The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.

and

Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own “war aims.” It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end.

The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, by Simone Weil

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

A Left-Handed Commencement Address by Ursula K. LeGuin

The number of cheap Kindle editions of Ulysses continues to grow. None of them are perfect: so far the editions generally accepted to be most free of errors (like the Gabler edition) aren't available, and the typesetting and layout are often amateurish. On the other hand, you can get a copy of a marvelous and strange book for the price of a candy bar and carry it anywhere.

• 2019 update: there is now a Penguin edition on Kindle, based on the 1960 Bodley Head edition, which would seem to be the obvious choice. However, it looks like it was poorly digitized and is riddled with errors.
• The Shmoop study version seems to be the only one that breaks the book up into 18 episodes. It adds Cliff's Notes-style commentary, for good or ill. Typesetting is pretty basic.
• The free Kindle edition is free, has the most reviews by far, but is apparently missing text (The Ballad of Joking Jesus and any other verse printed centered on the page.) Might be badly scanned. No idea what printed edition this is based on.
• Ulysses Unabridged (Illustrated) has the text the other version lacks. It's $2.99. Has only has one review, which makes me a little uneasy. No idea what printed edition this is based on. (Update: I ended up buying this one. It doesn't have chapter breaks. Despite what the one review says, it is actually illustrated. "Proteus" has a modern-day photo of Sandymount strand.)
• Project Gutenberg has a Kindle version up that lacks chapter breaks, although it keeps the three-part structure. Based on the 1922 edition.
• epubBooks also has a Kindle edition. Good luck finding out anything about it. It's probably fine. Why do I have to do this? Why isn't the answer obvious?

Recommendation: get the Project Gutenberg edition. Free, better than the "free Kindle edition", as good as the paid editions.

If you thought that was nitpicking, Google "gabler kidd".

And this, surely, is what Shakespeare also felt, because in one of his comedies there is a soldier, a cowardly soldier, the Miles Gloriosus of the Latin comedy. The man is a show-off, he makes people believe that he has acted bravely, and they promote him and he becomes a captain. Then they discover his trick, and in front of the entire troop they pull off his medals; they humiliate him. And then he is left alone and says: “Captain I’ll be no more; / But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft / As captain shall: simply the thing I am / Shall make me live.” “No seré capitán.” He says simply, “the thing I am shall make me live.” That is, he feels that above and beyond the circumstances, beyond his cowardice, his humiliation, he is something else, a kind of strength we all have within us, what Spinoza called “God,” what Schopenhauer called “will,” what Bernard Shaw called “life force,” and Bergson called “vital impulse.” I think this is also what was going on with Boswell.

Borges on Boswell

Oh man it's been WAY too long since I've read Shakes

Yet am I thankful: if my heart were great,
'Twould burst at this. Captain I'll be no more;
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
As captain shall: simply the thing I am
Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this, for it will come to pass
that every braggart shall be found an ass.
Rust, sword? cool, blushes! and, Parolles, live
Safest in shame! being fool'd, by foolery thrive!
There's place and means for every man alive.
I'll after them.

Audio, different reader every chapter - Tilda Swinton, Benedict Cumberbatch, China Miéville ...

• Infinite Ulysses (crowdsourced, some dodgy shit)
• The Joyce Project (not crowdsourced, UI not as slick, why do I have to hover over a word to see if it has an associated note)

I'm going to try something new in 2015: I'm going to write at least a little about every book that I read. (Ok, I'm going to try. This isn't a job.) I just finished "Tune In", the first volume of a projected three-volume history of the Beatles by Mark Lewisohn. It was really surprisingly fascinating and I want to try to explain why before all the images and impressions the book created fade from my memory.

Why do you care about those old men anyway?
I feel like an apologia for Beatles fandom is kind of required at this point. They're so central to the rockist canon, such a touchstone for the type of reactionaries who would dismiss hip-hop, techno and everything living and vital that I care about in music, that caring about them enough to read a book on them (three books!) seems suspect.

First, a generic defense of the study of history:it's not only not opposed to a progressive outlook, it's an important part of any understanding of the present. I say this as foundation-laying, I doubt any of the three people reading this would disagree.

Second, a more specific understanding of the Beatles - actually grokking their context, their rise, their loves, hates and ambitions - helps in understanding them as a specific group of people operating in a specific context, reacting to the music around them, expressing a particular Liverpool sensibility. All the talk about them as "timeless, central to rock history, giants" just obscures who they actually were and why they did what they did.

Finally, their rise coincided with - helped bring about - the rise of a new kind of music, a new youth culture, a new music industry ... every stage of their story so far involves people doing things no one had ever done before. Even if you think rock would have reached more or less the same place without them, a lot of things changed in the Sixties and the history of the Beatles is a fantastic lens for viewing it.

I'm pretty sure you were going to tell us about a book
It's engagingly written, a tiny bit amateurish in the best sense of the word, astoundingly well researched but wearing that lightly, and packed with memorable quotes and scenes. Lewisohn does well sketching milieu, and this is the foundation of the book.

Say something about the Beatles? anything
They weren't fantastic musicians, Paul maybe excepted. Fantastic singers and songwriters, yeah. But it's funny to think about how many people yearning tiresomely for "musicianship" put the Beatles at the top of their list.

They wanted to make black music. They had other influences, but when Little Richard told them they had that "authentic Negro sound" I can't imagine how happy they must have felt.

They were direct, funny, often assholes. Lewisohn keeps emphasizing how they refused to do anything that felt fake, that they were always true to themselves. He maybe hits that point too hard but you do finish the book feeling that part of their success came from aggressive disregard for what other people wanted or expected. I'm not sure that I would have been friends with John, but I would love to have spent time in his company. Even just reading the book you get inspired by how original his behavior - all of their behavior - was. You start to feel it's possible to live life less by rote.

Finally, when the group starts producing great work (they definitely didn't always) there starts to be a steady stream of little eruptions in the book, the Beatles doing something new and amazing. I'm not sure how much of this is their musical originality. Maybe Lewisohn could have done more to show how novelty comes from recombination - but he already does quite a bit of that. Maybe they had something.

New test: if your essay has less value than an essay produced by a lazy algorithm maybe don't publish it.

• Largest glacier calving ever caught on film
• "If you live long enough you get to see the cycles."

"He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating these conditions?"

"There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis from infancy through maturity to decay."

we tend to underestimate the amount we will change in the future

Brings up Chesterton

The Iliad may have been written by one man. It may have been written by a hundred men. But let us remember that there was more unity in those times in a hundred men than there is unity now in one man. Then a city was like one man. Now one man is like a city in civil war.

One of the terrors of dating is Milan Kundera, and specifically, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the sexually-transmitted book that this Czech-born author has inflicted on a generation of American youth.

I fully recognize the important role of the dating book, that is, the carefully selected work you lend a prospective lover sometime in the golden honeymoon period between your second cup of coffee together and the first time you spend a night in the same bed without touching ...

Dating Without Kundera via Enthusiasms.

I'll show you game mechanics ...

The main thing systems like Inform added over really old-style [interactive fiction] was more explicit modeling. An old-school way of doing things would be to write lots of chunks of text, parsers, code that causes things to happen, etc.; to the extent a world really exists, it's only because all the stuff you've thrown in is consistent with each other, the same way a world exists in a novel. Systems like Inform, instead, add an explicit declarative model of a world; there are objects with properties and locations, possible actions with preconditions and effects, containers and reachability, etc. A lot of the action and text is then attached to that model, and interactions and output are partly generated from it.
One thing still hardcoded in that model is style. The fact that a car is in the room with you and visible to you is explicitly modeled (not just buried in a canned snippet of text), but the style of how that's presented to you isn't explicitly modeled. Is it a matter-of-fact "There is a car here", some kind of dramatic gothic description, a vague offhand description, etc., etc.? The way to control that in standard IF is by attaching canned text snippets to different events. If you want style to change based on gameplay events, you write multiple canned text snippets and then write code to swap them in and out. And of course just informing the user of an object is one of the simpler kinds of output, so it gets more complex if you want to change style for, say, ongoing action, or want to present things in other than strictly this-is-happening-at-present narrative order, etc. You end up with tons of hacks like: an event happened now in the world model but we want to tell it to the player later as a flashback, so suppress the normal output and set this flag, then attach a callback to some other event that will replay the tell-about-this code later when we want it.
The main new thing Curveship adds to that is an explicit model of narration. It's motivated by a view in narratology (a sort of formalist variety of literary theory) that narratives are composed of an abstract "what really happened" component plus a narrational "how I am telling the reader about what happened" component. Since IF systems only have the first explicitly, Curveship adds the second too.

via

"Hosts ELISHA SESSIONS and MARK SINKER and their astounding guests burrow insensibly into the pulp and avant-garde science fiction of 1935-1975." Readings from and discussions of a bunch of science fiction short stories. There's a podcast link to the completed series, but, irritatingly, no link to see a list of all the episodes. So:

• Episode 1: John W. Campbell, "Who Goes There"
• Episode 2: Fritz Leiber, "A Pail of Air"
• Episode 3: Isaac Asimov, "Segregationist"
• Episode 4: Donald Malcom, "Beyond the Reach of Storms"
• Episode 5: Donald Wandrei, "The Red Brain"
• Episode 6: Ray Bradbury, "A Sound of Thunder"
• Episode 7: Frank Herbert, "A Tactical Saboteur"
• Episode 8: Howard Schoenfeld, "Build Up Logically"
• Episode 9: Robert Sheckley, "Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerley Dead"
• Episode 10: J.G. Ballard, "Track 12"
• Episode 11: Samuel R. Delany, "Aye, and Gomorrah"
• Episode 12: Arsen Darnay, "Such Is Fate"
• Episode 13: Brian Aldiss, "All the World's Tears"
• Episode 14: Thomas M. Disch, "The Squirrel Cage"
• Episode 15: Ursula Le Guin, "Things"
• Episode 16: Arthur C. Clarke, "The Forgotten Enemy"

Wish they'd done a Zelazny story.

I remember that Ultima ending! It blew my young mind.

Quotes from the Qu'ran are often taken out of context to prove various things, so I'm skeptical of this, but it's so lovely I can't resist:

Sura (Chapter) 5 of the Koran says that God sent mankind the Torah, the Gospel and the Koran. “For every one of you, We have appointed a path and a way ... So compete with one another in good works.”

from the New York Times letters section

We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demon- strate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their orig- inal are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, re- flecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.

- Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis

I'm re-reading The Adventures of Augie March, and I just got to one of my favorite passages.

Nor did she see what I strayed into town for in the morning, or why I took pleasure in sitting in the still green bake of the Civil War courthouse square after my thick breakfast of griddle cakes and eggs and coffee. But I did, and warmed my belly and shins while the little locust trolley clinked and crept to the harbor and over the trestles of the bog-spanning bridge where the green beasts and bulrush-rocking birds kept up their hot, small-time uproar. I brought along a book, but there was too much brown stain on the pages from the sun. The benches were white iron, roomy enough for three or four old gaffers to snooze on in the swamp-tasting sweet warmth that made the redwing blackbirds fierce and quick, and the flowers frill, but other living things slow and lazy-blooded. I soaked in the heavy nourishing air and this befriending atmosphere like a rich life-cake, the kind that encourages love and brings a mild pain of emotions. A state that lets you rest in your own specific gravity, and where you are not subject matter but sit in your own nature, tasting original tastes as good as the first man, and are outside of the busy human tamper, left free even of your own habits. Which only lie on you illusory in the sunshine, in the usual relation of your feet or fingers or the knot of your shoestrings and are without power. No more than the comb or shadow of your hair has power on your brain.

"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer ... what one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry - in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

It's a New York story, and it's beautiful.

I know cataloging your books online doesn't sound fun, but this is pretty addicting.

Here's my profile.

• amazon wishlist
• hm, should i read the Dark Is Rising series again, or will it disappoint me?
• the art of looking sideways
• book on the underground railroad
• Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles
• the unconsoled, ishiguro
• a dream of wessex, priest