Coté's Commonplace Book - Issue #58
The Dune books are almost annoyingly self-important; realistic cloud migration strategies; the year in reviews; and links!
Dune
I’m reading through the Dune books (the core six ones) and I’m struck by how incredibly self-important they are. That’s not the exact phrasing but they’re completely serious and humorless. Almost inhuman!
Still, I’ve finished the first too more quickly than I’ve read any books in the past 12 months. While the pompousness turns me off - and, ironically makes me laugh at how over the top it is - they’re page turners because I want to see what happens next, especially when it comes to world-building.
There’s so much mythos and lore about Dune in nerd-culture (and the two films - I’ve never seen the TV series) that reading the actual books is almost like filling in the details. You have to really be curious about the Dune universe, which, I guess I am. Similarly, I often get drawn into reading too many wikipedia pages on comic book movie characters and villains just because I’m curious about their stories.
But, man, the tone of the books is just so serious!
Original content
Lower your expectations
I wrote up my take on a recent cloud survey, a survey I liked a lot. Check out the write-up, and/or my discussion of it on today’s Tanzu Talk:
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Podcasts
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The comments here are even good! Some of them are, you know, a little too “guy who thinks they’re the smartest person in the room,” but still good.
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“When you’re young, you want things: work, love, children. When you reach middle age, you want to want things. When you’re depressed, you no longer want anything. Desire, hope, the future itself—all seem to vanish, as they had for me. But now I at least wanted to know whether Hume could have heard about Desideri. It was a sign that my future might return.”
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“When I first read those lines in high school, I fell in love with their author. This fact is neither novel nor particularly interesting; every dysthymic, literary 17-year-old falls in love with Joan Didion. But I also felt an immense sense of freedom: The Beats had been telling me that if I wanted to be a writer, I should immediately drop out of school and haul my ’87 Dodge Caravan across the country, feel every broken edge of this country and report back on how holy it all was. Didion, by contrast, told me that while I could do things like meet Eldridge Cleaver and Jerry Garcia in the summer of 1967 or even profile John Wayne, what my imagined readers wanted most was me.”
Also: she was never really impressed with the artistic or optimistic efforts of her subjects.
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Old Book Illustrations offers a wide range of public domain, royalty-free images scanned from old books.
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A summary and some commentary on an older talk of mine. How nice of them to care!
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