It was only two days ago Son John sent me a link to Laura Miller’s Salon review of Richard Powers’ Orfeo: A Novel and, intrigued, I got the book via Kindle. Been reading it ever since, underlining passages and even copying a few of them out. The first that got that treatment:
…people take up all kinds of hobbies in retirement. They visit the birthplaces of Civil War generals. They practice the euphonium. They learn tai chi or collect Petoskey stones or photograph rock formations in the shape of human faces… (Orfeo, page 2 or so)
Uh huh, I thought. Guilty. And it’s gone on like that, until I’m now 2/3 of the way through the book.
Again and again during this immersive reading I’ve found myself resorting to Google and other tools to elucidate some point, and I just found myself using Spotify to listen to Steve Reich’s Proverb, a realization of a Wittgenstein fragment
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
No surprise that YouTube has it too:
Well. Just goes to show, if it needed reiteration, how amazingly interwoven (Ted Nelson would say ‘intertwingled’) stuff is. I do wish that it was easier to snag bits of text from the iPad version of Kindle, to free them from the silo, because there are many others I’m inclined to stick into my Commonplace books.
I have read many books, but I do not feel qualified to say what books were most influential, or of value , etc. History is a better field for lasting affects on my thinking. Let me try. The first Salute, by Barbara Tuschman. Here she aquaints me with how fragile this country was in a revolutionary time, and it was a miracle that it all happened. This is so different from the propaganda I was filled with by the American educational system 12 grades and college. Edna picks ” Gone with the Wind”, because it was well written, not by the fantacy world of the “Old South” . so who can say? Laura Rivers Salon gives some interesting ways the world impacts us.
I am rereading ” Catcher in the rye” At 91 , I am not very impressed.
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