The little recently restarted daycare, the husband is soon to resume teaching for the fall. Teething has returned me to nights of little and broken and sleep. I walk around frustrated by how incoherent and uninspired I feel.
I feel the need to brain dump about what I’ve been reading and thinking about. I don’t know if this is how blogs work. If you’re reading this, thank you/I’m sorry.
Geek Love
On my kindle I’m halfway through Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. It’s brilliant, she’s an incredible prosist, an inspiration because she lacks any formal higher education and lived a life of early difficulty, leaving home at 17. But beyond her astonishing sentences I’m impressed with her sense of plot.
A Short Life of Kierkegaard
I’m a couple chapters into Walter Lowrie’s A Short Life of Kierkegaard. I read the introduction in an epsom salt bath and found some interest in the fact that Lowrie wrote the book in 1942. Kierkegaard was only a little less than a hundred years dead (incredible to think of a body of literary work vast as his, given he lived to only 42).
When Lowrie wrote his first, longer biography of Kierkegaard, there were no English translations yet, so Lowrie wrote the biography such that a bulk of it was Kierkegaard’s quotations.
By the time Lowrie was asked to complete this shorter biography, Kierkegaard’s works were broadly translated and known. Now it’s been about another eighty years, and of course we’ve all read a little Kierkegaard. I don’t think I have ever read a biography of a classic figure written by a biographer so close to contemporaneous with the subject. Maybe if I think hard about it this isn’t true.
Lowrie seems committed to Kierkegaard because of a shared devotion to Christianity. I knew nothing about Lowrie when I picked the book up at the annual Friends of the Library sale, mostly I just found the cover nice and had a peripheral interest in Kierkegaard. It turns out Lowrie is not only a major Kierkegaardian scholar but also a theologian. I’m fairly agnostic, but find myself lately drawn to the works of very cerebral Christian apologists, whom I admire for their thinking, though I don’t land on the same conclusions. I read and enjoyed The Screwtape Letters earlier in the year.
Relatedly, I purchased a King James Bible with the thinking that it’s fundamental to the canon and likely worth reading for its literary references, but I’m only right at “In the beginning…”
Florida
I’m a quarter through Lauren Groff’s short story collection, Florida. Without really getting into it, she’s easily one of the most incredible storytellers I’ve ever read. Every story is astonishing. Plots that I believe might come out campy in someone else’s hands read urgent and pristine in hers.
I prop the book on the back of the stroller and walk around reading them that way with the little, and so I’ve had to pause as the weather is so bad. But before the humidity and heat, there were days spent concealing my crying in the streets.
Kaplan’s LSAT Premium Prep
I took last week off work and did not do anything particularly exciting (beyond consume hours of docutainment) because I was studying for the LSAT. I was PT’ing around 173, then had a change of heart about taking it now. Suddenly I feel strongly that it’s better to wait until a simpler season when I can apply myself and get closer to a 180. That’s really been my obsessive goal since taking a diagnostic, out of curiosity, one strange maternity-leave night, the baby asleep on my chest, and getting a surprising 168. Does this mean I should go to law school, I wondered? Still unsure—all that has ever made sense has been writing, law never occurred to me, until now, but maybe a baby makes you more practical.
For now all I care about is the questions themselves and those shiny, 17-highs or elusive 180s. It has become less about the test and more about the frustrated desire to win at games of logic; if I drill a section and get one wrong, I find myself annoyed that they tricked me. These are just other similarly motivated writers, these logicians. If they write a question with one right answer and four wrong, it’s disappointing and ultimately unnecessary to click the wrong one. Why let them trick you?
It’s rarely like a chess blunder where you totally miss your opponent’s attack (though this does happen, a misread word…), and more often a matter of being outmatched—thinking about the question long and hard (as long and hard as you can when you divide 35 minutes by 25), and then committing yourself to the wrong choice. Unless these question writers are fundamentally more clever than you are, why should you get even one question wrong? There’s only one correct answer, why not click it? The game has become to take the test and get a perfect score, and the game exists in a bubble. It’s not the law school aptitude test but some inherently worthwhile marathon of logic.
This is the nature of the intensity the test has brought on me, and it probably doesn’t take a tremendous amount of psychoanalyzing to come to the conclusion that the test is proxy for something else, like a lapsed sense of self eleven months into motherhood, or both a desire for and a constant avoidance of the thing I should actually be doing, which is writing something. Compulsive LSAT behavior as metaphor for matrescence?
It might be true that I’m becoming a little obsessed with formal logic more generally, but the guides I’ve read insist LSAT “lawgic” really shouldn’t be confused for formal logic, because it writes its own rules. I did not study formal logic when I got my philosophy BA, but did get some when I took programming classes on the side (ironically these “for fun” programming courses put my GPA below the median that might have allowed me to go to the T5 schools a 180 LSAT might have).
And so I decided landing around a 17-low was not worth the miles on the highway to Prometric, and I plan to revisit the proctored, official exam later, when I’ve had more time and sleep.
Gravity’s Rainbow
I’m still halfway through GR. I’ll likely kick around here for a while.
I don’t find Pynchon’s prose entirely incomprehensible, but I do think my lack of war knowledge is a barrier. I’ll show my (Marine) husband a particularly cryptic passage and he’ll say, what’s not to get? An analogous barrier applies to DeLillo’s Underworld; I’m just not sure I can handle a book of that size about baseball.
(An assignment requiring that we code a scoring program for a baseball game is a key reason I did so poorly in an earlier referenced object-oriented programming course. What the fuck is an on-base percentage?)
The Exorcist
I’m listening to this one as an audio book. It’s a lot of fun. I’m a quarter through. As a child, you think this a scary story because you imagine how unfortunate it would be to be the girl. It is in fact a MUCH scarier story when you become a parent.
Since becoming a parent, my readerly empathy seems immediately to latch on to the perspective of the parent or, in other terms, I imagine every child as my own (even absent the perspective of a parent in the story). Does this new, universalized framing of sympathy impact all parents? It hit me like day and night.
As a side note, I wonder how this fits into Nussbaum’s perspectives on literary empathy.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles
I’m only a chapter into this. I love Murakami’s ability to create mood and a quiet atmosphere of eeriness or even something approximating thrill. On the other hand, I find the extreme spareness of the prose difficult to love. Sometimes I look at a sentence and think, is this beautiful? On the other hand, every sentence does read true.
