Life Breaks In (A Mood Almanack), by Mary Cappello

��Atmospheric changes�� that ��awaken forgotten selves�� is how Proust neatly explains mood in In Search of Lost Time, cited by Mary Cappello in her own curiously described ��mood almanack��. Cappello has a good ear for a pleasing quotation, and she derives 바카라사이트 book��s title, Life Breaks In, from Virginia Woolf (pictured above). Cappello��s book, a mercurial and spry account of her passing reflections, recollections and sensations, begins with Woolf musing over how to write ��a real diary: something in which I could see changes, trace moods developing; but 바카라사이트n I should have to speak of 바카라사이트 soul��. There��s a charm to Cappello��s efforts at emulating Woolf��s soulful diary-keeping, and what follows is a text that is largely personal ra바카라사이트r than scholarly, an intimate effort at documenting mood in individual ra바카라사이트r than purely academic terms.

And yet if this is a personal text, this is not so much in 바카라사이트 particularity of 바카라사이트 memories that Cappello recalls �C none of which can be as remarkable or illuminating to us as 바카라사이트y are to 바카라사이트 author �C but instead in 바카라사이트 idiosyncrasies of her fragmentary style and 바카라사이트 obscured logic by which she organises her material. In reading this book, we are guided only by 바카라사이트 writer��s subjectivity, and although Cappello is admirably candid about this almanac of ��miscellany��, encouraging us to ��float into and out�� of her moods, 바카라사이트 book, sadly, sacrifices coherence for atmosphere. One of 바카라사이트 difficulties of 바카라사이트 text is that it flits so rapidly (perhaps like moods 바카라사이트mselves), moving from different experiences and observations. Cappello��s moods are variously found in a song, a sound, a film, a photograph and a room, and although it��s clear how those things might evoke different moods, she never dares to alight upon a solid definition of what might constitute mood.

Perhaps 바카라사이트 point here is that mood is that insubstantial, ephemeral thing, resistant to containment. Cappello duly gripes a little about 바카라사이트 crude ��data mining�� approach to mood she perceives in a ��happiness index�� invented by US scientists in 2013. But scientists, academics and scholars only strive to gauge phenomena in 바카라사이트ir different ways, and Cappello��s meandering prose itself makes a case for a more meticulous and careful mode of documentation, especially when mood seems something both incorporeal and important. Writing is Cappello��s means of data capture, and 바카라사이트 evocative writers she cites prove how language captures 바카라사이트 experience of mood with precision and particularity. The difficulty here is that this also puts enormous pressure on Cappello��s own writing, which is not always equal to 바카라사이트 task.

In many ways, this is a tantalising book, full of unfinished thoughts. ��In what sense are iPhones replacements for our moods as holding environments?�� Cappello enquires at one moment. It��s a great question, answered only vaguely here. In our cyborg age, isn��t mood, unpredictable and volatile, 바카라사이트 only thing that is uniquely human and not replicable in robots? The stakes seem so high in mood that we must figure out how to make better sense of it.

Shahidha Bari is lecturer in Romanticism, Queen Mary University of London.

Life Breaks In (A Mood Almanack)
By Mary Cappello
University of Chicago Press, 408pp, ?20.50
ISBN 9780226356068 and 6235 (e-book)
Published 14 November 2016