back on schedule

I. That would Millions of More People than We Thought

Lost world fiction is some of the most enjoyably odd, and they keep finding out it's basically real life!

In what’s being hailed as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala.

Also, if you've never read She by H. Rider Haggard, now's a good time. (Also, look at that cover art! I believe it's Ursula Andress from the movie version.)

II. There are Too Many Mid-Century Male Authors Who tried to be Capital-G Great

But Philip Roth does have some amazing licks. Here's one that stuck out from his novel Ghost Writer, which I'm picking at when I have downtime. 

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and I turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I'm frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.

Frantic with Boredom and a Sense of Waste: A Memoir by J.A. Cuthbertson

III. Bad Journey, Great Colors

Bill Coberly and I recently started a podcast, which I mentioned in my last missive. We read The Worst Journey in the World, and I realized I didn't get to share one of my favorite aspects of the book. To begin, a quote:

...all the softest colours God has made are in the snow.

The colors of the South Pole are the one part of antarctic exploration that sound worth the journey. Again and again Apsley Cherry-Garrard describes the aurora, the sun setting, or various ways the snow captures and reflects (and refracts) light such that he seems to see new colors. In some ways (uh, geek alert), it's almost the inverse of Saruman's robe in LoTR. Where his coloring is a sign of degradation, for Cherry the colors are an elevation of what most imagine is a blank landscape.

Still, probably not worth the frostbite or having all my teeth split and fall out from the cold.

IV. Your Art is So Ecumenical

An old essay that I've had open in a tab, and been meaning to read, forever.

So, here's a proposition: The novel was an art form—the art form—of the modern Protestant West, and as the main strength of established Protestant Christendom began to fail in Europe and the United States in recent decades, so did the cultural importance of the novel.

The novel, it should be noted, also declined in cultural relevance with the advent of other entertainment media. So. I mean. This is a really fascinating essay but one that seems to start off by eschewing some obvious material considerations.

V. Opinion

Speaking of material explanations: Screens are bad, books are good. That's still basically what I believe if you forced me to have such an argument, but as someone who actually used/uses reading for escapsim, I think the binary suffers from the fact that most people don't read all that much and therefore can't conceive of binge-reading as not unlike binge-watching. For too many of us, reading only exists inside some rigorous, bettering-yourself paradigm. When I worked at a library (both times), I was confronted with the fact that the most active readers don't read good books, and they don't even remember the bad ones they do. I was always having patrons bring back a Nora Roberts book or a James Patterson book or some other crime-lite, faux-romance fiction disaster, and then confess they hadn't realized they'd read it until they were halfway through.

Look, I forget things, but if you read 200 pages before realizing you've read those 200 pages within the last five or so years, that means you were reading to turn your brain off! Doesn't that sound more or less like your relationship with Law & Order? My experience with reading escapism is different - I can give you the broad-strokes of my favorite Animorph books to this day - but I think by telling our kids, and ourselves, that more reading is good because all reading is generically good, we've rendered reading blase. I'm not even saying you shouldn't read a bunch of Patterson and forget it immediately (don't read Patterson, I take it back). I'm just trying to say that such a habit creates a different experience than reading P.D. James, which might mean our screen-versus-page dichotomy is mostly a way to virtue signal.

Although reading is definitely better.