tob Friday 3/13/2015
www.themorningnews.org/tob/2015/dept-of-speculation-v-annihilation.php
this is the one I am int most in. bcs ngtv feeling twd the first (wh is seeded at #1. hey I wonder if anyone will mention didion. cld look rvws this book too. troubled woman. wld be satisfying to me to read contrast w didion. how far. or to read didion critical of. maybe no reason criticism? but. not love.) and positive twd Annihilation. I like it. most of int to me of all bks here. /*oh yes also ATB,S./ having read cover descrip and opening pages.
so here is a match where I actually hope one wins! I hope he picks Annihilation. judge victor laValle Big Machine, so ~ I feel he might. why? bcs cool? but he might pick the other too. :/
less imprnt but of overall int as lessening the interest of this tournament, so far the higher seeded has won each time. no underdog, no surprise. both the #1s. and! both the #2s. Paying Guests. yesterday. and Seven Killings. /which, okay I support, but the #3 there All the Birds, Singing is the other book here I am now int in. maybe very.*)
the #1s were:
Mitchell Bone Clocks. I feel now less like am missing out w Dvd Mitchell: Cloud Atlas wh won the v first tob 2005, wh is the only one I d n read live, came upon 2006. I wonder if dlww or dlcs indicates how I came upon. maybe was already reading TMN. (and, maybe later though, had a link blog I think?). also Autumns of J Van der dutch ness japan ness cover and was on my shelf behind me in mailroom for long while. but wh read here and bit elsewh re Bone Clocks and how he is into entertaining (that's ok) and maybe not much depth. I had conflated just a bit w DFW, I mean Mitchell was benefitting fr the contemp big deal ish big novels ish same first name association. (Brit though, right?). Black Green Swan ~? :) but had not wanted to read, when looked at.
Doerr. All the Light. as some cmmtrs pleasingly to me expressed, not magic to me (I expect). "All the Adjectives." and this side of bracket, Dept eh. and I keep forgetting: Redeployment. okay. so that is my pick of the #1s. I think well of that. and saw Phil Klay on colbert, I think, y. liked. and glad getting attn.
is only non-novel here this year? short stories.
to avoid really being alone with her mind //and I am displeased bcs her mind if Not Like Mine. "Tell me you are like me." no. you are more like ~ everybody else. :/ and bcs she then *tries* to be like everybody else. she becomes a published writer, a teacher, a wife, a mother. so wh did I want? again, for her in 'troubled mind' to be Like Me. incl defiance? incl not ~of the world.
why hold against ~ ? more dislike for someone who seems category of me and is very different. than for someone very different. do not talk like me and then be other. / resentment of the 'almost but not' ?
and dislike the title. 'dept' I dislike to begin w. and speculation I guess again if you are going to come my way, come My way.
Something is wrong, the novel suggests. //and d n suggest any resolution? that I am int in, the not resolving. there is despair?
Annihilation.
There’s a feeling of mounting dread in this novel, right from the start.
If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you. //mm I love it.
it didn’t take long before I felt both books were, in effect, saying the same thing to the reader. Something is wrong. In this way both novels felt like they were offering a tantalizing mystery. If you suggest that something is wrong, then I yearn to find out what it might be.
// y good. 1. What is wrong? is *the* qsnt, for me? not just about me. /auden all is right in work of art ~ that also in hist. "but All is not right, there." /"There is nothing wrong in this whole world." //oh and *my* tangenting "You don't know what/s in my heart." was about cadence. only now thinking. oh: one voice says Nothing Wrong in Whole World. second voice says: you cannot know that bcs you do not know wh is in my heart. implicitly, probably: Something *is* wrong there. and there *is* in the world. /mm. th shld hv bn apparent to me, was saying that, by putting those two sentences tgthr. also echo of the Auden, sort of reversed. Hist is the Whole World. Art is What is in my Heart. if you say there is nothing wrong in history, it does not mean there is nothing wrong in my heart. and my heart is history.
// oh and 2. any question, every question. wh is so appealing about a mystery is that someone is looking for sth, activiely. /trying to find out. / uncover. 'disclosing unconcealment.' it is a qstn, and it has an answer.
In the Offill, the mystery revolves around the narrator and her uneasy mind. In the VanderMeer, the mystery revolves around the narrator and the uncanny landscape. If I found myself trying to gather clues, then both books worked hard to upend expectations of simplistic solutions. Offill and VanderMeer are just too fucking good to pretend there will be easy answers. That said, one of them did find a way to offer a conclusion, if not a neat ending, and it was this that helped me make my decision between two formidable books.
hmmm Annih!? hoping so. seems more likely. well, and I will like Dept *less*, i think, if it does offer an ending. see above re some int if ends w no answer to Sth is Wrong. (You don't know what's in my heart.)
but I am concerned. Annih might not 'end' bcs is first of three in a trilogy. int: all publ last year, just months apart. so maybe rather planned. so maybe does have its own ending. and no one in comments has said it suffers fr being read alone (hv not bn many cmmts about, but there was ~ yesterday I think ~ one or two saying it was their fvr) whereas several hv said th re Ferrante.
okay come onnnnnn Annihilation.
In Annihilation the biologist does make it inside the winding tunnel structure in Area X. There she discovers words written on the walls, a long half-nonsensical phrase that continues farther and farther down the walls of the spiral pathway. Soon it becomes
yay, yes, this bodes well! maybe.
clear the words are fresh: Someone—or something—is writing them even now. oooh. /and only now I think of Lost. ~ hatch. wonder if much mentioned in rvws rxns to book/
The novel draws you forward with the promise of discovering that being.
uh oh but does it fulfill, tantalize, or turn out empty..
errrr: Offil's narrator ..takes the pills the doctor gives her. Her hands stop flapping. She is less inclined to lie down in the street.
/almost. and no. no no. (I am leaving out the words that bother me mainly flapping brain buckling clown. in parking lot store two towns over yeah right the old parking lot bell jar. (I mean it's real. it's just, for me: almost and not at all. so. I dislike./
I began to think of this narrator’s mind much like the Crawler in Annihilation: both just around the bend of a deep, mysterious pathway, both outsized in their effect exactly because they evade direct confrontation for so long. /y: evade direct confrontation/
But eventually the biologist will have an encounter down in that tunnel. When it happens the scene is overwhelming, illuminating, baffling, troubling. It’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for, but it’s nothing I could’ve anticipated.
//Yayyyy!!!!! Annihilation for the win!!!!
The moment—I hesitate to even call it a meeting /mm intrigue /also this judgemnt write up is good*/—solves nothing neatly but does bring the novel toward a conclusion.
All the mystery, all the dread, that’s been building for 175 pages finally crystallizes. I understand the biologist, and Area X, in a way that feels profoundly new, and yet uneasy. I remain off-balance but still immensely satisfied. It’s an incredible thing to pull off and VanderMeer does it with such grace.
*yes see this is good (LaValle's Writing) - Offill’s narrator, or more precisely her novel, never afforded me such a shift. Certainly things change for the narrator by the end of the novel—there’s a wrenchingly beautiful last page—but in the end, callous as this may sound, I never worried for her marriage or her daughter or her career the way I worried for her. Offill just does such a bang-up job of depicting a brilliant person /rr. there's that rub. briliant, really? but not like me!// whose greatest enemy is a force abiding within her. It’s extraordinary. Really none of her other struggles could compare. By the end of the novel it was this situation that I was hoping to have illuminated in some way. /y. it is wh I want illuminated in my life. it is wh I regret when I choose not life: that there was sth still to tell. where: telling = finding out. illuminating, sure.// I wasn’t looking for some medical diagnosis, and I certainly wasn’t looking to see her cured or having a breakdown, but at the end I felt as if the novel had decided not to turn that last bend on the path, not to encounter the final ugliness it had been promising me. This was a shame, because I would’ve followed that woman anywhere. /mm. so how shall I write my./ In real life people can spend their entire lives avoiding the Crawler, but in fiction the reader, at least this reader, is begging to see.
me too. and in my life. thrfr want in a book. TELL ME YOU ARE LIKE ME. ---
//Victor LaValle I'm into you now!//
(As a little side note: In 2010, my second novel got to spend some time in the Tournament of Books. After a fun opening round win I lost to Marlon James’s excellent The Book of Night Women. I remember distinctly wanting to kick the judge in the nuts for that decision. So if Jenny Offill wants to kick me in the nuts for this one, I can’t blame her.)
TODAY’S WINNER: Annihilation
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internet interface ~innovatns of int
----blog top down most recent at top / but. days go 1 2 3 4 so blog posts 4 3 2 1 but within most recent blogpost #4, thoughts progresses 1 2 3 4 not 4 3 2 1 so d enforce breaks. pieces. could put sentences in reverse order ~ backwards paragraphs. but cannot put words in reverse ~ backwards sentences will not do.
basically, though, this format keeps current at top. most int. most live.
and
----"feed" - facebook. copying other sites, news, readers. again most current at top. sense of liveness. current. a current. it's all happening.
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The Case for Filth By STEPHEN MARCHE - SundayReview - Opinion
Housework is as complex as the connection between our emotional life and our material life, as subtle as all intimacy. /y good. cf: *Hoarders bk. not one categorical behavior. also as varied as emotional lives, as wh we do, how we think, object relations. *blog by icarus poster, re psy business in personal house cleaning, v int.// Suggested Tags: housework/
/here via ggl Stephen Marche judge in tob Paying Guests [a Booker Prize contender, w all the attributes th go into that contentn: English ppl, restraint, details of "inner life", naturalism, negotiatns w hist. .. wh ppl call "atmospheric" ..shld read if want spend 20 hrs w women who talk like this.] v Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall [shld d n read if not know who S___ Z___ is] /to wh cmmtrs reacted ngtvly. but I enjoyed as part of his style of ~distillation = 'this is this sort of thing' 'wh ppl call' //"oh we're talking about the Japanese tea scenario?" :) mark alzn oral. love th.
The Case for Filth -by Stephen Marche - Opinion - Sunday Review -NYTimes (Dec 7, 2013) |
dlcs sugg tags: Housework / Housework is as complex as cnnxn btw our emotional & material life. as subtle as all intimacy. /y. ///also re writing/thinking as distilling 'this type of thing' 'what ppl call'
//two ints here//
1) emotional life w material life.
2. writing that characterizes as 'such' ~ distills
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