So far:
begun last month, finished New Year's Day: Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip. A teenager on Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea in the early 1990s hears, then reconstructs, and finally reads Great Expectations, while her village community is corroded by civil war and her mother and a white neighbor who has stepped in to run the local school debate the question: whose existence is more plausible, Pip's or the devil's?
David Simon's non-fiction Homicide, a follow-up to Richard Price's Clockers, which I came to via Simon's HBO series The Wire -- I don't own a television, but thanks to Netflix I'm in the middle of the third season and deeply worried about the future of Stringer Bell and Omar.
Bob Hariman's edited collection Prudence, with stand-out articles by Bob himself, John Nelson, and Maurice Charland.
An article by Linda Zerilli in a 2005 issue of Political Theory, "'We feel our freedom': imagination and judgment in the thought of Hannah Arendt".
Horace's Satires book 1.
Some Gadamer, on Google books.
Associative thoughts on reading books on Google Preview (copied from Google Preview, of course, because I can't locate the book on my shelves where it's supposed to be): "Yet the most classical narrative (a novel by Zola or Balzac or Dickens or Tolstoy) bears within it a sort of diluted tmesis: we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as 'boring') in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always its articulations: whatever furthers the solution of the riddle, the revelation of fate): we boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations; doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer's striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening the episodes of the ritual (like a priest gulping down his Mass)... [The author] cannot choose to write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust's good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.)"
I omit the sentences on tmesis, which I read recently, too recently to bother to reread, let alone to retype.
Was intrigued by Mr. Pip but really loved the Wire--I know exactly what you mean about concern for the future of String and Omar. There's an interview with David Simon and the cast included in the extras for one of those early seasons: DS explains that the the series examines (in rather excruciating but/and? delicious detail, if you ask me) the tragedy of middle management: his formative influences included Greek tragedy and Stanley Kubrick's 1958 B/W Paths of Glory (with Kirk Douglas) about trench warfare in WWI.
ReplyDeleteI've watched the past few episodes with a sinking feeling, knowing my favorite character is doomed. (I'll avoid spoilers, but those in the know will understand who I mean. Third season: condo building under construction; a shotgun and a Walther PPK. Interesting that Simon talks about the tragedy of middle management -- I see that, but the theme I've been mapping onto the Wire is the immigrant/outside success story, the Godfather-I-got-to-get-out-of-this-game that Stringer inhabits so fully and desperately. My own Irish great-grandparents in New Englad, I suspect, would have known the feeling. "I've played the game everyone plays, just a little faster so that I can catch up: when can I sit back and enjoy the victory in peace?"
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