Random Number Lit

  I just finished Kafka’s   The Trial . I have not read Kafka since high school when I read   The Metamorphosis   and realized that there may be some aspect of literature that was outside of my grasp. I put Kafka on the shelf in my brain like that of Camus or Voltaire or Nietzsche as well. There are some things in the world that my brain was not meant for and these sort of fellows are it. Serious, dark, and deeply intellectual in a way that I find off putting. It is find to think very serious things, but you must tell a captivating and entertaining story while you do it. Because of this challenge, I drew Kafka here in the early days of this challenge and thought for a moment that it may well be this work that derails me. I thought it would be torture to read this book and that it might blow the wind out of my sails. I thought this about the book just before the Trial as well, Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans because other than deeply religious texts, I thought I mig

Alfred Corn: A Call from the Midst of the Crowd   This post comes from finishing one of the works from the Shorter List, like my post on O'Neill. There is a whole raft of authors, poets, essayists, historians that would appear on the longer list because their works do no rise the occassion of a significant work on their own. I am thinking here largely of poets that some of their individual poems may have stood the test of time, but not a longer, contained collection of these poems, I am thinking here of Coleridge or Pope that the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" or "The Rape of the Lock", respectively, would not make it onto 100 books you have to read before you die, but are significant enough to be considered.  For this time out, I pulled the name Alfred Corn of which I was wholly ignorant of. Corn is an American poet who is still with us. During this phase of the investigation, I will read the Wikipedia page and the Poetry Foundation page and any pertinent and r

I started this project sort of out of the blue during the first part of the pandemic disturbances. I realized that a lot of what I do is out of the house work, lecture, grading and student conferences in my office on campus, and the craft beer related stuff all bring me away from my house and so when it was just us in the house as many people experienced, I had the time to reflect on what it was that I wanted to be doing, that question for almost my entire life has been that I would rather be reading. As is the case with this project, this blog, the Youtube videos and the like, I would rather be reading. I saw someone post something some where that let people know that Amazon was allowing access to some audiobooks online, and I thought to look it up. I was reading Jeanette Winterson's book Frankisstein  which is fantastic at the time in my AI research sort of momentum, and I realized that I did not not know nearly enough about the original source material for that book so that coup

The next longer book that the random number generator selected was James Baldwin’s   If Beale Street Could Talk , which I checked out from the Kankakee Public Library through their curbside pick up program. I will do this again today that we will bring two of the books that we selected yesterday. I hope that this will be a consistent activity for Penny and I. We will select a book from one of the libraries, read it cover to cover here at home and then bring it back to rent out another one the next day. There is a bit more planning involved in this now because of COVID but we will make it work. This reminds me of the movements people have to make in order to visit someone in prison as is depicted in the book I am reading.     “But, at the same time, and even on the self-same day – and that is what is hard to explain – you see people like you never saw them before. They shine as bright as a razor. Maybe it’s because you see people differently than you saw them before your trouble started

Just finished Long Days Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill which was a deeply challenging text. I watched the 1987 version featuring Jack Lemmon, Peter Gallagher, and Kevin Spacey. There is some moments in this text that ring a little false, the relationship between the brothers when it works is good, but this idea of molding the younger brother seems very odd to me. I am not sure that stands up, but the mother’s preoccupation with becoming a nun or a concert pianist rather than taking up with the likes of the actor is a compelling story. The Irish dad that fights with his two sons that accuse him of being cheap is also fascinating. I didn’t know my dad who is 100% Irish, but the only time that I met him as an adult, I knew that I would have hated him. Oddly, he thought that the reason I came to see him was because I wanted money which I thought was odd. The one thing we did discuss while I was there was the books that we had read. I thought that he was lying to me the literature he

I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer as one of the first longer works of the Random Number Lit project. This book was not selected by a random number generator, or at least not in the traditional sense. I began this project a few months ago but I was not chronicling it then. I have a Word Document that I have kept a running log of my responses, reactions, reveries about these texts that I have selected sort of through the process, sort of not, and thought I should do something with this writing more than stash it on my computer for my daughter to find ages from now. Here is that undertaking, but you will have to forgive me of some of the ways I honor this project but also someway that I will diverge from it from time to time. I made mention of the works that I have read before the start of this project in the previous post, so I wont rehash that here, but in my preparation for, in the waiting for the delivery of certain works to come in the mail or through I-Share, I still ha

If you are like me, you have typed this initial post a million times. I have started and stopped a dozen blogs over my life and this one feels like the rest. The first few actions you take are full of confidence and zeal, but then you come finally to the first post. The same white screen presents itself in front of you and you think, this is never going to work. What do I have to say that is of any worth or note, who knows. But I did something recently that I thought was interesting and I wanted to create a space to keep these notes. I don't really know who any of this is for, but if you found this place then I encourage you to follow along.  I have been an avid reader since I was a kid. I am currently an adjunct English Professor at Kankakee Community College where I teach composition to undergrads. In my spare time, I write a weekly column about craft beer for a local paper, and I co-host a podcast about Nintendo games with a friend of mine, Josiah Black. These are humble pursuit