, usually in honor of a visiting embassy, like the one Carpaccio shows in The Legend of Saint Ursula. The ships were massive, built like cathedrals, and they looked almost amphibious, like smaller Venices within the real one, when they were moored to landing stages, draped with crimson satins, and carpeted by Persian rugs, and carrying women in cherry-colored brocades or green damask, close to balconies inlaid with multicolored marble, where other women would lean out to get a good view, in gowns with black sleeves with white slashes in them thick with pearls or adorned with point lace. It was unclear where the land finished and the water began, what was still palace or possibly ship, a caravel, a galleass, the bucentaur.”

Quest

This was a fine part of my grand TTRPG system hunt of 2025. I appreciate its fresh, modern, digital-first presentation and its breaking free from the D&D-rooted conventions that most games are still rooted in. I thought this might be a good system to run for my kid, but it’s a bit too high-concept and geared toward improv-ready grown-ups, versus Ryuutama which I ended up choosing instead.

(P.S. — This is the first Picocosmographia entry I’ve written using my new AI-assisted process. It reads my OmniFocus queue of books to write about, creates Hugo drafts with correct metadata, and selects a random one for me to write about.)

BEAT at Nippon Budōkan

Before the show I met a fellow chilling by the drink machines on the waterside in Kitanomaru park, wearing a Rovo shirt, and got to talking for upwards of two hours. It turned out we’d both seen Rovo open for Clammbon at Liquid Room in 2002. He had encyclopedic knowledge of prog and classic rock, and had traveled to Europe and America numerous times to see some of my favorite bands. He clued me in to a Les Claypool appearance coming up at the Blue Note Tokyo in November.

I had sprung for the highest tier of ticket, guessing that this might be my last chance to see a semi-official King Crimson performance. I’m still working on inhabiting the right state of mind when at a concert, rather than just letting my mind wander in the default mode network. But I arrived at a pretty good meditative state of contemplating the accomplishment of such an extraordinarily low-entropy state. And generally recognizing that these musicians gave me a glimpse of the Eternal when I was particularly receptive to it as a teenager.

やまなし

When I got very into the band Clammbon, my wife’s sister immediately recognized where their name had come from: this short story which is commonly read in grade school. It’s apparently commonly assigned in order to get children thinking about what ambiguous elements in a story might refer to, and each person develops their own idea of what the mysterious figure “Clammbon” mentioned in the beginning of the story might be.

I always meant to read the story myself, and found a collection on the shelf at the Katsushika Central Library, where I spend a lot of time these days waiting for my own children to do various activities about town. It didn’t make an especial impression on me, and I think I still have some study to do about its possible meanings, but I’m glad I finally traced the name of my beloved band back to its origin.

The Eye of the Heron

My read-through of the five novels in this Library of America volume continues. A few images and moments certainly grabbed hold of me and put me in a pretty particular 1978 SF state of mind. Other moments felt like too bare an exposure of the author’s own opinions about how societies ought to work; Always Coming Home seemed to me to be a more thorough and nuanced realization of a similar aim.

Luz Marina Falco Cooper sat in the deep window seat, her knees drawn up to her chin. Sometimes she gazed out through the thick, greenish glass of the window at the sea and the rain and the clouds. Sometimes she looked down at the book that lay open beside her, and read a few lines. Then she sighed and looked out the window again. The book was not interesting. It was too bad. She had had high hopes of it. She had never read a book before. She had learned to read and write, of course, being the daughter of a Boss. Besides memorizing lessons aloud, she had copied out moral precepts, and could write a letter offering or declining an invitation, with a fancy scrollwork frame, and the salutation and signature written particularly large and stiff. But at school they used slates and the copybooks which the schoolmistresses wrote out by hand. She had never touched a book. Books were too precious to be used in school; there were only a few dozen of them in the world. They were kept in the Archives. But, coming into the hall this afternoon, she had seen lying on the low table a little brown box; she had lifted the lid to see what was in it, and it was full of words. Neat, tiny words, all the letters alike, what patience to make them all the same size like that! A book—a real book, from Earth. Her father must have left it there.

“Sasha’s house is down there,” said the variegated child, pointing down a muddy, overgrown lane, and sidled away so effectively that he seemed simply to become part of the general mist and mud.

I imagined The Eye of the Heron as a Falcom PC-98 JRPG and something clicked:

• I was disappointed in the stories of actual JRPGs in comparison
• I liked the book a lot more

It’s so vivid in my mind how memorable a well-executed game, in that style, of this exact story, could be. The wistful aesthetics of a Legend of Heroes III or a Princess Maker 2, but the narrative and poetic weight of Le Guin.

ひらやすみ 6

This has continued to be the representative heartwarming slice of life manga of recent years. Every line is gently rounded, every corner softened — both in the art and in the story.

ファイブスター物語 15

The bit with Weinzel and Palsuet meeting Mrs. Cyan stands out as one of my favorite episodes of all of FSS: character drama that also enriches the history and culture of the Joker Star Cluster. As is my new method, I skimmed over a bunch of the standing around in nondescript outdoor environments yelling about military campaigns.

The Genetic Book of the Dead

Dawkins is of course the author who kicked off my adult nonfiction reading habit, and I’ll always read his new book when it comes out. I don’t know how many more times that will happen, if any. But I found “a sense of wonder” in his explication of how the immortal gene works, stumbling into the invention of such a vast and strange array of organisms along the way.

Sir D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948), that immensely learned zoologist, classicist, and mathematician, made a remark that seems trite, even tautological, but it actually provokes thought. ‘Everything is the way it is because it got that way.’

The primatologist Richard Wrangham has promoted the intriguing hypothesis that the invention of cooking was the key to human uniqueness and human success. He makes a persuasive case that our reduced jaws, teeth, and guts are ill-suited to either a carnivorous or a herbivorous diet unless a substantial proportion of our food is cooked. Cooking enables us to get energy from foods more quickly and efficiently. For Wrangham it was cooking that led to the dramatic evolutionary enlargement of the human brain, the brain being by far the most energy-hungry of our organs. If he’s right, it’s a nice example of how a cultural change (the taming of fire) can have evolutionary consequences (the shrinking of jaws and teeth).

Elementary particle of meaning in that section about the invention of cooking. The deepest reverence that humans can feel is actually warranted in some cases, for acts that actually do change the course of history on such an eon scale. Imagine participating in the invention of any of these: cooking, sowing of seeds, migration, tool-building, structure-building, social organization… Stuff that’s written deep deep down in our souls now. The Eternal!

Successful genes, then, survive in bodies down the generations, and they cause (in a statistical sense) their own survival by their ‘phenotypic’ effects on the bodies that they inhabit.

Is there an equilibrium needed to make these vehicles tho? DNA for ribosomes can’t do anything without many other genes in the right proportions

But even song loudness is not the end of the causal chain. As far as natural selection is concerned, song loudness only matters insofar as it attracts females (and deters males, but let’s not complicate the argument). The causal chain extends to a radius where it exerts an influence on a female cricket. This has to mean that a change in female behaviour is part of the extended phenotype of genes in a male cricket. Therefore, the extended phenotype of a gene can reside in another individual.

Surely gene replication is the end of the causal chain

The male gathers decorative objects – coloured berries, flowers, even bottle tops. Movies of male bower birds at work irresistibly remind me of an artist putting the finishing touches to a canvas, standing back, head cocked judgmentally, then darting forward to make a delicate adjustment, standing back again and surveying the effect with head on one side before darting forward again. That is what emboldened me to use a word like ‘tastefully’. It is hard to resist the impression that the bird is exercising his aesthetic judgement in perfecting a work of art. Even if the decorated bower is not to every human’s taste, or even every female bower bird’s, the ‘touching up’ behaviour of the male almost forces the conclusion that the male has taste of his own, and he is adjusting his bower to meet it.

Something eerie and Eternal about animal constructions

I do not know whether exposure to a more than usually magnificent bower stimulates a hormone surge in the blood of a female,

Every time you mention something unknown, I want to become a scientist

The gene’s-eye view of evolution necessarily incorporates the idea of the extended phenotype

Cf. deltas between Level III universes. Alleles create real alternate worlds!?

In 2002, Kim Sterelny, editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Extended Phenotype by commissioning three critical appraisals, plus a reply from me.

I concluded my piece with a humorously grandiose fantasy about the building of a future Extended Phenotypics Institute. This pipedream edifice was to have three wings, the Zoological Artifacts Museum (ZAM), the laboratory of Parasite Extended Genetics (PEG), and the Centre for Action at a Distance (CAD).

My main authority – indeed today’s world authority – is Professor Nick Davies of Cambridge University. His book Cuckoo is a delightful amalgam of natural history and memoir of his field research on Wicken Fen, near Cambridge. Described by David Attenborough as one of the country’s greatest field naturalists, he achieves heights of lyrical word-painting unsurpassed in the literature of modern natural history: North towards the horizon is the eleventh-century cathedral of Ely, which sits on the raised land of the Isle of Ely, from where Hereward led his raids against the Normans. In the early mornings, when the mist lies low, the cathedral appears as a great ship, sailing across the fens.

If it finds itself sharing the nest with either eggs or chicks of the foster species, the hatchling cuckoo fits them neatly into the hollow in its back. It then wriggles backwards up the side of the nest and tosses the competing egg or chick out. There is, of course, no suggestion that it knows what it’s doing, or why it is doing it, no feelings of guilt or remorse (or triumph) in the act. The behavioural routine simply runs like clockwork. Natural selection in ancestral generations favoured genes that shaped nervous systems in such a way as to play out this instinctive act of (foster) fratricide. That is all we can say.

I want to watch this evolution happen

Swann’s Way

I’d been curious about reading Proust for about a decade: I gave him the tentative research treatment in bookstores where I examined the editions they had, practiced on CDs in the 1990s when you couldn’t know much about an album except what you could glean from the packaging. I read De Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life and then didn’t read Proust for eight years thereafter. I read the Atlantic article about reading Proust on one’s phone. I stood in a Brooklyn bookstore on a work trip and seriously considered picking up the shiny red Swann’s Way there, but had to admit I couldn’t be sure I’d really read through it, let alone the rest of the volumes.

Upon moving to Tokyo, the Katsushika Central Library became one of my favorite places. We visited nearly every day in the course of bringing the kids to Kumon, Shichidashiki, or other activities. On the shelf in the quite decent English section I found two volumes of the Penguin Proust, translated by seven different people, and learned that two more were in the stacks. All of my prior research and concern about getting just the right translation and the right format were replaced by the notion of how meaningful it would be to start reading Swann’s Way any time I was in the library, and only when I was in the library. It could be something to look forward to, something to add beyond my regular reading pile, and something to progress slowly without worrying about how long it took to finish.

I lasted for a few weeks of only reading it when physically present in the library building, but eventually had to admit that I was captivated enough to want to borrow it for an overnight stay at my in-laws’. Not long after, I also got ahold of the ebook edition so that I could continue reading at any time.

I developed a habit of capturing each passage that hit me like a gust of wind, or tingled my nervous system, or rooted my feet to the ancient ground, or otherwise made me stop and boggle at its gravity. I’d photograph the page in the iPhone’s text recognition mode, copy the text, and paste it both to my commonplace-book in Ulysses and to my friend Sben, who I’d decided was the person I wanted to talk about Proust with. I also sent some to my cousin Stephen, who’d shown interest in reading Proust himself, but I stopped when he committed to starting to read it.

There must have been a good deal of reality in those Virtues and Vices of Padua, since they seemed to me as alive as the pregnant servant, and since she herself did not appear to me much less allegorical. And perhaps this (at least apparent) nonparticipation of a person’s soul in the virtue that is acting through her has also, beyond its aesthetic value, a reality that is, if not psychological, at least, as they say, physiognomical. When, later, I had occasion to meet, in the course of my life, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they generally had the cheerful, positive, indifferent, and brusque air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can read no commiseration, no pity in the presence of human suffering, no fear of offending it, the sort which is the ungentle face, the antipathetic and sublime face of true goodness.

And so — while some artist who reads the memoirs of the seventeenth century and wants to be like the great King, and thinks he will be making progress in that direction if he fabricates a genealogy for himself that traces his own descent from a historic family or if he carries on a correspondence with one of the current sovereigns of Europe, is actually turning his back on what he mistakenly sought in forms that were identical and consequently dead — an old lady from the provinces who was simply yielding to irresistible manias and to a malice born of idleness, saw, without ever thinking of Louis XIV, the most insignificant occupations of her day, those concerned with her rising, her lunch, her afternoon rest, acquire, because of their despotic singularity, some of the interest of what Saint-Simon called the “mechanics” of life at Versailles, and could also believe that her silences, a nuance of good humor or disdain in her features, were for Françoise the object of a commentary as passionate, as fearful as were the silence, the good humor, the disdain of the King when a courtier, or even his greatest lords, handed him a petition at a bend of an avenue at Versailles.

This bit o’ doggerel:

Love a dog’s arse, and to thy nose ’Twill smell like a rose

Was originally:

Qui du cul d’un chien s’amourose Il lui parait une rose.

But! The orienting snippet for the footnote quotes a different version, presumably from an earlier draft of the translation. That one apparently ended in “plum”, suggesting that it employed a stretch to rhyme with “bum”, until Davis found a way to rhyme with the literal “rose”. I wonder what the Moncrieff had it as? … Holy crap, he embellished it like so:

Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs' tails, And dirty sluts in plenty, Smell sweeter than roses in young men’s noses When the heart is one-and-twenty.

Then this; Proust must have known this stuff is hilarious, right?

He passed close to us, did not break off his conversation with his neighbor, and from the corner of his blue eye gave us a little sign that was in some way interior to his eyelid and which, not involving the muscles of his face, could go perfectly unnoticed by the lady he was talking to; but seeking to compensate by intensity of feeling for the somewhat narrow field in which he had circumscribed its expression, in the azure corner assigned to us he set sparkling all the liveliness of a grace that exceeded playfulness, bordered on mischievousness; he overrefined the subtleties of amiability into winks of connivance, insinuations, innuendos, the mysteries of complicity; and finally exalted his assurances of friendship into protestations of affection, into a declaration of love, illuminating for us alone, at that moment, with a secret languor invisible to the lady, a love-smitten eye in a face of ice.

The whole episode of trying to get Legrandin to admit his sister lives near Balbec is perfect comedy

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her. I liked finding its image again in paintings and books, but these works of art were quite different — at least during the early years, before Bloch accustomed my eyes and my mind to subtler harmonies — from those in which the moon would seem beautiful to me today and in which I would not have recognized it then. It might be, for example, some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre in which it stands out distinctly against the sky in the form of a silver sickle, one of those works which were naively incomplete, like my own impressions, and which it angered my grandmother’s sisters to see me enjoy. They thought that one ought to present to children, and that children showed good taste in enjoying right from the start, those works of art which, once one has reached maturity, one will admire forever after. The fact is that they probably regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an open eye could not help perceiving, without one’s needing to ripen equivalents of them slowly in one’s own heart.

How French that church was! Above the door, the saints, the knight-kings with fleurs-de-lis in their hands, wedding and funeral scenes, were depicted as they might have been in Françoise’s soul. The sculptor had also narrated certain anecdotes involving Aristotle and Virgil just as Françoise in her kitchen was apt to talk about Saint Louis as if she had known him personally, usually in order to put my grandparents to shame by comparison since they were less “fair-minded.” One felt that the notions which the medieval artist and the medieval countrywoman (living on into the nineteenth century) had acquired of ancient or Christian history, and which were distinguished by containing as much inaccuracy as simple good-heartedness, were derived not from books, but from a tradition that was at once very old and very direct, uninterrupted, oral, deformed, hardly recognizable, and alive.

It was right here that I started hearing Tim Rogers’s voice

No; just as what I needed so that I could go to sleep happy, with that untroubled peace which no mistress has been able to give me since that time because one doubts them even at the moment one believes in them, and can never possess their hearts as I received in a kiss my mother’s heart, complete, without the reservation of an afterthought, without the residue of an intention that was not for me-was that it should be her, that she should incline over me that face marked below the eye by something which was, it seems, a blemish, and which I loved as much as the rest, so what I want to see again is the Guermantes way that I knew, with the farm that is not very far from the two that come after pressed so close together, at the entrance to the avenue of oaks; those meadows on which, when the sun turns them reflective as a pond, the leaves of the apple trees are sketched, that landscape whose individuality sometimes, at night in my dreams, clasps me with an almost uncanny power and which I can no longer recover when I wake up. No doubt, by virtue of having forever indissolubly united in me different impressions merely because they had made me experience them at the same time, the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way exposed me, for the future, to many disappointments and even to many mistakes. For often I have wanted to see a person again without discerning that it was simply because she reminded me of a hedge of hawthorns, and I have been led to believe, to make someone else believe, in a revival of affection, by what was simply a desire to travel. But because of that very fact, too, and by persisting in those of my impressions of today to which they may be connected, they give them foundations, depth, a dimension lacking from the others. They add to them, too, a charm, a meaning that is for me alone. When on summer evenings the melodious sky growls like a wild animal and everyone grumbles at the storm, it is because of the Méséglise way that I am the only one in ecstasy inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the smell of invisible, enduring lilacs.

But in this strange phase of love, an individual person assumes something so profound that the curiosity he now felt awakening in him concerning the smallest occupations of this woman, was the same curiosity he had once had about History. And all these things that would have shamed him up to now, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, cleverly inducing neutral people to speak, bribing servants, listening at doors, now seemed to him to be, fully as much as were the deciphering of texts, the weighing of evi-dence, and the interpretation of old monuments, merely methods of scientific investigation with a real intellectual value and appropriate to a search for the truth.

On taste vs. online sludge

What we must find out is whether you are really that creature which ranks lowest in mentality, and even in charm, the contemptible creature who is incapable of giving up a pleasant thing. Now, if this is what you are, how could anyone love you, for you’re not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect, but at least perfectible? You’re only a formless stream of water running down whatever slope one offers it, a fish without memory or reflection which, as long as it lives in its aquarium, continuing to mistake the glass for water, will bump against it a hundred times a day. The image of a weak mind as simply a stream running downhill without manifesting any will, exhibited by what it chooses to consume…

Oh goodness:

When his eyes fell upon Odette’s photograph on the table, or when she came to see him, he had trouble identifying the figure of flesh or cardboard with the painful and constant disturbance that inhabited him. He would say to himself almost with surprise: “It’s she!” as if suddenly someone were to show us in a separate, external form one of our own diseases and we found that it did not resemble what we were suffering. “She”— he tried to ask himself what that was; for one thing love and death have in common, more than those vague resemblances people are always talking about, is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that its reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality. And this disease which was Swann’s love had so proliferated, was so closely entangled with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he wanted after his death, it was now so much a part of him, that it could not have been torn from him without destroying him almost entirely: as they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable.

A Month in the Country

There are some mysterious items on my OmniFocus project “Books to Read v9”. Usually I try to capture where I got a recommendation and why it stuck enough for me to record it. This one was just there, and when I looked at it I got a vague sense that whoever had recommended it had made it sound meditative and nourishing.

On a rare visit to California for work, I discovered the utopian Kepler’s Books, which felt like it belonged in a hip urban center, not a dismal walk down the unwalkable American street from my suburban hotel. There I spent an agonizing amount of time wandering from section to section, squinting at every recommendation card, trying to look like I needed a staff member to ask, “Is there anything I can help you find?” But I was too exhausted from travel and emotionally raw to approach someone myself, and unsure what question I would even ask. In the end I picked out this book and Thiese’s Notes on Complexity, all on my own.

I made some of my most vivid and satisfying reading memories carrying this around under my arm, sneaking pages whenever I could. On a trip to the publicly-owned lodging in Nikkou, maintained for residents of Tokyo’s Katsushika ward. At a tsukemen joint around the corner. At my in-laws’ creaky four-story house, about as old as me.

“Look, how many times have I to tell you I’m not an artist. I’m the laborer who cleans up after artists. And my coat doesn’t signify a thing: I wear it because I feel the cold round my ankles like other people feel it round their ears.”

From their accounts and from judicious pumping, their mother worked out how it was with me and usually sent a bit of whatever was being manufactured in her kitchen—rabbit pie, a couple of currant teacakes, two or three curd tarts. So, over the weeks, a splendid repertory of North Riding dishes was performed amanti bravura to an applauding Londoner, dishes Mrs. Ellerbeck had helped her mother bake, who had helped her mother bake who … Sometimes I’d share this bounty with Moon and it was he who suggested that we were eating disposable archaeology.

His hands talk like monks’ hands must have talked in the long silences

You can only have this piece of cake once; you can’t keep on munching away at it. Sad, but there it is! You’ll find that, once you’ve dragged yourself off round the corner, there’ll be another view; it may even be a better one.”

スピリット　サークル 2

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

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

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

Favorites:

• All-time favorite Off Book song: “Keeping it Plain”. I’d like to analyze this one line by line, rhyme by rhyme.
• “I Will Help You Follow the DoorDash Driver”

Off Book 340: Spark of Salvador Dali

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 I 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

Favorites:

• “A Bunch of Little Guys Pretending to Be a Bigger Guy” (38:00)
• “A Bunch of Little Guys Pretending to Be a Bigger Guy (Reprise)”

A Story

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

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. Also notable for having a surprisingly satisfying moral arc. 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

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.