Notes Found in Books and Their Possible Meanings

I find the notes and random enigmatic markings people leave in books to be tremendously fascinating. Since people generally don't leave markings in books for other people's benefits, they're often completely incomprehensible to any following readers. Hell, if the people who leave notes in books are anything like me, they're probably totally meaningless to themselves after a month or so.

So, divorced from the original intention as they so often are, I find it fascinating to speculate on why someone would take the time to mark a passage or write a word or two. What was it about that passage that they felt needed comment, or deserved coming back to? And, of course, some people will use the blank pages at the back of the book, or the inside back cover, to write more general thoughts on the work itself. But usually these are no more understandable than something written in text. My favorite note is in a copy of Beckett's Watt at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee's library. Just above the start of the text someone wrote, in large letters, "You're supposed to like Watt." Do they mean the character? Do they mean the book as a whole? If it's the former... well I don't really think that's a requirement, but whatever. But if its the latter, that's just hilarious. Were they some burgeoning Beckett scholar, but just couldn't stand Watt (which is totally understandable)? "Goddamnit, I just hate this book! But if I don't like it... what kind of a Beckett scholar will I be? No! I HAVE TO LIKE WATT! I'm just going to write it here so I remember that."

Gay Jesus Movies: Or, Toward a Better Sacrilege

I’m a Snopesophile. Snopes, for those unfortunate few who don’t know, is a website dedicated to urban legends, email chains, and other ephemera than can be identified as apocryphal or true. When I first found out about it, I would stay up nights digging through their horror page, finding totally over the top, but nonetheless unnerving grotesqueries. It’s a fantastic collection of silliness, but they also tend to do a commendable job of discovering hoaxes and, occasionally, analyzing their spread.

I don’t visit the site nearly as much anymore, but I am subscribed to their twitter feed and occasionally check out the Internet scuttlebutt. Unfortunately, as can be seen on their Top 25 page a lot of the circulating rumors tends towards the boring side. Most of the popular pages on Snopes are dedicated to ridiculous terrorist warnings, virus alerts, questionable home remedies and, unfortunately, Islamophobia. But one of the incredibly persistent rumors on that Top 25 list, one that’s consistently been there since I first started going to the site, is the warning that someone is making a gay Jesus movie.

The Cover Letter of Sisyphus: And, Libraries with No Money and No Proust

Searching for a job is tremendously frustrating. Everyone seems to point out that you have to look at your job search as your full-time job. That makes perfect sense, of course, but it ignores that fact that looking for a job is the worst job ever. First of all, you never get paid, and second of all you rarely get the satisfaction of knowing that your task has been completed in an excellent, let alone satisfactory manner. It’s not like, when you send a cover letter and resume out, along with a rejection letter you get a list of improvements that you should make. “This looks good, Nathan, but could you emphasize your work experience with archives a bit more?”

Nothing: Or, A Catalog of "Activities"

When I started this blog, oh so long ago, I did so with absolutely no overarching theme in mind, but I also wanted to write at least something every day. So far this has worked pretty much as expected: the posts have no connection to each other, and although I haven’t written every day, I’ve done so at least as often as I’ve showered (look, I’m unemployed). Since I have no central idea, I can write about books or games, or apparently something to do with listening to records. Since I have no audience to speak of, I can do each of those things pretty much extemporaneously: sitting down and writing whatever the hell I want to. Furthermore, I don’t have to edit it, which is great, because I’m sure if I looked back at things, I would probably have an incredibly strong urge to just delete each and every post.

Still, such freedom makes it difficult to decide what to do with a blank virtual page, especially when I haven’t really done anything of note (which is quite often). Today, just to keep up with appearances, I’ve decided to just sit down and detail the rather mundane activities of the last few days. And mundane they are. Theoretical readers, you are in for a treat with no taste. 

The Man Without Qualities: Or, Another Thing I’m Forcing Myself to Do

This is the second volume.
Buy this after you buy the first

I’m not sure where I’ve developed this compulsion to finish media that I clearly have no interest in, but along with Dragon Age: Origins, I’ve also been trudging my way through Robert Musil’s gargantuan The Man Without Qualities, a two volume novel that comes in at a minimum of 1,100 pages and a maximum of 1,700 pages (there’s an appendix of chapters and ephemera that wasn’t published during Musil’s lifetime. It’s part of my two volume set, but they way things are going, I’m not sure if I’m going to engage in the bonus material). It’s really strange when I consider that during school, when I was actually required to read things, I often wouldn’t. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that, though I can bullshit my way through an essay, I can’t really bullshit myself.

Dragon Age: Origins: Or, How I’ve Been Trying to Get My $50 Back

Steam keeps track of how long you've played a game,
but now how often you've enjoyed it.

When Bioware’s critically acclaimed computer role-playing game, Dragon Age: Origins, came out on November 5^th, 2009, I was inexplicably intrigued. Intrigued because it was getting a lot of positive press and because that press seemed to imply that it was one of the last bastions of old school PC games. I’m an old softy when it comes to games: I align computer games, even now, with the wonder they produced when I was a kid. I never had a NES or Genesis, so PC games were my source for geeky entertainment. Of course, I was also a kid so I didn’t have much money to buy games by myself. As a result most of the memories I have associated with computer games are severely tainted with whatever imaginative lens I viewed them through. I never actually played a lot of computer games, but I was fully aware of their existence. I spent quite a lot of time perusing PC gamer magazines and imagining the fantastical lands these games could take me to. And PC games were different back then: I never really put it into these terms, but PC games and console games were entirely distinct markets and the games that came out for them reflected that. PC games tended to be much slower and more precise; console games were far more inspired by arcades and were often, dare I say, more simplistic. Now, console type games dominate the market even on PCs. The console market is easier to develop for and more lucrative, but I don’t have a console and don’t really have any plans on buying one (plus playing first person shooters with a controller is hell – how do those people do it?). So when a game is lauded for its commitment to PC gaming conventions, it has a certain amount of pull for me. Because, you know, fuck those console gamers.

The Vinyl Revolution: Or, An Imperfect Analog

Sadly, the smoke box does not billow on the vinyl.

A long time ago I began a love affair with vinyl. Looking back, I think the impetus for this romance was Tool’s Ænima, an album that I was totally enamored with during my sophomore year of high school. The progression of my passion for Ænima followed a pattern that would continue for quite some time, and one that included resources that were rather novel at the time, certainly novel to me at any rate. First I downloaded the album on a whim from a disreputable source. At the time this meant dialing into the Internet with a 56k modem, finding an FTP site and queuing up the files in an FTP client to download for the rest of the night. The next morning, if you were lucky, you had a brand new illegal album. After I fell in love with it, I scoured the Internet for as many trivial tidbits as I could possibly find. For Ænima there was a virtual goldmine in the ridiculously exhaustive (and still available) Tool FAQ: unimportant factoids and dubious allusions galore! After a period of time, which turned much shorter as my “disposable” income increased and my self-control decreased, I purchased the actual physical album. This was, and still is, less to do with supporting the artist (though that’s part of it) and more to do with having a physical thing that is a manifestation of my interests. As time went on all of these things become more and more ritualized, to usually pathetic degrees.

Introduction: Or, Unemployment Blues

I don’t know how many blogs I’ve started in my lifetime, though I can at least tell you that under this specific profile, you’ll find four blogs started by me, and one blog that I’ve contributed to. Of course, most of those are at least semi-inactive, which should indicate that I’m not very good at the biggest part of authoring a blog: authoring. Indeed, though I already have a tumblr with this exact same name here, you’ll notice that the last post was dropped nearly nine months ago. You will probably also notice that most, if not all, of the posts were entirely inconsequential. I have no reason to believe that this blog will not fall quickly to the same fate. However, I do have one mixed blessing on my side, a situation that gives me more opportunity to write blogs, but one that simultaneously gives me less reason to do so. You see, I’m unemployed.