Coffee and Books (reading post)

[radiantfracture]

I accidentally cracked my coffee press while washing it (moral: never wash your dishes), so before yesterday's accidental omnibus meeting, I walked down to the second-nearest local coffee shop and bought a pourover apparatus. Hipsterdom circa 2011 here I come. I also bought a cup of coffee to tide me over.

I am not wholly convinced by the results of my first pourover, but I'm committed now.

Reading

I just re-read The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden, a comfort read for its luminous intensity. Although I usually read it as a sort of sensory reverie, this time I was much more attuned to the movements of the plot and the geometries of desire, which were crueller than I had remembered.

I haven't read any other Rumer Godden books -- should I? I tend to look for books of the same flavour rather than books by the same author.

On the family visit, I collected a copy of Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute my mother kindly ordered for me. I haven't finished all the stories, but I devoured several. These are a little grimmer than I expected from her other collections. I expected -- because it's what I love in her -- that politicized slapstick domestic surrealism she does so well, but these were -- well, also crueller. Perhaps better for that? I'm not sure yet, because I was surprised.

In theory and in practice (wa ha ha) I've been reading through Cruising Utopia of course, and have read a few of the short essays in Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie, which I think I'll discuss here next, unless there's hard lobbying for The Ghosts of My Life. There is some talk of taking up a further theory reading project with the copper bracelet crew, which would please me.

I'm re-reading This is How You Lose the Time War preparatory to teaching it. My brother also read it, and I think I have coerced him into making a video about the math and science therein. (He's the family mathematician, and also the family gamer, and he pointed out a possible connection to Halo, for which I am infinitely grateful.)

Oh yeah, and I'm almost finished The Starless Sea, which is propped up in a book stand on my kitchen counter so I can read a few pages each morning with my now-pourover coffee, like the newspaper from fairyland.

{rf}

Comments

[sovay]

That's a magnificent list, thank you. Some I have read and some I have not.

I hope you enjoy the ones you have not!

May I strongly suggest *In Youth is Pleasure* as a book I imagine your liking a great deal.

I will look for it.

I think I will add that for this precise feeling there also has to be a sort of trancelike quality often associated with summer, although as we discuss it I remember that Alain-Fournier's *Le Grand Meaulnes* is set in the dog-end of winter, but has it.

I don't know if summer is a requirement for me; I might agree on a strong seasonal component, which is part of the intensity of place; my personal numinous season is autumn; so does Tove Jansson's The Summer Book (1972) fall into this category for you?

[radiantfracture]

Yeah, I think your point about intensity of place is more salient than summer -- summer might signify only because many people seem to find it easiest to invoke this intoxication of the senses in recollection of childhood and of summer, together.

What I think /The Greengage Summer/ has is this quality of heightened sensory perception so intense that it becomes eerie, although nothing supernatural (or weird) (necessarily) occurs -- it's just the uncanniness of perception itself.

For me, quite mundanely, that time is the very end of summer and the very beginning of fall, when the light is changing, and just starting to darken at the edges, but there are still long evenings to be lived out by the fire.

[sovay]

Yeah, I think your point about intensity of place is more salient than summer -- summer might signify only because many people seem to find it easiest to invoke this intoxication of the senses in recollection of childhood and of summer, together.

I mean, it's a trope for a reason, it's just not my trope.

What I think /The Greengage Summer/ has is this quality of heightened sensory perception so intense that it becomes eerie, although nothing supernatural (or weird) (necessarily) occurs -- it's just the uncanniness of perception itself.

That makes sense to me. It tends to create in me the sense that the supernatural could occur at any moment, even if it never does, and accounts for the weird or fantastic feeling of many theoretically mimetic books or movies.

For me, quite mundanely, that time is the very end of summer and the very beginning of fall, when the light is changing, and just starting to darken at the edges, but there are still long evenings to be lived out by the fire.

I pick up a lot of ghosts at that time of year. (Also, the High Holidays.)