i’ve definitely fallen into Murakami’s style now, the very fantastic, science fiction twinged fables. After the Quake, as a collection, was far more striking. but a few of these stories stand out with an obvious sense of humor or enjoyable haunting mysteriousness—”The Dancing Dwarf” and “TV People” respectively. now i am curious to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle after the short story that appears to have been worked into a novel.
celia suggested this book to me a while back when i found someone’s notes in one story of a Mavis Gallant book. it is the first book to look at the history and argue for the value of writing in books.
marking books in any way is a practice largely unaccepted today, thanks to public libraries and public schools. extensive annotation (not just highlighting passages, but writing extensively in books) used to be taught as part of standard education, but once textbooks started being shared over years of students, it was no longer possible. it’s interesting how present marginalia used to be and that there are a few people who were somewhat famous for their marginalia alone. S.T. Coleridge was not a professional writer, like most of the annotators whose books are valued today, but friends would ask him to mark their books and eventually people who didn’t know him would send him books with hopes of receiving it back with his notes.
Jackson is obviously heavily biased, but voices sound reason about the value of marginalia through case studies that show the amount of information we can glean about specific people and the culture of the time they lived in and even the response contemporary readers had to the books they read. her focus is on english-language books from 1700 to 2000, and she shows the evolution of marginalia through the changing landscape of publishing. it’s interesting how prevalent annotation was in the mid-1800s, when books started to become a little easier to obtain for more than just upper-class, educated people (though the access was still limited). reading became a very social pastime, and friends would annotate books for each other. Jackson highlights one marked book from a man to his fiancée, which is an alternate version of a love letter, a form of courtship in a sense.
it seems quite remarkable now that i found annotations in the Gallant story, as fiction is far less commonly marked—Jackson theorizes that a lot of the desire to interact with texts is a result of disagreeing with points stated as fact or to clarify mistakes. and indeed, it cracked me up to reach p. 28 and find a note pencilled in the margin:
unfortunately i finished this one over a week ago, right before i went out of town and had some intense, life-changing stuff go down. so all i can really remember is that i liked this, but i wished it had been reformatted into a novel form. it seems like only minor editing—removing the redundancies that let the stories stand on their own—would have made it flow all together.
(pts 1 & 2)
i’ve spent the last week getting myself to the halfway point on this. it’s always a little bizarre to read non-fiction books and realize that while reading fiction, my brain must not be engaged as intensely or something, because suddenly i’ve “read” several pages and don’t remember a thing.
this is a classic book on urban planning, published in the early 1960s. while i occasionally wish that this text was updated for today, it’s amazing how relevant it still is, without ever having been changed from its original edition. it serves as an historical record, as Jacobs uses so many examples from big cities (i.e., “Great American”—as those are the cities she has extensive knowledge on), but from the 1950s when she was writing the book. at that time, she lived in greenwich village and even just the evolution that has gone on there in the last forty years is astounding.
there are just a lot of little things about this book so far that i appreciate, like the note after the table contents on illustrations:
The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.
the book isn’t overly academic and, in fact, feels like common sense rather than theory after a while. part of why an update of the text doesn’t seem mandatory is that it imparts the necessary structure to think about contemporary cities and new developments and how they fit in—it’s fundamental.
the first half of the book looks at the nature of cities (uses of sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods) and the conditions necessary for proper city diversity. now i’m going to rest a little before tackling the second half about decline and possible solutions.
impressive story told through the dialogue of two prisoners in a jail in an unnamed latin american country. a gay window dresser entertains his revolutionary cellmate by narrating movies he has seen, and over time an intimacy develops between them. interspersed are theory-laden footnotes about the origins of homosexuality. due to the format, a little tough to get into at first and even understand what’s going on, but it definitely rewards in the end. very smart.
this claims to be a “Greenwich Village memoir,” but it didn’t give me much of a sense of greenwich village directly after WWII, perhaps because this book was never finished. the stories and perspectives are interesting, but it feels more like a series of sketches than a cohesive work.
i stuck with this book even though i never really liked any of the characters. at the end i just felt ambivalent about the story in general. it always seems wrong to not care about the protagonist, but it’s worse to not care about anyone in the story or anything that happened at all.
an aging misanthropic writer follows a young woman he is falling for even though she isn’t attracted to him. it turns out she has fallen for this guy–who apparently is the most beautiful boy ever—who randomly confesses to the writer that he is gay, and therefore can’t love this girl. the writer suddenly has this grand idea on how to get revenge on all women using this guy’s beauty and lack of attraction to them to hurt as many people as possible. in order to save his family home and help take care of his sick mother, the guy goes along with it, marrying this girl he doesn’t love and then proceeding to string along a few other women until they are all nice and jealous of each other. in the meantime, he delves into the gay underworld of tokyo and breaks hearts by the dozens.
did i mention this guy is hot? the main theme of the book is how every other character is attracted to him.
Mrs. Kaburagi discovered once more that not only was Yuichi’s dancing skillful, it was also light-footed and without frills. Was it a vision—the youthful haughtiness she found so beautiful each instant? Or his candor, was it a kind of abandon?The usual men of the world, she thought, attract a woman with the text of a page. This young man attracts with its margins. I wonder where he learned the technique.
i’ve been curious about Mishima because of this band from the boston area that is named after him. if i had known anything about him, i might not have bothered.
