angel

A vast confusion and chaos of a book, a vain, egotistical venture, a great pain of the head (saith mine author), most miraculous in its misery, aimless, a menial torture, nulla sententia concordat cum altera [no statement agrees with the next], its foundation is naught, a spectacle of incoherence. And yet the mind is compelled in intense magnitudes, a great patience exercised, legere est effodere [to read is to excavate], to dig, to tear apart, to gnash, to obsess, to awe, it is a great beauty to read an unwinding soul.

Robert Burton's not a name you hear nearly as often has his contemporary greats. A Renaissance writer almost concurrent with Shakespeare (Burton wrote before 1616, but his masterpiece first dates from 1621 with several revisions up to his death) and contemporary to Cervantes, but seemingly forever outside of the realm of immediate recognition. Burton was a strange man who wrote a strange, unholy brick. Thanks to the Catherine Project this headache of a book has been my life for about 6 months. This confusing, consuming, logically incoherent, meandering, sometimes utterly brain-numbing book. A book so notorious for its difficulty and singularity that one of the first things scholars, or hypothetical transgender nerds, will describe about the book is how difficult it is to answer succinctly a question self-explanatory for the vast majority of books: what are you???

I don't think I quite ever figured that out. The mission is pretty evident, even in the title itself. The book is not an "anatomy", the results of complete dissection and organization. This book is an "anatomy", the process thereof. Melancholy, Burton's personal demon and, as his life progressed, his complete obsession, is to be identified, causes pinpointed and cures explored. If this is a curiously vague mission for an 1100+ page book, then you have just begun to understand the mental frustration me and my group felt. It's laid out in a manner similar to an encyclopedia, but stylistically it's all over the map, in between antiquated medical text, philosophy, something many identify as the first "self-help" text, and a tour through literary history, mythology, stories collected from contemporary pamphlets and newspapers. This book is a fucking mess. A miraculous one.

I cannot possibly dispel my thoughts in their entirety here. But when this book shines, it is like nothing I have ever come across. For every horribly dated piece of medical or behavioral advice are 4 more that are striking in their timelessness. Burton's articulation seems tuned to the max, squeezing all possible words to create something immense in strength and magic. Burton also finds these incredibly musical stretches of bliss inamomgst his monster, which leaves a lingering impact long after the page has been turned.

If any of this sounds not the most enjoyable, this may not be a book for you. You will struggle with Burton all the way to the end, whether it be his endless digressions, his opaque-ness, the sense of banging your head against the wall as you try to figure out what the damn point of all this is.

So who is Burton for? I don't think I have an answer to that either, but I know Burton is for me. I've read this thing cover to cover, and I'm still so in the dark, still feel like I've barely uncovered the secrets of the world Burton contained in his life's work. I think these are things I'll wrangle with forever. God, it's glorious.

Ranma :)

 (Read for uni)

Finally got around to some Kerouac, and I do plan to get around to the big one, On The Road. Like a lot of Kerouac this was written at a breakneck pace, in this instance under 2 weeks, and you can certainly tell, for better and for worse. When it's at its best, it's a gorgeous work of trying to find spiritual enlightenment and the self in a country which has seemingly wiped that side of life from function. At its worst it is nauseatingly aimless and full of itself. From what I'm told, On The Road suffers from this as well, and you definitely gotta take the bad with the good. The highs are definitely worth it in the long run, but this is likely not one I'll reread in the forseeable future. 

Traversed this short story collection at a very glacial pace, I'm aware lol. This was a lovely read to pick up! I'm very glad this was the Vonnegut I sought out this after the astounding Slaughterhouse-Five, because there is great versatility at play here. We have the gleefully cosmic and cynical alongside character-driven and devastatingly real, the earnest alongside the ulterior. Unfortunately, there are some duds, some problematic elements that are certainly a product of their time, and so on. However, the highs are so gripping and ecstatic and wonderful that it more than warrants this score. Individual short story ratings below. ????


Where I Live - 5/10
Harrison Bergeron - 10/10
Who Am I This Time - 8/10
Welcome To The Monkey House - 5-6/10
Long Walk To Forever - 8/10
The Foster Portfolio - 9-10/10
Miss Temptation - 9-10/10
All The King's Horses - 10/10
Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog - 7/10
New Dictionary - 8/10
Next Door - 9/10
More Stately Mansions - 9/10
The Hyannis Port Story - 6/10
DP - 10/10
Report on the Barnhouse Effect - 9-10/10
The Euphio Question - 9-10/10
Go Back To Your Precious Wife And Son - 8-9/10
Deer in the Works - 9/10
The Lie - 9/10
Unready to Wear - 9-10/10
The Kid Nobody Could Handle - 9/10
EPICAC - 7-8/10
Adam - 8/10
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - 9/10

One of my favorite on-a-whim discoveries in a minute, as soon as I caught the basic premise of this play I knew I was gonna be a sucker for this. I ended up watching a super charming lil high school performance of this on youtube while following the text and I quite loved my time with this work. I think this play is definitely flawed, it spends time on some extraneous details of this world while hardly mentioning others; just a very uneven work. However, it is such an unabashed execution of an incredible concept that it warrants its flowers. It is just as grisly and bewildering as it is beaming with great hope for today's culture, the footprint of our current slice of the boundless history of the earth, in the face of the absurd. I love Washburn's tight control of dialogue, and I'll certainly need to check out more of her work. :D

A very thorough picture of the relationship between tech and morality and politics. Some moments come off as very dry but this was still a pretty damn enjoyable read, only real biting complaint is the biases the author bring in, while I don't entirely disagree, can lead to some grating points. Far from ruins the book though, a lot of fun pulling it apart in my class too so that may be blinding some other comments lol. Not bad!

It's alright! I was dreading the worst with this thing, Lanier immediately comes off so full of himself in the intro and conclusion and while there is some very grating arguments sprinkled in here, a lot of the information is quite good. Huge props for making this as short as it is too, very brisk read.
Would never seek this stuff out on my own, but hey, not terrible!

To be totally fair this is one of a bunch of high school reads, maybe that ain't the best environment for this (certainly ain't for much literature) but I wasn't into it nearly as much as I'd hope. It's decent enough, definitely deserves its acclaims but eh. Open to giving Dickens and/or this book another shot sometime but this kind of coming-of-age tale is not my cup of tea.

Adding this solely because I'm happy as hell that I finally remembered it from 7th grade. 
This was a fun read from what I remember! Likeable characters and a lovely coming of age setting, dope :3

I absolutely loved my time with this, but I did not dedicate myself to it like the book clearly demanded and it got lost amongst concurrent reads. Will give another shot another time, this was magnificent. :)

Projected rating: ~4.75-5/5

Got caught up in other reads. Some very graphic moments that discouraged picking back up a bit, but overall not a bad reading experience. Will give another shot another time. :)

Projected rating: ~3.5/5

Some decent information in this thing but good Lord it is unbelievably repetitive. As soon as my professor moved on from this book so did I lol.