The Patient Etherized

The Patient Etherized
Q: Et tu, Jonathan? A: Read. Read some more. Buy Red Bull.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

-- Thomas Pynchon

This description is from Pynchon's summary of his new novel, though there is some controversy over whether or not he actually wrote it for Amazon.

posted by Jon | 8:38:00 PM

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Sweaty and Thoughtful

Just came back from my first run in a long time. I ran down to the India Point area, which goes along the river which divides Fox Point from East Providence. For the first part of the run I went through a big construction site where they're relocating I-195 in Big Dig fashion (meaning they're building a tunnel). Behind this huge mess -- girders, concrete cisterns, and enormous metal pipes lying on the dirt -- is the India Point park, which is a sliver of a park in an area that must once have been wharves. You can still see a factory across the water with three looming smokestacks, as well as a few low-slung, rusty-white, water towers.

Some people still come there to fish. I also noticed a few Portuguese or Brazilian men in their 40s and 50s who just sit on the benches and stare straight ahead. I wasn't sure if they were looking at the water or over it -- when literally twenty yards behind them is the massive construction site with its hills of upturned earth and scattered debris. Of course, the water itself doesn't seem to provide a view that could be called picturesque either, so I have no idea why they go there, when they could just as easily go to a nicer park. It also occurred to me that once the highway is moved, they will probably be forced to move somewhere else, since the property prices will go up and a lot of new development will happen in the area, so if they do have any emotional investment to the place they may not be able to come back anyway.

posted by Jon | 3:41:00 PM

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

So in the last few months I've done a fair bit, all of which is of course too long to go into detail here, but I think I should take out the ol' blogging hammer again and get to doing some work, mainly because I haven't been very productive (in terms of reading consistently without getting tired) for the past few days (though I have been cooking more, which leads me to believe that there is an inverse correlation between the quality of my work and the healthiness of my eating).

Whew...there went the world's longest sentence, replete with lots of relative clauses and maybe a few kayaks and arapaimas floating downstream as well.

Speaking of arapaimas, I'm planning a trip to Brazil in late August and early September that should be exciting. Right now the plan is to go to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Based on what I've read about the two ultramodern, ultrahip and/or touristy cities, it seems like I'll probably have some sort of Lost in Translation experience like when Bill Murray goes out to the karaoke bar in Tokyo.

I just began reading Origin of the Species as part of my effort to get better acquainted with this posthumanist discourse on the definitions of the animal and the human. I figured I'd read Darwin since I didn't really think much of what I've read so far of the Cary Wolfe edited collection, Zootologies.

The goal of this reading is to edit my Jewett paper by around August 1st, though so far I don't think I've read much that can really add to the paper, as I've read a bunch of novels (Melville's Pierre and The Confidence Man, among others) and a little bit of theory.

But perhaps writing more consistently can help me get over my mid-summer malaise. So here's to work, and working for fun.

posted by Jon | 12:47:00 PM