Brent Woo > Recent Status Updates

"It took him seven years to write that book, that's probably why it's so thin."

They have entered the lair of the FINAL BOSS. I can’t sleep.

just ripping through this monastery medieval murder mystery = Redwall+Sherlock+Aristotle

your soundtrack options are: (a) Machaut/Pérotin 14th century medieval masses/chanting, or (b) Age of Empires II vanilla soundtrack

om ॐ

"His is a face, however, difficult for Mason, or for many, to read much Sentiment in, so written upon is it, by so many years of hard Sunrises, Elements outside and in, left to rage as they might." ugh how do you WRITE like that

summary of so far: there's a reason why there's no exact equivalent of the word "spinster" for men

I would love Traister's take on a language like Russian, where the contemporary verbs for "marry" are different for men and women. when men get married, they "take a woman", and women "go behind a man".

[pregnant lady wondering if to keep child] But she knew for a fact what lay in wait was an endless path of thorns. She’d need the cruelty of a hardened criminal to condemn a child to that.

"As we are designed to acquire more languages than we encounter, so we are designed to neutralize more antigens than we encounter. Also, we cannot defend ourselves from this invasion, be it of antigens or sentences; just as the body cannot help but react to antigens, so it cannot avoid understanding a sentence it is exposed to"

Moro and his analogies

"Nobody has yet done a study of the effect of fonts on the taste of mashed potatoes, but a study HAS been done on the effects of font on attitudes toward preparing food. ... Subjects who were presented with the recipe in a difficult-to-read font rated the recipe as more difficult and were less likely to attempt it"

P throws the best shade
— I was not welcome. In my presence, dogs howled, milk turned, bread failed to rise.
— her destiny 'spite all may lie with this craz'd Christless wreck of a Husband, 

"He holds no quarrel with the Creator’s sovereignty, but is repeatedly appall’d at the lapses in Attention. We are taught— we believe— that it is love of the Creation which drives the Philosopher in his Studies. Emerson is driven, rather, by a passionate Resentment."

this is almost TOO exciting

turned out to be a black/white race story. I think this is meant to be read by like 60 y/o dads who are trying to learn not to be racist—complete with a 'Nam PTSD vet to empathize with. it's written with intentional gravitas but I'm getting very little from it.

oh! this is great! "Counterparts" is a trainwreck, in the can't-look-away sense. "A Little Cloud" is devastating and I'm uncomfortably close to identifying with Little Chandler.

there we go. after a week of false starts on crummy books I forgot how easy it is to watch KOK bumble around norway

gonna go through this slow, just a few a day. it's just gorgeous, placid landscapes so far. any tips/readings/recs about poetry let me know.

"in the cellar a poor man weeps / for he can no longer sing a song"

I forgot about this, I put it down over a year ago lol
sat down and enjoyed the chunk I read but man o days he is long-winded

good good. fancy writing for a rough childhood in brooklyn

"They faced a Rubicon and their lost happiness was on the other shore: he had to cross." — man o days, Russians know how to cliffhang a first part. ugh! so good!

pretty good so far, seems to be a fun Spy vs Spy / Cat & Mouse story

"That same thousand-yard Tiger Woods stare is what makes someone like Murakami or Roth or DeLillo or Thomas Berger so eerie and inspiring. They’ve grasped that there’s nothing to one side of you. Just you and the course." — I've quoted so much of this I've basically transcribed half of the book. awesome. I aspire one day to have 'conversations' like this

"He found it hard to spend the entire day dressed. He was too lazy to dine at the home of anyone other than the informal, mostly bachelor homes, where he could remove his tie, unbutton his vest, and even "lounge" or take a cat nap." me_irl

found this tonight, had to grab and start it: it's a indie spy-assassin novel where Johann Sebastian Bach is somehow a character

by the way, this is happening RIGHT NOW in Seattle, today a man with a Nazi armband was seen on a bus

https://redd.it/70svt9

and later, knocked out downtown

https://redd.it/70svm4

"I never participated in any of this. Whenever I received orders, I not only didn't follow them, but made sure they were disobeyed. For my part, I leave all this with CLEAN HANDS and a CLEAR CONSCIENCE."

that's not enough when it's n-zis.

(cf Kurt Gerstein)

where were the artists during the war?

Time and again my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep (131)

I just luxuriate in these words

We—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet, or a Beethoven quartet, is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music ; we are the thing itself. (72) sigh

painter painter painter!