Smatterings

• I had my first job interview upon coming back home yesterday, and my first rejection this morning. It was a case of other applicants having more experience specific to the job than I did. 
• I think I should drop some money for a bookshelf, but I don't know how I'd get it back to the apartment. May have to talk to the roommate about this.

This just isn't cutting it anymore.

• I think that this quarter, academically speaking, is going to be awesome. I'm finally taking archival classes for one, and will have an independent study in which I do nothing but study historic book making processes.
• I had my first encounter with with bookless library here on campus yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised at its efficiency. Sure, there is no browsing, but books requested actually do end up on hold within two hours, and I ended up biking home with a book bag so full my back was rather angry at me.
• There is still a lot I have to write about concerning my time at the Murie Center, but it will likely take a while for me to sit down a process. For now, here area few lingering photographs.

 One of my last projects involved assessing the condition of the film in the studio. We had about 16 reels, all in surprisingly good condition.

 Finally got a decent shot of a ground squirrel, since by the end of my time on the ranch they had become fat and lazy, and didn't mind being a foot away.

A box I found in Mardy's cabin turned out to be a portable film projector. It was a lot of fun to disassemble and to figure out what all of the little knobs and such did.

For the past few years now I've aimed to read about a book a week. Last year I only managed about a book a month, and the year before I don't think I actually kept a record.

This year has been pretty slow too. Technically I'm on my 14th or so book, and I don't think anyone needs to do the math to realize that we are not in the 14th week of the year. I've been reading consistently, but the books I have been picking up were not easily digestible. Typically it would take me a month or more to finish one, and then I would sit down with something short and finish that in a single sitting.

This time I spent about a month or so slogging through London, which was not nearly as good as what I've been reading lately, and the next item on my plate was a quick novel by Asimov that I finished in a few hours.

What I have been consistent with is writing reviews for each of the books I finished. I think so far Les Mis has been the only exception, and I have exempted it because I am still writing the review in my head. It's such a good book that I want to do it justice. All my reviews are linked to my account on library thing, and one I add one the widget on the sidebar is updated. The last few have been lazy, but I'm trying to up the quality into something that people might actually consider reading. I figure if that's almost all the writing I do, I should put more work into doing it well.

I myself don't usually read reviews of anything unless I have already read it or am in the middle of reading it. I use them not so much as a guide to what I should read next (because I have a list that stretches 100 books long to do that for me) but as a way to check my own impressions and understanding against some outside experience. And, I do get some bit of egotistical pleasure from reading reviews by people who really didn't get it too.

Next on the plate is Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. Lately I've been trying to brush up on my academics, listing Kanji compounds, practicing reading, etc... so it's good timing to read a book with a focus on Japan. Maybe I'll keep up with the good habit of updating this damn thing and put some notes down as I go through. I do this on paper as well, but true to my disorganized nature I keep forgetting which notebook I'm using for the purpose, and so my comments on books are spread out on random pages of random notebooks and are almost impossible to reference properly.

Books Books Books

Why do I love books? Because these sort of things exist:

The Voynich Manuscript

And

Codex Seraphinianus

The Reading Gap

via The Millions:
What is the biggest, most glaring gap in your lifetime of reading?

Most people who responded had a complete list, and as much as I want to follow their lead it would be more challenging to find one single gap and leave it at that. So I've been thinking about this for something like a week, and have finally decided that if I were told that I could only ever read one neglected part of my reading for the rest of my life, I would have to start concentrating on world myths, legends, and religious histories. My biblical education is painfully lacking. I went through the Catholic system, and was a confirmed Methodist, but I really don't have the christian myths down pat. And this doesn't just include biblical stories, but the epics that sprung from them, including Arthur and his holy grail.

Don't even get me started on anything outside of the Christian cannon. For a period of time I was obsessed with the Egyptians and Greeks, and managed to pick up quite a bit of their mythology, but I was more interested in using their civilizations as backdrops for my own imaginings than I was in remembering faithfully what I was learning. Same with Norse mythology. My Japanese fan phase got me acquainted with quite a bit of far eastern mythology, but when it comes to China or Taiwan I'm still very much in the dark. And if you say Russia or Africa or the Middle East I say forget about it.

Last semester I managed to pick up a ton of Campbell's mythology books during a library sale. The hope is that once I've finished with them this particular hole will be plugged and I can go work on the next one, contemporary fiction.

Book List 2009: #4 Ficciones

The following is cross-posted from Librarything.com.

Reviewing a book by a 'master' of literature always feels like a dangerous undertaking, so I am going to call this a response instead.

I read Borges for a class called Philosophy in Literature. While I'm not a total Philistine in literary matters, I would be lying if I said I caught half of Borges' references without having to look things up. Once I -did- look them up, my reading became much more enjoyable. Borges is utter nonsense unless you can figure out how to catch somehow the things he is throwing at you, and although I am sure that I've let the lion's share of the meaning in his work slip through my fingers on my first reading, what I did catch was delightful.

Borges is playful to the extreme. The stories in which he shines are those where he takes some strange idea and runs with it straight through. My favorite in the anthology has to be "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." The premise stripped bare of Borges' elaboration is idiotic, but the story is a great one none the less. I can hardly understand it.

While I read Ficciones I was constantly torn between crying out, "This is so stupid!" and "Oh god, this is genius!" at the exact same time. I'm inclined to think that his greatest stories are both.

There are also a few stories in Ficciones that are not nearly as interesting as the others. Perhaps if epic shorts like "Funes, the Memorious" had never been written, a story like "The Form of the Sword" would still be great fiction, but when compared to their neighbors, there are a few stories that do not incite nearly as much masochistic mental glee as the others.

Regardless, Borges is a master of imagination, and for that I tip my hat to him.

I've got three books vying for the next to-read. One, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets is required reading for class, so the chance that it will win out is high. I'm still slipping in chapters of Foundation and Empire here and there anyway.