One of the things that I feel like gets missed in Joyce due to his Reputation is how much he does this to himself. I always remember the part of Ulysses where he basically tells Stephen (a stand in for younger Joyce) to shut the fuck up. Joyce is a pompous asshole, but he has at least a bit of awareness here and it’s really fun.
Glad you made it through that book though. It’s genuinely deeply funny and damn if there aren’t still parts that can make me cry if I think about them for even a minute.
Yeah after Portrait I quite liked Stephen’s partial characterisation as a pretentious brat in his awkward post-university years. Apparently the whole meeting between Bloom and Stephen is based on a real random event that happened to a young Joyce where he was helped out of a jam by a random Jewish stranger who invited him back to his house. A real human happenstance. They never met again but it stuck with him that two people might randomly meet, help each other and be on their way to make it the crux of the narrative.
I keep reading Ivan Goncharov’s “Oblimov” which is the story of liturature’s first NEET. The entire story is people around him trying to get him out of the house and doing stuff and then Oblimov fucks it up. His childhood friend tries to get him hooked up with a gal named Olga, and Olga is like “I can fix him”. But then he works himself into a shoot by writing the worst breakup letter of all time after not getting enough sleep because he thinks he isn’t good enough for Olga. Part of the letter reads “love makes incredible progress, it is a kind of gangrene of the soul” like this is some 4chan greentext shit. Then he sends the letter and then he tries to take it back after confronting her. It’s a real mess!
Joyce did once resubmit a page of a proof of Ulysses because a single letter O was in the wrong typeface. Which can maybe seem a little pompous, but whomst among us wouldn’t.
I’ve been reading The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin, which is the third part of whatever that trilogy of books is called. I hesitated to mention it here as it is kinda “normy” but i have rather pedestrian book tastes unless someone literally puts something more interesting directly in front of me.
Anyways it is pretty good, as always my biggest issues is remembering who everyone is from the prior books as I read the last one over a year ago and the first a good bit before then. For the most part I am caught up but there is one minor character who I legit have no idea who they are.
Debating if I should start the next DOOM book right now. The ending to the first had this bizarre moment where the spider mastermind tried to stop Flynn from killing him by flooding his perception with vivid images of (one of?) the most traumatic incident in his life. the event in question is one where him and his dad were at a big museum in Hawaii looking at a statue of king Kamehameha, and his dad turns to him and starts jumping up and down in place, screaming like Tarzan, and saying shit like ooh aah I am big chief Kamehameha. Like this action hero is confronted not with his shadowself, or his failures, but this embarassing moment when his dad was racist in public. He then laments how it was the most he has ever been ashamed of his father, but flips the switch and kills the spidermind regardless.
reading donna harraway , ‘staying with the trouble.’ sometimes feels like reading a doctor bronner’s bottle but i think i’m vibing with it. otoh i do feel like most of the most interesting things are quoted from other people–also makes it very valuable–but means i am having a very hard time figuring out exactly what her point is, like the sum of all the very interesting parts she’s citing. i’m getting a lot out of those footnotes tho
I read Tell Me I’m Worthless by Allison Rumfitt in like, 4 sittings. It’s a deeply uncomfortable book but it’s so so so good.
Scattered observations:
The book paraphrases the opening of the Haunting of Hill House twice and yet I wouldn’t directly compare the two other than being haunted house stories that are Very Gay. I think Shirley Jackson’s mastery of The Sentence is stronger, but this book is hallucinogenic and violent in a way that Hill House isn’t.
On the other hand, if there’s one thing they have in common it’s empathy. Hill House (the fictional house) weaponizes empathy and Albion (the house in Worthless) completely burns it out of people. But the texts themselves are incredibly empathetic to their subjects even as they strip away all of their positive qualities before the end of the book.
I love love love how direct the book is with its themes. It starts with a content warning that tell the reader the themes, it drives the themes home within the text with incredibly graphic detail, and then takes two or three metatextual jaunts to directly tell the reader what the themes are. It screams “Do you get it??? No??? Then I will tell you!!!” This feels extremely Post-Twitter in the sense that it leaves absolutely no room for misinterpretation. Normally I would find this annoying but the book is so explosive that it earns its lack of subtlety.
The ending made me cry.I think it’s hopeful and realistic and bleak all at once in a way that few things rarely achieve. I love that it chides the reader for hoping for a happy ending midway through the book, then goes ahead and does it anyway. Although it’s not exactly happy either.
I’m fucking exhausted, jesus
Thanks @daphaknee and @iguferon for recommending this book, it was incredible.
after putting it off for over a decade i’m finally reading Against The Day. i haven’t gone back to any of his other novels in that period and was a bit worried this wouldn’t live up to my hopes or that his writing wouldn’t really hit for me anymore but i’m loving it.
Ended up kinda hate-reading the rest of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, though I often skipped the longer more boring sections. I think I need to read more bad writing to develop a sense of what I enjoy about it more.
The man is in love with the adjective and doesn’t know how to edit. Much of it is fictionalised autobiography but Wolfe has a bad talent for identifying what events of his life are worth putting down. Half the anecdotes lead nowhere or just seem to be something that struck only him as interesting. An unfortunately revealing case of how most of us lead pretty boring lives or at least may not realise what is most interesting. There’s some really good portraits dotted throughout, mainly of times and locations than specific people.
'e 'as an unerrin 'abit of ryeting everybodeez accent transli’era’ed phone’ically so we can all say ain’t 'e a clevah boy! I hate it. There’s no need and it leads to the bizarre framing of the main character as having no accent and no personality. Presumably liek Thomas Wolfe on most days. The main character is also extremely passive, never really taking an active role or position in most situations. He just gets buffeted about and Wolfe seems to think the author-protagonist is essentially a camera that records, but doesn’t engage with, its subject.
A brief section talks about their experience living in Nazi Berlin. It’s predictably a shit situation though Wolfe thinks the most tragic thing about the whole affair is the poor noble spirit of the German people being compromised. The book’s theme is about how you can’t really access your homeland over time due to changes that happen to it. But Wolfe comes to learn to love America again? Why? The nazis made me think America ain’t so bad. Apparently it takes seeing a Jewish passenger detained, almost certain to be killed, by Nazi officers at a checkpoint. All so we can have the stunning revelation that Nazi Germany is pretty bad, and America is a bit less bad by comparison. I’m not sure if this was revelatory stuff back in the 40s.
Wolfe can write but he can’t edit and he can’t suppress his desire to describe things only he finds interesting.
I always wanted to read The Dispossessed since I read The Left Hand of Darkness when I was like 19 or 20, and now I’m finally doing it. I want to talk about that book because it’s giving me much to think about. But I haven’t finished it yet and will sit with it for a while I think. Because I have been thinking about my time reading The Left Hand of Darkness, and realizing how time has really allowed me to see the way that book affected me in a way that I couldn’t have when I read it.
Though I really liked The Left Hand of Darkness, I kind of always thought of it as a book I’ve read but never had much to tell about it or my time reading it. And it wasn’t like I had forgotten the details. For years I’ve remembered things about it, fairly vividly. More vividly than some of the books I’ve read, maybe equally as much as books I’ve reread multiple times, though there was only that time that couldn’t have been longer than a few weeks when I was 19 or 20. But now I think of that book and can see the kind of person I chose to be in the decade that proceeded it, and I feel like I haven’t given it enough credit for the ways it sort of radicalized me. There was a guy I was close friends and roommates with at the time I was reading the book. It wasn’t so didactic as maybe this makes it out to seem, but I remember thinking that the way intimacy and the plasticity of identity and gender was talked about in the book made sense in a way more intuitive to me than any other way of looking at or thinking about those things I’d been presented with before ever did. But I think I can honestly say after reflecting on it that this book helped me to understand a way of being with people, and thus being in the world and being myself in a fashion I never could see before. At any rate it made me understand something about bravery, or maybe bravery in general. And for the next decade afterwords I look back and see myself making many honestly brave choices, hard choices for someone young as I was and without much of a community, seeking intimacy in its many varieties with people whenever I felt like I had good reason to pursue it.
The first of those brave choices was with the friend and roommate I had at the time. I would eventually chose to not be friends with him. It was full of awkward and painful but important lessons. But they were model experiences for how to do things and how to do things differently. The glimpse at joy only made possible by opening up to and becoming something else with others has made every act of bravery I committed in my twenties, though fraught and hard in their own way, seem completely justified in attempting.
And I don’t think there is another book or piece of media that I could credit with nearly as much of an influence. Lots of laughs and fun and feelings and tangible lessons, but I don’t think there has been anything else to spark a revolution like this within me.
