![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Life Update
Sep. 3rd, 2015 10:32 amIt has been quite busy lately. Not just with my vacation, and with the wedding stuff (and I wasn't kidding about the wedding when I quoted Blue Fringe. More or less my whole week after the wedding, my evenings were tied up with visiting family in some form or other. Which was great, don't get me wrong, but it was exhausting. I'd be worn down from a tough day at work and then I'd get a text from my mother explaining where they needed me to drive out to for the night's festivities.)
Mostly, life has been busy because work is busy. Work is busy because of ridiculous customers and ridiculous overpromises to said customer from my boss. We told them we could deliver in November if we got the order in June. We got the order in July, and then there was about a month of back and forth between us and the customer on contract terms... and we still have to deliver in November.
Because of life's busy-ness, my reading has slowed a bit. But here's what I have read.
-Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, massive and dreamy and alternately marvelously funny and painfully dated. It's about baseball, American dreams, diversity and social justice. It's also about anti-communism and capitalism and World War II. And it's about literature and the idea of "American literature" and at times Roth's prose is so impressive it's overwhelming, and it seems to say something about how the idea of a Great American Novel is not so much about telling the American story as it is about American literature conforming to the American progress narrative: the GAN is not impossible because no single novel can cover the scope of Americanness, it's impossible because our deepest belief is that every generation brings a new chance to achieve more than the last generation.
As a baseball novel, I think it stands among the all-time greats, in the depth and humor and imagination of its portrayal of the American pasttime. It tells the story of the Ruppert Mundys, a major league team evicted from their home by wartime needs and forced on a madcap Odyssean journey around the league as the perpetual away team. The humor is particularly driven by the tension between baseball conservatism and the outrageous ideas of a Bill Veeck-inspired character, to sometimes bizarre but quite often funny effect.
I was less amused by some of the stuff about anti-communism. When it went specific, its mockery of particular notable anti-communists felt dated and obscure as topical humor often does, and when it went broad, it went overbroad in a way that too often felt sympathetic to the brutality of the Soviet system.
-Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, probably the first time I've read Hemingway since high school. I admire how little he cares for style conventions, how he mashes up Joyce and Woolf in their rejection of Victorianism, yet sounds so unpretentious doing it. I also admire his feel for sentence shape, how the early novel features short sentences punctuated by dialogue, the hectic pace of Paris life, but once the novel moves to Spain we get his famously rolling run-on sentences. And I love Lady Brett and am keeping in the back of my mind the possibility of asking for genderqueer Lady Brett in future fic exchanges.
-Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest, which I am about a quarter through and am enjoying approximately as much as I enjoyed The Three Body Problem. I'm anticipating an interesting move toward some Foundation-y ideas shortly in the guise of the Wallfacer initiative.
Mostly, life has been busy because work is busy. Work is busy because of ridiculous customers and ridiculous overpromises to said customer from my boss. We told them we could deliver in November if we got the order in June. We got the order in July, and then there was about a month of back and forth between us and the customer on contract terms... and we still have to deliver in November.
Because of life's busy-ness, my reading has slowed a bit. But here's what I have read.
-Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, massive and dreamy and alternately marvelously funny and painfully dated. It's about baseball, American dreams, diversity and social justice. It's also about anti-communism and capitalism and World War II. And it's about literature and the idea of "American literature" and at times Roth's prose is so impressive it's overwhelming, and it seems to say something about how the idea of a Great American Novel is not so much about telling the American story as it is about American literature conforming to the American progress narrative: the GAN is not impossible because no single novel can cover the scope of Americanness, it's impossible because our deepest belief is that every generation brings a new chance to achieve more than the last generation.
As a baseball novel, I think it stands among the all-time greats, in the depth and humor and imagination of its portrayal of the American pasttime. It tells the story of the Ruppert Mundys, a major league team evicted from their home by wartime needs and forced on a madcap Odyssean journey around the league as the perpetual away team. The humor is particularly driven by the tension between baseball conservatism and the outrageous ideas of a Bill Veeck-inspired character, to sometimes bizarre but quite often funny effect.
I was less amused by some of the stuff about anti-communism. When it went specific, its mockery of particular notable anti-communists felt dated and obscure as topical humor often does, and when it went broad, it went overbroad in a way that too often felt sympathetic to the brutality of the Soviet system.
-Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, probably the first time I've read Hemingway since high school. I admire how little he cares for style conventions, how he mashes up Joyce and Woolf in their rejection of Victorianism, yet sounds so unpretentious doing it. I also admire his feel for sentence shape, how the early novel features short sentences punctuated by dialogue, the hectic pace of Paris life, but once the novel moves to Spain we get his famously rolling run-on sentences. And I love Lady Brett and am keeping in the back of my mind the possibility of asking for genderqueer Lady Brett in future fic exchanges.
-Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest, which I am about a quarter through and am enjoying approximately as much as I enjoyed The Three Body Problem. I'm anticipating an interesting move toward some Foundation-y ideas shortly in the guise of the Wallfacer initiative.