Friday 22 April 2022

Reading Projects as of Spring 2020:
Survey of English-language Essays, with CT
‘Best of’ Essays – with a focus on the Craft of Writing, with KC
Project 3: Otherlands – Lyrical Science, with CS
Project 4: Smellosophy – Neuroscience, with RB

I haven’t written about my reading in a while. I have four ‘projects’ going.

Contents

Project 1: Survey of English-language Essays

Last fall I began reading essays with CT, reading about 40 pages a week and discussing each of them; for me this includes making notes on the essays, which include quotations I like (see this page, and click on “refresh” for a selection of my favorites), and notes on word pairs or phrases that I find artful. I hope to use these – particularly the latter – to expand the ‘dynamic range,’ so to speak, of my writing. We have made it through The Oxford Book of Essays (700 pages), The Best American Essays of 2020 (250 pages), and are now reading our second tranche of essays from The Best American Essays of the Century. We were not that taken with the selection in the OBE, but usually found at least one or two essays of interest each week (we read about 40 pages a week). (This entry provides summaries and ‘tastes’ of my ten favorites.) However, the OBE was vastly superior to the BAE2020, which contained only one excellent essay (A Street Full of Splendid Strangers, by Leslie Jamison), and a handful of others of interest. The BAEC is proving to be better – at least as good as the OBE – and looking ahead it has essays by a number of authors I’d like to read.

More recently, I have launched some other reading ‘projects,’ each with one other person.

Project 2: ‘Best of’ Essays – with a focus on the Craft of Writing

With KC, I am also reading essays — in fact revisiting some of the favorites that I read with CT. It is interesting to see in what different directions the discussions go. Not suprisingly, KC has her own take on essays; more interestingly, that really changes the trajectory of the discussion. Of course, I do re-read each essay, and now that we have done this several times, my reflections are probably influenced by issues — such as the use of language, the ethics of the author, feminist issues – that have been recurring ones in previous discussions. It feels to me as though, in a discussion of this sort, the two participants between them define a space through which they move.

One other thing I’ve done with the KC reading project is to try to focus more on applying what I notice to my own reading. Besides the capturing of quotes and phrases that I mentioned earlier, I am also trying to extract ‘exercises’ to try in my own writing. Some examples:

Superposition. Providing differing points of view on the same thing/event/space to convey uncertainty/ambiguity. [cf. The Haunted Mind, Note 3, offers alternate PoVs: Is the sound of the bell from the dream or the world? Is the author is in the space of the dream or are the dream figments in the bedroom?]
Minor Key Interlude. A description of a train of thought, or conversation, that in response to some happenstance moves into a minor – dark, distressing, depressing – mode, and then, through more happenstance or perhaps intentional effort, moves back out of it. Attend to the inflection points. [cf. The Haunted Mind, Note s 6 & 7, where hypnagogic turn dark when being swaddled in bedclothes evokes a corpse in a shroud, and then attention to everyday objects serves to vitiate that line of thought].
Animated Trajectory through Three-space. Convey the sensation of a 3D environment by allusions to its structure; by agents moving through it; by objects falling and bouncing; by sound. [cf. The Acorn-Gatherer, Note 2, on the rooks moving about in the tree].
Persuasion via vivid description and inserting oneself into the scene. Vividness, particularity and layering of detail makes a description more convincing, and then with the describer injects themselves into the scene as describes themselves in the act of seeing and feeling. [cf. The Clergyman (Beerbohm)]
Zoom in from Safe Distant Anonymity to Too-Close Intimate Proximity. Zoom in on people interacting. Begin with a comfortable distant overview (e.g. momentary distant glimpses), and then zoom in to show the fine-structure of intimate and not-entirely-easy interaction, whether wanted or not (e.g. continuous up-close eye-contact). (cf. Insouciance.)

I’m not sure if I’ll actually tackle these, but I’d like to. I am a big believer in learning through imitation. I’ve always liked transcribing passages from my reading that spoke to me, and a couple of years ago I read in a biography of Benjamin Franklin that he taught himself to write effectively by reading essays and simply recopying them. I think there’s something to that. I know that as I try to transcribe a quote, I’ll have read it, will try to write it down, and then find I haven’t remembered the exact phrasing – and that leads me to reflect on why the author used these words in this order, rather than similar words in that order.

Project 3: Otherlands – Lyrical Science

Another reading project is with CS is the book: Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday (I wrote a little about it shortly after beginning it– that is here. It is a science book – a series of pictures of ecosystems at various points in the (geologically) distant past, the most recent of which is 15,000 years ago, and the others which are mostly 10’s to 100’s of millions of years in the past. It is quite a remarkable book, in that it is beautifully, even lyrically written; in some ways I am learning as much about writing from it as from the two essay projects.

Project 4: Smellosophy – Neuroscience

The final reading project – and I think there will be no more as four is about all I can handle – is with RB. It is the newest, and we have just started a book called Smellosophy, by A. S. Barwich. Barwich has a degree in the History and Philosophy of Science, and did her thesis on categorizing odors; since then she has done a considerable amount of post-doctoral research in one of the leading labs studying olfaction. The reasons this may be an interesting book are as follows:

We have had almost no scientifically-grounded knowledge of how olfaction works until the middle of the 20th Century. It was only in 1991, in a breakthrough that lead to a Nobel Prize fifteen years later, that the genes that coded for smell receptors (and thus the existence of smell receptors themselves) were identified.
Smell appears to work very differently from hearing and vision. This is important because those senses — especially vision – and their neurobiological basis have come to serve as a defacto model of how the brain works. Studying olfaction promises to re-write, or at least greatly expand, how we think about the brain.
Unlike sight and hearing, which respond to one basic quantity (length/intensity of light waves, and frequency/intensity of airborne pressure waves), olfaction is triggered by (a large variety) of molecular structures, and there is no simple relationship between structure and odor.
What was particularly surprising about the 1991 study is that the genes for olfactory reception comprise about 10% of the mammalian genome, which is an order of magnitude more than any other function. Also, the proteins that serve to register odors are in the same class as proteins that play crucial roles in the immune system and neurotransmitter recognition (which, in retrospect, makes a lot of sense). In any case, the proportion of the genome devoted to olfaction suggests that it is much more important than we commonly imagine.

It will be an interesting read, although my sense, after the front matter and a couple of chapters, is that the writing will not be anything special. At most, I will hope for clarity.

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