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Notes from a reading diary
Mar. 13th, 2023 05:19 pmThis year I'm doing the Writing for the Page masters course at the Institute of Modern Letters; basically, it's a course in which ten people end up with a draft novel each by November. More on this later! But I keep not getting around to writing about the course, so here are some excerpts from the reading diary it asks students to keep. It's a rainy, windy day, thirteen degrees out, i.e. cold enough for my liking, and I just cycled home exuberantly, singing in the Mt Vic Tunnel (all the cars honk and I have to join in somehow).
~
08/03/2023
...and I've started Everything For Everyone – an oral history of the New York Commune 2052-2072, a structurally fascinating utopia. It makes the conclusion of Nothing To See jump out at me as especially pessimistic – presenting, instead of [spoilers], a period in the near future when communal action overthrows the flailing Capitalist nation-states and fixes the world. The book's authors project themselves into the future: this is a project that will be undertaken by these real people, M.E. O'Brien and Eman Ahdelhadi, in another fifty years' time. Politically the book's focus on mutual aid networks and social reproduction theory* appeals to me, though my pessimism warns that nothing will ever go this well; narratively, the conceit of the book as a scholarly introduction followed by a collection of interviews allows a beautiful collection of voices and perspectives. We'll see how this one sticks the landing, and what my Trotskyist family members think about it. (Prose-wise, in the wake of Barzun it is again the case that I want to nitpick individual words).
12/03/2023
Another chapter of Everything For Everyone today, and a really interesting conversation with my activist sister about it. She says the revolution it's depicting strikes her as plausible, for the most part: people have been saying 'One day capitalism will finally eat itself' for a while, and it hasn't happened yet, but it's still a coherent thing to imagine happening. Meanwhile, I enjoy the quality this book shares with Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, a favourite work of mine: the future arises from the present in really weird ways. Today's trivial-seeming social club is tomorrow's only source of intercontinental communication. Also, I have heard from a lot of people,** Americans and other, who are sick of the centrality of New York in the discourse; this book is very deliberately global in scope. New York's in the title, but chapter two is about Palestine and that social club I mentioned arises from ships that circle the Indian Ocean. (I'm interested to see how this would chime with Robinson's New York 2140, which I suspect of being an active counter-inspiration, though on very little evidence).
13/03/2023
Today I read Leese Webster, by Ursula Le Guin and James Brunsman. It is a picture book about a spider living in an abandoned palace who begins to make her webs into art. I suspect it of also being about writing, but what's that Le Guin said about message versus applicability? A good fable is a multi-purpose tool like a bowl, you can put a lot of different things in it and it's still the same bowl, ready to be re-used. I read this book while looking for Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, a book whose applicability to my novel project I understood; still haven't found that book, but I went home from Victoria Library with six unrelated things none of which I'd been looking for, and having read a Le Guin story I'd never heard of. Serendipity is one of the things this course is for.
*[note: I have not actually read any social reproduction theory, but it came up in the conversation which recommended me the book, so: based on what I deduce social reproduction theory to be from the first third of this book alone, it appeals to me!]
**[note: two people. Guess I like to sound confident in this diary, huh.]
~
08/03/2023
...and I've started Everything For Everyone – an oral history of the New York Commune 2052-2072, a structurally fascinating utopia. It makes the conclusion of Nothing To See jump out at me as especially pessimistic – presenting, instead of [spoilers], a period in the near future when communal action overthrows the flailing Capitalist nation-states and fixes the world. The book's authors project themselves into the future: this is a project that will be undertaken by these real people, M.E. O'Brien and Eman Ahdelhadi, in another fifty years' time. Politically the book's focus on mutual aid networks and social reproduction theory* appeals to me, though my pessimism warns that nothing will ever go this well; narratively, the conceit of the book as a scholarly introduction followed by a collection of interviews allows a beautiful collection of voices and perspectives. We'll see how this one sticks the landing, and what my Trotskyist family members think about it. (Prose-wise, in the wake of Barzun it is again the case that I want to nitpick individual words).
12/03/2023
Another chapter of Everything For Everyone today, and a really interesting conversation with my activist sister about it. She says the revolution it's depicting strikes her as plausible, for the most part: people have been saying 'One day capitalism will finally eat itself' for a while, and it hasn't happened yet, but it's still a coherent thing to imagine happening. Meanwhile, I enjoy the quality this book shares with Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, a favourite work of mine: the future arises from the present in really weird ways. Today's trivial-seeming social club is tomorrow's only source of intercontinental communication. Also, I have heard from a lot of people,** Americans and other, who are sick of the centrality of New York in the discourse; this book is very deliberately global in scope. New York's in the title, but chapter two is about Palestine and that social club I mentioned arises from ships that circle the Indian Ocean. (I'm interested to see how this would chime with Robinson's New York 2140, which I suspect of being an active counter-inspiration, though on very little evidence).
13/03/2023
Today I read Leese Webster, by Ursula Le Guin and James Brunsman. It is a picture book about a spider living in an abandoned palace who begins to make her webs into art. I suspect it of also being about writing, but what's that Le Guin said about message versus applicability? A good fable is a multi-purpose tool like a bowl, you can put a lot of different things in it and it's still the same bowl, ready to be re-used. I read this book while looking for Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, a book whose applicability to my novel project I understood; still haven't found that book, but I went home from Victoria Library with six unrelated things none of which I'd been looking for, and having read a Le Guin story I'd never heard of. Serendipity is one of the things this course is for.
*[note: I have not actually read any social reproduction theory, but it came up in the conversation which recommended me the book, so: based on what I deduce social reproduction theory to be from the first third of this book alone, it appeals to me!]
**[note: two people. Guess I like to sound confident in this diary, huh.]
