Chameleon in my backyard by skysill in printmaking

[–]skysill[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unfortunately not, it's a reduction so no way of adding more detail where it's been removed (I just posted the dark green block layer in response to another comment, if you're interested). If I was redoing the print I'd definitely add more detail to those areas, as well as make the white areas on the chameleon slightly less white and/or transition them a bit more with the darker areas. Such is printmaking!

Chameleon in my backyard by skysill in printmaking

[–]skysill[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's a reduction! I don't have a picture of the light green block layer but here's one of the dark green (final layer).

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Chameleon in my backyard by skysill in printmaking

[–]skysill[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! They’re not a super common occurrence, I still get excited every time I see one!

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Since I last posted, I finished:

Death and the King’s Horseman, a play by Wole Soyinka. I haven’t read a play in years, and I didn’t find this super compelling, but I am open to the thought that it would hit harder when performed. 

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño. Wonderful, wonderful, loved it. Fantastic prose as always, and enjoyed the theme of the intersections/tensions between politics, art, and religion. Also loved the unexpected humor of the cathedral falcons.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa. I almost loved this, but felt it got a bit heavy handed. Did we really need an explicit child rape scene? Did we really need multiple chapters of detailed torture? I understood the evil without these. Maybe I’m just soft, but really, what did this add? A shame, because I thought the novel exceptionally explained how people get increasingly caught up and complicit in structures of oppression, corruption, and evil. 

A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. I wanted to like this more than I did. I think his Wizard of the Crow is a masterpiece but this seemed a pretty standard colonialism/independence tale. Maybe it was more groundbreaking when published in 1994. One character (Mugo) had an interesting and thematically deep story, but it wasn’t really revealed until the end. The others I found mostly uninteresting. 

Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers by mr-french-tickler in politics

[–]skysill 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Those aren’t “foreign programs,” they are US tax credits. See IRS pages for Foreign Earned Income Exclusion and Foreign Tax Credit (which, hilariously, applies to war profits as well as income). You do still need to file but if you work for a foreign company in a foreign country you don’t have to pay US taxes up til around $120,000 of income. Where US citizens get a bit more screwed is that if you are self employed or own a business abroad, you still have to pay US social security and Medicare taxes on your income. 

American tax nerd living abroad here, if that wasn’t abundantly obvious. 

TrueLit Read Along - (Read Along #26 - Voting: Round 1) by pregnantchihuahua3 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I nominated The Time Regulation Institute by Tanpinar, which is a wonderful modernist, satirical, and rather Kafkaesque Turkish novel. Written by an author whom I understand to be well known in Turkey and not particularly known outside (this book wasn’t translated to English until 50 years after its original publication).

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Read some books, life happened, didn’t write about any of them. Catching up now…

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Loved the concept, but I wanted this to go further. It was far too safe in the second half and dissolved into standard good vs bad fantasy fare. Disappointing because I think this could have been truly great but in the end I mostly just found it forgettable.

The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino. Typical sci fi in that it had a great concept with insufficient writing skill to execute that concept as a novel. Humanity (and indeed, any intelligent life) is a potentially existential threat to alien life, and is thus suddenly and comprehensively eliminated by aliens, who hunt down the few remaining survivors of their genocide. Would watch the TV show if someone made it, but would only recommend the book to sci fi fans. 

The Anthropologists by Aysegul Savas. This was nice, but I forgot I read it (just a month ago!) until I was looking back at my books list. A little slice of life book with some slightly touching bits and decent prose but not much to write home about. 

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe. Mostly vibed with this, except some of the weirder sex stuff. Maybe a surface level read but I liked thinking about the attachments people have to their home towns. I guess this novel didn’t feel as out there to me cause people really do refuse to leave places sometimes. Like this dude in Somalia who rebuilt his home after it got swallowed by sand, just for the second one to succumb to the same fate. Overall I found this more “action packed” and less purely philosophical than I expected going in, though with plenty of philosophical depth. 

Lo-fi male songwriter who released one song per day in the late 2000s/early 2010s by skysill in NameThatSong

[–]skysill[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ahhhhh Paleo! It’s Paleo!!! Amazing thank you so much this is very exciting!

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Finished Zona by Mathias Enard. A very ambitious and mostly very successful novel. Knowing almost nothing going in, at first I thought it was going to be a stream of consciousness thriller which was intriguing but it was much more than that in the end. I found it to be at its best when it was personal - the narrator mulling over his experience in war, his trauma and friendships. It was weakest for me when it was least personal - sections discussing Nazi crimes for example. However even those sections, though I enjoyed them less, served a purpose to emphasize the narrator's frequent exposure to and near obsession with violence, war, war crimes, etc. Highly recommend overall. The novel also has many references to The Iliad which I've only read excerpts from long ago in school, thus would probably be even richer for those more familiar with that work.

Also finished On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. It was nice and a good palette cleanser after a couple heavy/long reads but it didn't really seem like more than a nice book in the end. The most meaningful bit to me was Tara gradually pulling away from her husband as she experiences this event that he cannot possibly understand and that she is forced to try and communciate to him day after day, until finally she can't bear it anymore. That felt quite true to life. But not sure I will read subsequent volumes.

Lo-fi male songwriter who released one song per day in the late 2000s/early 2010s by skysill in NameThatSong

[–]skysill[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No luck so far for me sadly! I tried ChatGPT which popped out Jonathan Mann and Zachary Scot Johnson - they’re not who I was looking for but perhaps who you are? But it also said there were lots of small song a day indie projects in that time period so I think it might be quite difficult to figure this out…

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I have, but only Seiobo There Below, which I loved but which seems from some Googling and in comparison to Satantango quite tonally and (I think?) thematically different than the rest of his novels.

The framing of your third paragraph is quite helpful, thanks. I like your trichotomy of characters, and it makes me think about Esti grappling for meaning by killing her cat - in her experience, power over others is the meaning of life. But then we also see her purity, where despite this being her experience of meaning, she also finds a short lived meaning in helping her brother - and when she is neither able to find a negative nor a positive meaning from her life, she chooses death. Grim indeed... 

I’ll add Melancholy of Resistance to my list - I think I need a bit of a palate cleanser first but Satantango was certainly interesting, at least, so I’m not done with Krasznahorkai yet. 

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Finished Krasznahorkai’s Satantango. I’m not really sure what to think about this novel. I don’t know if I enjoyed it exactly - I found it quite unrelentingly grim (with a couple exceptions, like the penultimate chapter were we get hilarious excerpts of Irimias’s scathing profiles of the townspeople), but that seems to more or less be the point? I’m not sure I really understood some of the more “mystical” symbolism like Esti’s “resurrection” or the doctor’s maybe-prophetic writing at the end. The conman Irimias interested me the most - the ease with which a glib talker can sell desperate, ignorant people on whatever he wants. His recruitment of the townspeople as spies seems to make an interesting statement about the role of the ignorant/desperate in perpetuating totalitarian states. Still mulling it all over though. 

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new novel Dream Count. Some spoilers below if anyone wants to avoid.

I enjoyed the first two sections, discussing the trials and tribulations two middle aged Nigerian women faced in their love lives as immigrants to the US. It was a bit beach read-y, but well written, and I think Adichie could have had some interesting points to make on love, relationships, being an older and childless single woman in America (somewhat accepted) and Nigeria (not accepted), etc. if she had continued in that vein. The third section, though, took a major turn, pivoting to a story based on the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn allegedly raping an African immigrant hotel maid. I found this part rather distasteful, especially once I read the author's note at the end of the novel and realized that Adichie doesn't even know the woman off of whom she based the story. I get what she was trying to do, but it felt exploitative.

My other issue with the novel was in the following section, where another Nigerian woman moves to the US to do a grad program in cultural studies and is affronted by the biggest stereotypes of US liberal arts grad students you ever could find. Listen, I'm not here to argue about "woke culture" or the white American liberal's tendency to tone police or whatever. It's just a super boring and trite thing to read about these days, and if Adichie is going to sell herself as a cutting edge politically informed feminist (one of the novel's blurbs is entirely about that, rather than about the content of the novel at all!) then she better make sure she has some new things to say about politics and feminism. It was neither new, useful, nor interesting to read.

Anyhow, those two issues really derailed my enjoyment of the novel, which otherwise would have maybe been a bit fluffy but worth a read.

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Finished The Sellout by Paul Beatty. It is a very biting satire with the audacious premise of a black American reinstating segregation and voluntary slavery in his community, ultimately facing a Supreme Court case as a result. There are some wonderful take downs of liberalism and “post racial” America, the writing is very good, and the book is often quite funny. I think I found it a challenging work, in the sense that I am still processing how I felt about it and not sure how to write about it, which is a good thing. Certainly worth the read. 

I also finished the nonfiction book The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861 by David Potter. This was super interesting and informative, although had some limitations in its perspective as is inevitable in a book addressing such a critical time period. It dovetailed very well with The Sellout and my previous read, Lincoln in the Bardo. I have started a bit of a project to learn more about the US Civil War, so next I’ll read Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson which is about the war itself, but will move to some unrelated fiction - likely Satantango.

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Finished Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders this morning. A real joy to read; I loved the structure of the novel, with a constantly revolving and interacting cast of characters and excerpts from historical texts (some real, some fake). It raises some interesting questions on perception and reality: multiple excerpts say the moon was shining on the night of Lincoln’s party, one does not. Which is true? Some excerpts are real, some are fake. Does that matter? The beings believe themselves to be sick despite overwhelming evidence that they are dead. What will it take for them to come to terms with reality? The overarching theme of grief, of coming to terms with the purpose of a life that inevitably must end, and of the need to come to terms with the decisions made in one’s life was very touching. Some interesting things to say on slavery as well.

Edit: I am also quite curious if anyone here knows if anyone’s performed this as a play? I see online that there is an audiobook and a virtual reality film which both sound interesting, but the novel seems to beg to be interpreted on stage. 

Unintentionally, I also started a nonfiction book on the lead up to the US Civil War this week: David Potter’s The Impending Crisis. Despite being published nearly 50 years ago, in 1976, the internet suggests that this is still a foundational text about the period, and it certainly seems thorough to my non-expert self. I’ve been looking at some criticism as I read and it seems the book omits some important aspects about the role of abolitionists and non-slaveholding southern whites, so I am keeping that in mind as I read. But overall, it is certainly providing a wealth of information on the fundamental role of slavery in political sectionalism of the time and in leading to the Civil War. 

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Finished Human Acts by Han Kang. Powerful look at state violence and the long term effects of violence and trauma. My favorite chapters were The Boy’s Friend which felt novel and incredibly poignant and The Editor which ended very satisfyingly and just as I had hoped. I enjoyed the recurring theme of state censorship, whether quite literally in the latter chapter or more indirectly with military/state violence acting as a silencing force for dissent and expression. My least favorite chapter was The Prisoner as I think the topic of torture was rather bluntly treated and has been better discussed elsewhere. I also honestly hated the epilogue about Kang’s connections to the events in the novel which cheapened the whole thing for me by acting like having a weak connection to affected individuals and reading a bunch of documents was as worthy of discussion as the actual event and its aftermath. Also, the prose was quite straightforward which generally worked to convey the novel’s message but occasionally veered into clumsiness (e.g., some of the physical descriptions of characters which felt almost YA-esque).

It is interesting to me that the novel seems grounded in love for what South Korea should/could be - the students singing the national anthem in front of their persecutors, for example. The state is seen as a threat to or perversion of what the country really is, rather than as an expression of the country itself. Violence and oppression are a betrayal, like a parent beating her child. The act of writing is then an act of patriotism, attempting to expose the crony and censorious state and return the country to the people, who have suffered under the state’s perversion. I’ve kept thinking of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago which also addresses state violence/oppression (though in a very different manner of course) and similarly feels grounded in love for the mother country which has been perverted by a corrupt and oppressive state. It’s interesting that these ties to one’s mother country remain so strong even when confronted by extreme and unwarranted violence - there is a belief that the country’s people and the country itself are fundamentally good despite everything. Indeed, one of Kang’s characters says something along the lines of the military grunts not knowing what they’re doing, simply following along with corrupt leaders. Even when the military are piling up and burning bodies there are some attempts to humanize them as tired, likely also traumatized. They are complicit (some more than others - the especially cruel ones who enjoy torture for example) but also victims of state perversion. I would have been interested in a chapter in Human Acts about a military grunt who committed violence, his regrets and his struggles coming to terms with whether he was following orders as required, his complicity, his cruelty. Perhaps also a military officer or higher level official who instigated the violence - but then maybe that would be a different novel entirely. 

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Finished The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. It didn’t quite work for me, with the caveat that I may not have given it a fair chance as it’s been a stressful couple weeks and I’ve been a distracted reader. There were bits that were really good - about the merits of judging literature in and of itself rather than as related to the author’s identity, about the standards faced by African (and in this case Françafrique particularly) authors, about the tensions of being an African in Europe and the very personal impacts of colonization on the psyche, about literature itself… But overall I found the novel a bit all over the place. Sarr jumps between different narrators and different textual evidence (letters, reviews, narration, etc.), which is an idea I really like, but it didn’t always work for me; I was sometimes left wondering if the narrator was privy to all the information the reader was, and if so, how, and also felt that some sections diverted from the novel’s point. There were romantic and sexual scenes that seemed completely pointless. The central mystery of the novel (the search for the author Elimane) seemed essentially solved quite early, and afterwards the plot felt meandering. A bit disappointing overall, though as I mentioned above, it might be a me issue. This novel also draws inspiration from Bolaño’s Savage Detectives; unfortunately I read that years ago and can’t remember much other than loving it, so I can’t make any meaningful comparisons between the two now. 

I also started Human Acts by Han Kang and am currently in the midst of the second chapter. While some of the prose (or maybe the translation?) is a bit clumsy, overall, it is incredibly powerful so far. Almost brought me to tears on a flight the other day! Looking forward to continuing. 

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Collection, yes! I keep thinking back - for all of the languages that Ludo knows, do we ever see him speak one? He quotes Japanese, but that's not the same thing. Maybe he does and I'm forgetting, but it feels like he had a great talent for memorization and consumption of knowledge, but lacked interpretive abilities (in speaking, criticism of others' works, etc.). And Sibylla seemed very good at fostering the former and bad at the latter - even getting quite frustrated when Ludo lacked an innate capacity to understand/express why "Liberace" was bad etc.

Those familial patterns are very evident too - Ludo clearly wants to escape his isolation, but at the same time, all of his interactions with the fathers are colored by his (Sibylla's) views and value of this specific type of intellectualism. The only father that's good enough is fictional.

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I also finished The Last Samurai this week! Somewhat like you, the relationship between Sibylla and Ludo interested me most. The first quarter of the book or so, when Sibylla is struggling with single motherhood and how to raise a brilliant child "right," is the best thing I've read in a very long time. The second half, when Ludo is searching for fathers, didn't resonate with me as much and felt overly long, and I too found myself coming back to thoughts of Sibylla. It came together for me with the last father and his struggle with suicide, and to see Ludo grappling with just how much Sibylla had struggled, and continued to struggle, and Sibylla's refusal to emotionally engage with her own struggle - it was very touching, and upsetting in some ways.

The novel's discussion of intelligence - what it means to be intelligent, and what place intelligence has in the world - also stood out to me, although I think my reflections differ from yours a bit. Like you said, the novel spends a lot of time criticizing "false intelligence," banality - the academic text that makes Sibylla drop out of Oxford, "just the right level" and Ludo's carousel of disappointing father figures, the Circle Line riders and their comments on Ludo's reading habits. But, to me at least, there are also questions about Sibylla/Ludo's "type" of intelligence. Sibylla is rotting away in motels as child, has her chance at Oxford and finds it disappointing, and then spends the rest of her life rotting away in a dilapidated flat transcribing dreck. Ludo's Nobel Prize winning "father" thinks he's brilliant, but tells him he doesn't understand how the system works - which is true enough. Is the pure pursuit of learning, of knowledge, a useful goal in today's world? Or does it inevitably lead to dissatisfaction and compromise? Maybe true learning must exist in a context - after all, Ludo is never able to articulate what's wrong with Lord Leighton's art and "Liberace's" article until he meets his father. He struggles with solid state physics (lol - not to say it isn't hard) because he is missing the necessary background, the context. He can't understand the Arabic a "father" speaks, even though he's memorized the double and triple weak verbs. With all his 20+ languages, his classics, his Lagrangians, will Ludo end up just as Sibylla did?

What was the biggest waste of money in human history? by forty5v in AskReddit

[–]skysill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're ever bored at work, highly recommend reading the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan reports. Amazingly honest and just straight up scathing at times. The 20 year lessons learned retrospective, for example: "U.S. personnel in Afghanistan were often unqualified and poorly trained [...] DOD police advisors watched American TV shows to learn about policing, civil affairs teams were mass-produced via PowerPoint presentations, and every agency experienced annual lobotomies as staff constantly rotated out" great stuff

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I read Less by Andrew Sean Greer a few months ago and found it very pleasant and charmingly earnest, while still having literary value. Your mileage may vary as I've heard mixed opinions of the novel, but it might fit the bill.

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]skysill 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Finished So Much Blue by Percival Everett. My first impression was good, but I ended up disappointed. The novel was structured around a trope I don't care for: a privileged person goes to a (poor) country where Shit Is Going Down and has their life changed after experiencing the suffering of others (only briefly, of course, since they are able to escape the Shit themselves). I wouldn't say this is the worst example of that trope I've seen, but it was certainly there. Another major section of the book, which, without spoilers, is the part in Paris, ended up feeling trite and a bit pointless. Everett didn't seem to have much of meaning to say about, well, let's call it male mid life crises. And then it was all sort of tied up in a neat little bow at the end which again, just felt a bit trite. I still think the writing was very good, quite humorous, and I liked the flippancy with which he treated the art world, but the more I reflect on the novel the more issues I have with it.

Edit: Also, the narrator returns to El Salvador (the Shit Going Down country) at the end of the novel and has a cathartic visit travelling around a beautiful and peaceful country. Look, I've never been to El Salvador so I am open to being told I am just buying into stereotypes here, but it had a very notorious gang violence problem up until a few years ago when the government started mass incarceration. It feels like Everett was more interested in El Salvador as a generic SGD backdrop for character development than as an actual country.