comments

Selected comments I got on short stories I wrote in college:
"I do wonder why [the main character] thinks of death so often, but maybe that's not something that needs to be explained in this story for this character."
"Anyways, I didn't quite understand the narrator's fascination with death."

"Is the narrator a 'maniac'?"

"I slightly wondered what gender the narrator was."

"Well, I think this is more advanced storytelling than I'm able to usefully assess, but here it goes....I'm sorry I wasn't smart enough to be much good in helping you with your story."

"Why doesn't he just wait for the parade to find the woman? Rather than looking for her in the neighborhoods (a bit creepy). I guess these sorts of things could really work to your advantage to reveal something about his character (obsessive compulsive?)"

"Also, I needed more information about the character and more explanation to warrant his obsession with finding him and the bizarre methods he used"

"The scene of him following the woman is great, and subtly hilarious. I enjoyed it. It's very apparent that he has no idea how creepy he is, especially with the surgical masks."

"I know people just like this."

"The imagining of fungus spreading across the city seemed to come out of nowhere."

"Who is the woman and what is the significance of the panda earrings? How much of this really happens?"

"I have to admit that I really don't get this story other than the fact that the narrator is unhinged....I can't even say where the heart of this story lies because it confuses me so much."

"I like this story. I don't understand it, but I like it."

"I'm not even entirely sure of the narrator's gender. Names would also be nice."

"And why do something so irrational and obviously futile as walking around block by block of a map and hoping that something appears, eliminating areas on foolish assumptions?"

"Manipulate me."

"This guy has a very nervous energy to him....did he just have an intense case of O.C.D. or was there something more serious going on."

"The little details and moments really bring the blood and pulse into the story, like the woman pushing a wheelbarrow of cabbages."

"He's certainly an odd duck"

submlimated lessons

While re-reading Nietzsche's Ecce Homo recently, I realized I'd sublimated a few of his guidelines after my initial reading 3 years ago.

The task is not to master all resistances, but only those against which one has to pit one's entire strength, suppleness, and mastery-at-arms--opponents who are equal...Equality before the enemy--first precondition for an honest duel....First: I attack only causes that are victorious--on occasion, I wait till they are victorious. Second: I attack causes only when there are no allies to be found, when I am standing alone--when I am compromising myself alone

I can't say I've thought of this explicitly over the last few years, but my intuition has more or less followed what is set out there. Anyone can criticize the weak spot, or identify the "fatal flaw" of an argument or system of thought. That's fine. But since when have fatal flaws actually proved to be fatal?

 Here's an important means of judging the quality of my own arguments: would I respect someone for changing their minds based on my arguments? If not, I haven't reached the heart of the matter.

my secret life

A moving passage from Moll Flanders, a book that has not moved me: "Madam, you are a stranger to me, but it is very unfortunate that you should be let into the secret of the worst action of my life." I often wonder about this, but the reverse. Not about whether my friends will ever know my worst actions, but whether they'll ever know my best ones. Strangers are intriguing because of the possibilities for committing extreme good or extreme evil that will never be attached to you. Casual generosity and cruelty. The possibilities for confession are endless, and most interactions with strangers are moments of confession. And as far as I'm concerned, doing good can be as big of a burden on the conscience as doing evil. Everything is easier when repetition isn't expected.

waste management, 16th c.

From Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain: "And I must also mention, with all apologies, that they sold many canoe-loads of human excrement, which they kept in the creeks near the market. This was for the manufacture of salt and the curing of skins, which they say cannot be done without it. I know that many gentlemen will laugh at this, but I assure them it is true. I may add that on all the roads they have shelters made of reeds or straw or grass so that they can retire when they wish to do so, and purge their bowels unseen by passers-by, and also in order that their excrement shall not be lost."

One Last Thing...

...on the books I read last year. Most represented publisher was Penguin with 12 books, then 4 for Oxford University Press.

More on What I Read Last Year

On the way back to Seattle from my friend's bachelor party, I started reading Conrad's Outcast of the Islands. The novel was unremarkable, although I'll keep reading Conrad, but in the notes I learned that one of Conrad's main sources was Alfred Russel Wallace's Malay Archipelago. Since I happened to have a copy of Wallace on my shelf, I read them at the same time. The main things I learned from Wallace and from the Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman, is that 19th century travelers loved killing animals, drinking coffee, and getting sick.

I did indeed finish the Decameron, as I anticipated, and read it's cousin, Arabian Nights, or at least the first of three volumes. The Decameron took about 4 years for me to read since I would put it down when the stories started to blur together. There were some real gems, especially about putting the devil into hell and a man trying to turn his wife into a donkey, but it doesn't even compare to the genius of Arabian Nights.

Regarding Marx's Das Kapital vol. 1, I've never had so little to say about such a big book, which is basically how I felt about Anti-Oedipus. One of my goals for the year is to find a few things to say about Marx. Briefly, though, I was less attracted to the economic theory and more attracted to reporting on working conditions and labor history, and Marx's style. I'm about 50 pages from finishing a collection of his journalism, and plan to read quite a bit more of him and about him this year.

Trollope's Autobiography was better than his novel, the Eustace Diamonds, which I expected to be quite a bit more hardboiled than it was. The most memorable episode from Trollope's autobiography is when he visits Brigham Young while traveling across America. It's a brief meeting. (Incidentally, Francis Parkman talks a lot in his book on how all the travelers are terrified of Mormons.)

Last year marked a return to genre fiction for me, which I continued by reading the Bonehunters, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons. I don't see my self going whole-hog back into genre fiction, or picking up random titles, but I'll at least finish out these two series and a few others.

The List

In 2011, I read 39 books. 2 were by women. 11 were written in the 21st century, 11 in the 20th, 14 in the 19th, and 3 before that. Original languages are English, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Danish, Japanese, and Arabic. 21 were fiction. Goodreads calculates the total as 17,941 pages. I'll write more on this later but, for now, here's the list:

The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccacio
Capital vol. 1 -Karl Marx
The Hours - Michael Cunningham
Human, All Too Human - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen J. Gould
Off the Books - Sudhir Venkatesh
Inez - Carlos Fuentes
The Challenge of Jesus - N.T. Wright
Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas de Quincey
Redburn - Herman Melville
The Seven Pillars of Creation - William P Brown
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
Sons of the Profits - William Speidel
Scarlet and Black - Stendhal
Reaper's Gale - Steven Erikson
Orient Express - Graham Greene
The Sublime Object of Ideology - Slavoj Zizek
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
An Outcast of the Islands - Joseph Conrad
In the Lake of the Woods - Tim O'Brien
The Eustace Diamonds - Anthony Trollope
An Education - Lynn Barber
Nobody Move - Denis Johnson
A Feast for Crows - George Martin
Anti-Oedipus - Deleuze & Guattari
An Autobiography - Anthony Trollope
Repetition / Philosophical Crumbs - Soren Kierkegaard
The Malay Archipelago - Alfred Russel Wallace
A Dance with Dragons - George Martin
Jonathan Wild - Henry Fielding
The Birth of the Clinic - Michel Foucault
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Gay Science - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Oregon Trail - Francis Parkman
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
Reflections - Walter Benjamin
Arabian Nights vol. 1