What is a Net?

It’s a series of reticulated interstices.

Of course it is!

[This, my favorite and winner of the 1938 Most Overly Complicated Dictionary Definition, taken from a recently-read math book, which shall remain thankfully anonymous.]

So, kids, remember – “we live in a fathomless sea of plastic mind substance,” so, drop your reticulated interstices in and catch yourself a world-shattering idea!

Ulalume

by Poe, 1847

The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll—
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.

(just the first two of ten stanzas)

...

Man, I wish I could write poetry. If I could, this is what I’d aim for, suspended over the Lovecraftian abyss at the low-point of the catenary footbridge as I am, swaying above and within the darkness. Reading Poe’s words I find myself a child again, dreaming (or not?) of white clouds swaddling an alien moon, crisp dark leaves at my feet as I stumble uncertainly though strangled wooded paths. And – of course, ever of course – that leaden thesaurus tucked under my arms, weilded like a crucifix to ward off the evil that lurked just beyond my sights at the edges of the periphery ...

Future Reads

I have five stories left in my Lovecraft omnibus (about a hundred twenty pages), plus “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” in another anthology, plus a paperback of August Derleth stories continuing the Cthulhu Mythos – this is my “Lovecraft phase.” I expect to finish up around the first week of April.

Around the start of summer I’d like to read two thick books on the Civil War and two thick books on WW2 (timing to read one of the WW2s on vacation at my in-laws, since they bought it for me for my birthday last year).

So the existential, absurd, and nauseous question that confronts me, as ever it always does, is –

What to read next?

That is, what shall I occupy myself with in the eleven or so weeks between, say, April 7 and June 21?

My only certainty is to zip through a pair of Asimovs. A palate-cleansing is the phrase that immediately comes to mind, a phrase I like. Asimov is good for that I’ve discovered. So on the shelves behind me I have his short story collection Nine Tomorrows, a mainstay rave favorite from my earliest youth that I have not re-opened in decades. Right next to it is The Robots of Dawn, something I picked up after reading the surprisingly enjoyable Prelude to Foundation two years back.

But what after that?

The Asimov duo should take me two pleasant weeks to peruse. That leaves me with two whole months of fiction I need to fill.

A possibility is a book-on-CD read-along, which caused my inner nerd to hulk out on several occassions over the past few years. It did with The Lord of the Rings, Atlas Shrugged, The Killer Angels, and Great Expectations, and I pretty much enjoyed each experience. The book I’m thinking about doing it with would be Richard Adams’s classic Watership Down, another mainstay from my youngest days. But there’s only one CD set for it housed in the entire conglomeration of libraries in my county, and when I tried to do this last summer, it always seemed to be checked out.

I could decide on a biography – I have a bunch sitting lonesome on the shelves, one for Vincent Van Gogh, another for Albert Einstein, one on Poe and another on Hemingway. Hmmm. Not sure. I have some historical fiction (Exodus) and some classic political thrillers (Seven Days in May, Clancy’s Red Storm Rising). Have Mary Stewart’s Crystal Cave and Hollow Hills, Arthurian tales from my Freshman high school year in need of a re-read. Plus about thirty other books, ones I’ve never read before. Re-reading The Passion of the Christ for Lent appeals to the monk in me. As does something completely far-out and out-of-character, such as re-reading some of my old books on Zen Buddhism.

I dunno. As usual, these things get resolved last minute when the spine of a book buried beneath the debris that surrounds my writing desk catches my eye and forecefully calls out, “Hopper! Hopper! Read me! Now!”