We take a detour from our irregularly-scheduled programming for lighter waters. (What? LiveJournal can be used for such things?!?!/1interrobang)
Courtesy of the faintly ridiculous but undeniably fun
Delicious Library -- I'd buy a drink for whoever came up with the webcam-as-barcode-scanner idea -- here are some books I'm currently reading:
Three books on sociology! One to make me feel bad about being shallow, one to make me feel good about being shallow, and one to make me feel shallow about Japan. A novel from the inscrutable archipelago, too: it may be more classically Japanese in tone than even Kawabata's
Snow Country, which I would've
a priori considered impossible. You can't get much more American than the Rabbit series of novels, though, and I submit that there's a bit of Harry Angstrom in all men. Finally, a thorough examination of someone who might just disprove that last sentence, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who said in 1929, "My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It's a pity they can't be combined." That he was so wrong on that count is chilling, touching... probably for him most of all, haunting.
One of my favorite pastimes when I was young was just to go to bookstores. I could spend arbitarily long amounts of time in them. (That this enthusiasm never quite extended to libraries is an issue for another post.) Even now, when my time in my beloved home city of NYC tends to be short, I always devote an afternoon to making the pilgrimage to at least two of my favorite bookstores there (Housing Works! Three Lives and Company! The Strand! The list goes on.) I just found a lovely little bookstore here in St. Louis, in fact, and...
Hell, did I just use the word "lovely," and not in reference to a hot chick?
By the way, I've never been too enamored of obscure vocab, but words can still entertain me. I ran into an old favorite today, "velleity," which roughly means, "volition of the weakest kind." Fricative to liquid to stop, ohh, joy! I am only half kidding. Sometimes I think I should just buy a Random House Webster's Unabridged for the fun of it. (Don't get me started on the OED, man. Have you ever tried to use that thing? And seriously, how many pages do you really need on "and"?)
Anyway, I actually have a book on the way from Amazon (I know what I just said about bookstores, but it's hard to beat Amazon for instant gratification) titled
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler. I haven't indulged my amateur interest in linguistics in a good long time. I guess all that Latin training meant something after all... I suppose I did go on to the even more (structurally) elegant language of ancient Greek, and then to the controlled insanity of Sanskrit...
What the hell am I blabbing on about, anyway? I bet you wish I'd just posted a juggling video instead.
- Cal
