Alex > Recent Status Updates

I wonder if it might have been a mistake not to develop Percival as a character. It was clearly a deliberate choice on Woolf's part and maybe I haven't read far enough yet to understand that choice, but at the moment of his perishing, I felt nothing. I'm observing the emotions of surviving characters now without feeling any connection to them. It feels like a missed opportunity.

Light, am I right?

Mmf. Dat prose.

This book is going to be a jumping-off point for some personal research into consciousness. I figure it's best to have a decent grasp on physics before getting into neuroscience and making comparisons with phenomenology, AI, etc. So from here I'll be moving onto Chaos: Making a New Science, and the work of Walter J. Freeman III. Of course there will also be Husserl, Hofstadter, and other philosophies to approach...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudos... I met one of these little guys today. He was hanging out between the staggered edges of the pages. Lanced a fruit fly right in front of me. New favorite animal.

I may pay the Ransom Center a visit next week when I travel to Austin. Has anyone had a chance to peruse Dave's collection?

I should probably stop beginning new books and just finish one already...

This is often beautiful, but I'm not yet convinced that the "play-poem" form (soliloquy after soliloquy) is doing anything for the content. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf accomplished similar shifts in perspective without having to put "Mrs. Ramsey said" at the end of every paragraph, which to me seems like a superior mode to be operating in. Obviously I still have plenty of time to change my mind on this matter.

A previous reading failed about five years ago. Knowing that this was written as a "play-poem" has made the style much easier to enter this time around. I'm also a much better reader than I was at that time.

Must... finish... today!

I'll be taking up The Waves once I get through the year in which it was written.

Tunnelling out of this thing by the end of the week.

Gotta get my ass in gear this weekend. The plan is to finish up the handful of fiction I've got going and begin The Waves.

This was great fun at first but it's getting pretty repetitive and therefore tedious.

I was expecting this to be waaayyyy worse based on Dave's own gripes with the thing, and it's true that the ratio of head to heart favors the head here, but the DFW personality is fully present in the prose and I'm enjoying every word. It's also economical in a way most of his other work isn't.

I thought I would plow through the remainder of The Tunnel this week, but I have come face to face with the fact that no such action is possible in the universe of Gass. So I will continue digging slowly, and in the meantime I've picked up this and Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, both of which I can digest and enjoy at a peppier pace.

Mr. X may have been the most difficult piece of fiction I've ever read. Anyone out there have some insight to provide?

I was enjoying this... "Mr. X" however might just plain... bad?