Recent reading
May. 16th, 2024 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeMy reading momentum is low these weeks. I'm still working my way through one shelf of books, but actually most of the reading I've been doing is around the sides of that - 'small bit of a random philosophy book with breakfast,' 'handful of poems on a long dull afternoon,' 'the intro to a book from the five dollar bins at work that I can safely read while eating'. Also, I have taken a message from the fact that I am reading all of the fiction on the shelf, postponing all of the nonfiction, while listening to a bunch of nonficton podcasts: I've started listening to an audiobook of Children of Ash and Elm, a history of the Vikings which I've had a paper copy of for two years now without reading.
However, from the official list of Books In Queue:
Nova by Samuel Delany.
I don't get this book. Partly it's the thing I felt with Babel 17 where late Delany has ruined me for early Delany, partly it's the way this book centers on an unpleasant rivalry/revenge quest, but also, I just don't get this book. I don't particularly care about anyone in it; I don't know why it's the shape it is. I guess that means I'll read it again sometime? he said dubiously.
Nifty stuff: the way a character will periodically mention to another character something that's been true of their world the whole time but not yet relevant, i.e. the fact that disease has been so totally vanquished that nobody cares about dirtiness anymore. The sensory syrinx, an instrument that plays not just music, but visions and smells.
Unquiet Landscape by Christopher Neve.
British landscape painting book, one chapter per painter. DNF. I think this might be worth reading in between two visits to a British art gallery. Good things about the author's stated method: he saw every picture he wrote about, he was friends with a number of the still-living artists and had long talks with them. I like hearing what painters paint and why, but not enough to prevent me from wandering off.
In its first pages I am worried by phrases like 'Must have struck him', 'Must have produced in him', and, "Nash cannot have failed to notice the surreal brevity of the shutter's click in relation to the unimaginable antiquity of the sites he photographed and subsequently painted." To which I react, 'well, sure he can. Where are you getting this impression from?' A lot of the general claims being made make me call bullshit or at least call for citations. Music "Depends, like life, on development, which is why it has a hotline to the emotions." "God becomes a preoccupation in the landscape more easily than in the town. The fact that the land is instinct with suffering and hardship induces it." what do you mean. Sometimes an expert's wishy-washy-seeming claims resolve into exactitude when you know the subject better, but this is not criticism that offers a lot to me, as someone who doesn't know these painters.
I like the chapter on Ravilious more than the chapter on Nash, because Ravilious is cheerful and Neve is not viewing his paintings as infused with the inexpressible but rather the opposite, steadily insisting on being a cheerful assemblage of unusual bright shapes even when some of those shapes happen to be WWII tanks doing exercises.
The chapter on Stanley Spencer is a grand narrative because Spencer was an obsessive character in love with a single township. (The hints about his domestic and sexual life seem important but aren't expanded).
However, from the official list of Books In Queue:
Nova by Samuel Delany.
I don't get this book. Partly it's the thing I felt with Babel 17 where late Delany has ruined me for early Delany, partly it's the way this book centers on an unpleasant rivalry/revenge quest, but also, I just don't get this book. I don't particularly care about anyone in it; I don't know why it's the shape it is. I guess that means I'll read it again sometime? he said dubiously.
Nifty stuff: the way a character will periodically mention to another character something that's been true of their world the whole time but not yet relevant, i.e. the fact that disease has been so totally vanquished that nobody cares about dirtiness anymore. The sensory syrinx, an instrument that plays not just music, but visions and smells.
Unquiet Landscape by Christopher Neve.
British landscape painting book, one chapter per painter. DNF. I think this might be worth reading in between two visits to a British art gallery. Good things about the author's stated method: he saw every picture he wrote about, he was friends with a number of the still-living artists and had long talks with them. I like hearing what painters paint and why, but not enough to prevent me from wandering off.
In its first pages I am worried by phrases like 'Must have struck him', 'Must have produced in him', and, "Nash cannot have failed to notice the surreal brevity of the shutter's click in relation to the unimaginable antiquity of the sites he photographed and subsequently painted." To which I react, 'well, sure he can. Where are you getting this impression from?' A lot of the general claims being made make me call bullshit or at least call for citations. Music "Depends, like life, on development, which is why it has a hotline to the emotions." "God becomes a preoccupation in the landscape more easily than in the town. The fact that the land is instinct with suffering and hardship induces it." what do you mean. Sometimes an expert's wishy-washy-seeming claims resolve into exactitude when you know the subject better, but this is not criticism that offers a lot to me, as someone who doesn't know these painters.
I like the chapter on Ravilious more than the chapter on Nash, because Ravilious is cheerful and Neve is not viewing his paintings as infused with the inexpressible but rather the opposite, steadily insisting on being a cheerful assemblage of unusual bright shapes even when some of those shapes happen to be WWII tanks doing exercises.
The chapter on Stanley Spencer is a grand narrative because Spencer was an obsessive character in love with a single township. (The hints about his domestic and sexual life seem important but aren't expanded).
