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In Hungary, winters can be long (so I’m assuming). Before television, intelligent Hungarians tried many different pastimes to make it through those dark days. One of these, János Bolyai, resorted to non-Euclidean geometry.

Bolyai wasn’t warning his son off gambling, or poetry, or a poorly chosen love affair. He was trying to keep him away from non-Euclidean geometry.

via Duel at Dawn – The Barnes & Noble Review.

I myself tend to contemplate the Cantor Set, but that’s just me. This looks like a tempting book, though.

William Shakespeare’s grave

At the moment, I am tackling Shakespeare: all of him. I have gotten a brand-new Complete Works for this particular purpose. This new edition, put out by the Royal Shakespeare Company, is far thicker and heavier than my very old and dusty one from college, even though it is printed on what my son calls “Bible paper.”

I have read at least half of the plays already, back in college. That was a long time ago, longer than I want to admit. The memories of the plays are extremely faded.

My main purpose in this reading is to wean myself off of the canned convenient culture that we live in now. I have come to rely on the quick slogan, the news clip, the punch line, the condensed and busy version of reality that I have gotten from this fast television and Internet culture that I live in the midst of.

I want the great words to roll through my head. I want the words that are going to last.

Sure I know what happens at the end of Hamlet. However, the re-reading of that play is not made unappealing by that. I want to enjoy the journey as well as the destination.

I must first start out here by saying that I am not a gardener. I grew up deep in the country but had nobody to tell me the names of the various plants around except for those of three or four varieties of trees. Today, I can definitely distinguish a specimen of any species of moss from a sunflower, and both of those from a California redwood. I actually do know a few more species than that, but I have never really had a garden except for a horrible attempt at the house we lived in before Peter arrived, when I tried to keep the previous owner’s prize-winning rosebushes going. Buck planted a lot of squash vines the next year which tried to consume the whole house in their furious growth. That was pretty much it, as far as our efforts at gardening have gone.

Which brings me to one of the wonderful books that have just arrived in my morning mailbox, and no, not from my dearly beloved Amazon.com. It is Gardener’s Nightcap, by Muriel Stuart, and is from Persephone Books (persephonebooks.co.uk) in London. She was, judging from her bit of biography, a very passionate gardener, and it shows in this book which is not an endless bunch of chapters on how to raise rosebushes etc. and not kill them off. It is rather a string of small essays upon gardens, plants and the natural world. Each essay-let is short enough to be read easily before you turn out the light for the night. I am devouring them even though I have no similar experiences to go along with the reading.

Grown-ups never realize how close a child is to the earth, how intricate and detailed the earth is to him. Things that to older eyes are but tufts and pleasant tangles, are to him as distinct and individual as the furnishings of a doll’s house. He sees the tiny life between the stones, the entrancing growth of very small plants, just as Rossetti, face down among the grasses, noted that the wood spurge had ‘a cup of three’. We learn on dust, from Socrates, from the field daisy. But only in childhood do we live such lessons.

— Muriel Stuart, ‘Single Flowers’, Gardener’s Nightcap

LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER Four of the five Man...
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One thing about this year’s Man Booker award process just struck me as I was sitting here waiting for my doctor’s appointment (regular checkup, nothing scary): there were three women up for the prize. And in none of the commentary that I saw was it mentioned that three women writers were up for the prize, and how would they fare? It was simply that the merits of each book and writer were discussed.

When Hilary Mantel won for Wolf Hall, it was simply reported that Hilary Mantel won for Wolf Hall. No reflections upon what that means for the future of women’s contributions to literature, no wondering how seriously we are or are not to be taken.

In fact, the only we in the whole proceedings was the collective we of readers. That is as it should be. We can melt into the crowd now.

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Ulysses, James Joyce
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Norm at the Library has a hopeful note up today. It’s possible to like books with plots in them, and not have to be publicly ashamed at that fact.

Well, folks, it looks like the long literary nightmare is finally over.

via “…they have trained us… to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment.” « Stacked.

Maybe now I can admit that I never finished James Joyce‘s Ulysses. I’ve felt overly sensitive about that fact ever since our tour guide in Dublin said he’d read it long ago.

According to the WSJ article that Norm links to,

If there’s a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

That’s another reason that I’m enjoying A. S. Byatt‘s The Children’s Book: stuff happens. Should I admit that in public? Oh, why not.

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I believe that I have come to the end of my attempt at reading Infinite Jest.

Is the book “too much” for me? Perhaps. Probably not. So why did I stop? Too much exposition. Too much detail and not enough reason to want that detail. The characters’ lives, both inner and outer, are spread before me, the reader, in truly astonishing and well-done detail. I can’t want for more diligent descriptions.

I quit caring about the characters very quickly, though. There is, in this book, too much detail and not enough substance. Yes: what do I mean by that? I mean that, knowing great amounts of detail about someone, such as Hal Incandenza, is not the same thing as knowing them. Knowing about is not knowing. I did not feel taken into the book.

Bringing this into context for me was receiving my copy, bought from Amazon UK, of A. S. Byatt’s latest novel, The Children’s Book. The book is not out here in the USA yet, not until some time in September, so fans who can’t wait must order abroad and pay silly shipping fees.

I started reading the book as soon as it was delivered. I felt drawn into the book with the first sentence. I am not sure how Byatt managed to do that trick, because it’s a very plain little sentence. I know less about the characters than I do about Wallace’s. However, I care to know more, and read on and find out what happens. Here is the point where I am supposed to regale you with mysterious bits of plot development from The Children’s Book, but I have not progressed far enough to do so. Even if I had, though, I would still do my best to have you go on over to Amazon and put in a pre-order for that title.

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