la gloire + la guerre

The current political climate makes particularly relevant Combeferre's little anti-imperial staircase-ditty at the end of Les Misérables III.V*, which goes like:

Si César m'avait donné
la gloire et la guerre,
et qu'il me fallût quitter
l'amour de ma mère;
Je dirais au grand César,
"Reprends ton sceptre et ton char!
J'aime mieux ma mère, o gué!
J'aime mieux ma mère!"**

ten books i can in good conscience recommend to almost every single one of you (+ some i can't)

[out of all the ones I read in 2015, the full list of which you can find here.]

10. A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES (Janna Levin) if you like the idea of logic more than you like logic itself.
A brilliant little book that's highly speculative in its detailing of the lives and loves and genius and internal suffering of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing: but Levin doesn't seek to depict these men with total accuracy (this is a work of fiction, after all) so much as she wants to make us feel the beauty and revolutionary nature of their ideas, contrasted with the ultimately tragic lives they led -- wracked as both were with loneliness, illness and the myriad punishments of nonconformity. Their ideas intersect as their lives parallel each other (resulting in a few genius storytelling moments) and (bonus!) the book's held together by the ever-present Wittgenstein. (I maintain that he's haunting me.)

#9 through #1 + extras, under the cut.

2015 in film, with blinders on

Yours truly was truly bad at watching Great Films outside of my preferred genres this year. That aside, these are the five films of 2015 which I enjoyed the most and which I am very invested in all of you watching and talking about with me. (I guarantee you I did watch more than five -- more than ten -- films that came out this year, and that not all of them prominently featured the letter 'M' in the title. I'm not scrounging for films to fill up this list. These are the cream of the crop, y'all.)

listen up, y'all

"Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train." — Keynes

Everything in my life came together in the space of three seconds earlier tonight. I found the connection; the universe is telling me something. Now, what that something is, I don't know — but I am nearly 100% certain that the ghost of Ludwig Wittgenstein has everything to do with it! If you would, consider the following:

1. The book I've most thoroughly digested (and enjoyed) since I moved to Philadelphia: The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace. WITTGENSTEIN.
2. I have been on time to one linguistics lecture this semester. (This isn't my fault, mom. My programming class is in a biology building, and the walk takes ten years on a good day.) And who did we discuss in that lecture? Only a "very interesting fellow by the name of... WITTGENSTEIN."
3. On a lark (lark, what a! plunge, what a!), I went rooting around for books in West Philly last Thursday. I found four, as mentioned earlier. the first one I read is about Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel (A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin, I recommend it). Whose ideas hold the book together? Why, those of WITTGENSTEIN.
4. My father's primary piece of advice to me has always been "when you have nothing to say, say nothing." This is a corruption of "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," which hails from the TRACTATUS-LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICALUS, which is the only book ever written by WITTGENSTEIN. This is something I mutter under my breath often while in the library, for there is inevitably some blockhead Skyping sans shame in the No-Cell Zone.

This is it, y'all. I am an unwitting Wittgensteinian, devoid of wit but full of gene snit. Updates on the haunting to follow... perhaps.

Trainspotting is wonderful, but I'm convinced that listening to "Lust for Life" one too many times left me with an extremely painful ear infection — my first in 13 years, perhaps? I mean, of course I've had it in the ear before! I was (according to my parents) a baby with a perpetual ear infection. I had tubes put in when i was young. Before I went under, whoever was anesthetizing me asked me what I liked to do for fun, and I said I liked to play with Barbies in the driveway, which was a blatant lie. To this day, I am not entirely sure what the tubes were for. I'm also not sure why I said what I did.

buddenbrooks

as mentioned earlier. i wish i could read german, or at least appreciate exactly what certain german dialects (the usage of which mann seems so fond) imply about their speakers. i cannot and may never, but i recommend this book anyway, as it was recommended to me — for those who read jane austen and know something of german history and eat chocolate with an eighty-five percent cacao content.

lost in (the first, lowe-porter) translation: much of the book's charm, i think.* i could barely get past the endless descriptions of one (1) dinner at the beginning of the book. i had no idea how anyone, much less the highly intelligent person who recommended it to me, could call buddenbrooks their favorite book. the woods translation remedies this; it wasn't a chore to read, not at all. it was a joy! the purest of them! plein de gratuitous french to boot! the chapters are of such manageable sizes that buddenbrooks managed to break my heart every morning over a bowl of oatmeal.**

consumed, lately

by forces within and without: me. i've been at college for one-point-five weeks, in class for point-five. the bullet journal has kept me out of trouble. by "out of trouble," i mean that i've taken my multivitamin every day, i haven't been late to anything (yet), and i did my laundry before i ran out of clothes. two small victories! and one big one! yes, that last is really an accomplishment, considering that i didn't pack enough clothes.

by me: a few books, more films (rare!), some good food. even more not-so-good food.