Experiments in SciFi and Fantasy (and Hello again, Third Culture Literature: It has been a long time)

 

I am reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor (for . . . reasons), and I still have Ursula K. LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven on the go ( for those following along, that means War and Peace is neglected for the moment, though I made it as far as the wolf-hunting part, which is roughly half way).

Remember how I wrote that blog , which, among other things, tried to define "Third Culture Literature," and that academic book trying to suggest there were specific characteristics of  Third Culture Literature?  Yeah.  Been a while for me too.  

Anyway, Bujold writes "Radial symmetry was popular among the tiny creatures occupying the ecological niches held by insects on Earth" (17) and "Do you think they could be like those birds from Earth, that pick parasites off cattle?" (21).  

LeGuin writes about Dr. William Haber's office in Portland:  "It did not have a view of Mount Hood [. . .] But on one of the walls was a big photographic mural of Mount Hood" (6).  It is the absence of this mural that first signals the world-changing effect of Orr's dreams (24-5).

These two incidents of the unfamiliar fantastic and scientific compared to Earth (radials, Mount Hood) together made me think "Huh.  Interesting.  I bet a TCK wouldn't compare the current world with a past one.  I bet they'd just occupy the new world, without comparison."  

So, I set up a little experiment re: world-building to see if I was right.

SciFi  (We are on spaceships, new planets and all that):

Bujold's Shards of Honor  vs. CCK Nnedi Okorafor's Binti

Fantasy (We are on Earth, but its crazy different.  Maybe this is also Sci Fi?  I need to tighten up some definitions)

LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven vs TCK Mohsin Hamid's Exit West

I need to do more work on this.  I got blindsided by my second migraine of the week (after swimming which is so virtuous I ought to be radiating health, but I am not) so this is very preliminary.

Guys.  The results of my experiment are surprising.  I expected an absence of comparison in Hamid and Okorafor.  I expected their characters to just get on with being in the new places.  What I may have found instead is the introduction of that ever-mind boggling extra dimension: TIME.

Okorafor roots Binti in a fantasy of the past (ancestral land) as well as a science fiction of the future (launch port)  when she has Binti muse "We Himba don't travel.  We stay put.  Our ancestral land is life; move away from it and you diminish.  We even cover our bodies with it. Otjize is red land.  Here in the launch port, most were Khoush.  [. . . ] Here I was an outsider" (3).

Hamid describes portals through which migrants travel from one part of earth to another.  Migrants cross immense geographic and cultural distance in an instant.  However, the past gets left behind, and all the people in it.  "When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind" writes Hamid (98), and adds "We are all migrants through time " (209).

It brings us back to Salman Rushdie's "Imaginary Homelands": "The past is a country from which we have all emigrated.  It's loss is a part of our common humanity" (12).  

It's true.  We all do leave the past behind.  

However, an early response to my hasty experiment is that SciFi and Fantasy contrasts "home" places (ancestral lands, Earth, which is home for Bujold's readers if not for protagonist Cordelia Naismith) with imagined ones, without much considering how the home places are necessarily also past places.

CCK and TCK SciFi and Fantasy cannot seem to help themselves in thinking about the importance of the past as it informs the future, and in so doing, reminds us of how irrevocably it is lost to us. Time  as a metaphor for distance from place is of the essence.

Addendum (the good bit, actually.  Best thoughts below):

Perhaps you are infuriated by the Ford Escalade sized hole in this argument?  I received this text at about 6.20 AM, from a good friend who is also a good scientist, and a good reader: 

"George Orr’s dreams [Lathe of Heaven] change the past. That’s the entire premise. Not just for him, but for everyone. "

Doh!

On the one hand: throw this laptop out the window melodramatically for that is correct

BUT!

On the other hand: why did LeGuin's writing about the past automatically feel different to me?

Giving myself benefit of the doubt for a second led to this insight: I am  indeed wrong  in my conclusion "CCK and TCK SciFi and Fantasy cannot seem to help themselves in thinking about the importance of the past as it informs the future."  No.  Not correct.  TCK and CCK SciFi show a separation between past and present.  The past is a vision with no direct connection to the present.  The past does not cause the present.  That's the problem really: the rupture between past and present leads to nostalgia for something to which there is no chain of connection from the present.

In LeGuin, you do see how the past informs the present.  Over and over again different pasts inform the present in different ways.  For LeGuin, the focus is on the present, on the ramifications of a tweak to something in the past.  Causality is everything.  The past causes the present.  The present, as outcome of altered past, is relentlessly the focus.

To belabor the point, in CCK and TCK work, the past does NOT cause the present.  Rushdie opens his essay with: "An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall in the room where I work. It's a picture dating from 1946 of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born" (9).  The past is a relic, static, fetishized even.  It bears no resemblance to the present, and how it connects with the present at all is the mystery because it does not seem to have any bearing on it whatsoever.

Freedom of Movement (War and Peace, Lathe of Heaven, MTA Buses)

 I had to take my Hyundai to the dealership this morning.  It took close to an hour just to check in.  I'll get my vehicle back . . . maybe tomorrow?  Unclear.  

Already impatient after an hour of waiting, and emphatically not first in line for drop off, I opted not to use Hyundai's shuttle service, and instead walked up the hill into Towson towards the red line, a bus route that is actually fairly functional and gets me quite close to home.  Walking, as Thoreau knew, is prime time for thinking, so I was thinking, and feeling.  I felt free.  It was great to leave the car behind, and walk the cool and shady side of the street under the crepe myrtles.  I felt like I was on vacation.  I could be anywhere.  I could be anyone.  The world was bigger because I was slower, and fully exposed to it.  However, I also thought "I have a doctor's appointment in Timonium on Wednesday.  Can I even get there by bus?  And I am supposed to get to Mount Washington later today.  East-West transit is basically impossible."  I felt freer... and inconvenienced.

In War and Peace, very rich people leading affluent lives simply go places.  Pierre goes to Petersburg: we don't get many details.  However, soldiers and cossacks walk.  They walk and walk and walk.  They walk until their boots fall apart. They have no food, so they walk to a village to raid it, but there is no food.  Nikolay is a rich person in the army and like many has been able to purchase/ argue by birth rite his way into the rank of officer.  Nikolay rides his horse to see Denisov in hospital, and even that takes a long time.  His horse is starving, its fur falling out.  Even for Nikolay travel is a big deal.  Nine miles is an enormous distance.

I'm leavening my reading of Tolstoy with LeGuin.  Lathe of Heaven feels light and easy when I switch to it because of its first person narrative POV.  (War and Peace: omniscience.)  

LeGuin's journey is through possibility.  You travel through George Orr's dreams.  You travel a looooong way through those dreams, though technically George never leaves Portland, Oregon.  We fly on his imagination.  The nasty catch here is the manipulation of Orr's imagination and his dreams by Dr. William Haber.  Haber is idealistic, but also self-serving and the realities created by Orr/Haber dreams get corrupt and bizarre.

I guess where I am going with this is a multi-pronged observation: 

*humans like travel stories (they are some kind of metaphor for human life)

*but travel is hard, and delightful as the narrative of an arduous journey may be, humans want their own travel experiences to be easy. 

*the shift of actual journey into imaginary realms doesn't make it less of a journey or less about human life.

That may be as profound as this particular meandering gets.  I'll try for something better next time.

War and Peace & Outlast (Alaska, 2026)

 War and Peace is taking me a while, folks.  I know you are waiting for the review, but it's slow, big, 1400 pages in 10 point font.  

It's a bit of a soul destroyer too.

Take Pierre, for instance.  At the novel's start, he's idealistic, interested in what Bonaparte is up to in the rest of Europe, and a galumphing, socially inept outsider.  He's charming.  

But he inherits a massive fortune, folks toady up to him, and he is gullible enough to believe their flattery. He doesn't go to war against Bonaparte as many of his peers do.  He stays at home and manages his enormous wealth instead.  He just doesn't think about politics any more.  He is manipulated into a marriage (Helene's family stand to profit through the connection).  It ends badly (Helene has an affair).  Pierre then flees, becomes a Freemason, and is set to change his life entirely . . . except he doesn't.  He goes to parties instead.  (That's as far as I've gotten with Pierre.  We'll see what happens next.)

It all makes one think about how weak humans are.  Well-intentioned, but easily seduced by money, and, well, sex.

This seems especially trenchant these days (jeez, Antje, why?  What could possibly make you think of the corrupting influences of money,  and sex?).

Enter, of all things, a reality TV program.  Outlast is kind of a Survivor reboot but without tribal council.  In the 2026 Alaska version there aren't even challenges, per se, beyond the challenge of surviving in Alaska's wilderness with primitive supplies.  

An interesting schism happens in this season of the show.  In its end stages only two teams survive.  One, a team of young athletic folks (primarily Texans).  The other, a selection of folks that runs the gamut from model to chef to wilderness expert.  The Texans, hooting and hollering, vote off their ailing friends one by one, and wind up as a duo.  The other team votes off no one.  In fact they even take in an extra player, one who tries to betray them and steal their boat after which they forgive him and take him back in to their team.

Interviews with individual players about what they would do if they won the money show the model talking about wanting to pay for care for her mother with dementia, and the wilderness expert wanting to pay for his knee surgery.  One Texan want to buy more party boats, the other wants to buy a second house.

The team of five make it to the end, all five of them, but the Texans, just the two hooting and hollering young men, win.  Toxic white masculinity triumphs again, it seems.

However, the team of five's exit interviews are striking: the model thinks she made her team lose because she was too slow, but the rest of her team disagrees, they hug her, pat her on the back, tell her to not be so hard on herself, point out that she's the only woman that made it to the end and to be proud.  The Judas who tried to steal the boat and was forgiven cries to the camera and says his team healed something that was cracked inside him, something that goes far beyond the show.  The chef, often thorny and cantankerous during the preceding weeks, breaks down weeping and says that the last month was hard, but the worst part is that it is over and he can't be with his closest friends anymore.  The five person group refers to each other as family.

That five person group represents the kind of life one wants (love, acceptance, survival, warmth, healing).

The two person Texan group represents prevailing culture (Win at all costs.  Get to the end.  Never mind the middle.  Get to the end, the cash.)

You can tell I love the five person group: there's something in there about how to be human because the end really is just death.  To get to the end ruthlessly?  For what?  What about the life in the middle?  Can that be warmer?

I'd like Pierre to get his shit together and think about this.  He needs to watch Outlast.

It is true that Tolstoy is illustrating many of the themes Outlast captures: War and Peace.  We have not figured any of this out, as humans, and continue to be selfish, manipulative, and miserable.  

However, it is also obdurately true that:

The Texans won and can buy duplicates of resources they already have.  

&

I am pretty sure I saw one of the Outlast players on the team that didn't win stocking carrots at Whole Foods.

Summer 2026 starts with War and Peace

 Hello, Blog.  It's been a minute. 

Look what I bought!  You'll never guess where I bought it.

The newsstand at BWI airport!  I felt like I had to support BWI for having stocked this, so I bought it.  It was, of course, an awful thing to carry across the continent and back on my trip to a conference, but I couldn't resist the ridiculousness.  Plus, if you settle War and Peace on your tray table, no one strikes  up a conversation with you mid flight.  It's an excellent social preventative.

I'm about 300 pages in.  The first 50 were hard.  I had to flip repeatedly to the page giving a list of who is who.  It's getting easier to read, and Tolstoy's knack for positioning all of his characters as flawed (and  oblivious to their own flaws), and on the brink of catastrophe (to which these flawed characters are also oblivious) is reeling me in.

I'm coming off a challenging three years.  I have sabbatical coming up this fall.  I will do serious work, I promise.

But I'm not really starting until I finish War and Peace.

Oh, and as a reward for my work these past three years, my colleagues bought me a very generous gift card to The Ivy bookstore.  My first installment just came.  These will also have to wait until after I have finished War and Peace.

It's nice to be back.  What are y'all reading?

Text (Reader+Author)=Meaning

 

The image above is from Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), a little free library find that may be my favorite read of the summer.  I finished it this morning, at one point standing in the living room because I couldn't bear to put it down as I went to close the window, and then was so transfixed by the words that I stood in the middle of a dark room, reading.  

Its structure is soooo rewarding: there is a narrative arc of sorts, but then surprises and reprises.  I read too fast, wanting the next bon bon of surprise and delight.  It's personal, academic, accessible, and political.  It reminds me that I want to change the image that represents me on social media to a water bottle filled with rice and baby formula.  The image above refers to a theme in the text about livers, but I like how the alimentary tract here terminates with an intestinal USA, a full one.  (I am not sure what to make of the placement of Hawaii.)

The passage above the image includes these lines about a dialogue between author and editor: 

"I understand that what she wants is an explanation of the mysterious connections that exist between an author and her text.  If I am present in the subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves?  Is 'I' even me or am 'I' a gear shift to get from one sentence to the next?  Should I say we?" (Rankine 54).

Rankine's musings hit on a couple of issues I am thinking about currently:

1) First person narration.  I am writing a thing that is fiction, but in a confessional first person ("Curses: My Year of Internet Dating").  It does concern me that readers will think the "I" is me when really I do want something more widely applicable.  I am trying to write a "we," an everyperson kind of scenario.  It is inevitable that folks will think this is about me (and worse, if they are someone I have gone on a date with, about them).  

2) "We" is about the narrative voice (the weaving together of author and subject and fiction and known truth, the embodied and the imaginary).  BUT "we" is also about how the text and its reader create meaning.

Yesterday I wrote this in my journal: 

"Good literary analysis teaches you about yourself, your world, and the people you know.  

It is 'creative' in that it is generative.  

The text is what it is (50% of meaning) and how its reader meets it (the other 50%)"

(My journal: August 7, 2025)

I think a lot about how reading is actually a compact between the text and its reader.  I think I disagree with the new critics that texts have a pure intrinsic meaning, one that is objective.  But I don't think I am exactly advocating Reader Response Criticism either.  I'm probably closer to RR but feel like something in that model isn't quite right.  It implies a lack of rigor maybe?  I'm not sure.  I need to unpick my biases and learn more about RR first.

Anyway: leaving other thinkers aside, I think texts have meaning because of how readers interact with them *and that readers should be allowed freedom in their interactions, and not be shoehorned into checklists demanding they identify certain codified and approved "important" textual elements.*

After reading Rankine though, and in spite of wanting the "I" in my own writing not to be collapsed with me, I think there is also some residue of the author that we have to contend with, like it or not.  

For years, I have believed Roland Barthes that the author is dead.

But now maybe I wish the author wasn't?  Maybe I wish that the text had certain intrinsic characteristics, but also that a murky web of connections reveals things about the author and their world, and that to arrive at any meaning at all in reading fiction in particular, a reader HAS TO bring their own murky webs, connections, experiences and insights, their memories  and imaginations, into play.

Trivia: memory and imagination happen in the same part of the brain.  The Hippocampus. 

No not this kind of hippocampus.

Perhaps it is all part of my freak out about AI and its effect on the Humanities, reading and writing in particular? 

Maybe it is just me being defensive?  

I insist on putting all the humans back into the equation.  For now, at any rate, when it feels like AI is the final precipice off which "English" or "Literary Studies" will fall, and conclusively perish?

But humans will still live, right?

And humans will still want to feel themselves seen and understood by other humans?  They will still want to connect, and share powerful emotions?

Because that is what makes life worth living as a human, right?

So, I end with math:  Text (Reader+Author)= Meaning 

and maybe "meaning" here really means connection.

On the Importance of Intermittence in Cognitive Processes (I owe you a meaningful post about the summer reading experiment)

 

Well, reader, I feel like I owe you something closer to insight, or fact, or revelation.  

I went on vacation!  It was nice.  I stayed at a place that looked out over a small lake.  There was a verandah with a little wicker couch facing the water.  I made a wee reading nook there.  It was the bomb.  So good.  I read most of Kevin Kwan's Lies and Weddings on that wicker. I left my phone and iPad in my room (upstairs, far away, no distractions), and I would read, sip tea, read, look out at the lake, read, adjust my position on the couch etc.. 

Planning this post, I initially thought that what I had learned was that reading with a view helps.  I tested the theory at home this morning by reading on my front porch (Jodi Picoult's House Rules, a book I picked up at the lake place when, after I had already packed my mostly finished Kwan novel, there was a delay and I needed something to read in my nook and it was in the cabin's "grab a book if you need" basket).  

At home on my porch (see photo above): yes the view helped, it was nice.  Something about bare feet and wind helps too, as I have remarked in a previous post.  I have a colleague who often slips her shoes off while reading or thinking hard, I've noticed.  Is there something to this?  Has a neurologist/ cognitive scientist ever studied feet as they relate to thought processes?  

Really though, my observation is about cognitive processes being somehow intermittent.

This last month has been a struggle with my computer and my wifi.  I learned through that struggle how much my ideal writing process is intermittent.  Technically, I can blog, or work on my other creative writing offline.  However, I realize I have a dependence on keeping silly, meaningless tabs open and flipping to them periodically.

I like writing for a bit, and then flipping to another tab and [reading a horoscope, looking at Facebook, glancing at McSweeney's or The Onion].  Productive writing happens in bursts, with short periods in which my brain needs a rest and so I look at something else passively.  It's not multitasking.  I am not productive on anything other than writing.  What I flip to in other tabs is fluff: nothing that truly engages me.  I can't watch FB videos: they suck me in too much.  Instagram likewise, I get pulled into something too long.  The news, likewise: too strong an emotional tangent.  Email--don't go there; it requires focus.  

So, I write for [I'd guess 5-10 minutes--I haven't precisely timed it, and it varies I think based on how difficult the writing task is: harder would be shorter] and then I read my horoscope. And then I come back.  It's like my brain just needs a minute.  It's resting, yes, but I think it is also still working somewhere back there.  It's still kind of on task with the writing, but needs a moment to let that work happen in the background somewhere (in the cool, shadowy, deep of head, murk of not really conscious thinking from whence truly good ideas actually come) before I press back to typing (which is sharp and shiny work somehow, and feels very frontal, piercing, hot, all eyeballs and forehead).

Reading is not exactly the same as writing. I don't feel reading as all eyeballs and sharp.  It's not as intense and front of the head and bright as writing is.  Maybe it feels like it's in the middle of my head (which tracks with what I know about parts of the brain involved in reading fiction).  HOWEVER, it is the same in that I need to come in and out of a tight focus.  I read for a while, and then I need to look at the plants and green things.  I read for a while, and then I lift my gaze and I sort of look at my surroundings, but lightly.  I am not looking around intently, not trying to see or hear or feel my surroundings.  I am just taking a moment to pause from the stimulus the book is creating and to process.  My eyes may be looking at purple coneflowers, or a lake, or someone at a nearby table eating a croissant, and I may very lightly be engaging with those things, but the depth of my engagement in those fallow moments is still with what I am reading.

I may have looked up for a few minutes, but during that looking up my brain is still working on, working out, thinking of, reflecting on, absorbing, processing, the thing I have read.  This moment might look, from the outside, like distraction, but I don't believe it actually is.  

I think intellectual process is a wavy line: one swerves in and out of tight focus on task, and needs the swerve away into a "resting" moment.  The swerve away is as important as the tight focus.  They balance each other.  I'm "on" and then "rest" and then "on and then "rest"--THAT is how the reading or writing moves forward.

As for the wind and one's toes: not sure yet how that figures in but wouldn't it be a fun surprise if it turns out there is something important there, neurologically?  Readers with fMRI facilities, can you please check into this possible connection, stat?

Commitment Issues

 It is possible for me to have more than one book on the go, especially during semester (bedtime fun book, multiple things being read for work).  It's easiest if they are very different genres and time periods so they don't start to meld in my head.

However, my current situation is unsettled, ridiculous.

I started  Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.  43 pages in, I am wondering if this is simply not the right time for this?  Too male maybe?  Or lacking interiority?  Or I just can't seem to latch on to the narrator and be interested?

I read half of Claudia Rankine's Don't Let me be Lonely yesterday, some of it while standing in front of the little free library in which I found it.  Rankine quotes Cesaire, Coetzee!  She's so good.  Why did I not know this before?  I am saving the other half.

At bedtime, not wanting Seven Moons, I tried Zadie Smith's The Fraud (Dude!  I'm sure the David Copperfield feel is intentional, but even so.  It's too Dickens/Austen and not enough ZS.  Likely I need to give it more than 4 pages to be fair, but it was not love at first page, which surprised me.  I generally love ZS).

Then (still at bedtime) I read a few pages of Ayobami Adebayo's A Spell of Good Things. 

It was promising, so why, when I got up this morning, did I start Cynthia Green's blue feet monsoon over breakfast?  It is full of references to Singapore in the 1980s (totally my jam).  Who else remembers Paya Labar airport (precursor to fabulous new Changi)?  Whoo!  I do I do.

Efforts to get this laptop to connect to home wifi for more than 90 seconds are now in the "f*ck around with DNS" stage, which is REALLY advanced for me.  Please send help.

Feet out the Window

 This afternoon, reading with a headache, I was inside in my reading chair set-up with as few lights on as possible.  It was okay.  I was relatively comfortable.  The headache did not have me in bed.  I was able to focus just fine.  I read for about an hour . . .

But honestly, I enjoyed my reading more yesterday morning when I was waiting for my teenager and parked on the far edge of a school's parking lot so I could be in the only tree's deep pool of shade.  I rolled all the windows down.  It wasn't too hot (only about 80F), and there was a light breeze.  I hiked my skirt up and took my sandals off.  I put my right foot out the car window, and my left foot on the dashboard.  I could feel the breeze on my toes.  I read happily for about 45 minutes.

On headaches: 

I get migraines.  They are not as bad as they were two years ago when I was getting 17 a month of which 3 or 4 confined me to bed for the day.  I am very glad they are not so bad, but they still slow my life right down, which is hard for me.  I'm a doer.  I'm not necessarily productive, but busy-ness is definitely my go-to coping strategy.  

To not do.  To sit.  To wait, To let things get better with time.  To just be in one spot, and feel the various discomforts, and wait them out . . . is very very hard.  

It's also good for me.  In that messed up way one can have gratitude for lousy experiences, I am grateful that migraines remind me that sometimes if you are still things do just come and you see them, experience them (e.g. the young sparrows on the windowsill, wings aflutter, still demanding their parents feed them, or e.g. my own teenagers who might share an extra word or two with me if I am sitting still on the couch).

Also, I am reminded that any day I am not in bed is a good day.  Doesn't matter what else does or doesn't happen.  Am I out of bed?  Yes?  HUGE WIN!

On the book I just finished, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood:  

Ooo.  This is understatedly interesting.  It is a kind of secular soul searching.  Instead of gospels we get a snippet of Joan Baez ("Action is the antidote to despair") and of Hippocrates ("First, do no harm") (26).

There's a moment to which I relate profoundly in which the narrator, retreating from trying to engage with the world's problems and solve them, unsubscribes from 25+ newsletters: Threatened Species Rescue Center, Human Rights Watch, Aboriginal Legal Service, Greenpeace, Green Living Australia and more (152).

There's this gem of an observation: "I used to think there was a 'before' and 'after' most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life.  But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after.  Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it's still there" (210).  

This one helps me understand what sometimes feels like frustrating "stuckness" in a dear friend whose wife died suddenly of a brain aneurysm five years ago.

And finally, I hope this is true of me in this moment:

"A feeling that something is coming, waiting to be born, out of this time.  Almost physical, like before a period, or a pregnancy, or vomiting.  Something is getting ready to resolve itself" (254).

Kapoor wrap up

 I am trying to learn from Kapoor's Age of Vice.

I am trying not to be annoyed by the last 130-150 pages, and am trying to remember that this may just not have been the right time for this book for me.

I am trying not to feel like the author's self-indulgence has robbed me of time.

It's not a bad novel.  There are some lovely moments of insight.  It does a nice job of tackling a problem using multiple intersecting perspectives.

Kapoor could maybe have prioritized certain plot elements and characters, and eliminated others in order to crystallize and sharpen the whole (this is a lesson I can learn: I have a baggy, problematic, self-indulgent manuscript that needs to be turned into something better).

Kapoor and I could both do with editing more like the imagist poets did: what is the thing?  Find it, describe it, cut out all the connective tissue so that you can really see it.

Pivoting to the positive: should I read something fluffy next (Kevin Kwan's Lies and Weddings), or a Nigerian political novel (Ayobami Adebayo's A Spell of Good Things),  or an Australian novel about a woman's moral/mortal crises (Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional)?

I'm leaning towards Charlotte Wood, perhaps because it will offer a single narrator rather than the complexities offered in the Kapoor work.  Also because it offers Australia (a change of scenery given that I have just been "in" India).

Did I mention I have a lovely new laptop from work that absolutely will not get along with my wifi at home though it works fine at work or in a cafe?  If I restart everything, I get about 3 minutes of wifi use at home.  I have spent almost three weeks trying to solve this problem, with hours on the phone with various kinds of tech support.  Today's move will be asking the wifi provider for a new wifi gateway.  I have written this short post at home, and have been prompted by blogger several times that updates are "failed" because I am no longer connected to the internet . . . So, time to reboot folks.  See you on the other side.

But really the thing that feels good is LOSING time

 Re: the summer reading challenge thing, and time.

I was talking yesterday with a talented and insightful poet friend about time.  She has a great poem which I read as about how we perceive quantities of time as enough or too little.

It made me think about time's elasticity, and about something I once read about the uterus, or maybe actually it was about the vagina: pictured in textbooks as hollow, that space is not rigidly circumscribed (vagina like a hose, uterus like a melon), but is squishable, flexible, more like an uninflated balloon: there's only space in there if something makes the space, if something stretches the walls apart from each other.

What! You are thinking.  Why am I reading about the female reproductive system??

Gentle reader, sorry.  But isn't time uterine?  

It seems to be firmly circumscribed  (years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds) but really its walls collapse and touch each other, or expand apart if something stretches them?

There's a lot more to be said about time.

In terms of the summer reading, I am now deep into Deepti Kapoor's Age of Vice.  

A couple of days ago, I had my first experience in many years of taking welcome refuge in reading a novel.  I went to it to hide from other tasks, and I spent time there that felt restorative.  I lost time.  I did not count the minutes, or think about them.  I read until I felt recuperated enough to tackle other parts of my day.

Being released from the work clock, and from the clock of child care really helped.  I felt like I was in a warm honey flow of the day, not wearing a watch. 

What a relief.

The summer reading challenge is about focus, but describing it by rigid time and as an exercise in sustained concentration both also make it effortful. (Yes, sometimes effort is needed.  I am not necessarily opposed to effort.  However... ) 

My realization of the last few days in which I have been reading a lot, with pleasure, without pressure, and with a sense of imaginative dreaminess and physical restoration is that this state lets me escape time, and that feels great.  It feels like much sought ease.  It feels like luxury.

I don't want a Rolex, I want to feel like I have slipped time's noose.

Ideally, reading fiction gets me there.

Bookstores

     Perhaps you are too young to remember when bookstores were a more prevalent thing?  Barnes and Noble, Indigo, WHSmith, and Borders were all massive chain bookstores with cafes where one could buy a mediocre pressed sandwich of some kind and an overly milky espresso-style beverage.  

    Those who believed in independent bookstores thought the big chains would put the small places out of business, but ultimately Amazon put the big chains out of business and some of the hardy independent stores survived.  Thank goodness.

    The real threat is that people don't read.

    The other real threat is that we have found the pleasure of typing specific searches into computers and getting specific answers straight away.  There's a strong upside (if I want to replace my toilet tank, I don't want to browse information; I do want the most specific advice only).  The downside: you have to know what you are looking for. 

    What if you don't know what you are looking for?  What if you want to wander into a palace full of enticing options arrayed artfully, curated wittily?  

    What if you want to find a book you wouldn't have ever thought to ask for?  

    Then you need a good bookstore, one in which someone knows how to present books in manageable, interesting assortments so that you can browse pleasureably, without overwhelm.  It's an art, I think, putting good combinations of books into appealing displays.

    My home base bookstore in Baltimore (Bird in Hand in Charles Village), does a fairly good job of this.  So does Greedy Reads.

    Really superlatively good, however, is a bookstore in Harrisburg, PA called Midtown Scholar.  Midtown Scholar is huge.  It sells new and used books.  It is curated extraordinarily well.  At my recent visit, there was a large entry area ringed by "Famous Authors," and peppered with tables grouped in some predictable ways (“current bestsellers”), as well as some joyfully unpredictable ones ("for the revolution," "gothic horror and romance").  

    There's a whole room of children's books, a large wall upstairs of YA fiction.  Art, Art History, Literature, Literary Criticism, Philosophy  . . . it's a lot. It could be overwhelming.

    But it is so thoughtfully laid out: if you want to come in and buy an iced chai, a funny book about recipes based on The Hobbit, and a manga, you can do that easily in a comfortable browse, probably before your chai has even gotten drippy with condensation.

    I bought the following:

The Groff and Kwan were happy finds in a densely packed upstairs shelving area (fun for those who like a good hunt).  The others were eye candy in the artfully configured main room.  Smith in "Famous Authors," and Yuzuki in a "Featured Authors" display.

    Did I need more books?  Absolutely not.

    Did my soul need Midtown Scholar, as a balm in these trying times?  One thousand times, yes. Yes.

    Go check it out.  While you're in Harrisburg, visit the Pancake Row Houses in Shipoke.