Sam Moore
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.
Public transport read
Really struck by Salinger here as a writer of childhood and innocence, how fragile it all is; the child on the beach in the first story; Esme; the slightly strange, Buddihst Teddy. Salinger evokes peoeple who don't know just how much they don't know, putting them at odds with a brutal, postwar world -- a world that's going through an existential crisis of its own
Great ear for dialogue, the spare prose does a lot to capture so much of this sense of the unknown; having thoughts and feelings that his protagonists so rarely have the words for.
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Read if you like: coming of age with the world around you; the fact a baseball game takes a whole day to play; telling a long story and getting lost along the way; not knowing who you could be tomorrow
I love a book of theory that I can butt heads with, and this is one of them; it has some wild ideas around modernism and the political undercurrents that Danto associates with it are kind of wild -- and I don't agree with them at all. And it feels like he picks and chooses when questions of like, institutional value and taste matter in a way that aligns with his taste and thesis: a Rembrandt forgery is bad because history has moved on from the way Rembrandt is historically understood; but Gureilla Girls aiming to skewer male-dominated museums is bad because...? There are some really curious moments of uncertainty about like, when the roles of these institutions matter and when they don't. Maybe I'm just mirroring Danto and looking to see the artists I like (GG) given the like, attention I feel they deserve in the way Danto does with some of his history-remixing-case studies.
But the idea of being at the end of something and what comes after it is something I've been thinking about a lot. Inevitably feels like it needs to be tied into Fukuyama? That yes, we're at the end of something but that just means a sort of full stop in the macro, things in the micro will still happen. The question of the worth and merit they get in a world without these narrative arcs of history/artistic development is one Danto doesn't really answer: maybe the point is that there is no answer.
Bizarre inasmuch as it always flirts with being a Bond parody in ways that stress how grotesque a lot of spy fictioh can be but it has a really interesting thematic core about voids and how people choose to fill them: with country, with wealth, with sex, with food. And I think more than anything this is probably a spiritual novel; about the decay of Hillier's soul, if it happens as a requirement for spycraft and if the cost, in the end, could ever be worth it. It's also just full of really smart uses of language, even in throwaway lines and moments that all add up to something that's occassionally confounding, but always really interesting. Had an enjoyably strange time with this one
What I love about Maggie is her work always makes me think; it seems animated by an impulse I relate to in a big way: writing in order to understand what one actually thinks about something. Here, she returns to the metaphor of the "knot" across her four essays, the idea of something complicated and worth untangling in order to understand what to actually do with it; how to feel, how to move forward. This works better in some of the more culture-forward essays, because in the essay on climate, it does seem to veer towards the idea of progressive passivity and a continually outstretched hand to those who act against the idea of meaningful change (she's too generous to climate deniers, to put it bluntly)
But my qualms with her approach to ideology aside, what's great about this is what's great about a lot of her writing: a sense of malleability, a desire to see what the limits of language are. I think about the moment early in The Argonauts where she writes "it is idle to fault a net for having holes," and here the holes seem just as important as the net itself -- she grapples with the ethics of writing about addiction, the tensions around sex positivity and what it means to think of desire as something constantly explored, in flux. She's such a good writer of flux, of surprise; there's a moment -- in the climate essay, maybe ironically -- where she remembers spending time with her son, and the idea that it's possible to be that happy. And while this isn't a happy book by any means, it does seem to be interested in those moments of clarity, of understanding (especially since so much of it is about what we owe to each other)
There's a sense of a practice here, the idea that care and its end product is labour, is constant; needs to exist beyond gendered lines and beyond the self. It's a curious book; thorny and sometimes frustrating in terms of what she gives weight and importance to. But that thorniness is the point. And it is, after all, idle to fault a net for having holes; On Freedom seems to ask what's worth reaching through the holes of a net to hold onto and keep close
This was terrific; sadder than I expected and infused with that uncanny hauntedness that I loved in You should come with me now, but here it's all cycles of decay and rebirth, repeating forever on all aspects of life: whether its a house in the midlands, a furtive relationship that can never allow itself to fully become something; the loss of memory and self to age; the strangeness lurking beneath the tides. Endlessly compelling exactly because of how little it explains when it comes to what happens, but so understanding and incisive about why -- especially when it comes to descending into the lake in the woods. Everything is embedded with a certain weight that's difficult to shed, the way clothes cling to you after you get in the water; even the novel's more conspiratorial impulses and ideas aren't approached with urgency, but instead a grim, shambling inevitability.
Do I think that with that in mind it could have worked without the few explicit references to Brexit? Sure; the way in which it approaches time and community and that indefinable Lost Thing everyone is searching for puts it in a post-Brexit context very neatly anyway. But the past, I suppose, is another country.
Read if you like: The Twilight Zone; water as a metaphor for (re)birth; standing in the corner / losing your religion
And I asked myself about the present. How wide it was, how deep it was, and how much of it was mine to keep.
Psychic and temporal breaking in the wake of the trauma of war, anti-war in the sense of being anti-narrative; it doesn't choose not to try and make sense of Dresden but instead concedes its impossible. And so instead Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck; sees time as a supercut, some vast hand that grabs and throws him around. Feels sort of trite to think about it as something that only happens in his head but there are enough breadcrumbs that one could read Slaughterhouse Five as being “About Trauma” if they wanted.
But to me it seems to be about narrative and about free will; about telling ourselves stories in order to live, which Billy does in extremis through Tralfamadorians and time travel and something that isn't quite making peace and isn't quite acceptance. But is instead a kind of surrender. Time is vast and constant and therefore immutable. War can't be stopped because its always happened and always will. What we do in the face of that is existentially unsettling.
So it goes.
Time is strange in winter (the season) and in Winter (the novel); at once long and endless like grey skies, and short like the days. The way we slowly drift from past, present, yet to come is a marvel – Smith mentions Dickens a few times throughout, most bluntly with a paraphrasing of Tiny Tim in the book's final moments.
Winter as time for refuge, family, shelter from the storm. At once approached with earnestness and deconstructed through the eyes of warring sisters who can't help but love each other.