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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Proto-Random Number Lit Read)

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 coupled with some extra bandwidth and I decided to start reading Frankenstein, I feel like I want to say this for almost every entry on this list, but - hey y'all, this book is incredible. There is some bits at the beginning that I was not crazy about, and I can see how this book would bore you to tears if you weren't sort of game for a bit of a reading adventure, but I loved this book. 

Winterson's novel takes from Frankenstein what I think everyone intuitively knows but what we must all face, that technology presents itself rhetorically to us as an advantage, as a benefit, as boon. It has to present itself to us, that is its rhetorical force. Right now something you are doing is not working well, this is obvious because - as the saying goes necessity is the mother of invention - if you can conceive of a way that the thing you are doing is not good then by necessity you must envision a way that it could be better, technology is usually the remedy in all cases, and so the technology gets invented to solve this perceived problem. It is always a solution to a problem. What Frankenstein questions is not the thing itself, we hardly understand what the monster is, but the question at the heart of progress, will it always bless us or in our quest for victory do we pervert the thing we hope to assuage, ourselves. The problem always starts with ourselves, the rush for efficiency is greed, the quest for health is the quest for power in immortality, the propulsion to categorize, synthesize, read, write, chronicle ever more swiftly and efficiently is vanity, look at what I have done and done ever so much better than you, but here the monster rears and asks of its creator, why and what hath you wrought? This is Frankenstein, this is the feminist critique of the scientific process. I may say this a thousand times over the course of the project, these books are worth reading. That is why this book is still around it is the proto-story yet to be unseated that is at the back of the mind of every dystopian novel since. And the dystopian novel as a canary in the coal mine continues to ask of itself its own question, are we doomed? Necessity is the mother of invention, if we weren't doomed would we ask the question? Here, we may chase ourselves to the very outer reaches of ourselves to find the answer, frozen, alone, on a blood lust excursion for vengeance,we must seek the monsters of ourselves. 

It was from here that I started Paradise Lost but put it down some months ago. I left this project sort of pause after I left Paradise Lost alone, but came back to just after this with Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 

Literary References and Allusions: In this quest, I am also compiling every literary reference and allusion in these works. I may miss some along the way but I want for each of these works of classic literature to continue aid me in my journey to read a great deal of that which is worth reading under the sun. Shelley includes references to:

Cornelius Agrippa (not on my list)                      

Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus (not on my list)

Coleridge "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" (on my list)

Oliver Goldsmith - Vicar of Wakefield (not on my list)

Cato the Younger

Percy Shelley "Mutability" (on my list - sort of)

Volney’s Ruins of Empires (not on my list)

Milton's Paradise Lost (on my list)

a volume of Plutarch’s Lives (on my list)

Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werter (on my list sort of)

Wordsworth Tintern Abbey (on my list sort of)

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