Beautiful and Stupid TBR Tuesday

It's that resolution time of year, or, for me, that time when you start pulling out the bullet journals and writing projects and project notebooks and trying to read ALL THE BOOKS AT ONCE WHILE WRITING ALL THE STORIES. Usually this lasts until February or the first busy weekend. Or, like last year, the first time you put your project notebook Right Here Where I Will Surely Remember It. LOL.

Last year, I really enjoyed participating in the Sunday poetry whirl of Poets United and The Sunday Muse and I'd like to continue with Sunday poetry this year. However, I'd like to add a few days with related themes...such as TBR Tuesday (today's entry) and, perhaps a day for discussing writing projects or planning (maybe more to keep me working on these than otherwise). TBR Tuesdays will be a brief mention of some of the books I'm reading. Comments and questions are always welcome and reading suggestions are appreciated. One of the "projects" I'm working on this year is trying to keep my library "on hold" selection full to support my local library. And,of course, to keep myself in good books.

The books this week include one from the library (Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente) and one from my existing TBR shelf (Notes on the Death of Culture, by Mario Vargas Llosa). These are oddly sympathetic books to read together, both short books that take aim at our foibles and assumptions of sentience and language that draw you deep into the language. Both of these proved provocative, Space Opera because from the first I wanted to remonstrate: "Not Douglas Adams. Don't do that." I had to get out of my way with this but I kept reading. Notes on the Death of Culture reads a bit like an extended troll essay in which supposedly good things (freedom and self-determination) become hideous flaws that lead to crap art and an inability to appreciate music.

There are interesting arguments in NotDoC...but they are undermined somewhat by essays in which the author's inability (for the first time!!!) to find a book he would like to read in a bookstore become symbolic of cultural decay. It seems (in the essay) as if he went to an endcap, read the titles, and left. I don't know why these particular books would have been symbolic of anything and he doesn't bother to explain. They just don't appeal and that's it. The challenge is that when he engages with the idea of the spectacle and the way in which culture becomes a catch-all term that seems to mean something positive and worth preserving but elides any actual meaning under a wider and wider definition (anything produced or consumed or believed or made...live & active yogurt cultures!!), his argument is quickly lost to another bout of trolling (Damien Hirst is a con artist!) (sex has lost the art of eroticism!) and peters out. I start to take notes, start to think about counterarguments...and then we're on to the next section and culture proves as elusive an object of critique as it was to define.

Space Opera perks along in short and punchy chapters that overwhelm and then infiltrate my brain.  At times, the aliens are difficult to picture and sometimes are just blobs of color in my brain...I'd really like to see this as a miniseries (please, please, please NOT the SyFy channel) and possibly more anime than live action. There's a fluidity and rapidity that would fit well with visual representation and amazing voice acting. The central conceit...a universal singing competition in place of total war...makes for interesting worldbuilding. I'm enjoying the flip between art and aggression in terms of specialization (and the jokes about proliferating hits are awesome), especially the not-so-different implications.

Only...well...Valente wrote an entire book on fridging as a concept...so why is Mira dead? Why?!?  This irritates me because Mira both haunts the book and feels like the obligatory not-everyone-survives-the-business cautionary tale. And love would have saved her life? Like a song could save the entire planet? Ugh. (maybe this is completely unfair...I'm not 100% through with the book...sooo she could have something planned for this that I don't yet see)

And yet, I'm really enjoying both books. I'm stoked to have gotten Space Opera from the library and to be able to read it, as books should be read, in hardcover, with easily accessible (not tightly glued) pages, curled in a beanbag, daydreaming of crazing alien concerts and hoping that everything turns out okay (and finding, surprisingly, that I'm more on the side of Oort than Decibel lately. How tastes change as one gets really, really too old to read these kinds of books). NotDoC is a great book to read in between other things, an inspiration for margin notes and second thoughts and thoughts on whether "culture" really needs to be split into a cluster of words. Also, I can't stop thinking about a song consisting of four and a half minutes of a pianist staring at the instrument. I think it's brilliant--whatever the composer intended, encountering silence immediately throws you into your brain, along with all the music that came before and the present experience you are having...the other humans sharing the concert space, your choices up to this point...who is really naked in this experience? Has the composer sold you a bill of goods or provided, in a delimited amount of time, a counter-theme to consider? For me, I come down on the side of counter-theme and continued engagement in the totality of the event despite the lack of aural accompaniment from the performer.

LOL...this was not brief. But I'm glad to have gotten it down. :)

-- Chrissa