AdamSmith

Re: SF, I'm most of the way through David Brin's Existence. Just wow. No words to encapsulate it. If anyone today is the rightful heir to Clarke, Brin is it. And there's no higher praise in my book.

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You know The New Yorker used to have an editor dedicated to giving editorial tune-up advice, on both the captions and the artwork, to their cartoonists. (Not directly relevant here, just interesting.)

Was wondering that myself. Simple error, messed-up part of the joke, something else...?

Another favorite is Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, the first significant American novel (1798), a Gothic novel reviled in its time but better received later, as it began to be recognized as an early specimen of "psychological fiction." Must dig that out of the basement.

Thank you! Will do. That was me. The thing is interminable, to be sure. I first read it in college, didn't really like it until I got more than halfway through. (Had to read it on account of being assigned to lead the seminar discussion of Book VI, the last section of the novel of course). Now greatly enjoy opening and rereading bits at random. Also enjoyable are Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford novellas (made into a television series by BBC, broadcast here by PBS 2008). I liked a lot Gaskell's frankly amateurish story construction, visibly just making it up as she goes along, bringing in characters and then dispatching them with little regard for normal story arc development. And the picture of 1840s English northwest country society full of, indeed dominated by, many strong women characters.

Crime and Punishment! Must re-read. And intend (some enchanted evening) to get into Gogol. Stanislaw Lem's SF novella GOLEM XIV which I mentioned above, cast as a series of lectures by the sentient supercomputer of the title, opens with an "introduction" by an MIT scientist (character), who was one of the computer's keepers, saying in part: ...GOLEM devotes its interest to the species rather than to the individual representatives of that species: how we resemble one another appears to it of greater interest than the realms in which we are different. That is surely why it has no regard for belles-lettres. Moreover, it once itself declared that literature is a "rolling out of antinomies" or, in my own words, a trap where man struggles amid mutually unrealizable directives. GOLEM may be interested in the structure of such antinomies, but not in that vividness of torment which fascinates the greatest writers. To be sure, I ought to stress even here that this is far from being definitely established, as is also the case with the remainder of GOLEM's remark, expressed in connection with Dostoevsky's work (referred to by Dr. E. MacNeish), the whole of which GOLEM declared could be reduced to two rings of an algebra of the structures of conflict...

Yesterday's yuks about FLL reminded of this...

Right now rereading David McCullough's 1776, gripping on-the-ground account of the travails of Washington and his army across the vexing uncertain first year of the war. Also rereading Stanislaw Lem's Imaginary Magnitude, chiefly the novella GOLEM XIV about a sentient supercomputer created by the U.S. military for war gaming but which refuses such pointless activity, instead delivering a series of lectures on the nature of evolution, intelligence, Homo sapiens, and the ascending tree of constructed intelligences. For a taste, see here -- some zealot scanned the whole thing into GitHub: https://github.com/ilonajulczuk/laughing-archer/blob/master/library/Science Fiction/Imaginary magnitude-Stanislaw Lem.txt On the next-to-reread pile, Middlemarch and Absalom, Absalom! On the ambition pile, Remembrance of Things Past, finally to read all the way through instead of just bits and snatches. Still dipping into at random, Thayer's Life of Beethoven that I noted here before: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43591

Your emoji just made my day.

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