comeupyoufearfuljesuit.com

So after being basically illiterate for months on end I decided to try out Gene Wolfe. The Book of the Long Sun is totally great, and I’m looking forward to reading other work. Like all foo-ologies, there were some problems near the end where keeping up the overall development of the arc required a bit of excess, but man have I ever read a lot worse.

Building on this, I have redoubled my attack on The Past Regained and I’m tentatively hoping to get through it by the end of the month. Best like plans of walruses and antelopes and all that, but you never know. Helping to sustain this optimism is the fact that Paris’s social life carrying on under the searchlights set up against air raids is intrinsically surreal in a way that allows the dreamy-Marcel-voice to invade the real world, which is pretty agreeable.

Work has been incredibly grueling lately, because I’m supposed to be exercising functionality that has problems that fall between people’s object domains. Basically, there’s a systems-level problem deep within code that somebody else is writing, so nobody has a very clear picture of what the hell is going on. For my part, I’ve been turning Amazon EC2 instances on and off a lot which, let me tell you, is pretty satisfying.

Part of the whole turning things on and off process is making sure the EC2 instances is making sure their domain names are all in a line, which is good because the recaptcha phrases at dnspark.net are basically the only thing keeping my head from exploding. Small miracles &c.

Speaking of complaining, I have finally reached the ultimate volume of Proust’s Masterwork and am almost ready to participate in a seaside summarizing contest while on holiday. I picked it up at St. Mark’s Books when I was in NY a couple weeks ago, which I found kind of appropriate, as I have purchased my copies of all but one of the previous volumes there. The Fugitive finished strong, and this one is starting well, so I have high hopes. There’s a lot of explicit discussion of memory here. We’ll see if it’s cool enough to displace the dream-talk of volume 3 as my justification for slogging through the crap parts.