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Esmé Weijun Wang - The Collected Schizophrenias. A good read, mixing the personal with the societal. It's a little unbalanced in that it never addresses either fully, or to a functionally complete (in my understanding) way. One nice aspect of it was the essays start at the societal and external then move inwards to ever deeper understandings, all the while plucking bits and pieces from the opposing (internal/external) viewpoint and juxtaposing them. It ends with Wang talking about how she has found meaning in her illness, although it's still an ongoing, chronic illness. There's a lot to be found there as simply informative, and a lot that sheds light on personal struggles. I've read a few reviews that says it's not as horrific as it could be. I'd agree with that to a certain extant. It starts out with the words, "Schizophrenia terrifies," and I guess in a way that's giving the reader an imperative to fully realise it themselves rather than forcing them to do so. Although the science of the illness is mixed throughout, it's either high level readily established science (DSM definitions) or necessarily missing the contestation of science over what schizophrenia is in favour of one or other personal meaning. There's also a very telling essay on appearance, and how she tries to look well put together and fashionable so as to defy the expectations of her illness (appearing not-typically-schizophrenic is a constant theme.) This seems to echo from throughout the essays, where she doesn't fully write into the enveloping of the illness (as others pointed out with regards to the horrific) as though she's attempting to maintain her appearances in writing as well. I think there's a point to that, and again it's asking something of the reader. Whether others will find this meaning I don't know. It's a short read, that I could through in about five or so hours. Worth a go, and illuminating if you treat its implications seriously. Edit: It's about the various forms of schizophrenia, in case the name doesn't give it away. Mrenda fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Feb 5, 2019 |
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Feb 5, 2019 19:29
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chernobyl kinsman posted:bodily secretions of most kinds are treated as taboo and unclean across most cultures. mary douglas' purity and danger is the seminal (heh) work on this. there's also kristeva's powers of horror but she's terrible I thought Powers of Horror did a brilliant takedown of the hypocrisy of the catholic church, and all the gotchas involved in catholic thinking.
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Dec 11, 2019 20:33
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chernobyl kinsman posted:powers of horror barely talks about catholicism at all? I was fairly certain there was about half a chapter on it? Maybe that was my own thoughts as I read it, though.
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Dec 11, 2019 20:56
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Isn't there a part of it about the church establishing taboos/sins of thought rather than sins of action/deed? Edit: maybe you're right about it being about Judaic law, but I was reading it into my own upbringing in catholic school where similar would apply. Mrenda fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Dec 11, 2019 |
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Dec 11, 2019 20:57
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And she explained her actions as passing on no more than writers gossip so they'd leave her alone. Edit: And this is getting away from the fact that bodily secretions have long been considered taboo (and so hilarious as well.)
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Dec 11, 2019 21:01
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i am pretty sure she still defines sin as an action, since even thought is a form of action, but i might be wrong. looking at it now, the only time she mentions catholicism is to sort of bemoan "the contemporary post-Catholic destiny for mankind bereft of meaning" What I'm remembering is the idea of sin as a means to control (and sin coming from a form of abjection, at least the nascent idea of sin.) Where actions can be controlled, and so an un-sinful life is theoretically possible, thus denying the church and god their ability to forgive, by implementing a sin of thought, thinking of someone lustfully, feeling pride, or whatever in your thoughts, no-one is ever able to control that so the church automatically made you sinful as an inevitability. Maybe it wasn't Powers of Horror I read this in, but I don't remember reading another Kristeva book and I'm fairly certain it was Kristeva who firmed this idea up for me.
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Dec 11, 2019 21:31
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chernobyl kinsman posted:thats not actually what catholic thought about sin is tho. "thought-sin" of the kind discussed by Jesus ("whoever lusts after a woman, adultery in his heart" etc) requires internal and conscious assent. feeling an attraction to someone is not a sin, but indulging that attraction - lust - to the point of fantasizing about them or w/e is. the former is uncontrollable, but the latter is entirely within your control. this is linked to what Jesus says about plucking out your right eye if it offends you and so on. its part and parcel with ancient thought on practicing inner discipline as well as outer. the bible as a whole, and the NT in particular, and certainly subsequent christian writers, are pretty clear that just going through the motions or acting externally pious is not enough; there must be real inner change, which involves real inner mastery of your baser drives like lust and pride and wrath and the whole bunch. Your, or your representation of what they're saying is drawing a much finer line between control and lack of it when it comes to the likes of feeling lust and a conscious, if internal, action. I mean, I have no doubt you're correct on the theology, but the teaching of that theology to kids in a school isn't so nuanced when they talk about sinning in thought. And that sets up a whole host of internalised personal issues in a catholic country.
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Dec 11, 2019 21:51
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I just finished Sally Rooney's Normal People. I went through quite a few reactive emotions to it, a few directly in response to the text, others in response to the craft and the shape of the text. It's definitely a book that deserves literary critique, not least because of the attention it's received, and stemming from that a critique of the current literary environment we've found ourself in. As a directly affective work, emotionally and intellectually, it'll take me a while to slot everything into place. And mostly that's a deep questioning of what people actually want from reading?
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Jan 31, 2020 04:35
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Sock The Great posted:Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino. I loved this book, one of my favorite non-fiction reads in current memory. Nine separate essays about the moral illusion of being a millennial and living you life on the internet, with no prescription or advice on how to escape it. It's It's a good book. And plenty of people shouting stuff like, "THIS IS VITAL!" and then completely ignoring the many hypocrisies it pointed out and disavowing any debate about what she brought up.
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Feb 1, 2020 03:56
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I read Threshold by Rob Doyle today. A "novel" about a guy called Rob Doyle (and thus began the auto-fiction/confessional/what is it debates) loving about, doing drugs and visiting places important writers lived and died. There's an entertaining scene where he pisses in some dude's mouth. Overall I'd guess I'd say it's a friendly novel. It's like that guy you've known for years unloading his stories on you, but instead of being badly told with an alcoholic breath it's quite well written and packaged into a book. It's worth a read, even if there's nothing revelatory in it. (I think the biggest questions it asks, in a way the author may protest about, are over the shapes we give to the stories we tell, and how they thus get approached.)
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Feb 3, 2020 07:38
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I just finished Malone Dies, and I don't really see the point of reading any other book (not at the moment, at least.) It definitely feels like a crossover point for Beckett from modernism to aware post-modernism. I was approaching it from the point of view Beckett was writing his career into the story, the act of writing written into the story (with the character literally writing another.) At the end it felt like the deaths were to give permission for the reader to write/create/imagine/think their way forward for the characters/themselves. A great read overall, and probably the "tightest" of the Beckett novels I've read so far.
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Jun 20, 2020 05:59
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Lockback posted:Anyway, it's good. If you're looking for a "classic" that easy to read, and has some just amazing prose I'd recommend it. It really captures the "your good buddy tells you about this amazing bender" feel to a T. It's more "modern" than what you've described, but Threshold by Rob Doyle captures something similar. Less "good buddy telling you about an amazing bender" and more random mysterious guy in a pub who's done interesting stuff but you don't know if he's full of poo poo, just that you probably won't see him again. It has the same vibe of someone recounting, learnedly, their excess, while indulging in excess (i.e. actually writing a book about it.)
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Jun 22, 2020 16:01
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I read Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride in one sitting the other night (it's quite short.) Apparently she doesn't like restrictive comparisons, but she was working with a Beckett archive while she wrote the book and it really shows through in the text (comparisons to other authors may apply too.) The gist of it is that a woman spends various nights, over a number of years, in foreign cities, in a hotel room, trying not to think of something that happened to her in the past, all the while ruminating on what she's doing now (seeing as we're all forced to think.) I thought it was brilliant, the prose is convoluted but, to me, a natural way of thinking when the mind is actually in convulsions. It helps that the prose is quite pretty, too. If you ever wanted to read a more embodied, feminised Beckett you couldn't go far wrong with Strange Hotel. It felt like writing applied directly to my way of thinking, and naturally has entirely split reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads (generally a good sign.) I think it's a future classic. In many ways I've always been looking for "silence" in a work, how writing can capture the feeling of "silence." I think this is the closest anything has come to my desire, by allowing you, the reader, to give yourself over entirely to the noise of another mind. By empathising, feeling that noise, you achieve a related silence for yourself. Like I said, a future classic. There's a nice (if slightly tangential) interview with her here. If my spiel doesn't sell you on it, read the introduction from the interviewer. https://hazlitt.net/feature/there-are-plenty-readers-whom-plot-not-be-all-and-end-all-interview-eimear-mcbride
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Jul 1, 2020 13:14
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I finished I Is Another, the second volume (of three) from Jon Fosse, following up from The Other Name. If the first volume details the character's childhood, and the formative events that establish his thought patterns in later life, the second volume follows the path to show us where a teenager might start walking to given a bit of their own freedom. It's an amazing book (both volumes) dealing with art, religion, alcoholism, loneliness, friendship, death, afterlives, and the nature of who we are from the perspective of a man hitting old age. The big "gimmick" (it's not at all a gimmick) is that Asle, the protagonist, has a doppelganger (who we actually get to interact with in this volume.) It provides a strange effect for the reader, because we don't know how the narrator, one specific Asle, has access to this other Asle's history. Doubt is cast over who is who, and who is speaking from where (and this gets into the book's dealing of who we are,) but this doubt, at times, has an effect of drawing the reader in. It makes us doubt which Asle is which, who is speaking, and so we become a participant in the story, an active reader seemingly inhabiting the space between one Asle and another Asle as a reader-person within the books. I think the biggest standout for me is how un-judgmental the storytelling is about all the "problems" the characters face. The two main strands are alcoholism and religion. Both Asles are alcoholics, one "recovered", who quit for love and religion. The book shows (so far at least, I'm eager for Volume 3) that both are more-or-less valid choices for how we cope with the pressures of the world, whether it's losing a wife, or not having the success we wanted, or simply to escape the noise that is every day (the book is written in "slow prose" where the main character's thoughts are repeated and repetitive.) There's parts where you can feel the trepidation of his beginning-drinking, later refusing drinks, and how his religion is just as much an escape or excuse as alcohol. And so from that we can't judge the other character's near-death from alcohol. It's a phenomenal series. Probably some of the best storytelling I've ever read, with a style that may not climb to the literary showmanship of some great authors, but matches better and surpasses many of their efforts with the effect of aligning what we're experiencing from the events in the story with our view and expectations as readers. I'd fully recommend both The Other Name and I Is Another to anyone. It's a thoroughly modern book that I hope will be looked at as a great in the future (if it's not happening already.)
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Mar 9, 2021 10:42
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I gave up after Part 1, a little way into Part 2. To be a bit facetious there was a heck of a lot of world building. Reading the wikipedia summary it seems it does eventually stop spinning its wheels, but when a book portrays madness, and no-one in the book shows an ability to contend with madness, it's not going to do very much for me. For all of Part 1 there were indications it was about something, the theatre scene with people throwing out money, the apartment scene with people desperate for the apartment of someone who's just sent to an asylum, but, in many ways, while we had repeated showing of such "strange goings on" no-one tried to reckon with them. I certainly didn't, which could either be a flaw of me or a flaw of the book. When Part 2 started and we got more crazy poo poo happening, I gave up. And "crazy" is the wrong word. With madness (at least as I know it) things may appear disordered, people looking on may see the person experiencing madness as disordered (or in this book's case the world as disordered,) but the person who is experiencing madness is not so unaware of it (at least at the beginning) that they do nothing to tackle it. Sure, Part 1 might have been a mirror to society, where someone says, "This book is showing a society's madness (satire, basically,) and no-one's coping with it. Isn't our world also mad, and no-one tries to cope with it?" But that's far too cute and also absolute bollocks. If you're showing a world where no-one is seemingly able to reflect on its strangeness, where it's just presented as-is, that's worldbuilding (at best "scene setting.") And I'd had enough. The book could absolutely work for someone who places the nexus of their issues, concerns, and insanity beyond them, in the world. For someone who believes that nexus, even if caused by the world, is personal, it did nothing.
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Jul 4, 2021 13:58
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Solitair posted:The Master and Margarita felt like a deeply personal work to the extent that it sometimes felt uncomfortable, like I was intruding on Bulgakov's private life just by reading it. I interpreted it as a metaphor for how he saw himself as a free spirit with a vibrant inner life suppressed by living in Stalin's USSR, to which the only escape he saw was through imagination and magical thinking. Yeah, reading the wikipedia description of it I get the impression it address this, and personal strength and integrity, via "The Master and Margarita" in Part 2. It's just by that point I'd given up because I didn't feel Bulgakov had gained my confidence in Part 1 which felt like it was going nowhere (even if it was going somewhere.)
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Jul 4, 2021 14:43
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I finished The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett this morning. The first, maybe fifth of it was difficult to get through. It was a constant stream of subjectiveness, questioning, roundabout thinking. There was never a truth to it, or anything solid in the narrative you could latch onto as an object, something firm and real that isn't questioning the reader (or narrative, or author.) As the book went on, being that I was lacking in insight as to what it was about, I decided the book was about being a book. Looking back, this makes sense. Often at the start of a book an author is figuring out what the book is about, or where it's going, or what its voice, narrative, or "plot" will be. Editing should take that out of a story, but in this it didn't. Not because the book is trying to be difficult, but because the book is simply being a book, as presented in all it's book-ish-ness. About halfway through I realised (some of the things that informed my just-written post-hoc commentary on the first 20% and) that the book is living in reverse. At the start we have a death, then by end we have life. The book involves the reader. If writing something that is to be published (and so reach a final(-ish) state) the writer must kill the idea they have floating around their head. Every word they write kills off the feeling, and possibility, of what they were thinking about. No writing can really capture the totality of "a thought." (Given language, feeling, percepting, being aware of, and countenancing the thought can't capture the thought.) So the book, in being written, is a death sentence for the the totality of what is possible from before its beginning. The book/text is aware of this, and grapples with this, that it is less than what it could be by taking a form in being what it is. By the end I was fully convinced (which is to say I believed in what I was thinking) that the book was in argument with itself. It's a book that was annoyed it had to be written, that all its possibilities in not being written were ended by being written, and it expresses its annoyance in its bookish form (lots of words.) It had to keep going on, until the point it became a book, and satisfaction was met between author, presumed reader, (editors and publishers,) and text. The text was mostly referring to itself, as much as a book conscious of being a text can refer to anything but itself. Ending on the idea that the book must go on (and by ending I mean the book ended, it didn't go on) the book realised that it exists elsewhere. It's formulated by the author, by the reader (me, as I'm doing,) and is only itself in not being itself, because itself can't fully comprehend itself, only continue with the reckoning of itself, until its satisfied, or dead, or has forgotten about itself, and can maybe, through implication, consider it exists in this post I'm making, in my thoughts, and in other readers' thoughts. The Unnamable is a book annoyed it has to exist, but having to exist it just gets on with things. If you've ever said, "Damnit Mom! I didn't ask to be born!" then this is your answer, because having being born you really have no choice in having existed.
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Jul 14, 2021 14:41
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 14:02 |
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I just finished Out by Christine Brooke-Rose, as in just a few minutes ago so these are fairly raw thoughts. The most striking thing about the book is how it deals with perception (and it frequently refers to perceiving phenomena.) It denies the existence of history, in many places, at least the accessibility of history. There are a huge amount of "resettled" people in it, and when asked their former occupation they never settle on one thing, what they say changes over, and over, and over, and all are true for some degree of truth. In denying the accessibility of history, it's saying we can only exist in the now. This is handled really well, as passages in the book are repeated often, with small changes, over, and over, and over. If they're memories (to the reader) even though they're happening in "the now" they show "the now" can warp memory, can perceive new things in the memory, and for "the now" the memory is not wrong or changed, it just is. As a book it's hard to piece together its through-line, except via "the now" that constantly brings up the past. By repeating passages we're allowed to/forced to identify that the truth of the matter is never assured, except as experienced, which when examined can never again be the same "truth of the matter." Reflections come up too, or dualities, experiencing another as yourself, experiencing your reflection as another's, and desire or lust being the driver of this, a wanting to live and experience, perhaps, the other. The whole book is premised on the "Western World" becoming "the other." And it says you/they/it are not any less in being so, it is just a matter of one reality. The book presents living as a sickness, growth as a cancer, but one where we continue on experiencing things and this cancer as entirely natural. By the end of the book it collapses into an unreality, the cancer has become terminal, the medicine (living) the thing causing the cancer. In unreality it says this is just as much a "reality" as anything else. It's comforting to see someone address this, not quite in a "look on the bright side of things" but saying looking at any side of things is what's valued. (Perhaps it's very privileged in saying experiencing is what's valued, and not coming from a place where experiencing is insufferable.) Maybe it's just what I've been reading recently (Gravity's Rainbow, The Unnamable, now Out, all of a similar vintage) and my frame of mind that views them as incredibly existential novels in the way they prioritize "the real" by showing we are often dealing with a lack of understanding, but that's the beauty of it; we continue; we exist; some say we exist within a world and some say we exist within ourselves, both true. To have a full appreciation of anything would turn both it and your perception of it, perhaps even you (as the books are very much about "you" and how "you" deal with them) into an object. Finite, not in the sense of having an end, but in being limited and having the ability to be known. Out says your knowing changes, if you're living. Gravity's Rainbow says despite some amount of knowing and not knowing, and knowing "knowing" leads to a "paranoid" (everything is linked) view of the world, we have to content ourselves with our roles, even if contenting ourselves is by deluding ourselves into a role, for a while, except when we don't. And The Unnamable says some day we won't know, or be known, but having begun to know, and be known, we have no real choice in the matter. All three are great books, and I'd recommend each of them.
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Jul 17, 2021 20:07
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