First Lines of Julia Voss' "Hilma af Klint"

 "What kind of world was Hilma af Klint born into in 1862? Which paths were set, which doors were closed, and which were open to a young girl? When the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft visited Sweden at the end of the eighteenth century, she was appalled by what she saw." 

- Julia Voss, Hilma af Klint, a Biography

I only recently discovered Hilma af Klint's amazing paintings. She creates colorful organic mandala-like patterns that pulse and vibrate with life. This book is one of the first biographies that I know of her life. It's interesting and readable and filled with reproductions and full-color prints. So far my only quibble is that while i'm gaining insights into af Klint's life, it doesn't have the immediacy of seeing her life though her personality (like, say, John Richardson's Picasso bios) perhaps due to the lack of primary materials. Still, there's a lot to learn about af Klint's situation and motivations; one of the most interesting so far is that her work drawing illustrations for veterinarian reference books inspired some of her best paintings:

"The photographs' black backgrounds set off the bright circle of the petri dish where the tiny life forms swarm and grow. Hilma would later use the composition in the 1907 series The Large Figure Paintings, which looked at the world as if through a microscope." p. 108  

I have a print of The Ten Largest No 2 - Childhood and this book helps me to explore it's depths though the eyes of it's creator - no small feat.

First Lines of Jeff VanderMeer's "Acceptance"

 "Just out of reach, just beyond you: the rush and froth of the surf, the sharp smell of the sea, the crisscrossing shape of the gulls, their sudden, jarring cries. An ordinary day in Area X, an extraordinary day-the day of your death--and there you are, propped up against a mound of sand, half sheltered by a crumbling wall. The warm sun against your face, and the dizzying view above of the lighthouse looming down through its own shadow. The sky has an intensity that admits to nothing beyond its blue prison. There's sticky sand glittering across a gash in your forehead; there's a tangy glottal something in your mouth, dripping out."

- Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance.

The conclusion of VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy opens up as many questions as it closes, as one would expect from such a sprawling examination of an unknowable mystery. As such, it's as enjoyable as the first two volumes, although the book's structure prevented me from being absorbed into the journey as much as I did in the first two books. Here, VandeerMeer splits up the story between different narrators, each one with their own perspective and time, so that you're forced to jump from the time before Area X arrived to before the 12th expedition to after the inexplicable expansion of Area X's borders.  So it's not that this book isn't as good as the previous two - there are at least two scenes here that sent chills up my spine - but it's tone and flow are discordant, and thus I only enjoyed this book on a more intellectual level than the previous two.

Regardless, all three books are very much worth it. I appreciate VanderMeer's questioning style, making you think and ponder what everything means. Even if this leads to the character's ultimate paranoia: 

“What’s wrong with asking questions?” 

“Nothing.” 

Everything. Once the questions snuck in, whatever had been certain became uncertain. Questions opened the way for doubt. His father had told him that. “Don’t let them ask questions. You’re already giving them the answers, even if they don’t know it.” p. 23

I really enjoyed the limnal space this trilogy created.

Related Posts:

• First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Authority"
• First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Annihilation"
• First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Hummingbird Salamander"
  

Are we there yet?

 "One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."
- Henry Miller

or

"...
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now. ..."
- part of Ithaka, by C.P. Cavafy

And to play us out...

First Lines of Catherynne M. Valente's "Deathless"

"In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her."

- Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

I've read a number of Valente's books before - Palimpsest, and part of In the Night Garden - and while I've appreciated her artful and moving prose and imagery, I've been left cold by an issue I have with a lot of fantasy writing: the stakes don't feel real. The fantasy gets in the way of true pathos. I did not have that issue with Deathless.

I picked this up, honestly, because of Koschei the Deathless's amazing role in Mike Mignola's brilliant  Hellboy comics. But Valente transforms what in the original myth feels like a muscly thug, a simple cypher for imminent death, and turns him into a sympathetic figure, as someone who revels in his role but has not yet become it. And yet he's a strangely distant figure in the novel - most of the book focuses on Marya Morevna's entry into and exit from mythology. This is Valente's genius: she writes not only an updated retelling of the Russian myths in their amazing strangeness and complexity (for example, there's a Tzar of Birds here) but also comments on a meta level on myth-telling in general. It's an odd dance and I can't say that I understood it all - but the book was a hell of a journey and I enjoyed every minute of it.

First Lines of Milan Kundera's "Slowness"

 "We suddenly had an urge to spend the evening and night in a château. Many of them in France have become hotels: a square of greenery lost in a stretch of ugliness without greenery; a little plot of walks, trees, birds amid a vast network of highways. I am driving, and in the rearview mirror I notice a car behind me. The small left light is blinking, and the whole car emits waves of impatience. The driver is watching for the chance to pass me; he is watching for the moment the way a hawk watches for a sparrow." 

- Slowness, by Milan Kundera

First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Hummingbird Salamander"

 "Assume I'm dead by the time you read this. Assume you're being told all of this by a flicker, a wisp, a thing you can't quite get out of your head now that you've found me. And in the beginning, it's you, not me, being handed an envelope with a key inside... on a street, in a city, on a winter day so cold that breathing hurts and your lungs creak."

- Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff Vandermeer

Despite a slow start, this book works its way up to an alluring fever pitch of paranoia that keeps you turning pages way past when you should be going to sleep. More of a thriller than his Southern Reach trilogy. I'll be reading another Vandermeer shortly; perhaps Borne?

Related Posts:

• First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Authority"
• First Lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Annihilation"

First Lines of Peter Wohlleben's "The Hidden Life of Trees"

 "Years ago, I stumbled across a patch of strange-looking mossy stones in one of the preserves of old beech trees that grows in the forest I manage. Casting my mind back, I realized I had passed by them many times before without paying them any heed. But that day, I stopped and bent down to take a good look. The stones were an unusual shape: they were gently curved with hollowed-out areas." 
- Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees

A wonderful little book filled with close observations about the trees all around us. Trees turn out to be so much more complex than we usually think, and Wohlleben paints an alluring picture of their life at a MUCH slower pace than we are used to perceiving. I found this book insightful and enabled me to see new aspects about the trees around me - for example, the splits in the bark of young trees that are growing too fast because they were planted away from the forest. Good stuff.

First Lines of Oksana Zabuzhko's "The Museum of Abandoned Secrets"

"And then come the photos: black and white, faded into a caramel-brown sepia, some printed on that old dense paper with the bossed dappling and white scalloped edges like the lace collars of school uniforms, all from the pre-Kodak era—the era of the Cold War and nationally manufactured photography supplies (really, nationally manufactured everything)—and yet, the women in the pictures are adorned with the towering mousses of chignons, those stupid constructions of dead and, more often than not, someone else’s (ugh) hair."

- The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, by Oksana Zabuzhko, translated by Nina Shevchuk-Murray.

What an intriguing, sprawling, frustrating, and rewarding book. I'm about half-way through its 718 pages, having read that in fits and starts. Zabuzhko's style includes long sentences, which i'm normally okay with, but the sheer amount of clauses and parenthetical asides make them hard to follow. Luckily, that's one of the themes of the book - that life is messy and "... is an enormous, bottomless suitcase, stuffed with precisely such indeterminate bits and pieces..." so I'm looking at it as more of an impressionistic painting where the details of the plot or dialogue don't matter so much as the overall impact. Curious to know how this one plays out.

Happy Halloween!

 

A quick sketch of Mr. Voorhees for Halloween. I didn't have the right "blood color" red but still liked how it came out.

First Lines of Cal Newport's "Deep Work"

"In the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, near the northern banks of Lake Zurich, is a village named Bollingen. In 1922, the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat. He began with a basic two-story stone house he called the Tower. After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office."

- Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

This useful book has helped me in a number of ways already - and I'm only 75% completed. First, it provides an inspirational picture of what we can do if we can conduct "Deep Work" - what Newport defines as "Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit." He provides a lot of detail, but mainly the culprit in our inability to conduct Deep Work is in what he calls "network tools... constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction." The best part though is that he provides four rules for building your ability to conduct Deep Work: 

1. Work Deeply.
2. Embrace Boredom
3. Quit Social Media
4. Drain the Shallows 
   

First Lines of Stephen King's "Billy Summers"

"Billy Summers waits in the hotel lobby, waiting for his ride. It's Friday noon. Although he's reading a digest-sized comic book called Archie's Pals 'n' Gals, he's thinking about Emile Zola, and Zola's third novel, his breakthrough, Therese Raquin."

- Stephen King, Billy Summers

Recently, I contracted a nasty case of swimmers ear, and luckily I had Stephen King's latest novel on hand to entertain me. Finding it hard to do anything else, I consumed the whole book in six days: a testament to both the propulsiveness of King's prose (even after all of these years!) but also the compelling story he's written. Many people make this claim, but in his recent novels I've found that his climaxes tend to border on the absurd: Take the final confrontation in Mr. Mercedes, the "supernatural showdown in Doctor Sleep, or even The Outsider's siege: they can feel by-the-numbers and sometimes even - as hard as it is to admit - boring.

This was not the case here. I was quickly sucked into Billy Summers. King's really does have a masterful eye for detail and an ability to create compelling characters. The plot of the first half of the book is a standard crime novel, and the second half builds on a "hit gone wrong" and moves to a darker place that explores the evil inside us all. Interestingly enough, the narrative is interspersed with an excellent "coming of age" story and war narrative, written by Billy himself, that provides insight into his character but also is a great book in it's own right. It avoided any supernatural elements and kept me reading and engaged to the very last page.

But there's one caveat that I have to mention. King has never shied away from gruesome details either physically or psychologically, but as I get older, i'm bothered by the extremely graphic details about sexual trauma. I'm not sure that level of detail is necessary for the story and, combined with (spoiler alert!) Alice's almost immediate recovery from a terrible sexual assault to become Billy's assistant, it rang false and perhaps somewhat titillating. Honestly, I couldn't avoid thinking this aspect was the male gaze at work, and pondered how the same story would have played out if written by a woman. It was a disturbing blemish on an otherwise excellent novel.

First Lines of Javier Marias' "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me"

"No one ever expects that they might some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms, a woman whose face they will never see again, but whose name they will remember. No one ever expects anybody to die at the least opportune of moments, even though this happens all the time, nor does it ever occur to use that someone entirely unforeseen might die beside us."

- Javier Maris, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

I've had this book for a long time. I don't remember why I bought it nor why it took me so long to pick it up, but when Marias sadly died earlier this year, I learned more about him and realized it was time. So far i'm impressed by both the sheer length of his sentences and his powerful observations. For example: I suspect that this early line will be a recurring theme of the novel: "... the misery of not knowing what to do and of having to act regardless, because one has to fill up the insistent time that continues to pass without waiting for us, we move more slowly: having to decide without knowing, having to act without knowing and yet foreseeing, and that is the  greatest and most common of misfortunes, foreseeing what will come afterwards, it is a misfortune generally perceived as quiet a minor one, yet experienced by everyone every day."

First Lines of Kevin Lucia's "Liminal Spaces"

 "I'm sitting, crisscross-applesauce, in the deepest part of the deepest end of the Twin Oaks Community swimming pool, but down here, I may as well be sitting on Mars. My eyes are closed, have been closed, for about five minutes."

- from "Written in Water," by Robert Ford, the first story in Liminal Spaces: An Anthology of Dark Speculative Fiction edited by Kevin Lucia.

Lucia writes that this anthology offers takes on "dark specultative stories about the in-between. ... Neither here nor there. Strange stories about poeple and places lost in a shadowy, hazy middle-ground." Thus these are tales a person or a place with a dark- often occult - secret, and the fun comes from the journey of discovering that secret. I enjoyed it but like with most collections there mixed results based on your personal taste. For example, Jessica McHugh's "Back to One" and Chad Lutzke's "Womb with a View" were too grotesque for me. But most were quite entertaining. My highlights were "The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own," Gwendolyn Kiste's take on the Black Dahlia; "Mirror, Mirror" Joshua Palmatier's fantasy offering; "O Adelin," Michael Wehunt's Lovecraftian post-apocalyptic tale; and the twisted logic of Norman Prentiss' "Cabinet People." 

First Lines of Octavia E. Butler's "Wild Seed"

 "Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages. The village was a comfortable mud-walled place surrounded by grasslands and scattered trees. But Doro realized even before he reached it that its people were gone."

- Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed

I'm about half-way through this unique book with mixed emotions. On one hand, it's a killer pitch: a struggle between two frenemy immortal shape changers, one of whom is obsessed with breeding ever more powerful and unique abilities and the other who can provide them but doesn't agree with the project. On the other hand, much of the book takes place in long, intense conversations that, while skillfully rendered, take a long time to unfold without much actually occurring. It's essentially philosophical dialogue, but about the esoteric situations of these two supernatural beings that don't directly connect to the moral dilemmas that I personally find relevant. I've debated stopping the book but find myself compelled to return to it - there's a understated, moving power in Butler's prose. Curious to see how this ends; i'm hoping it's a clean ending and not merely a bridge to the next Patternist book.

Empathy for Growth

 "When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet, if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change."

- Thich Nhat Hanh, from Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/866197-thich-nhat-hanh-no-blame-no-reasoning-no-argument-just-understa/

 

Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/866197-thich-nhat-hanh-no-blame-no-reasoning-no-argument-just-understa/

Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/866197-thich-nhat-hanh-no-blame-no-reasoning-no-argument-just-understa/

Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/866197-thich-nhat-hanh-no-blame-no-reasoning-no-argument-just-understa/

First Lines of Cory Doctrow's "Walkaway"

 "Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza was too old to be at a Communist party. At twenty-seven, he had seven years on the next oldest partier. He felt the demographic void."

- Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

An entertaining novel depicting a technocratic future where people drop out of "default" society in order to build another based on more egalitarian and Eco-principles. It reads like a series of philosophical discussions inter dispersed with violent confrontations between the two societies. It's the ideas here that are the great draw - Doctorow knows his stuff, and his criticism of capitalistic societies are spot on. What I struggle with are his conclusions. I admire his idealism and ability to extract the optimistic visions out of the software developer mindset, but many of the solutions he proposes feel a bit naïve in their post-scarcity. For example, much of the Walkaway culture is reliant on 3D printing which assumes that there's unlimited machines, raw materials, and internet capacity. Regardless, it's a thought provoking book that paints an attractive picture of an alternative society that answers much of the criticisms and failures of late capitalism.

The Blue Girl

 An older acrylic painting - can't even remember from when, but memory serves to remind me that it's modeled off of an old girlfriend. I've always struggled with color, but found that a monochrome palate makes shading easier than one that's wide open. Of course, that didn't prevent me from going with blocks of color like in the shade, but here I think it works. I tried to get an icy effect on the window with mixed results. Seeing this one again makes me want to give it another go!

First Lines of Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary"

 "'What's two plus two?'

Something about the question irritates me. I'm tired. I drift back to sleep.

A few minutes pass, then I hear it again.

"What's two plus two?"

The soft, feminine voice lacks emotion and the pronunciation is identical to the previous time she said it. It's a computer. A computer is harassing me. I'm even more irritated now."

- Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary.

Another entertaining book from the author of The Martian. I don't want to give anything away about this book as there's a steady stream of revelations, but similar to his successful first novel the book is propulsive, humorous, and doesn't shy away from using science to make sense of the world. While I found some of the scenes, explanations, and achievements to be a bit too pat, Weir's engaging every-geek protagonist helps you suspend disbelief and go along for the ride. Fun vision, well executed, great read.

Summerlicious Tab Dump

 Some interesting things I've read:

• A persuasive case that, despite its very real cultural value, no successful business makes money supporting the Long Tail
  
• So You've Decided to Bungle your Company's Flexible Work Plan. It's funny because it's true. 
• A few reads about current musical trends:
• Why Music has Lost it's Charms. Risk-adverse labels yes, but also this: "[Labels realized that] they were being paid exactly the same amount per song whether the song was brand new or 50 years old. They quickly concluded that if their customers (stations and streamers) were indifferent to the age of the content and the end users were actually looking for the older music, there was little or no reason to rock the boat and push for new material. Investing in new talent turned out to be an incremental cost which they chose to avoid." 
• The above quote is most likely at the core of why The New Numbers on Music Consumption are Very Ugly
• Umair Haque makes the case that while the above is true, technology and algorithms are a technical reason why music doesn't sound like music anymore, another factor contributing to the problem
• In The Lost Art of Looking at Nature, Rachel Reiderer astutely observes that in our current environment of terrible climate change and ecodoom stories, she appreciates the genius of David Attenborough: "The bulk of the screen time is spent shoring up this anodyne, if novel, notion: plants are sensory marvels. The beauty and strangeness acts as a spoonful of sugar, so diverting that you hardly notice the fleeting discussions of the ecological importance of plants and how they are endangered by monocultures and climate change. These less frequent passages are the series’ medicine. Attenborough’s films often end with a call to action. But it is savvy of him, both as an artist and as an activist, to make plenty of room for pleasure. ... To pause for a moment, guided by an old naturalist’s eye for curiosity and beauty, is restorative. It gives a viewer the energy to face the hard truths of the rolling crisis and serves as a reminder of the wonders outside the human world that are also at stake."
• A visual guide to the Aztec Pantheon
  
• Six Zen Buddhist livelihood guidelines
  

Related:

• Tab Dump 2021: Music
  
• Time for another Tab Dump
• Bride of Tab Dump