October/November Recap
sheeit, I missed an Oct update. Overall things are better than they were in Aug/September. Hurricane Ida arrived just as two of my closest friends were hit with Covid; one of them has long Covid and the other one, my housemate, passed away. September was mostly about deciding what to do with his stuff, especially his two dogs, and recovering from stress and grief. We found a home for one of the fluffballs (the extroverted pit mix) and I kept the other one (the introverted husky mix). The last two months have mostly involved trying to salvage the fall, and I've more or less been able to do so. Wrapping up two classes. Sent out a meaty book draft at the end of October. Been reading more. Continuing to make questionable decisions in both fantasy basketball and life.
Bob's Books [42/52]
Nnedi Okorafor, Shuri: The Search For Black Panther. Read this for my Health and Technology class. I don't know much about graphic novels or the Marvel universe, but it was a fun read and I'm inspired to teach a class on science fiction (I also watched and enjoyed Dune...gonna read that book over the holidays)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun. narrated by a robot. Basically a Black Mirror episode recast as highbrow speculative fiction. Starts strong and weakens midway through imo...has inspired me to read more Ishiguro (probably Never Let Me Go).
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys. Whitehead is so damn grim and good. For anyone who cares about US history and can successfully stave off depression, this is a must-read novel about the abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. Here's the
newspaper article that spurred Whitehead to delay writing Harlem Shuffle in order to write this one. The book is told from the perspective of one of the boys (now a grown man living in NYC) who reflects on the school's dark history.
Quote:
He’d thought them pathetic, moaning about what happened forty, fifty years ago, but recognized now it was his own pitiable state that revolted him, how scared he got seeing the name of the place and the pictures. No matter the front he put up, nowadays and back then, his bravado in front of Elwood and other boys. He’d been scared all the time. He was scared still.
Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle. This one, set in 1960s Harlem, lacks the urgency of The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad. It's essentially a heist novel involving an almost-thief named Carney, a furniture store owner who has one foot in the crooked world and one in the straight world. Lots of good parallels with the underground gambling world, which is unsurprising given Whitehead's interest in poker.
Quote:
Striver versus crook. Strivers grasped for something better—maybe it existed, maybe it didn’t—and crooks schemed about how to manipulate the present system. The world as it might be versus the world as it was. But perhaps Carney was being too stark. Plenty of crooks were strivers, and plenty of strivers bent the law.
Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
Normal People
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Rooney, a celebrated "millennial novelist" from Ireland, has become something of a literary sensation, and so I picked up one of her novels out of curiosity and ended up really enjoying them all. The first two read to me like highbrow soap operas where not much happens apart from lots of talking and sex and arguing; they're addictively readable. Her third book, Beautiful World, is intellectually heftier without losing the drama of the first two, and it's probably my favorite. One reason for the book's heft is its inclusion of emails between two young women—a famous thirtysomething writer (like Rooney herself) and an underpaid editor at a lit mag—in which they struggle to explain why their lives suck (even if, materially speaking, they're living well). “I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase," one of them writes, "and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition.”
Not much happening pokerwise. I've logged just over 100 hours for the year
and am looking forward to playing more consistently in 2022. Was fun to watch coverage of the Main...the HU battle between Aldemir and Holmes was great.
Nantucket wedding
high art
u talkin to me?