Big Sky

Hours spent looking up, trying to cram it in.

Or empty it out. It comes to the same thing.

Lebensraum For Earworms

The Internets tell me to listen to That Summer, At Home I Had Become The Invisible Boy by the Twilight Sad. So I do.

And it is good.

Of my own accord I listen to Go Tell The Women by Nick Cave and Grinderman. We are scientists, we are. It is good.

(By accident I discover the soundtrack of I’m Not There. Cat Power sings Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, Mason Jennings does The Times They Are A-Changin’. Jeff Tweedy sings a Simple Twist Of Fate.)

After a while, the earworms are fighting it out in the brain for room to breathe.

Out Of Shelf, Out Of Mind

My books are still in their boxes. They entered these boxes earlier this year when I moved and, well, I never unpacked them. I am reminded of this brute fact because a friend asked to borrow some books that I know I own, but for the life of me I cannot find them, though I did find some books which I didn’t know I owned. Huh.

On that note; either I’m getting stupider or Justina Robson’s Living Next Door To The God Of Love is a little denser than I was expecting. I had to take a week-long break from reading it and when I came back I was thoroughly confused. I intend to exploit this unexpected pleasure and read it again from the beginning. Until someone gives me Endymion (two people have offered so far) this is all I have on hand to read.

Until I wrote that sentence I think I honestly believed it to be true. But then, of course, one stares at the words, and one thinks, wait, that can’t possibly… It’s not even remotely true. Not only do I have three hundred and eighty-seven megabytes of downloaded unread texts, not counting comics, but I have only this very evening discovered, while digging through the boxes, that I also own books that I have not in fact read.

Many of them, I think, are books I felt I ought to read. The category of the acquired-but-unread ranges from the comparatively lowbrow but essential genre reading (say, Delany’s Dhalgren or the entire Moorcock back catalogue) to the likes of David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon. And Dostoevsky. I found a copy of The Brothers Karamazov lying forlornly in one of the bigger boxes, sandwiched between Marcus Aurelius and a Fritjof Capra book which -come to think of it- I haven’t read either. I was halfway through Crime and Punishment earlier this year, before I moved, and now I can’t even find it. And I had forgotten I was reading it.

Started, not finished, and then forgotten that I’d started. Amnesia gives us a further subset. Moby-Dick, for example. Some non-fiction, including the Dawkins-Dennett-Harris New Atheist unholy trinity.

(It suddenly strikes me that this is the ideal post to namecheck Pierre Bayard’s Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus, which would be especially delicious since I haven’t read that either. Nor do I have a copy.)

Alors, unexpectedly cheerful fact: far more importantly than a few bouts of amnesia, I have discovered a vast pile of unread books in my possession and am not actually hostage to Dan Simmons.

Now I just have to get some goddamn bookshelves.