Ex Libris Kirkland is my entirely self-centered way to keep track of what I read, what I enjoy, and what I want to remember.
📓 Recent Notes 📓
A rambling, discursive hundred pages about the lecture itself as a format. Interesting, and like an in person lecture I am left with a few notable memories.
a note about Lecture
Ultimately I found that the end fizzled out, which is pretty typical for scifi. It posed a pretty good mystery but the resolution (SPOILER: it was a computer simulation all along) was disappointing.
a note about Children of Memory
Also there are pairs of talking ravens; one who observes facts and one who draws conclusions; together they work like a single brain but they deny they are conscious. Loved them.
a note about Children of Memory
The third in a scifi series, which I felt cool enough that for each book I wasn't sure I was going to read the next. But I enjoyed this one the best, even if it was ultimately unsatisfying. Partly that's because the outlandish complicated nature of the last two books was already understood (terraformers from earth accidentally created giant intelligent spiders who worshipped a scientist who uploaded her consciousness to the last surviving satellite before she died, then realized she wasn't a god but befriended her and then also helped raise humans to Humans, a higher-consciousness species. Who then met a planet where something similar happened with octopuses and also an all-devouring mold that can reconfigure itself to include consciousness/es.) When the book starts, we meet a NEW planet of desperate terraforming humans, but now our heroes are really the a multi-species community of spacefaring utopians (spiders, cephalopods, humans, AIs, molds) who have technical prowess indistinguishable from magic. So it's actually kind of fitting and nice that he bulk of this story takes place in a more fairy-tale-like world.
a note about Children of Memory
Look, I’m not accusing this debut author of using AI to write this book. But it really feels like it. I read the first fifty pages and could not shake the feeling that this was llm-output. ESPECIALLY the prologue. It's such a bad, hollow feeling. I couldn't get past the first fifty pages or so.
There’s a guy who is trying coin a word, ailom - the AI Induced Loss of Meaning. Like ultimately, when there’s no person behind the creation of the work, it’s hard to feel like that work can mean anything. Right? I felt this here. Also a pseudo western about a giant salamander that drives people mad? Not for me, I guess.
a note about The Great Work
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
I say this, and yet I admit a nostalgic fondness for the thing that one must always say in a lecture, the phrase, "As we all know..." followed by a list of books and references that you know nothing about and after which you run out to find. Or, "As we will all remember ..." It is an arrogant presumption, but, at the same time, I have to say I love the share of knowledge it tries to dream: the lecture as a rite of passage into a readership or a community or, well, I hope not, a club? Perhaps this is where the lecture fails, but if it makes us want to run to a library, (ok, or to the Internet), or run from it, or toward something we didn't know enough to want to run toward or away from before we heard it, that may be all to the good; if it tempts us to move differently, maybe that is all good.
an excerpt from Lecture
TED Talks give me the creeps. Please do not confuse them with lectures. They all have a whiff of organized religion about them and the feel of the sermon on the infomercial mount.
an excerpt from Lecture
… that though we consider the note the most natural recording device, it is hard to know whether we note to remember or note to forget
an excerpt from Lecture
Midway between a sermon and a bedtime story, the lecture is knowledge’s dramatic form.
Nonfiction’s lost performance: the lecture.an excerpt from Lecture
Though a reader might assume that my sources are in evidence as citations, my thinking, just like yours, actually derives from a mostly invisible "uncommon archive" —my pet phrase—or what Barthes would call a plurality of desires and reservoir of perversions that lay at the heart of any creation and must be allowed free play.
an excerpt from Lecture