The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

I've had various Georges Perec books on my list for a while now, so when I discovered this long story at the library I jumped on the chance to check out his style.  It's a droll sixties take on 'computational literature' which narrates, in a single 50 page long sentence, all the possible paths through the satirical corporate flowchart associated with the titular question.  While the lack of any punctuation or capitalization is off-putting at first, I found myself quickly falling into the rhythm of the text.  In fact, at some point it become a strange sort of breathless page turner, despite the fact that it seems mathematically impossible to write a good story given the constraints.  While the text is very repetitious, Perec's comic wit and timing turn every repeated phrase into a new punchline. After such a masterful display of making something out of nothing I'll surely be reading more Perec in the near future.  

So It Was Said

As a result of SPUDS book club I discovered that you can order Sutta Central's new translations of all the Pali Cannon materials via the print on demand service Lulu.  This particular handsomely produced little volume is a translation of the Itivuttaka, which consists of 112 short sayings from the Buddha, each accompanied by a verse commentary.  It's not the most compelling part of the Pali Cannon that I've read, since it's frequently just a list of things that are not helpful and things that are helpful in practice.  But there are some interesting and puzzling moments thrown in there.  My favorite was number 49, which describes something that might sound either insipid or tautological, but turns out to be incredibly profound: "And how do those with vision see? It's when a mendicant sees what has come to be as having come to be."

The Rider

 I'm not sure where I discovered Tim Krabbé's wonderful little window into the world of high level amateur cycle racing.   I do remember it was suggested as a classic example of short fiction, and I can see why.  Krabbé, a journalist and former chess player in addition to a serious cyclist, narrates his ride in the Tour de Mount Aigoual.  It's a fairly short but incredibly hilly road race in Southern France that has occasionally featured in the Tour de France.  

This may not sound like a great setup for a story.  Just a bunch of fucking amateurs moving their feet in circles for hours.  But Krabbé manages to make it exciting and entertaining the whole way.  Of course it's a sports broadcast of sorts.  Who broke away from who and what the racer's strategies were.  This part alone is surprisingly entertaining, to the point where it almost makes you want to watch cycling on TV while eating a baguette and shouting allez!  But Krabbé's narration is also constantly interrupted with stories drawn from his own past and the history of professional cycling.  In other words, precisely the knowledgeable commentary you **wish** sports broadcasters provided.  

The really amazing thing, however, is the way the writing style captures the type of thoughts one has on a long ride.  I haven't raced a bicycle since I had one with streamers and the prize was bragging rights about who got to the end of the driveway.  But I have done some long riding and noticed how thoughts get incredibly short and repetitive when you're working hard, but then can sometimes take crazy flight into delirious daydream when the pace lets up a bit.  It's a real *tour de force* that you can read faster than he rode it.

The Gambler

This short novel was packaged alongside The Double in Pevear and Volokhonsky's new translation. Unlike The Double, this one was written smack in the middle of Dostoevsky's most creative period, which included classics like Notes from Underground, The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment. Unfortuantely, The Gambler is nowhere near as interesting as any of those.  It tells us the story of young Russian employed as a tutor by a wealthy family passing time in "Roulettenburg".  Alexi Ivanovich is tormented by his doomed love for one of the young ladies in this cortege, and, in an attempt to help her out of some monetary difficulties, takes to gambling.  Unfortunately, he wins.  This gets him a lot of money at first -- although not the girl he wants --and a lot less money later, as his beginner's luck inevitably turns on him.  In the end, it is a novel about addiction, though for the bulk of it that addiction is to unrequited love, and not specifically to gambling.  Apparently, Dostoevsky saw them as equally corrosive.

The Ministry of Time

A friend recommended this new sci-fi novel from an author I'd never heard of.  Its a breezy, entertaining, forgettable, and not really science fiction even.  In fact, it's more of a romance novel with some light time travel grafted onto it.  While the writer is perfectly competent at making the pages turn (no mean feat), there didn't seem to be much intellectual substance to the novel beyond some vague implications that the British Empire might not have been wholly a good and glorious thing.  

The plot centers around the way that 'expats' can fall in love with another one simply because they feel out of place in their new society.  The narrator is a really quite helpless and annoying first generation British woman whose mother is a Cambodian refugee.  She falls in love with a mid-19th-century British explorer who was plucked from arctic starvation by the titular Ministry's new time machine.  The past, it seems, is a foreign country.  But a sexy one!

The Magic Mountain

Sometimes, the great books just aren't. I found Thomas Mann's classic pretty underwhelming.  It's long.  It's kinda boring plot wise -- the narrator at one point evens calls it an attempt to tell the story of time passing.  It features too many epic philosophical debates between a humanist and a Jesuit that end up sounding like just so much sophomore dorm room bullshit.  And it's filled with interminable descriptions of the way the snow glistened and her eyes looks and the exact dimensions of the latest stereo system.  

Perhaps, in its defense, we can imagine the way it may have spoken to its moment when it was published in 1924.  The novel is set almost entirely in a Swiss sanatorium before the outbreak of WW1.  It describes an idyllic world of 'illness' completely removed from the 'healthy' goal driven "flatlands" of Germany, where our hero Hans Catorp spend years on end recovering from even a hint of tuberculosis and other maladies of the age.  In other words, it depicts a seemingly endless and meaningless pause in the 'real' life of the world below, a sort of aristocratic nihilism where the values of discipline, productivity, and efficacy no longer have the same import.  When the madness of war gradually intervenes in its final pages, the question of what is 'sick' and what 'healthy' takes on a new poignancy.  I can only imagine that in Weimar Germany this may have struck a chord we can no longer hear.

The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti

This translation of "A Mahayana Scripture" by Uma Thurman's more famous dad fits into the recent penchant I've had for exploring related spiritual traditions via things sitting on the shelf at the cat bookstore.  I believe it caught my eye because at one point I started the Michael Taft & M.C. Owens lecture series (before finding M.C. Owens intial overview a bit long-winded).  It's the first Mahayana scripture I've read other than the Heart Sutra.  And I guess it confirms me as 'Theravadan', at least for the moment, because I didn't find it particularly approachable or revelatory.

In fact, it leads me to reiterate the same question I asked in the case of Tantra Illuminated -- if the philosophy is so simple, why is its exposition so ... gaudy.  The basic idea is so profound and straightforward that it is almost totally summed up in the five short pages of Chapter 9, "The Dharma-Door of Nonduality".  ALL PHENOMENA ARE EMPTY.  Thank you for you attention to this matter.  And yet this scripture has an elaborate literary structure that spans multiple universes and involves uncountably large contingents of boddhisattvas doing various magic tricks.  On top of that, it rather condescendingly uses all the Buddha's 'Hinayana' disciples as whipping boys to illustrate the superiority of the Mahayana path.  I get that all this is supposed to expand our mind in trans-rational ways, and there is doubtless a profound teaching in that.  But I simply don't have the background to find this stuff helpful.  I think I better stick with the Early Buddhism I'm familiar with and that makes sense to me.