recently read #1
words absorbed by my brain
I’ve been doing more reading recently, so wanted to share!
“Detail of the Rice Chest” by Monica Youn
My friend Alec attended the L.A. Times Festival of Books recently and heard Monica Youn read this poem. They were completely blown away—I think their exact words were something like “I didn’t know poetry could do that”. It isn’t quite the same experience, reading it online, but still. An absolutely stunning, incisive portrait of Asian Americanness.
“At the Clinic” by Sally Rooney
I love Normal People, and this short story is a predecessor to the novel, featuring Marianne and Connell. There’s a sentence in this story I keep coming back to. This sketched trajectory of their relationship bore so little resemblance to anything he thought or felt that he just nodded and said: Yeah, exactly. That sense of resignation—not even attempting to cross the abyss—Rooney is sharp for that observation.
Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88
An extraordinarily dense interview. I didn’t get through all of it, and I don’t think I’ll be able to process everything I did read. She articulates so much of the role writing plays in my own life: Yes, that you travel inside of. I think that’s what poems are supposed to do, and I think it’s what the ancients mean by imitation. When they talk about poetry, they talk about mimesis as the action that the poem has, in reality, on the reader…I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
I found this in my living group’s library and started it on a whim. I’ve often found it difficult to get through historical books—admittedly, old-timey prose can be dry—but this one is absolutely captivating and so relevant even a century later; I guess some things don’t change. Her sentences sparkle, but the most impressive achievement, I think, is in the whip-smart observations on human nature.
Figured I should share something technical. Recently learned about this secret-sharing algorithm, which exploits the Lagrange interpolation theorem, which you may have learned about in a high school algebra class. I found it very clever! Like with most other cryptography, no idea if I’ll ever get to apply it in the real world, but as an intellectual puzzle, it’s fun.