For a time, I didn’t have internet in my modest flat. In these most wonderful of times a personal renaissance of reading flourished. Hundreds of dollars of worthless money were transformed into written matter—nay, pure gleaming knowledge—of a sort most heretofore unprecedented in my media-wrecked life.
Then, a stray WiFi signal brought forth tragedy! horror! ArsTechnica, MetaFilter, 4chan, Archinect! Athena wept as sadly mindless minutes filled my nights; as my mind took on a gray and slightly fetid state most unpalatable.
It stops here. It stops now. Time to bust through the books by my bed!
- Apr 2-Apr 5: Yale’s Retrospecta and Perspecta. Topical!
- Apr 6-Apr 8: (busy ravaging Kuala Lumpur)
- Apr 10-Apr 15: Bill Clinton’s My Life. For shame, he’s been at Oxford for more than a month.
- Apr 16-22: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. I’m at the part where he’s talking about some kind of fortress. Riveting.
- Apr 23-Apr 29: Jeremy Aynsley’s Pioneers of Modernism: A Complete History. Left over from my periodic “Imma gunna be a graphic designer!” phase.
- Apr 30-May 6: Philippe Legrain’s Open World: The Truth About Globalisation. I’m at the part where he says sweat shops are good.
- May 7-May 13: Ray Monk & Frederic Raphael’s The Great Philosophers: From Socrates to Turing. I’m basically reading this so I can impress chicks with Heidegger and Marx. Wait, that IS how it works, right?
- May 14-May 20: Gauri Viswanathan’s Interviews with Edward Said. Incredibly boring thanks to pedantic professor-speak. Professor of English and Comparative Literature professor-speak. So far he doesn’t like movie critics, except for some guy at the New York Times. Predictable.
- May 21-May 31: Rick Poynor’s No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism. I think I mentioned that Rick Poynor writes incredible, lucid things about design, and that he’s entertaining as hell to read. Academic architects need to write more like Poynor and less like Said.
- June 1-June 10: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Saving the best (sort of) for last!
I’ve been reading Thomas Harris’ “Hannibal Lecter Trilogy”: Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, bound in one volume. Harris is incredible. He patiently reveals his characters’ facets like miner coaxing diamonds from a mountain, and his sequences are beautifully built one innocuous sentence at a time. “She smoothed it out on the little desk and made it peck.”
The Trilogy is a bell curve that starts high, brightly peaks, and meekly descends. He perfects Red Dragon with Lambs, both careful character studies developed by opposition into an urgently engrossing plot. The prose is so sublime I hardly read its presence. Hannibal is, somehow, less “authentic.” The main characters from Lambs return, and so there isn’t the same sense of discovery—they’re written more as caricatures than as people. The book’s events feel forced and ham-handed. Harris is good at writing vernacular, but in Hannibal his lines are noticeably labored. “Let’s swap body fluids, bitch.”
But still, Harris proved his talent with Red Dragon and Lambs, and the rest is understandable cashing-in. Stephen King explains that, at times, Harris would take a day to pen a few lines, writhing in agony the whole time. I can relate.
People wonder why I seem to know a lot of words—it’s because I look up a bunch of stuff.
The following are words (plus respective page) I looked up while reading Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.
- Apocrypha (30): “As for Ravintzer and The Little Apocrypha“
- simulacra (68): “that I had defeated the ’simulacra’”
- serous (69), serum, coagulate, serous membrane: “they exuded a serous liquid”
- ampoule (73): “I remembered I’d left these… these ampoules in a drawer.”
- demonomania (76): “a sort of elementary demonomania” *not in dictionary
- cerebroside (77): “one of the constituents of the cerebrosides”
- discomfiture (77): “enjoying my discomfiture”
- laconic (81): “the entries in the log were laconic and negative”
- colloidal (82), emulsion, miscible: “a thick colloidal substance”
- treacle (83): “it was like a very thick treacle”
- apiary (84): “that I recognized an apiary”
- compress (96): “Do you want a compress for your forehead?”
- auscultation (101): “A little auscultation, eh?”
- corpuscle (102): “red corpuscles”
- albumen (103): “nebulous outlines of threads of albumen”
- perspicacious (107), keen: “less perspicacious”
- cretinous (108): “cohabiting with a cretinous dwarf”
- monograph (115): “already relatively obsolescent monograph”
- obsolescent (115), obsolete: “already relatively obsolescent monograph”
- alimentary (118): “conveyed alimentary materials”
- mimoid (118): “The ‘mimoid’ formations are considerably more complex” *not in dictionary
- vehement (118): “elicit a more vehement response”
- conscientious (119): “The conscientious Giese”
- tegument (119), integument: “ejects a thick tegument”
- capriciousness (122): “the total instability and capriciousness”
- vitrifies (123): “vitrifies and begins to shine”
I think the translators went a little nuts. They’re probably linguists or something.
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