Reading

So a while back I said I wanted to post about what I was reading. That includes two related books. One of them is my father’s modestly titled book Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett. That was my father’s first book, an expansion of his PhD dissertation. His basic thesis is that during the eighteenth century the idea of luxury underwent a major shift to turn into the modern idea (which makes it basically a sin of the wealthy and powerful). Prior to that time, according to my father, the idea of luxury retained its classical meaning of wanting (or having) above your station. That meant, of course, that it was as much or not more a sin of the poor, who had so much above them that they could aspire to.

He looks at this idea through the lens of Tobias Smollett’s last novel, Humphry Clinker, which he sees as in some ways the last gasp of the older, traditional conception of luxury, and so I’m reading that simultaneously (on my new Nokia 770, which has a great screen for reading ebooks) I love reading books (fiction or nonfiction) that come out of a very different time from my own, and always have. It’s a liberating experience to realize that a couple hundred years ago (or a couple thousand miles away) the basic assumptions people took for granted about their universe (especially their social universe) were very different from the basic assumptions that the people around you take for granted. I think that’s part of why as a child I was always asking myself why the human world around me worked the way it did. (That was my mother’s attitude, too, and I’m sure I picked at least as much of it up from her as from books. But having concrete examples that showed that the way my culture did things wasn’t the only way to do them was pretty powerful.)

Anyway, my father’s book is interesting (if not exactly a gripping page-turner), and it’s an interesting and pleasant (if odd) experience to hear the voice in my head of a man who’s been dead for almost ten years while I read his words. (I heard him give a fair amount of lectures on similar topics, so it’s easy for me to imagine.) It kind of makes me want to write things that will be read after I’m gone. Some people’s meaningful lives are hundreds of years longer than others’, and that kind of immortality, while rare, is relatively cheap. On the other hand, I also feel that I’ll live on for a long time in my influence on the people in my life and their communities; it doesn’t necessarily have to be ink on paper. I just like the kind of communing with authors long dead (or recently dead, or even still living) that I do as a reader, and it would tickle me to think that I might be a part of that experience for other people.

(I’m also reading Stop Walking on Eggshells, a book on borderline personality disorder (BPD) that a friend of mine who used to be a therapist mentioned. It's pretty good, although not well-written, and since almost everybody has some borderline-like traits in relatiosnips, it’s one of those books that strikes me as worth reading just for the perspective on healthy relationships that you can get from reading about unhealthy ones. I wouldn’t be reading three books at once, but this one is from the library and I have to get it back soon.)

Shabu Zen and Jake Ivory’s

Last night I met darxus, cathijosephine, and her father for dinner at Shabu-Zen. I confess I’d been a little dubious about the concept when I heard about it, but it was very, very good! The tables have a hotplate in the middle of them with a boiling dish of broth on it, and they bring you all your food raw and you cook it yourself by dipping it in the broth. The meat is sliced very thin, so it cooks almost instantly. It was really amazing.

Then we (less darxus) went to Jake Ivory's, a raucous and fun sing-along piano bar near Fenway Park. I enjoy it there, but I always feel like there’s something oddly circular (but effective) about the pianists’ patter about how much fun the audience should be having. They’re trying to create an environment where you feel good about the fact that you’re feeling good. A noble endeavour, but I’m kind of surprised it works. The music was fun, and ranged from the Muppet Show theme through “Ring of Fire”.

Oh, and I went back to the eye doctor’s today and (1) had my follow-up contact lens exam and ordered lenses and (2) picked up my replacement glasses. So when you next see me, one way or another I won’t look nearly as silly as I’ve looked over the past few months in the many-times-bent old glasses that don’t fit me properly. I really like the way the new glasses look, but I expect I’m mostly going to be wearing contacts from now on.

And for those of you who are not in the Greater Boston Bastion of Civilization, the weather has been gorgeous lately! The walking we did last night was exceedingly comfortable (at least for me, who hadn’t been doing it all day long), and today I left my coat in the car while I wandered around Newbury Street and enjoyed the sunshine. I got a burrito for lunch and ate it outside. It can stay this way for a while, as far as I’m concerned.

Link of the day. Week, possibly.

This sort of thing is why I read BoingBoing. “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew— uh, could you hand me a napkin, Horatio?”