Jonas David's Blog, page 8

Re-Reading: a special occasion

I very rarely re-read books. There is so much out there, infinitely much out there to read, that how can I spend the precious little time I have on this earth reading something I already read?

I’ll tell you how: when it’s such an indescribably good read that I haven’t stopped thinking about it in the four years since I read it.

I’m talking about The Peregrine by J.A. Baker, which I’ve just recently started reading for the second time.

How can a book composed entirely of the experiences of one man’s single winter of hawk-watching be one of the best books I’ve ever read? Because good writing is not about ‘what happens’ but about ‘how it feels.’ And the words are so delicious that I have to keep putting the book down every few pages to savor them. I originally read it on Kindle, and now I have a physical version, the 50th anniversary edition in paperback. I find myself constantly caressing the pages…

Already, too, I sense that I’m enjoying this even more than the first time. My reading experiences over the years have added to my appreciation of it, somehow.

I may have to make this a regular occasion… maybe 1 or 2 rereads per year, of the very best I’ve ever read. Certain books that have had a deep effect on me.

My tastes have completely, radically changed since 5 or so years ago. They seem to do this quite often. So any book that can stay with me that long, and be just as amazing the second time years later, must be a masterpiece.

If you have a taste for nature and beauty, and the natural darkness therein, I recommend it strongly.

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Jackson is the queen of subtly blurring reality and imagination into a single, unnerving gradient. This story follows Natalie, a 17 year old just starting college, and her slow descent into solipsism and possible madness.

The more you read, the less sure you become of what has really happened, and what has been dreamed up by Natalie, who spends nearly half the pages in the book inside her own head, either imagining pulling people apart like they were dolls or moving the houses about the town as if she were a giant, or other bizarrely dark things.

This was Jackson’s first novel, and my second favorite so far, after Hill House. If you enjoy subtle strangeness and great prose, recommended.

Oops I read a bunch of books and didn’t blog about them again

Wow, it’s been a while! Here are some more books I read and some thoughts on them to close out the year

Agamemnon’s Daughter by Ismail Kadare

I blazed through this one in two sittings, extremely engaging and also strange and upsetting. I picked this originally because I decided I wanted to read books from each country in the world, and started looking through the A countries… Albania, okay!

This book contains 3 stories, the first one, the title story, is about a state worker who is in love with the daughter of a high ranking official. He is invited to a parade, and given a seat that only an important person should have. The story is so full of paranoia and fear, and much of it focuses on him wondering why he has this seat as he walks through the security and crowds to get there. Very unnerving, and a focus on the perils of totalitarianism

The next story ‘The Blinding Order’ is another chilling portrayal of a totalitarian state, and how fear of your neighbors can be used to control the people. The state initiates an order that anyone who has the ‘evil eye’ is to be blinded. If you volunteer to be blinded you get some payment, of course turning in others has a reward as well, with no real definition of what ‘the evil eye’ is, it is easy for people to report their enemies or those they have grudges against, and so on.

The final story is a strange one about the Great Wall in China and an invading army.

Very gripping read overall and recommended!

The Treasure Chest by Johann Peter Hebel

I read this because Sebald mentioned it in a book of his that I was reading. It is a collection of short stories from the early 1800s that were at one time featured in an almanac. They are extremely short stories, some are basically jokes that are only a page or two long. While there were a few stand out stories, after a while these all began to blend together, since they all followed the same pattern of featuring cheeky rogues or Jewish stereotypes scamming each other in various ways, and Hebel saying ‘but you shouldn’t do this’ at the end. Historically, worth reading though

The Black Lizard and Beast in the Shadows by Edogawa Ranpo

I found these two short novels written in the 30s by Japanese Crime/Horror writer Ranpo to be starkly different in quality. The first one read to me like a comic book. The villain was almost a caricature, and it made the gruesomeness of the crimes hard to take seriously. The second one was much better in my opinion, and was about two crime writers whose style varied, and one trying to catch the other in a real life crime. This one had much better quality prose in my opinion, and was also very engaging and darkly beautiful.

All the Names by Jose Saramago

A clerk working in the central registry of an unnamed country accidentally pulls the filecard of a random person, and becomes obsessed with finding out who she is. This book had lots to say about life and death and what makes us matter, to ourselves or others. One of the final scenes takes place in a graveyard where we find out that a shepherd has been switching around the name plates on newly dug graves, so now no one can be sure who is buried where… if he’s the only one who knows this, does it make any difference? Many thoughts such as this one were provoked throughout the book. But I disliked the writing style quite a bit, and am not sure I’ll try his other books for now.

A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald

This series of six interlocking essays about different writers and artists is another Sebald masterpiece, and one of my favorite reads of the year. Each essay describes briefly the life and ways of these creatives, and as I read I found the subtle pattern (there is always a subtext with Sebald) was leading me ever more internal, ever more separate from the ways of society. Until the final essay, on the painter Jan Peter Tripp, seemed completely disconnected from the painter, with the objects of each of his paintings hanging in a void, yet still connected with other art and the world in unexpected ways.

An amazing journey, beautiful, subtle, and as always, a little dark.

The Tanners by Robert Walser

I read this one because Walser was the subject of one of Sebald’s essays, and I found his life and way of writing to be very interesting. I also have found multiple amazing reads by going on Sebald’s suggestions. Walser liked to write on scraps of paper in a weird ancient german script, in letters so tiny and cramped they could barely be read. He would design his stories to take up exactly the amount of space that he had on whatever scrap he happened to be writing on.

This novel was about several brothers and one sister in the Tanner family, and their various thoughts and actions. It’s hard to describe because not much happens, which is usually fine for me, but I had a hard time caring about much in this one. I liked many of the lovely descriptions of nature and wonderfully evocative descriptions of all kinds of things, but large sections of the book were monologues that the characters would give to each other, which were much less enjoyable to read. Incredible prose, but I only wish there were more of it, and less monologuing.

The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani

This one was a hallucinatory nightmare that was also full of humor and beauty. About an old man in a hospital that may or may not be some kind of afterlife, I was never sure exactly what was real or imagined, but the characters and the vivid, sharp prose were delicious to read. A quick, highly recommended read if you like dark, unnerving beauty.

The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima

I simply can’t get enough Mishima. Probably my second favorite author right now, right behind Sebald. This one follows a young sailor and his love for a new girl in town. A tale as old as time, but told so well, and with the trademark beautiful prose of all Mishima. However this one is the first I’ve read without the dark, sickening undertones of glorified death. This was pure, joyful and beautiful, though I almost found it less memorable for its purity. The dichotomy of beauty and death in his other books is what always struck me so much. When it’s all beauty and loveliness, it is almost less, somehow…

And that’s it! I’ll try to keep up to date more this year. I’ve been thinking I will try to take notes as I read, so I can have more clear thoughts about the book when I do post about it. We’ll see how that goes!

Bye Bye 20 20

Is it over? It’s really almost over! A year that has been a symbol of awful for so many people. Obviously switching a number at an arbitrary time won’t end any of the terrible things so many people are going through, but it’s a useful thing to our human minds to imagine that it will spur some change for the better. So, here’s to a new number spawning new goodness in our lives!

GOALS

Though I wouldn’t be surprised if most people’s new years goals involved simply surviving and staying as happy as possible, whatever that takes, I do have some personal writing and reading goals. Here they are! To hold myself accountable, since I didn’t write any down last year so am not even sure if I succeeded…

Writing goals:

Finish this new thing I started writing about some people lost in a forest. I expect it will be a novella. Finish cleaning up the thing about birds I just finished writing, and send it a few placesRe edit The Observer, my novella from a few years ago, and send it some more placesWrite 5 short stories and actually send them places.

Okay! Doesn’t sound like much, but I think finishing the forest thing will take a lot of my time. I just spent a year and a half writing the bird thing, which was only 20k words… so, I am being a bit ambitious to complete the next project in one year… but I think I can do it!

Reading goals:

Don’t buy any books! This sounds counterintuitive, but I have SO MANY books sitting around waiting to be read. I want to force myself to actually read the books I have instead of being distracted by constant new shiny things. There are exceptions to this, which will be mentioned in my other goals.

Read 40 books! I keep not reaching the magical number of 40. (really i’d like to do 50 but, baby steps) This year is the year!

Always be reading: 1 Novel, 1 Short story collection, 1 Poetry collection, 1 book in Spanish. Since I don’t own very many short stories, poetry, or books written in Spanish, buying these if I run out will be an exception to my ‘don’t buy’ rule.

Increase my country list by 5. I have been keeping track of which country each book I read comes from, and so far I’ve read authors from 25 different countries. I want to read 5 new countries this year, which is a very low number, but I don’t want to impede my main goal of clearing off my shelves too much. I may be able to find 5 new countries in my shelves, but if not, this is another exception to the ‘don’t buy’ rule.

And there they are! Okay future self, you better have done all this!!

What are your reading and writing goals?

450

It took me just about a year and a half to read 50 books.

I know because when I reached 400 I blogged about how that was such a paltry number for a life of reading. I still feel that way about 450.

In fact, I feel like I could probably lower my number to around 150, or less. Because almost everything I read before a three or four ago was complete garbage, and I can’t even remember anything I read more than ten years ago, and many of the books on that list are just there because I know I read them, even if I can’t remember any of the contents.

I would like to be able to read 50 books per year. That seems like a reasonable goal. Really, all that should take is an hour or two of reading per day, since most books seem to take 6-8 hours to read.

But easier said than done. The only reason I was able to read as many books as I did this year is because many of them were very short. And also several of them were trash, which is very easy to read quickly.

But why do I worry about quantity anyway? I guess, because time feels so short. Every year goes by quicker. And also every year the books I read get better and better and there are so many I’ve never even heard of which are probably still even better… It makes me happy and sad at the same time to think of the never ending supply of amazing books to read.

The poetry of Jorge Luis Borges

I’ve read his many stories off and on throughout my life, but never his poetry until this year. From reading his memorable stories, certain words and ideas have come to carry a lot of ‘Borgesness’ with them: Labyrinth, hexameter, tigers, algebra, chess, libraries, mirrors, coins–and this carries through to his poetry as well.

This could be recency bias, but Borges poetry is even more impactful and beautiful to me than his stories. There is such a density of ideas and imagery, in only a few lines I am transported to other times, places and mind spaces. Even the simplest acts are somehow elevated to the strange and mysterious when described by Borges. For example, dropping a coin off a ship:

To a Coin

Cold and stormy the night I sailed from Montevideo.
As we rounded the Cerro,
I threw from the upper deck
a coin that glinted and winked out in the muddy water,
a gleam of light swallowed by time and darkness.
I felt I had committed an irrevocable act,
adding to the history of the planet
two endless series, parallel, possibly infinite:
my own destiny, formed from anxieties, love and futile upsets
and that of that metal disk
carried away by the water to the quiet depths
or to far-off seas that still wear down
the leavings of Saxon and Viking.
Any moment of mine, asleep or wakeful,
matches a moment of the sightless coin’s.
At times I have felt remorse,
at others, envy
of you, existing, as we do, in time and its labyrinth,
but without knowing it.

This poem so spoke to me because I have found myself with similar thoughts. I often wonder about the fate of objects, or of their history. The simple fact that things continue to exist when out of our sight and out of our, or anyones, lives, is something odd to contemplate. Where is the first coin you ever touched? It exists somewhere, regardless of if anyone ever knows that it has claim to that title. From the moment it left your hand it continued on its journey through the world, touching other lives, other places, all of them now connected to you in some way unknown to them.

In a similar vein, this prose poem about a dagger struck me:

The Dagger

A dagger lies in a drawer.

It was forged in Toledo at the end of the last century. Luis Melian Lafinur gave it to my father, who brought it from Uruguay. Evaristo Carriego once handled it.

People who catch sight of it cannot resist playing with it, almost as if they had been looking for it for some time. The hand eagerly grasps the expectant hilt. The powerful, passive blade slides neatly into the sheath.

The dagger itself is after something else.

It is more than a thing of metal. Men dreamed it up and fashioned it for a very precise purpose. In some eternal way it is the same dagger that last night killed a man in Tacuarembo, the same daggers that did Caesar to death. Its will is to kill, to spill sudden blood.

In a desk drawer, among rough drafts and letters, the dagger endlessly dreams its simple tiger’s dream, and, grasping it, the hand comes alive because the metal comes alive, sensing in every touch the killer for whom it was wrought.

Sometimes it moves me to pity. Such force, such purpose, so impassive, so innocently proud, and the years go past, uselessly.

Thinking of objects as having a mind and a purpose is perhaps part of the human condition, but I think Borges takes it a step further here when imagining the dagger’s needs and desires as continuing on, even in the darkness of the drawer, with no one looking at it, or even thinking about it. The dagger bides it’s time, waiting for the chance to fulfil its purpose. Will the dagger tarnish and rust to pieces before it can do what it was made for?

These are just two of my favorites, but there are hundreds more, all as stimulating and beautiful.

The collection I purchased, the Penguin Deluxe edition, has the Spanish alongside the English translation, so I hope to be able to reread these in a couple years, and enjoy the original language.

If you are a fan of Borges stories, I highly recommend these. Even if you’ve never been interested in poetry before, you will find yourself suddenly enamored with these poems.

Both quoted poems are from The Self and the Other (El otro, el Mismo) published 1964

Tim Heidecker’s Fear of Death: a narrative on our current and future destruction

If you’ve heard of Tim Heidecker, you most likely know him for his slew of comedy shows, such as Tim and Eric: Awesome show, Great Job, Tom Goes to the Mayor, or the more recent Moonbase 8. But he is also a very accomplished, though far lesser-known, musician.

Fear of Death is his third studio release of a non-comedy album, and I have barely stopped listening to it since it came out in September. As a bonus, the album was done in collaboration with Weyes Blood, who I’ve come to believe, after listing to her album Titanic Rising, is actually a reincarnation of Karen Carpenter.

Folk rock and country are not usually my taste in music, but this album has grabbed me so hard not only because Heidecker really knows how to write an earworm, but also because the lyrics are such a perfect mirror of the times we are living through.

As I’ve been listening to it repeatedly, I’m starting to see a narrative that links all the songs together. It’s possible that, being a writer, I’ve just made all these connections myself, but I’d like to think there is intention in the ordering of these songs.

Come away with me.

The first real song on the album (second track, after the prelude) is an upbeat, seemingly optimistic tune about moving out of a stinking city into the country, where there are “green hills and golden fields, and lakes that are made for swimming.” The lyrics capture the hope that many of us feel for a better, cleaner, more affordable life. “We could live like kings, if we move out of the city” and we could “make our own honey from a family of bees.”

The song builds to a crescendo of almost religious fervor, repeating the line “the green hills and the golden fields, and lakes that are made for swimming” with increased intensity and what sounds like a choir of backing vocals. The overall impression is one of a desperate hope that the grass will be greener somewhere else.

Backwards

The third track on the album, this one is more low-key and country. It opens with a description of children playing and laughing in the water, with no idea that “we’re moving backwards.” In the next verse we find out what is meant by this, with lines such as “grass is getting browner, trees are falling in the heat” and “don’t it make you cry, don’t it make you wanna lay down and die.”

This song for me perfectly captures the hopelessness of watching the natural world die around me. In the previous song, the lyrics described someone trying to escape the heat and stink of the city, and now, we find that even in the country the trees and grass are dying. The next verse follows with the lines “the sun is setting on the good times, oh no,” and “funny, when I was younger we loved the future, but the future knew we were moving backwards.” These lines really struck me because I have such strong memories of imagining the amazing future when I was a kid, and even into my late 20’s. All the advances in technology and discovery had convinced me that only improvements and incredible things lay ahead, and I had always been excited for what came next. But that feeling died sometime in the past ten years or so. The future now seems to be nothing but death and wearing down, and it’s hard to think about it with any kind of hope.

The song ends with a description of moving to a cabin in Canada and skipping rocks at a lake, and the repetition of the line “Oh Canada, our bald eagles are moving up there for good” followed by the closing line “the rest of us suckers would be moving up there if we could.” This is an echo of the previous song, with the singer moving on to somewhere else, where things may be greener and happier.

Fear of Death

The title track of the album is a happy, upbeat song about having nothing to live for. With lines like “I’ve learned all I am gunna learn” and “I don’t see the value in having fun” and the earwormy chorus “I think I’m done growing, fear of death is keeping me alive” the song seems to follow directly from the previous two, describing someone who has given up on a world that is crumbling around them, and has lost all value in their life, and only continues to live because they fear the end. This use of bright, happy music combined with depressing or morbid lyrics is a signature style of Heidecker, as seen on his previous album ‘What the Brokenhearted do,’ and it works perfectly for this song.

But behind the cheery sounds is a truth that hides in many people: they don’t have an answer to the question What is the reason for living? Is it simply to stay alive? It’s something many of us shrink away from thinking about. I’m reminded of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, contemplating on how even if he were confined to a single square-foot on the peak of a mountain, where any motion would cause him to fall to his death, he would still feel impelled to try to stay alive, up there in the icy wind, unable to move, with nothing to do but struggle, to use all his energy to simply keep living.

Nothing

The sixth track on the album is a Heidecker and Weyes Blood duet, featuring a solo piano and a haunting melody. It opens with the memorable and devastating chorus:

“Nothing, that’s what it amounts to, they say. A black void waiting down the road for us one day. We’re all gunna die alone, there ain’t nobody gunna carry us home, and there ain’t no place where the angels roam.”

This feels to me, again, to be the next step in a progression from optimism to dread, to finally simply waiting for the black void at the end. This singer has gotten over his fear of death.

The lyrics swap between the chorus, posted above, and snippets of the singer’s life, such as meeting hollywood friends for drinks, or going to a big premier, but they are presented as mundane, pointless, and hard to focus on. And for the average listener who is not a movie star, these lines are even more disconnected and difficult to identify with, giving the feeling of ‘who cares’? Which, in the world of this song, is all that’s left to feel about life.

“Ain’t it overwhelming breathing in? Ain’t it overwhelming breathing out again?”

This song might be my favorite on the album, and perfectly captures the disillusionment of accepting mortality–both our mortality, and nature’s.

Property

The most rocking song on the album, in my opinion, asks the question: “Are there gunna be cemeteries a hundred years from now?”

The character-the idea of a personality that I’ve got in my head up till now-in this song, is someone who has lost all hope, and has accepted death, and is now contemplating that not only is his body temporary and mortal, but even his gravesite won’t last, because “we won’t resist the urge to turn it into property.”

The chorus of Property calls back to the chorus of the very first track we mentioned, Come Away With Me. In Come Away With Me the singer extols the green hills and golden fields that he could enjoy if only he could get out of the city. In Property, there is no hope for those fields to last, because “property is all we’ll see in those fields of green.”

The lyrics go on to describe the construction of a highrise over the gravesite, singing that “the dead won’t care, they’ll just be lying there” and also noting that “we did it to the Native Americans.”

This seems to be the final letting go of all hope of meaning, the acceptance, if bitterly, that not only will life end, but your legacy will be erased, and probably sooner than you think.

Oh How We Drift Away

The final song on the album, and the only one in which Heidecker doesn’t sing, is written and sung by Weyes Blood. The song is about how we become disconnected from our friends over time, until we don’t know each other anymore. “You can take me out of your phone, if you come knocking I won’t be home”

The first two verses are down to earth scenarios about trying to catch up with an old friend, but the third and final verse pulls back to a cosmic view and shrinks the previous scenarios into meaninglessness:

Twenty thousand years ago — can you even imagine
In the Chauvet caves women painting on the wall
Pictures of their memories, pictures of their stories
Pictures of their love affairs, pictures of their worries
I wonder if they ever dreamt of us at all

Oh, we stand on their bones and walk on their souls
And the children who lived grew into women and men
And painted over their mothers’ work again and again
Again and again

In this final image of the song and of the album, human history is seen to be a fleeting dream, a fragile handprint on a cave wall that will be covered up, if not by other paintings, then by dust, or moss, or graffiti of the proceeding centuries. Everything will be forgotten.

This is another kind of death, the final death. The final end of a person is not when their breath has stopped, but when all memory of them is gone.

And farther out from that, the true death to fear is not the death of any individual, but the death of humanity. A death that seems, sometimes, to be rushing toward us with increasing speed.

Good Choice Read awards

Every year a certain book-rating website holds what they call the Choice Awards where millions of members vote to let you know which books they have read.

Of course, this is presented as an award for ‘best’ book in a given category, but in reality, it is simply an award for being the most read.

With twenty(!) books in each category of the semifinal round, there is little chance that anyone is picking the ‘best’ book after having read them all. The vast majority of the nearly 3 million voters (so far) will be choosing between 3 or 4 books, or will simply click on the one book they’ve read, or heard of, in each group.

So what is this award for? Well, for being popular, clearly.

At the end of this very long and involved voting process we will finally know which book the most people have read or heard of this year. Which we probably could have easily done just by looking at whichever book got the most ratings this year.

But voting is fun, right? And everyone gets to feel validated that a book they read got an award.

But should that be the point of an award? From a marketing standpoint, sure, I suppose. An award-giving organization wants to award books that people have heard of, otherwise no one will care about the award. It’s a sort of catch 22 in our profit-driven world, where even the awarding entity needs to make money and have name recognition.

But as a reader, I have zero interest in the winner of a ‘most popular’ award. If I’ve already heard of a book because millions of people are talking about it, I don’t need to see an award telling me that millions of people are talking about it. Awards should exist to raise awareness of quality things that people might not have heard of, not to congratulate things for being well known.

Of course, an awareness raising award is much more difficult to put into practice than crowdsourcing your awards. Awards based on merit would require a person or group of people to read a large number of the books coming out that year, and pick out not only the best of the best, but specifically the best ones that flew under the radar.

But wouldn’t that be so much more interesting, and exciting to look forward to?

Instead we get the equivalent of an award for the most awards. And who cares about that?

2020 books catch up part 2

It’s happened again. I read a bunch of books and didn’t write anything about them. So here we go! What have I been reading lately?

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

This was a short, intense read about a man returning to the town of his birth to find his father. Though also, it is way more than that. The story is packed full of ghosts and visions, and swaps in pov and is written in a very fluid way that was at first confusing to read. But eventually I got into the flow, and let go of the need to know who was thinking or seeing what, and just went along with the experience. It ended up being a very vivid and powerful story, one that I will probably have to read again for full effect and understanding.

Fellowship of the Ring

I’d read this before as a teen, but remembered almost nothing of it. The main thing that stuck out to me was how charming and silly it was for the most part. The hobbits are so useless as adventurers that it makes you really like them. There are also so many songs that are quite enjoyable to read, and the scenes with Tom Bombadil and Goldberry were by far my favorite. It’s too bad they were cut out of the movies, probably because everything needed to be dramatic and ‘gritty’ in hollywood in those days. For about the last third of the book I did get quite bored with it, because it was all about action and I already knew what happened. Otherwise, a decent read.

The Green Child by Herbert Read

A strange and evocative read. It opens with a literal green child walking out of the moors into a small village in England, and the villages reaction to this strange occurance. Then we switch over to the story of some Jacobin revolutionaries in Buenos Aires, and end with an out of this world utopia description. A wild read, and one that had me glued to the page. Hard to categorize, but easy and thrilling to read. A definite recommendation for all philosophers.

The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan (Patricia Highsmith)

The story of a young woman who is completely struck by, and instantly enamoured with an older woman who walks into her shop. The two circle around each other, unable to avoid their attraction, despite the push and pull of other things in their lives. This is one of the most perfect description of young, helpless love that I’ve ever read. It perfectly captures the confusion, desperation, and intensity of an infatuation that won’t quit. If you didn’t know the author, you probably wouldn’t believe this book was written in the 40s. For its time, it was a one of a kind. All other lesbian fiction of the era ended invariably with the characters either going straight, or killing themselves. I loved that this one hinted at both of those options toward the end, but then went its own way. Highly recommended.

The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde

If you want stories with a moral that aren’t preachy or groan inducing, then these are for you. These are written in the form of children’s tales but were very enjoyable and enlightening to me as an adult. I would read these to kids if I had any.

One, None, and a Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello

The seemingly innocuous realization that others see him differently than he sees himself causes the character Moscarda to slowly lose his mind. How can communication be possible if the person you speak to hears your words coming from a completely other person that they have invented for you? How can anyone truly be themselves, or anyone at all, when we are a different person through every set of eyes that see us? These, and other thoughts, slowly wear away at Moscarda’s personality until he has no idea who he is, and sets out to extreme actions to prove to everyone that he is not how they see him. An interesting and a bit unsettling read.

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn

A collection of Japanese folk tales, followed by a few essays on insects. This is a weird little collection and extremely entertaining. A window into the myths, ideas and culture of Japan.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

How have I gone my whole life without reading this hilarious play? One I’ll probably read again, and would love to see live. Somehow I never expected this title would be a pun. A quick, fun read that everyone should enjoy.

a scrap from 5-22-19

Here is something i wrote in a journal

Sunlight heats, feeds, drys, kills, burns, melts, pushes with the tiniest thrust, like the breath of stars. Catch the sun in your hand and you’ve caught the world. All power comes from it, all being, all form and motion. Do or don’t, the sun is there, will not ever stop, will always be. Time to us is a blink to it. From the past, a photon traveling, wrecking(?illegible) into your skin, triggering a feeling of warmth, or into your eye to birth a color. That photon traveled a million miles to bring you that tiny sensation. Thank it, and the sun. For all senses worship of the sun is the most logical of religions.