The eighteen ways of calculating the volume of a three-dimensional object

You can't understand something you haven't observed for years. She nodded. You understood some words only hearing it many times. You saw some things only after looking at it many times. Most things were like that. Especially things that remained for a long time in her heart. It was the same when she was looking for materials. Blowfish were alien to her, something she's never handled. Observing something for a long time was the first step toward comprehension. She'd learned that at the beginning of her art career.

Melancholy, introspective, and thoughtful, but also confusing and painfully slow reading. It's a mysterious force that pulled me through to the end of Blowfish, by Kyung-Ran Jo. Quite possibly I need to observe it for a much longer time to comprehend it. Kind of a love story, as two (nameless) lonely, haunted people connect.

She wasn't used to feeling the need to buy something; it made her uncomfortable. A bamboo cutting board, a tea set, leather shoes and a bag, a dinosaur robot with sensors, a hefty notebook she picked up and put down sever times, a feather pen. An object's initial power was in the way it drew out possessiveness. A feeling that began with ordinary desire. She had been thinking about the power inherent in objects, and a part of her thoughts had been devoted to the special objects at the center of her work. "Not now," she murmured, then realized that everything was hurtling toward the end, despite what she told herself.

The main protagonist is planning her own death, by poisonous blowfish. While her intention is clear, her motivation is less so — maybe fate or art. Although she is a celebrated sculptor, death is more central to her character than art, and philosophical reflections on art are reserved for her friends and colleagues.

Most of the works explored daily life and personal emotions, avoiding the question of What is sculpture? and What roles do objets d'art have? Some works were dramatic, others were lighthearted. At this moment in time, an artist's inspiration and philosophy seemed more relevant than grappling with the essence of sculpture. These works interrogated the boundary between what was sculpture and what was not. Saim had long been interested in the boundary between painting and sculpture, in how the divide between three-dimensionality and two-dimensionality was becoming fuzzier, and how that gave rise to experimentation and exploration. 

The supporting protagonist's story is told in alternating chapters. (This format was initially confusing for me, as the characters do not have distinct voices.) He is an architect.

Forget about perfectly straight red bricks; when morning light fell on buildings built with warped or damaged bricks, it was almost overwhelming to witness their powerful beauty and dynamic character. A house whose bent, cracked, missing, twisted, and protruding parts looked all the more striking and glorious in the sun. Standing there in his brother's suit, he stacked red bricks in his mind, one by one.

Sculptors and architects have a special relationship with space, and what transpires within or moves through any given space has its own volume, density. I wanted more from this book than it offered. Neither character carries much weight (maybe that's the point? learning to occupy space?). I did not care if the sculptor lived or died; I did not care if the architect found meaning, or love.

Still, he needed to say what he felt. He needed to tell her that love was three-dimensional, that the volume of this three-dimensional thing was difficult to figure out. He heard creaking at the bottom of the stairs. Why did he only now feel the need to tell Sinae these things? Quiet footsteps crossed the hallway. He remembered her silhouette, the woman who had seemed to limp with every step. He heard his door open. He squeezed his eyes shut. He began thinking about the eighteen ways of calculating the volume of a three-dimensional object.

Kyung-Ran Jo in conversation (The Korea Society)
Review (Korean Literature Now)

It is — what it is

He sighed. Sighing is the worst form of breathing and I try not to do it myself but I admit it's hard. Sighing is something we struggle to unlearn. (from "The Air as Air")

The stories in An Oral History of Atlantis are funny and weird. I laughed and nodded along. I was so looking forward to a new book from Ed Park; the only disappointment is that it's not a novel. 

The star of the collection, in my view, is "Well-Moistened With Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts." (And I would love for this story to be a full novel.) An archeological dig, funded by a mysterious foundation, consisting of 18 women all named Tina, on a nameless and drifting island, with a mission to collect samples and translate "oracle bone script" — they wanted never to leave.

We contemplated sending him some saucy photos, the Syllabic sybarites draped languorously over pottery shards and lexicons, feeding one another thumb-sized grapes, but that plan could backfire: it wouldn't do to waste a resource as precious as film. So we pecked out letters on the rusty old Remington, asking the Foundation to consider the value of establishing permanent scholars on the island. A final draft was produced. Then we realized there was no mail service. I volunteered to type out five more copies. These were sealed and tied to the legs of birds we'd befriended. We showed them a picture of our benefactor and hoped for the best, releasing them into the giant Rothko painting that was the sky at twilight, salmon over slate.

As for the language of symbols they were intent on deciphering, "everything could mean anything, as well as its opposite. You had to pick which side of the contradiction to embrace, or else record the whole unholy snarl itself." One day a Tina falls ill and leaves, and a replacement is sent, the Anti-Tina. "All poetry is accuracy," she said.

In "Eat Pray Click," a writer of "pure Sensibilism, with a shot of Mood Writing," devises a Kindle hack (or virus) whereby a book is revised on every reading.

Basically, he longed for a text that wasn't set in stone, something more akin to a living organism — a story with free will. He didn't like that books started on the first page and ended on the last.

"Where's the freedom in that?" he'd say, in letter after letter.

"The Gift" describes a charismatic prof's Fundamentals of Aphorism lectures at a community college and recounts the occasion on which the now heavily overused tautology "It is — what it is" was uttered for the first time in recorded history.

Not a weak story among them.

The Stories 
A Note to My Translator  (at 0:56 of audiobook preview) 
The Wife on Ambien (in The New Yorker)
Machine City 
Seven Women 
Two Laptops (more or less)
Thought and Memory
Eat Pray Click (or Easter Promenade)
Slide to Unlock 

Review

A fucking tyranny of fast-held shapes

Yet once they halted in their relentless cataloguing, recording, reporting … wasn't there so much to give them pause? Hadn't one, in the wet slurp and roll of a glinting dark body glimpsed for just a moment in a natural canal, had to impose a species name on what could not, could never, be intuited from such a glimpse? Wasn't the prickle of unease crawling up the back of their necks tied to some actual shadow in the night? Some distant muttering while they slept?

Drunk Boat called it, roughly in the same month, in a different context, "the null effect — to create a something from the nothing in the darkness, the mind betraying you every time." This directed with a nudge at Man Boy Slim, of "the way the human imagination fills in the gaps."

The "sample" material, however, is actively defying the idea that it might to be catalogued — whether it is the evolutionary result of environmental or artificial factors on indigenous species, or something invasive from somewhere that will not stand for our paltry human attempts at identification, let alone understanding. "Manifestation of the foreign entity."

[I have been wanting to catalogue the plant life in the ruelle, the vegetation beyond the fence of my terrace, under my bedroom window. I feel compelled to document it, preserve it, nurture it. The grape vine is choking out the wild flowers. The raspberry bushes have little fruit this year, perhaps because of the dust and trauma of the construction next door, or maybe the workers are eating them all. So many leafy stalks I'd like to identify, I want them all to thrive. I want to replicate them in clay and display them so that the interior wall reflects the exterior and preserves the record of its evolution.]

Jeff VanderMeer's Absolution is wild. I'm not sure I understand what happens in this book, but it doesn't much matter. This is dense reading that moves from general uneasiness and a creeping eeriness to intense dread. Shades of Solaris with its doppelgangers who mimic, but also fulfill an expectation, filling in a gap in the humans' perception or understanding, and also the zone of Roadside Picnic, where different rules apply.

The first section of Absolution is a prequel occurring some 20 years before the three other Southern Reach books to date, recounting a mission to the Forgotten Coast. Skip ahead 18 years to Old Jim's cover story managing the village bar while reviewing that old mission and keeping an eye on the Séance & Science Brigade. And then a fresh perspective on the First Expedition.

[My rue plant, the one keeping the squirrels at bay, was for a day home to four black swallowtail caterpillars; one fat caterpillar cannibalized the others.]

Area X has its own physics of space and, seemingly, other dimensions — "past, present, and future collapsed into each other." Absolution casts the events of the original trilogy in a new context regarding what is or was known, and what can possibly be known.

All Old Jim could be sure of is that the biologists' sense of time and reality had been obliterated and put back together differently — and that this had harmed them beyond repair.

I had a hard time getting into this novel. I gave up on it once months ago, but now I was determined to soldier through, despite recalling next to no detail from the other books, except the feeling, the existential horror. But I have already circled back to reread Absolution, before revisiting the rest of the series.

[The hydro workers meanwhile are chopping branches of lilac and serviceberry. The birds don't visit the way they used to; I don't blame them. Yesterday a sparrow flew into the airspace of my covered terrace and hovered, homed in on a spider hanging by a thread before snatching it.]

Is anyone absolved? The biologists are absolved of their duty. Old Jim is absolved of his guilt, from living with guilt. Lowry is absolved of humanity. 

Undulating waves of wolves, but made of black liquid and slurping their way across like liquid lava fire, and no that wasn't it but the sight defeated the eye like an eye defeated an ear and a tongue because he needed to see the enemy, not taste or smell them.

By then, Lowry has snorted and swallowed a lot more drugs from Landry, thank the gods. So maybe he was shouting at the liquid things that seemed so joyous in how they could dissipate and re-form and why couldn't all in life be like that? Why did anyone have to commit to just one fucking shape. It was a fucking tyranny of fast-held shapes and what if he just wanted to be a circle or an oval with no end and no beginning?