![writersnoonereads:
No one reads Carlo Sgorlon (1930-2009).
From Jessie Bright’s introduction to the The Wooden Throne:
Carlo Sgorlon was born in 1930 in Cassacco, a tiny village near Udine, capital of Friuli, a region in northeastern Italy near the Austrian and Yugoslav borders. He spent much of his childhood in the countryside, where he attended primary school only rarely but came into daily contact with Friulian peasant life. The influence of his grandfather, a retired schoolmaster with a strong literary bent, and his grandmother, a practicing midwife steeped in local folklore, formed the basis of his love of literature and his reverence for ancient peasant traditions.[…]He has written a number of novels in the dialect of Friuli, as well as twelve novels and numerous short stories in Italian. His fiction has been translated into French, Spanish, Finnish, German and certain Slavic languages. His literary scholarship, aside from translations from the German, includes two major critical works, one on Kafka and the other on Elsa Morante. […] The Wooden Throne, his most famous book, was a best seller in Italy and since it was first published in 1973 has gone through fifteen printings. In fact its publisher, Mondadori, has recently brought it out in a new edition as part of a special series entitled “Twentieth Century Masterpieces.”
I started reading this book today and it is very charming.
Also in English: Army of the Lost Rivers
Cover art by Alexandra Eldridge](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m24kbmh90Q1qf0717o1_1280.jpg)
No one reads Carlo Sgorlon (1930-2009).
From Jessie Bright’s introduction to the The Wooden Throne:
Carlo Sgorlon was born in 1930 in Cassacco, a tiny village near Udine, capital of Friuli, a region in northeastern Italy near the Austrian and Yugoslav borders. He spent much of his childhood in the countryside, where he attended primary school only rarely but came into daily contact with Friulian peasant life. The influence of his grandfather, a retired schoolmaster with a strong literary bent, and his grandmother, a practicing midwife steeped in local folklore, formed the basis of his love of literature and his reverence for ancient peasant traditions.
[…]He has written a number of novels in the dialect of Friuli, as well as twelve novels and numerous short stories in Italian. His fiction has been translated into French, Spanish, Finnish, German and certain Slavic languages. His literary scholarship, aside from translations from the German, includes two major critical works, one on Kafka and the other on Elsa Morante.
[…] The Wooden Throne, his most famous book, was a best seller in Italy and since it was first published in 1973 has gone through fifteen printings. In fact its publisher, Mondadori, has recently brought it out in a new edition as part of a special series entitled “Twentieth Century Masterpieces.”I started reading this book today and it is very charming.
Also in English: Army of the Lost Rivers
Cover art by Alexandra Eldridge
A video game! A blind video game… you explore your island using only sound and touch…
The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss.
A young man goes to a college for wizards (astute observers may notice a theme in my fantasy tastes) and does heroic things.
The editors at bong boing love this book, and they claim that the author likes to play with language. I adore adventure stories with clever language tricks, and I hope that the Name of the Wind lives up to its reputation.
I am so happy to know that these exist.
I’m rationing them, watching no more than two per day, so they’ll last longer…
(Source: liquid06)
I have decided to study mathematics.
This came of an off-hand remark to my mother that the math department here allows students to challenge any class by exam for full credit, and so I could take the whole course of study that way and graduate in December. She was well pleased, and as I thought about it, the idea grew on me, too.
Mathematics is the fourth declared major I’ve had since beginning my labyrinthine way through academia, but it’s the only one I’ve been really excited about — excited enough to have almost given up my usual time-killing repertoire of hobbies in favor of doing math homework. I like this.
I’ve certainly got my work cut out for me. I must teach myself six syllabi of math (the class syllabus seems like a reasonable unit of measure for knowledge…) of math by May, then about twice that again between May and December. I finished the first syllabus yesterday :)
Math is really cool! An entire discipline consisting of nothing but puzzles to solve. Some of the solutions have practical applications, but that, to a mathematician, is secondary to the fun of solving the puzzle!
(An old joke: An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are staying in a hotel. The engineer wakes up in the middle of the night to discover a fire in his bathroom. He quickly grabs the ice bucket, fills it with water, and douses the fire.
The physicist later awakens to find a fire in his bathroom. He calculates the exact amount of water necessary to extinguish the flames, and the correct trajectory to toss the water, thusly launches it, and puts out the fire.
The mathematician, too, wakes up and notices a bathroom fire. He sees the fire, the bucket, and the water tap, proclaims, “A solution exists!” and goes back to sleep)
I wonder why I never thought of this before.
Everyone talks of the memories born at family gatherings. What of the older memories triggered and recalled?
I remember my first glimpses of a girl’s nipples. The girl’s name was Amaranta and she shared several of my classes in high school. She was gorgeous, and smart: she got into the same stratospheric level of gifted classes that I did. But she was outgoing and popular as I had never been, friendly with everybody and rumored to be too easy with her sexuality.
That sort of thing has never bothered me. Quite the contrary; I feel a sort of worship toward women who are comfortably sexual, and if they ever discomfit me it is only with a deep sadness in the case of those who have slept with everyone but me.
Amaranta and I never slept together. We never kissed or hugged or dated or even spoke much except as called for in class. I was desperately shy, and misanthropic and bitter for the pain my shyness caused me. But she was pleasant to me on those occasions when we did speak, and, as I said, smart and gorgeous, and so I developed an outrageous crush.
Amaranta often sat in front of me, and she had a great wardrobe, but there was one shirt of hers that I particularly adored. She didn’t wear it often, but I think I remember every day when she did.
It was a silver and bronze rattlesnake skin print, with spaghetti straps. When she leaned back in her chair, wearing this shirt and no bra (there was never a bra) I could seer right down the slight swells of her adolescent breasts, see the pink crinkles at their summits.
I supposed at the time that she didn’t know, but looking back I guess she must have. I wonder what could have happened if I’d been as ready and as comfortable with myself then as she was.
I am reminded of this as I sit here playing Cranium post-turkey with family and friends. One of the guests — gorgeous, smart, and a date invited by a friend of mine — is wearing the exact same shirt.
Most xkcd comics are funny, a few are really insightful, and about one in a hundred is sublime. This is one of those.
More fun with Picasa.
This is a sazerac, a tasty cocktail from New Orleans traditionally made with absinthe and decorated with a cock feather (it’s the original cocktail!). This one had the absinthe (recently legalized) but lacked the plumage, and was served in the delightful Zeus Cafe in the Crystal Hotel in Portland.
