Tag: reading

• Orbital mechanics

  “A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness.”

  Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

  I’m a little way in to A Desolation Called Peace, the second and final (I think!) part in Arkady Martine’s duology that began with A Memory Called Empire. Incidentally, I was reading the first book around the same time last year. It was the first fiction book I’d read in some time, and I was finding it difficult to get through.

  There are all sorts of reasons this can be true of any reading experience, but after getting through three other books in record time at the beginning of the year, I’ve slowed down once again for Desolation. It’s an odd sensation, like the mental equivalent of slogging through wet sand.

  This has nothing to do with the plot of the novel, which is multi-layered and surprising; nor the characters, most of whom are wonderfully idiosyncratic, deep and engaging; nor Martine’s writing, which is lyrical and free and so alive, a tiny diamond glittering in what is often a staid and immovable boulder of a genre.

  I think it has more to do with where I am meeting this book, this series, this writing. Like near everyone on the planet, I’ve had a Big Few Years(tm). Throw multiple health issues into the mix, add a dose of grief, your basic burnout, and you’ve got a lovely thick batter to play with. I don’t think that’s necessarily it, though. It’s just where I am, what I’m doing, the byways and backstreets around which my thoughts often careen.

  Martine’s writing feels like a foil for my current state of mind; a fitting opposite; yin to yang; boy I’m really stretching the old metaphors this time aren’t I.

  Sometimes it’s not up to the reader as to how long something takes to read. Sometimes it just takes as long as it takes. It might be a page or two here and there; it might be a hundred pages in a sitting.

  At a time when everything feels accelerated, truncated, made more homogenous and shallow, where the maxim is more, more, more, but never deeper, never stopping, never allowing thoughts to wander, connections to be made, boredom to set in… at a time like this, it’s nice to meet a thing, a story, that literally stops me in my tracks.

• r and/or r

  

  This was totally going to be ‘the place’ to keep up with my goings-on while I was away from work. Or, more likely, a place for myself to note down anything of interest while on leave. As it turns out, leave thus far has mostly been about resting and recovering.

  While not keeping up with the latest in creative tech news, I’ve watched the entirety of Breaking Bad (yes, for the first time), as well as finishing The Final Empire and Cibola Burn. I replayed and re-completed Grand Theft Auto V. I’ve also taken myself game arcade-ing and ten-pin bowling. For someone who used to bowl league in high school, the latter was a painful return (Wii Sports bowling this ain’t).

  For the rest of my time off, I’m planning to watch a few movies, attempt to finish The Witcher III, and maybe do some media things that aren’t 10+ years old. I’m currently reading Owls of the Eastern Ice, which is proving a pleasant non-fiction change from my usual fare. We’re also popping away for a week to rest and recover even harder.

• A Saturday

  

  Phone calls, coffee, vinyl. A Melbourne cliché.

• More lockdown ramblings

  

  Today is Tuesday. We’ve not had internet since Friday morning. Five long days.

  It’s a little thing. An inconsequential thing. Pretty rough for work, but generally not a huge loss: I can do research offline, tethering my iPhone when I need to, I’ve rescheduled meetings.

  I became reacquainted with boredom, with that lack of control over how you spend your time. But I also became a little concerned about how reliant I am on the internet for entertainment, for distraction.

  It’s an old conversation now, rife with misinformation and half-baked platitudes. But there is a loss of the moment when you’re swept along by the stream.

  We watched a bluray on Saturday night; a movie I grabbed from the bargain bin at JB a few years back. I have a whole bunch of such purchases, still in their plastic wrap and gathering dust on the bookcase.

  I read 550 pages of a book on Sunday: I’ve not done that since I was a teenager. I wouldn’t have done this if the old modem was ticking along. With hindsight, it was kind of wonderful: I did it because there was not much else I felt like doing, and I was bored.

  I got some Lego for my birthday; another thing I’ve not touched since even before my teenage years. It was perfect: just follow the instructions, put it together. The perfect occupation for a tired and overwhelmed mind.

  I’m not 100% sure what I’m getting at here. I’m certainly not singing the praises of the offline experience: Jesus H connect that broadband to my veins I need it, particularly during lockdown. I guess I’m more or less saying that rifling through the bookcase, the DVD collection, these were kind of nice things to do at a weird time.

  There is no old media or new media, as Simone Natale writes; rather there are cycles of use, dynamic shifts and re-organisations of our perception of and attitude towards different artefacts, platforms, systems.

  Nothing forces you to reevaluate your relationship to what surrounds you than being forced to live in it with no escape for months. And having looked closer, there are some hidden gems, new experiences to be had. (And then, doubtless, one hell of a spring clean once this damnėd lockdown ends.)