Sam Moore

enjoyably gonzo and shot through with dark humour; does the almost farcical escalation of stakes and double crossing that I got from watching The Big Sleep (maybe noir thrillers and farce are inherently similar?)

Jackson at the center a naive, suffering figure but one who remains fundamentally good in the face of a strange and violent underbelly. Love Himes’ ear for dialogue and the bleak poetry in his more protracted description

Fascinated by this formally; its refusal to really do much of anything with plot, and absolute absence of dialogue or character's as individuals -- they're always a couple, always defined together and always through the prism of other things. Their relationship to objects, geography, night clubs, sex shops, all the patchwork that defines them, becoming ever more rigid, as if their sense of selves might calcify and trap them forever. The way distance -- from a time, a place -- changes the way we see it and constantly try to make things seem better than they are (through our own eyes, and when we're perceived). Morbidly compelling, and really rather good

(read for work)

Epistolary break-ups will always be my jam; all those ghosts and failures, letters as archive of a past, a self, what might have been. Full of really incisive stuff -- obviously reminded me of things like Kraus and Anne Carson -- that I naturally devoured. Haunted, not just by a lost lover but a lost self, one that for better and for worse, emerged through intimacy with a specific person. All alchemy, magic

Dynamic and transformative in a way that surprised me. The San Quentin section all superb; feelings that can't be given a name but that end up haunting much of the novel, especially its final part -- a novel that constantly grapples with how to define Freedom and what people do when they don't have it. A stark, lonely thing, a generation of people who never had Opportunity in the way that their parents (so often absent, dead) did; the world itself seemingly haunted by what came before and what never quite came after. Violence the only language these people know; the way things calcify and take root. Very good

A serious ranking of contributors to The Anti-Aesthetic in order of readability:

Edward Said

Douglas Crimp

Rosalind Krauss

Frederic Jameson

Craig Owens

Jurgen Habermas

Kenneth Frampton

Jean Baudrillard

***

Struck by how this an After the End of Art both talk about modernism -- a stripping back, a search for purity, a kind of formal absolutism -- as much as by its post- The questions here about rebellion and mass culture are interesting but I was really struck by was how some of the contributors attack things from an angle that feels very contemporary and alive decades later; Craig Owens' essay on feminism was a real pleasant surprised.

Shoutout to Said specifically for being more readable than his comrades; for approaching theory and academic discipline in a way that, perhaps in a way that feels most appropriate for postmodernism, asks for more: for an understanding of theory and politics and pedagogy that refuses to be siloed into one, ornamental thing.

This kind of dense theory is always a bit of a fight for me to get through, its been a while since I was in the academy; but I always get a lot from it, should read more of it, keep the muscle limber

(re-read)

Read it if you like: Seinfeld; greed being good; Huey Lewis and the News; molecular gastronomy; the world ending not with a bang but with a whimper; architectural digest tours; Ludwig Van and a bit of the old ultraviolence

***

Weirder and more like Seinfeld than I remember; the stream of consciousness so effective in terms of just burying you in Bateman's brain and the way he sees the world: all slick, hollow surfaces. Struck by the fact there's not much violence and grizzly stuff (but when it rains, it pours...), so much of it is Bateman wandering through a hell-ish, barren landscape, a world that's different to everyone around him; informed by money, status, suits, Those little flickering moments of the mask slipping, mode of address changing is great.

It's also, incredbly funny; in the dialogue, in the ridiculous food, even in some of the most brutal and unsettling moments there are jokes that cut through it.

More emo-coded than I remember; Victor less a mad scientist and more a romantic poet taken to extremes, his fear and revulsion of The Creature a fear of himself, as if it were his soul given form