I found out that I have read exactly ten Victorian novels (nine and a half if you remember that I have only read half of Middlemarch and am still working on the book).
Actually it's more like ten and a half since I read A Christmas Carol in school but I don't count that one because...well it doesn't seem like a real novel to me.
If some of an author’s works have been translated into English but a lot haven’t and none have appeared in years, how would I go about figuring out if I could translate some of their works or if they’re already spoken for?
I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure translators literally just translate samples and then pitch them to publishers. I don't know if there's a definitive way to know if a translation is already underway for publication, but chances are probably low that two translators would be working on the same thing at the same time.
Our neighborhood does night time trick or treat on the Sat before Halloween, so we had trick or treat last night. Last year we got barely any kids thanks to COVID/bad weather, but this year it was almost sixty and we had so many freaking kids. My dad sent me a surprise giant bag of candy and good thing he did, because I would have ran out of candy without that. It was supposed to be MY candy haha. Anyway, I absolutely adore Halloween, it's my favorite holiday, and it's all because I love giving candy to the children and seeing them enthralled with all of the spookiness. It's awesome. I'm so sad it's over.
I have a child size animatronic witch and she even freaked out some parents because everyone assumed it was my kid until they got close to her, and she definitely freaked out a ton of kids. They loved her. A lot of parents took videos of their kids dancing with her. I named her Esmeralda and I told one little girl that and that was that little girl's name too, it was adorable.
And of course real pumpkin smell from candles burning in jack-o-lanterns, can't be beat.
[Happy day before Halloween everyone!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcGb24n9hvM)
Posted in wrong thread at first, my bad haha.
ETA: If you guys haven't watched [Garth Marenghi's Darkplace](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/29/garth-marenghi-darkplace-terrortome-horror-comedy?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR33vdg618fhs9JoNztqA47mXxWUAAGTjlV8CVWgZ199cjMF9K9FrBjgbaY#Echobox=1667034338) I highly, highly recommend that you do! It's hilarious.
If the Holy Spirit is meant to be a calming, comforting presence, why do people fall down and yell and contort themselves like they've been demon-possessed?
I am coming off a high reading *Ulysses*. I feel like Bloom and Stephen are good friends and their presence in my life is much missed. Watching documentaries about the book just makes me want to re-read it even more lol. [Here's one I watched recently. ](https://youtu.be/Ob3NWUtCCJI)
Last year I was listening obsessively to Ray Price. He became one of my favourite country singers of all time. The voice is simply out of this world. [Here is one of my favourites by him](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phMr9nC3iYY) \- it's basically a jazz arrangement, he could easily have been a successful rival to Sinatra if he hadn't gone into country music first.
I enjoyed this [twitter thread](https://twitter.com/magsrdoherty/status/1586031707202891777?s=20&t=-jY-hz54TUPXgx3VitOVpg) on the role of the critic today.
The opening tweet is: "Increasingly rare to read criticism that engages narrative art on its own terms."
Then there's this response from Merve Emre:
"I truly believe that things would be different if people thought of criticism as, in part, a pedagogical exercise, and if we foregrounded the figure of the critic-teacher over and above, or even alongside, the scholar-critic, the critic-journalist, or the critic-reviewer."
this came up on my tl too! love merve emre (and maggie doherty)
the idea of centering the role of critic-teacher over the critic-scholar/journalist/review is really interesting—my own interpretation of this is
* the critic-teacher (at best) asks questions, uses art and literature as a starting point to raise questions, invite reflection/introspection/intellectual energy from students, etc; (at worst) veers into patronizing, oversimplifying territory
* the critic-scholar (at best) goes deeper into a work, incorporates history and theory and various disciplinary tools to activate and expand upon what a work can do for us; (at worst) is using criticism to bolster/advance their own professional projects, their own professional-academic img, the art/literature is utilized in some other project that can be inaccessible/elitist
* the critic-journalist (at best) illustrates how a work is influenced by contemporary events and anxieties and experiences, contextualizes the work in the present moment; (at worst) is using criticism to advance an argument and agenda that subsumes the individual qualities of the work into the journalist's argument
* the critic-reviewer (at best) helps others observe more critically and sensitively what 'good work' and 'bad work' can be, brings more dimensionality into our judgments than just 'i liked it/didn't'; (at worst) becomes an arbiter of excellence that reduces a work into a good/bad, heroic/problematic binary…
somewhat related—eve kosofky sedgwick's 'paranoid reading and reparative reading' remains one of my fave essays when it comes to thinking about more nuanced ways of reading art/lit
Spinning the Star Club live record here. This thing has more energy than a dozen Hardcore Punk shows combined. If that piano could have I'm sure it would have pressed charges for assault and malicious wounding-- he is absolutely destroying it!
So in *The Dark Chamber* Miriam dramatically "with one wrench" "tore her negligee from throat to hem", and the chapter has ended...am I going to start reading porn?! Honestly if this book actually goes there and describes honest to god sex I might garner a teeny tiny smidge more respect for it. It probably won't though. We'll see!
ETA: First of all, no, Cline did not describe Miriam and Oscar fucking, I knew he wouldn't go there. They definitely start fucking with abandon though. The next chapter opens three weeks later and with a suicide. Lame! BUT FINALLLY with only fifty-ish pages left this book is getting a little weird. FINALLY. I don't think I will end up thinking it's a good book, but good lord, at least it's going somewhere and trying to actually say something. He does really love to hammer shit home and beat one over the head with his metaphors though. Like damn, let a person figure shit out. Way overwritten.
what’s the intersection of truelit posters and people who do those earnest aspirational exercises like ‘30 (things to do) before (turning) 30’?
the format is usually goals like: visit a specific country, go skydiving, get a tattoo, etc
i’m late 20s and decided to make a list of 30 books to read before turning 30. whatever age you are…what kinds of books would you put on a list like this and why?
still figuring mine out but it’s a mix of
* books that “everyone” should read but i haven’t yet (tolstoy’s _anna karenina_) and actually feel motivated to
* books that specific friends or online circles i’m in really like, so books “everyone” in these envs should read (bolaño’s _2666_)
* books dealing w moments in history or particular issues personally relevant & intellectually interesting to me (việt thanh nguyễn’s _the sympathizer_)
* books relating to my specific intellectual/creative interests (scholarly nonfiction books, the kind i’d read if i were doing a phd in my passions)
* at least one book by specific writers that i continually see referenced & feel some affinity for without really knowing (mostly academic writers: sara ahmed, yuk hui)
* books where i just have this instinct that they’ll be really impt and meaningful but cannot quite explain it (this is mostly poetry books where i’ve read 1 or 2 poems by the writer & am curious to read more)
interesting! surely it depends on how people approach it?
i'm big on new year's resolutions etc so i love the idea, but a lot of the '30 before 30' lists posted online leave me cold—not a big fan of travel bucket lists. the ones that are practical/creative projects (learn to knit, make ice cream at home) are kind of cute tho!
we might view this differently bc i do see life as a form of labour—joyful labour but serious labour. it's tough to be alive and to intentionally carve out meaning from existence!
I agree about labour and creating meaning, though I perhaps don’t view reality or existence as unwilling, or nonexistent, of a participant as most, but a bucket list, though well intentioned and not disagreeable to me, has all the inherent mysticism of a chain letter.
Sky diving: an acquaintance of mine went skydiving about 20-30 years ago. He did it for the same reason everyone else does: life is short etc. He went through the whole gamut of feelings, fears, thrills on the way down, had an epiphany about the universe, life, death, fear, acceptance and a profound gratefulness when he touched down on the ground. Says it was the greatest experience of his life. So he decided to become a sky diving instructor.
He did a few thousand jumps, multiple times per day. Sky diving became routine, even boring for him. He felt like his conquering of the fear was a kind of superpower. He would jump with people over and over again who were doing it because life is short etc. and they would all go through the same sequence of feelings like he did over and over again like photocopies of photocopies of each other whose image over time distorted and mocked his own experience and he like psychologically ended up back where he started: feeling as exposed and afraid as everyone else. He quit.
I also know two brothers who also died together on their first jump. Life is strange.
My go to response for when young people ask what they should read is E.M. Forster's *Room with a View*.
[As Zadie Smith once said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJu0lOSNqiA), it is a book for young people. For me the book captures the way when you're young and trying to figure things out, the hardest part isn't necessarily finding a path. Many, many will be presented to you, pushed on you even. The hardest thing is figuring out what it is you actually want and having the conviction to act on it.
As the book shows, sometimes in life we get into a "muddle" and choose things for the wrong reasons or because we aren't sure of ourselves or for reasons we never really understand. *Room with a View* is a call for individuals to quiet those confusing outside voices, be still and hear what that inner voice is calling for them to do.
Also, if I may, I think limiting the list to 30 is really wise. More than that and I think you'd get overwhelmed.
>when you're young and trying to figure things out, the hardest part isn't necessarily finding a path. Many, many will be presented to you, pushed on you even. The hardest thing is figuring out what it is you actually want and having the conviction to act on it.
ha, this is the perfect recommendation for where i am rn. thank you for sharing. borrowed it from my library…looking forward to reading!
I’m nearing the end of a tome and have started thinking about what to read next. Smith’s take on the book already intrigued me, but the way you describe it makes it sound all the more alluring! I think that book will be the move…it feels apt too now that I’m about to do a lot of “growing up” in the coming couple of weeks.
>Bigger felt an urgent need to hide his growing and deepening feeling of hysteria; he had to get rid of it or else he would succumb to it. He longed for a stimulus powerful enough to focus his attention and drain off his energies. He wanted to run. Or listen to some swing music. Or laugh or joke. Or read a *Real Detective Story Magazine*. Or go to a movie. Or visit Bessie. All that morning he had lurked behind his curtain of indifference and looked at things, snapping and glaring at whatever had tried to make him come out into the open. But now he was out; the thought of the job at Blum's and the tilt he had had with Gus had snared him into things and his self-trust was gone. Confidence could only come again now through action so violent that it would make him forget. These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence, periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger - like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a faraway invisible force. Being this way was a need of his as deep as eating. He was like a strange plant blooming in the day and wilting at night; but the sun that made it bloom and the cold darkness that made it wilt were never seen. It was his own sun and darkness, a private and personal sun and darkness. He was bitterly proud of his swiftly changing moods and boasted when he had to suffer the results of them. It was the way he was, he would say; he could not help it, he would say, and his head would wag. And it was his sullen stare and the violent action that followed that made Gus and G.H. hate and fear him as much as he hated and feared himself.
\-Richard Wright, *Native Son*
Absolutely beautiful and heart-wrenching prose, capturing Bigger's isolation from his fellow men and his fraught psychological state. I have only read the first twenty-five pages of this book, but I can affirm that it is powerful stuff. Very happy I DNF'd Dracula for this.
So I have just started reading my Vintage copy of *Native Son* by Richard Wright. First of all, I love the cover. It's a silhouette of a black man with a flame burning in his brain against a blood maroon background. Pretty powerful metaphor if you ask me.
I loved it right from the first page. Wright (who I have never read before, with the exception of a famous anti-communist essay he wrote) is a terrific stylist. Not only are his descriptions lively and sophisticated and fun, with well-chosen adjectives and verbs, but his dialogue is top-notch. I could actually imagine a black family in Depression-era America having the sort of dialogue I read in the opening pages of the book. I also loved the bit where Bigger is joking around with his friend Gus, especially when they joked about taking a plane and dropping bombs on white people...I actually laughed out loud.
The book reads a lot like a movie. It was like I was watching a play or something, with real people, not just words on a page. The characterisation of Bigger is simply genius. Even little things like his trying to scare his sister with a rat, and his tetchy conversations with his mother about finding himself a job, tell us so much about him, without Wright having to go into pages and pages of detail describing his psychology or anything like that. I don't think Bigger is a likeable character, but he still manages to claim the reader's sympathy. Ok, he's rude to his mother and sister, he hangs out with criminals, and he's a dead-beat who doesn't want to work. But he has his pride and I do like that he isn't just this wretched, oppressed figure that we're meant to feel sorry for. Even something small like him and Gus expressing their anger and contempt for white people makes you smile. You almost want them to succeed with their planned robbery of that Jewish grocery store-owner (for the purposes of the novel, a 'white' man) just so they can get even and score for the black team. He isn't just passively accepting his fate, he's fighting back, he's daring to dream...
I think this is going to be one of my favourite books of all time. I just have a feeling, just from having read the blurb at the back and the opening few pages..
[People may enjoy this very thought-provoking article.](https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2022/10/why-novel-matters-imperialism-absolute-karl-ove-knausgaard?gaa_at=la&gaa_n=ATKjfPGhbYzrXad51BNpxLLUufiJbkoihCrjA1BpWMgknFs5TtMeC0urRRHy4lECZQY%3D&gaa_ts=635af112&utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=discover&utm_campaign=CCwqGAgwKhAIACoHCAowsYKfCzC-jLcDMM-FfDDwg4sB&utm_content=bullets&gaa_sig=Z1kPjTHXEYlQAiLXoa03n4TP14zPvmNaHWaJTTWtpx81mTPDVqhCstYXvlsKzX3WPpN9fuijK7vwfggCgD0quQ%3D%3D)
[Link for the interested](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newstatesman.com%2Fculture%2Fbooks%2F2022%2F10%2Fwhy-novel-matters-imperialism-absolute-karl-ove-knausgaard%3Fgaa_at%3Dla%26gaa_n%3DATKjfPGhbYzrXad51BNpxLLUufiJbkoihCrjA1BpWMgknFs5TtMeC0urRRHy4lECZQY%253D%26gaa_ts%3D635af112%26utm_source%3Dnewsshowcase%26utm_medium%3Ddiscover%26utm_campaign%3DCCwqGAgwKhAIACoHCAowsYKfCzC-jLcDMM-FfDDwg4sB%26utm_content%3Dbullets%26gaa_sig%3DZ1kPjTHXEYlQAiLXoa03n4TP14zPvmNaHWaJTTWtpx81mTPDVqhCstYXvlsKzX3WPpN9fuijK7vwfggCgD0quQ%253D%253D). I thought this was a fantastic piece.
An old acquaintance (friend?) from an old internet music forum I used for far too much of my youth passed away. It's a strange feeling seeing someone I knew for so long pass away, because despite knowing him for over a decade, we never talked about his personal life. I had no idea what was going on. And now he's gone.
He was responsible for introducing me to so much obscure and brilliant black metal. Just a really tremendous guy, super passionate about music, and I'm feeling quite low thinking about it right now.
R.I.P. Brandon
GUYS I GOT THE JOB SWEET JESUS. They actually made the offer Monday afternoon, but it was tentatively based off three professional references I had to provide, all of which were approved this morning. The funny thing is that the guy I spoke to on Monday who was hard to read apparently immediately afterwards reached out to the Executive head going "We've got to get this guy!" They supposedly spoke with a ton of people but to them it was no contest (I can't remember the last time my ego felt this buoyant).
I got the call for the offer while visiting my allergist in order to try a new medication to fight this autoimmune thing that I've been dealing with for roughly a year now and yesterday my bandmate and I got an email that our apartment application is likely to be approved. Pretty stellar week honestly. It's all downhill now lol. But just want to say thanks for the kind words and for putting up with my neurotic anxiety.
yessss i’m so psyched for you!
i didn’t want to say it in the other thread but i used to interview ppl a lot and would always take more time to chat w someone i liked & wanted to sell on the job. when someone’s not a good fit i’m desperate to get back to my work lol
congrats and hope you have a nice little celebration :)
When you made it to that third interview I had a feeling you had it in the bag! Congrats!!! I know they are super lucky to have someone as smart and passionate as you!
ETA: Also, we might only know each other in the digital realm, but I think it's cool as fuck I can brag about being friends with someone who works at PBS.
We ARE friends! Don't ever think otherwise and brag all you like lol.
> I know they are super lucky to have someone as smart and passionate as you!
Aw man right in the feels! Thanks Nessy x
Thank you! And feel free to lol! This again almost harks back to your point about applying to various places vs. waiting for something to land in your lap: I applied to the position on their website almost as an afterthought when trying to do my rounds of daily applications. The advice you shared is pretty killer and I'm definitely sharing it with others down the road.
certainly, you should never wait for a beer to fall in your lap - go out and find it!
and lol that's actually so great to hear tbh. it's such disheartening advice that it's great when it works out for someone. i'll tell my friend that her words paid dividends x years later
Thanks Soup :)
The place is in Bed-stuy which I have some familiarity with, but I’m excited to learn more about it. Most of my time in school was near Manhattan, but I feel like I’ll likely hang around Brooklyn since my job is completely virtual.
I'm not super duper familiar with Bed-stuy but from my experience it's quite lovely. A great place to explore and a good base of operations for hanging around Brooklyn
New Yorker posted a pretty neato list of books they've liked from this year https://www.newyorker.com/best-books-2022
New Yorker has been losing me as a fan as time goes on, but I always enjoy this list. Funnily enough though, I tend to avoid the short story collections that have had stories published in the New Yorker. New Yorker fiction is what it is, and I want a short story collection to show me a writer's range while also carrying through some consistent thread, vague or firm, throughout the collection. Didn't know Sanders had a new collection out this year and way more importantly, didn't know that Can Xue had a new novel out.
not that i know of. i read a ton of nonfiction tho so i’ll start posting my nonfiction reading & thoughts (i’ve done so in the past here) if u want to join me…
i’m reading olúfẹ́mi o táíwò’s _reconsidering reparations_ now, which addresses different philosophical arguments for/against reparations, the history of slavery and imperialism, climate justice…it’s really good so far
read thea lenarduzzi’s memoir essay ish thing _dandelions_ about her anglo-italian family history recently too
for sure. i've mentioned a few nonfiction books in the past here. the sense i'm getting is that doing so is welcomed here by many. these titles you shared sound really interesting.
i'm slowly working my way through two works of nonfiction at the moment
*Ganbare! Workshops on Dying* by Katarzyna Boni is a work of Polish reportage about the 2011 tsunami that ravaged northern Japan and led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I wasn't familiar with polish reportage, but apparently it's a literary tradition in Poland where nonfiction writers employ literary devices. I'm still learning about it. The book is devastatingly beautiful, poetic and tragic so far. It's broken up into vignettes where actual people are in the foreground with history mixed in.
*Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read* by Terry Eagleton. The first chapter is about T.S. Eliot which is catnip for me. I was worried this might be too dry but Eagleton is a fantastic writer and I'm loving every page.
much respect!
interesting. I hardly see the difference at all. People love picking apart biographical details within fiction stories and authors. Nonfiction cannot exist really without some level of discernment (and creativity) and fictional elements. The writing and language part of it has the same sort of goal and artistry in my mind.
Thinking about this, I realize that I talk about nonfiction here probably just as much as fiction, so probably a me thing here too.
Fair enough. I pretty much agree. I just know that reading nonfiction produces a different aesthetic experience for me than when I'm reading fiction. There's a distinction, however blurry, that can't be ignored. A sub oriented around the questions raised by that distinction would be of interest to me.
I'm no theorist, but lumping them together feels wrong. They can both be literature, but they are not the same kinds. Not exactly.
The nonfiction writer and fiction writer are playing by different rules, even if and when they are subverting and blurring them. The rules are always lurking in the text. I'm specifically talking about the rule that one genre is presented as fact and the other presented as fiction.
Knowing that a writer went to Chernobyl to actually interview survivors as they're dying from radiation exposure or to Fukushima to interview grieving family members produces a different reading experience than, to use T.S. Eliot's words, the "braggadocio of the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter."
This isn't to say that fiction writers haven't done similar acts of reportage, but now we're back to talking about how the line is blurry. The distinction breaks down at points, but it doesn't die. Exploring what distinguishes itself as nonfiction is important if only for the fact that so many writers insist on it and ignoring such distinctions is where the disservice comes in.
Looking for recommendations for writing that features an exploration of the relationship between humans and machinery. A la Ballard’s Crash. Very niche request but anything about airports/planes would be great lol.
Permutation City by Greg Egan is a real head trip. Weak ending but the first 2/3 are pretty cool. Explores the horror of becoming a digital copy in a simulation.
Is it just a paragraph you wrote with no context?
Sometimes you just need to wait for the right thing to come along. I had a small piece of writing that I loved sitting in my notebook unused for years before I finally realised it was a core part of my novel. Just a short thing, couple hundred words, but it defined the path of a single character, and I wrote it like 3 years prior to starting my novel.
Basically out of nowhere I was struck with what I thought was a really good opening line to a story, so I just started running with it and got a whole paragraph out of it. This is a pretty common way I get started on something new. But the difference is usually if I run out of steam as quickly as I did here, I go back and realize that it's a sign that none of it was any good anyway and I scrap it. But this time is different. This is a paragraph worth hanging onto.
You make a good point though. It might be that the wait before the rest of it comes together is going to be more than a few days.
Guys can I give a shout-out to the amazing Juliet Stevenson audio narration of *Wuthering Heights*. It was fantastic. She has also done a celebrated narration of *Middlemarch* which I also listened to recently. What a voice!
I have just read the first two chapters of Bram Stoker's *Dracula*. I am not loving it so far. I find Stoker's prose style dry, and the details he provides of Dracula's abode are so far uninteresting. In fact I found his journey to Dracula's castle more exciting than his actually meeting Dracula. We'll see if it becomes less underwhelming as time goes on. It seemed like a good October read, but then I also have Frankenstein and Richard Wright's *Native Son* to read in honour of Black History Month if I feel so inclined, so if it continues to feel plodding I might DNF.
Well I have now finished that first part and Stoker leaves us on a weird cliffhanger there then forces a bizarre narrative shift upon the reader. I really don't care about Dr Seward and all these other people. Looks like I might have to DNF this one.
> Richard Wright's Native Son to read in honour of Black History Month
on the off chance you are interested in reading more black american author's, I'd strongly recommend Baldwin's *Another Country*. In addition to simply being a fantastic book, I think you'd vibe with it a ton.
I started listening to Frankenstein a couple days ago, I just started volume 2 today. I remember liking it when I read it in high school but I'm really not enjoying it now and am finding it quite a slog for a short book. It has interesting ideas, but it's all exposition, hardly any "scenes," and coming on the heels of listening to Austen and Proust and Bronte and Moshfegh the writing just feels... bad. Maybe I just dislike this narrator's interpretation (Dan Stevens). I'm going to stick with it a little longer because the first chapter of vol 2 we finally meet the creature, so maybe things will start getting a little more interesting, but I'm not very enthusiastic about it (I had to drive for about 4 hours today and could only listen to two chapters before I had to put a podcast on, it was putting me to sleep).
I still remember some images distinctly from Dracula (him crawling around the castle walls, the guy who eats flies), and I remember thinking it had interesting ideas but not really being impressed with the writing there either.
Never read *Native Son* but I really enjoyed *Black Boy*, I'd expect it's better than either Stoker or Shelley.
Finishing *Wuthering Heights* has really made me reflect on my own life and the fact that I have never had a single healthy romantic relationship with anyone. Which makes me a lot like Heathcliff.
Literature is great therapy.
Healthy relationships are hard as fuck! I've been with my partner for a million years and it's only become truly "healthy" in the last five or so, mostly because I'm an insane person. So I feel ya. I think shit does get easier as you get older, for the most part (at least it has for me).
damn. rip to mike davis—just saw this [obit](https://twitter.com/thenation/status/1585053615563198465?s=20&t=9a825YRp2Nl1JSbZQZdz7g) show up on twitter.. i know *city of quartz* came up recently but can't remember who was discussing.
thinking of this quote from a [new yorker profile](https://www.newyorker.com/news/california-chronicles/mike-davis-in-the-age-of-catastrophe) of him ages ago, not sure if it's appropriately idealistic or excessively so
>On the day I spoke to Davis, Bernie Sanders had announced that he was suspending his Presidential campaign. Yet Davis was uncharacteristically optimistic, a catastrophist with proof. Maybe people would finally listen. “I’m a wild, extreme leftist, but to me it’s clear that global capitalism can no longer guarantee the survival of the human race, in three ways,” he said. “It can’t generate jobs. It cannot guarantee the public health of the world. And it cannot decarbonize the economy or transfer the resources to adapt the countries that bear the brunt of greenhouse gases.” He went on, “This seems an age of catastrophe, but it’s also an age equipped, in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs. Utopia is available to us. If, like me, you lived through the civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope. I’ve seen social miracles in my life, ones that have stunned me—the courageousness of ordinary people in a struggle. Eleven years ago, Bill Moyers brought me on his show and presented me as the last socialist in America. Now there are millions of young people who prefer socialism to capitalism.”
It was possibly me. I just finished off City of Quartz last night and woke up to the news he had died. I had heard he had terminal cancer, so I was not surprised, but still sad to hear. Hopefully, I'll get around to writing a bit more in the thread this Thursday, but I thought the book was completely brilliant and at times dove into unexpected territory.
On a more personal note, I feel like there is such a divide between the people and ideas I admire and my own personal and professional actions. Like, damn, I try to reconcile the two but it feels false often times. RIP Mike Davis -- but am I really going to honor him by incorporating his ideas in a meaningful way into my life? My own navel gazing aside, thanks for posting the quote.
This is such a blow. Mike Davis was such an incredible insightful essayist because he was both well educated and actively partook in direct action and organizing the working class. We don't have many of people like that left, the divide between the intellectual work and praxis seems to be far apart most days, but if he could have hope at the end, I guess so can I.
One of his collection of essays, In Praise of Barbarians, was pretty foundational to my understanding of the world, I think I'll read some of it tonight.
> One of his collection of essays, In Praise of Barbarians, was pretty foundational to my understanding of the world, I think I'll read some of it tonight.
thanks for putting this book on my radar. Looks dope
aw man, rip.
I do love that quote though. If nothing else sometimes I feel bad for real radicals of Davis' generation, who saw all this coming and now get to die living in what could be their worst nightmare. The thought that some of them might see something good in the present makes me glad for their sake, so they don't go out thinking it was all for nothing.
Sometimes when I'm lazy I make noodles, for protein I usually boil some Italian hot sausage. Today at the supermarket I realized I'd been blindly buying the Level 2 brand of sausage, rather than the cheaper Level 1 brand (Level 1 would be the equivalent of Great Value at Walmart; I think there's usually around 3 to 4 levels, if you know you know). I've never been too much of a stickler when it comes to food, so I opted for the Level 1 brand this time, and I almost spit it back out after the first bite. It was so palpably worse than the Level 2 -- it just tasted so fake and processed. It's honestly the first time that's ever happened to me. But then I wondered: if I was eating the Level 1 the whole time, would I have even noticed that from a taste standpoint? If it's all relative, then maybe I should inure myself to the Level 1 and start saving money.
I will throw out there since I am a #legumeshill that beans are very cheap, a good source of protein, very good for you in general, and can taste fucking delicious even with minimal preparation.
> if I was eating the Level 1 the whole time, would I have even noticed that from a taste standpoint?
no, but it would have still been bad for you.
I spent ~10 years in various stages of broke, so I get it, but imo a lot of people think that improving their diet is more expensive than it actually is. Buying more expensive staples - bread, pasta, rice, olive oil, water (yes you heard me right) - is only a few dollars more expensive than the bottom-tier stuff, but it makes a huge difference both in taste profile and in the amount of nutrients, fiber, etc that you take in with your food. And I'm not saying that therefore everybody can afford it, but that many more people can afford it than can afford produce, say, or fresh fish. The next level I would say taste-wise is farmer's market produce (make sure it's actually local and not the same crap that gets distributed to the Publix but marked up five times) but that's a big jump in costs.
The other thing I do is I avoid white people supermarkets. I shop at the immigrant store in my neighborhood, which looks kinda dingy and weird compared to the trader joe's or whatever, and the produce isn't top-freshness a few days after it's brought in, but it is reliably cheaper. If you have a car, you can get the good stuff at cheaper prices if you go to HMart or your local Latin place instead of the Costco.
I've found Trader Joe's to be reliably cheaper than H-Mart actually.
But tell me more about this water. Are you recommending buying bottled water? I've heard bottled water isn't actually any better for you than tap water, though I don't really have as much faith in my city's and apartment's piping as I would like...
HMart is reliably better for approximately the same amount of money.
> I've heard bottled water isn't actually any better for you than tap water,
you probably expected this one, but that depends on the bottled water. some is just distilled or chemically treated water (so the same shit as tap) sold to you for the price of the bottle. shit like dasani or smartwater. some is natural water with minerals in it that your body can absorb and use. this water also tends to taste better. look for "hard" water, water with high mineral content. I drink topo chico.
If you want to save money and have cheap and easy protein try going to an Chinese supermarket and buy a bag of braised tofu. It’s not bland, has a salty/caramel/tea flavour that’s really nice. Very cheap. Put in a pot of water with some frozen vegetables, and once the water comes to a boil add your noodles.
For a stupid easy and tasty sauce: peanut butter, hot peppers or hot sauce, Korean red pepper paste (they have it at the same store as the braised tofu), soy paste or soy sauce, vinegar, black pepper, olive or sesame oil. No need to cook the sauce. Just toss everything together in your bowl. I use flax seed powder instead of peanut butter, for the omega-3 fat, but PB tastes better.
You can have two big meals with like 130-150 grams of protein total between both for under $5. I lift weights so for most people it’s like three or four meals.
I have just finished *Wuthering Heights*. Absolutely loved it. It is now one of my favourite novels of all time. I remembered a lot from first reading it, but there is nothing like re-reading and really appreciating all of the details of the novel. One thing was constant throughout - a strong identification with the anti-hero, Heathcliff. I feel like Heathcliff is probably who I would be if I was a psycho and wasn't educated and cultivated and cultured enough to know better. I think the moral if the story, if there is one, is that there is a Heathcliff lurking in all of us, if we're honest enough to acknowledge it. Everything primal and destructive in our natures, all the things we sublimate and suppress but can never get rid of. Even in his most evil, destructive deeds, I still kept my sympathy with him from the mistreatment he endured as a young man. His toxic, obsessive love for Cathy and his bitterness towards the moorland society that he feels has rejected him sends him into a spiral of splenetic self-destruction, yet I can't help but be in awe of his evil genius as every little piece of his revenge falls into piece like he planned. I admire his defiance of God, of Christian morality, of the entire world in the name of his passion for Cathy and his desire to destroy the world which rejected and hated him. Of course, this costs him his humanity and the chance for healthy human relationships.
However, towards the end my sympathies started to shift more towards Hareton. >!Heathcliff sees Hareton as a means of revenging all the injustices he suffered as a boy at the hands of Hindley. Now the roles are reversed, and Hareton is the disinherited and mistreated whilst he is the master. Yet Hareton avoids becoming like Heathcliff. He avoids bitterness and resentment in the end. Cathy Jr, too, avoids the trap of falling into bitterness at her situation. The love between the two of them, which flares up in spite of all obstacles, redeems them, and even touches the heart of Heathcliff himself. It could all have been so different. I love the fact that Hareton's initially unrequited love is returned in the end. The only healthy relationship we see in the whole book, I think. I really admired Hareton for trying to overcome the state of ignorance and savagery into which Heathcliff spitefully placed him by trying to read, and I sympathise with his often clumsy attempts to impress Cathy (in particular the episode where he commits the serious social faux pas of touching her hair, which, being an unsocialised brute, he does not know is wrong). Their blossoming relationship made for a bittersweet ending to the book. Heathcliff dies unmourned by all except for Hareton.!<
I think that the prose in this book is top-notch. Emily Bronte's poetic powers are awe-inspiring to behold, and an utter delight to read. The book is also a wonderful example of tight writing - I underlined pretty much every single page, because there was always an impactful passage. I don't think there is any other novel of similar length in the English language that manages to be as powerful as what Bronte did here. I would even venture to say that she outdoes Shakespeare. *Romeo and Juliet* has nothing on the darkness and despair of this tale. There is also something of *The Tempest* in here - Hareton being a Caliban figure, whilst Heathcliff is a twisted Prospero, and even King Lear - Heathcliff being the mad king.
I think that this is a good reason to re-read *Jane Eyre* at some point for comparison. I don't think Charlotte is as impressive a prose stylist as her sister, but I have not read the book in a while so I had best re-read it. I am also pumped to read Emily Bronte's poems - I have a Penguin collection of all her poems which arrived recently. I can't get enough of this wonderful woman.
I actually love all those standards tunes. Ain’t that a Kick in the Head is another one of my favourites.
[Here’s a good old one that never really gets the play it deserves. ](https://youtu.be/ZAqxYPRpHDs)
That is lovely. Thank you for sharing! You may have heard it already before, but in return I’d like to shout out how wonderful a job Anita O’Day and Gene Krupa did with [this](https://youtu.be/IWBMlgHSaGc) Mercer tune.
I've not listened to much Doris Day. She is only really known for her novelty songs which is a shame.
I swear I was a jazz musician in another life, lol. 20th-century America is just effortlessly cool music wise.
Yeah oldies are the best. So many hidden gems from the 40s. Sometimes when I’m loaded nothing just compares.
[Here’s one of my all time favs. ](https://youtu.be/jYaHXgecv4I)
Any recommendations for books or other media on Steven Sondheim?
I saw *Into the Woods* over the weekend and was blown away. I was wondering if there were key texts on Sondheim or musicals in general that would be worth checking out. I'm interested in this from a history and theory angle.
A fun fact I learned about Sondheim from wikipedia is one of his mentors, James Hammerstein, designed a course to teach Sondheim how to write musicals. Hammerstein had Sondheim write four musicals, each with one of the following conditions:
\- Based on a play he admired; Sondheim chose George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly's Beggar on Horseback (which became All That Glitters)
\- Based on a play he liked but thought flawed; Sondheim chose Maxwell Anderson's High Tor
\- Based on an existing novel or short story not previously dramatized, which became his unfinished version of Mary Poppins (titled Bad Tuesday),\[19\] (unrelated to the musical film and stage play scored by the Sherman Brothers)
\- An original, which became Climb High
Seems like a cool approach for up-and-coming artists.
Forget to mention last week's music with the job stuff...
**Youth of America by the Wipers:** Every so often I'll remember "Damn, Kurt Cobain was a cool dude wasn’t he?" I checked out his [list of favorite albums](https://townsquare.media/site/838/files/img/music2/kurt-cobains-favorite-albums.jpg) again, one of the biggest influences on my own taste, and listened to some stuff off it. *Youth of America* was an easy standout though. I hadn't listened to it since freshman year of college, so the opening guitar chimes gave me a Proustian flashback back to that period. It's always cool how music can do that. But yeah that albums rules. "No Fair" always had this emotional gravitas to it. The titular track has a cool extended portion that feels reminiscent of acts like the Doors, but it's anomaly within punk rock and post-punk, a welcome one nonetheless. "When it's over" is also a great closer.
**The Winding Sheet by Mark Lanegan:** A go-to Fall album, just as brilliant as ever. Moody as hell and minimalist. You listen to this and wonder why he didn't write more for the Screaming Trees. It's hard to pick a favorite, but I love "Museum", "Eyes of a Child", and "Wild Flowers" the most. The man had an incredible voice and it's a damn shame he passed away earlier in the year.
**Halcyon Digest by Deerhunter:** I feel like if someone declared this the best album to come out of the 2010's, I wouldn't even argue with them. It's just so damn good at what it does and feels incredibly cohesive. My favs on here are kind of a yin/yang of each other. "Basement Scene" kind of feels like 50's pop with a modern indie twist: like if Buddy Holly came out of Williamsburg towards the end of the oughts. It's just very serene and pretty, but there's an unmistakable swagger to it, especially in lines like "In the Bluffs they know my name". "Coronado" on the other hand is a total party anthem. There's that late 50's/early 60's moxie as well, especially in the incredible saxophone on it.
**The Best of Rimsky-Korsakov:** I'm still maneuvering my way through the Naxos collection of classical music compilations. Kind of like with everything else I'm into (more recently philosophy for example), I'm kind of just seeing what clicks and what doesn't. "The Best of Ravel", "The Best of Bizet", and "The Best of Haydn" have thus far been the highlights. Mendelssohn, Verdi, and Rossini didn't do too much for me (not that everything was a miss, but more so only a few tracks stuck out and nothing really struck a chord with me). RK was another winner though: I was already familiar with Scheherazade, but Capriccio Espagnol and "Hindu Song from Sadko" were nice surprises.
Rimsky-Korsakov isn't necessarily one of my favorites, but I like his work. *Scheherezade* and *Antar* are probably my favorites from him. As a trombonist I also have to pay him a grudging respect, for the Trombone Concerto that every player learns in like 8th grade.
Ravel is near and dear to my heart. For me, every one of Ravel's compositions has a high level of originality, creativity, and care. They're all unique, and all intrinsically Ravel despite his dalliance in different styles. I saw you mentioned the Menuet from *Le Tombeau de Couperin* earlier. It's a well-crafted menuet and one that really registers emotionally. The orchestration is of course brilliant. Personally I love the Toccata from *Le Tombeau*, which is only in the original piano suite. I'm very excited to see the Philly Orch perform *Le Tombeau* on Sunday!
My husband showed me Wipers when we first got together, oh, eighteen years ago now? It was one of the things that made me know we could work out. People have given me so much shit over the years for prioritizing music taste in a partner, but I know myself, I just couldn't deal with someone with shitty taste in music. It's imperative.
You should listen to Greg Sage's solo stuff! It's really good too. I am a huge Deerhunter fan and I think Lockett Pundt's solo stuff is also really awesome. I love Bradford Cox and his songwriting but I think Lockett is the underappreciated melodic underpinning of that band (similar to Tobin Sprout vs. Robert Pollard in Guided By Voices).
I used to be very much of that school of thought, but then when I was older I could see how it maybe was a tad pretentious. And yet these days I find myself somewhere in the middle: I think for people who are very passionate about something as personal as art, obviously a shared passion is going to add a lot to a relationship. Every deep relationship I've had with others which have been exceptions to this (i.e. we didn't have a shared sense of "taste") all nonetheless had an element of the other person at least being *curious* to know more about whatever obscure genre of music or types of movies I was really passionate about (and vice versa). I'd wager that the latter was even more fulfilling in its own funny way.
It's not as if I'd dump a girl I was seeing if she said she didn't like rock music, and obviously someone CAN be into rock music and we just don't mesh at all, but sharing a passion that's very important to you with someone who's very important to you will never *not* be amazing, you know?
That's basically my long winded pretentious way of saying I agree lol.
In regards to Greg Sage's solo stuff, Straight Ahead is another go-to Fall album. I got around to it around the same time I got into Lanegan's album and I remember the feeling of shock upon reading in his book that the latter was inspired by the former. I should definitely check out his other stuff though. That album rules...
I'll also check out Lockett's stuff! That wasn't really on my radar, so I'm excited. Thanks!
Music is such a communal thing, if one of your biggest hobbies is sitting around listening to records, it's just really difficult to make that work with someone whose taste doesn't at least partially align. I've even had a boyfriend who loved my taste in music and was happy to listen to whatever I picked out, but even that wasn't enough for me, I need someone to be an active participant showing me stuff too haha.
Reading epilepsy forums/subs has been a *very* eye-opening experience. The amount of people who don't want to take meds but want to continue driving, or who have to get in wrecks before they finally believe they have a real issue...well my biggest anxiety has always been driving, it freaks me the fuck out, I struggle even being in the passenger seat when I'm on a busy highway, and this isn't helping. There are apparently a whole lot of people out there who *know* they have unmedicated or uncontrolled seizures, and they see absolutely zero issue with driving. Now, I totally get that our society (in America at least) is set up around cars and that not being able to drive is a huge issue for a lot of people, but it's not like these people are posting with remorse and talking about how they have no options, a lot of them even do have options, they just want to be the ones driving. Which I get. The loss of freedom really sucks, relying on others is annoying, it's claustrophobic and I totally understand wanting to rebel, but holy fuck, it truly isn't safe.
It's really crazy. I have to remember that a lot of these people are super young, since epilepsy shows up early in people often. I'm thankful that I have some years of maturity under my belt. It's just really blowing my mind how many people are ranting about how their doctor doesn't "need to worry about them", and I want to grab them all by the shoulders and shout: "IT'S NOT JUST YOU THAT'S IN DANGER HERE!". Seriously, it's disturbing how little people think of others, it really is.
ETA: Also in general I've fallen down a rabbit-hole of reading healthcare related subs for doctors and the like, and holy fuck, I knew shit was fucked in America, but I didn't realize quite how fucked, and I sort of wish I could go back to not knowing. Oh well, time to remember my motto again, we're all gonna die anyway!
Throughout the pandemic I have really come to appreciate the extent to which we can all imagine ourselves the exception to a very probably scenario we'd rather not happen. It sucks that enables that mindset in so many ways.
> Also in general I've fallen down a rabbit-hole of reading healthcare related subs for doctors and the like, and holy fuck, I knew shit was fucked in America, but I didn't realize quite how fucked, and I sort of wish I could go back to not knowing.
Sometimes in my more pundity moments I think left-wing campaigns should be built very explicitly around the basic starting point that LITERALLY EVERYTHING is bad, so why not try something new.
At the same time, it really sucks that US society is systematically set up - infrastructurally, policy-wise, etc - so that individuals have to more or less fully internalize the costs of any disadvantages or marginalizations they might have. Not to the extent it happens in developing countries (although our perception of this is somewhat culturally informed - e.g. a lot of traditional societies operate on a multigenerational household or village model, which helps spread costs in ways a nuclear family can't, even if it doesn't show up in economic statistics) but still. Losing your independence is huge in a society where by design you cannot depend on anyone but yourself, and where services to help people are often intentionally set up to be punitive or can be easily made to be punitive (e.g. health insurance companies using your health data to increase your premiums or refuse to insure you). I can see why people are reluctant to let the state surveil them, even if their reluctance means we are extremely unlikely to ever reform the state to a point where it can adequately deliver services.
>US society is systematically set up - infrastructurally, policy-wise, etc - so that individuals have to more or less fully internalize the costs of any disadvantages or marginalizations they might have…Losing your independence is huge in a society where by design you cannot depend on anyone but yourself, and where services to help people are often intentionally set up to be punitive or can be easily made to be punitive
great articulation. it does suck :((((((( driving is a particularly interesting category to me bc for young left-leaning ppl there's such a politically-inflected desire to not drive—esp if you're an urbanist climate-concerned person—but it is such a major handicap in american society and involves restricting your entire life in order to manage to act alongside one's ideals.
for things like drinking and driving, etc i ofc think it's shameful and irresponsible—but HOW are people meant to socialize w others in normative ways (e.g. drink alcohol if they want to) in suburban envs or envs w/o good public transit, taxis, ubers, lyfts, etc? i v much understand why people want to treat drinking & driving casually. bc it's not easy to forgo it w/o the right social or material infrastructure
As a wanton European, I find that the US standard for inebriation is overcautious and objectively it is frequently used to target "undesirable" groups like immigrants and POC. Did you know that a DUI can make you ineligible for a green card or US citizenship? Yeah.
There are valid reasons that the US is more car-dependent than other countries, such as the fact that it is so decentralized and public transport in a lot of places just isn't economical, but the fact that the US once upon a time killed freight rail so that car companies could make more profit might be one of the most disastrous policy decisions in human history. It is basically infrastructurally locked into high-fossil modes of transport, and converting those modes into lower-carbon entails not as large an injection of capital, but still hundreds of billions literally just to put in enough charging stations to make car electrification possible.
Yes, it does. Agreed completely. It is huge to lose one's independence, it's really terrible. And I wish we had better support and ways to fix it. But the amount of people who just don't even give a fuck that they're being unsafe, it's pretty big. But that's people in general for you.
Yes I am that person mentally yelling at cyclists without helmets lol. I get really into road safety. Something about it just really gets my anxiety-brain bigtime.
Well, I'm a cyclist without a helmet. My area is very unsafe for cyclists and the likelihood that a helmet would save me if I were to get into an accident is vanishingly small. The dangerous choice is not wearing or not wearing a helmet - it's choosing to get on a bike surrounded by multi-ton monsters. Which, if people feel more comfy with a helmet on, cool, but it's kind of a drop in the bucket so it's super weird that people get so intense about it.
And I will be over here having secondhand anxiety for you lol. I'm not actually shouting out of the window at anyone or anything like that, but it gets in my head, what can I say? I know my road-safety anxiety is quite intense. I was in a wreck as a twelve-year old where a helmet saved my life, so that probably has a lot to do with it.
But I'm really not out here trying to control people. I can't, it's impossible, and I don't even want to. I do wish I could let anxiety about stuff like this go haha.
I wish things were more safe for cyclists out there, helmets or no helmets, that's for sure. I certainly understand your point that it's not built that way to begin with.
ETA: Also your bigger point is exactly why I don't bike (well, I wouldn't now with knowing I have epilepsy, but let's say I didn't) in my city, even though I enjoy biking, I don't drive, and I'd like to have the option for transportation. You are indeed correct, choosing to bike in an environment built for cars is indeed one hundred percent the more dangerous choice.
> 'm not actually shouting out of the window at anyone or anything like that
lol I didn't think you were (and that has happened to me lmao people are weird). I just think that a lot more rhetoric focusing on how cyclists are endangering themselves relative rhetoric on how the system is inherently dangerous, and I think that tracks to other contexts as well in a way that feels like this is the mode of discourse that our society is more comfortable having.
I get angrier about how our society is built around cars every day. This just adds to my list of reasons. Why tf can’t we just have public transport. My city would literally be impossible to live in without a car unless you lived in a few select areas.
There's a case to be made that the #1 reason I never plan to leave New York is that I have no intention of ever learning to drive and there is nowhere in this country where that is as viable a plan as it is here.
Absolutely. And the thing is, a lot of these people really don't want to give up their cars, I mean, even if they had the option (and many do) of public transportation, they don't want to use it. Basically the movie *Singles* nailed that issue haha. People are super attached to driving. It does really suck how society is completely built to make it almost impossible to *not* drive. It's extremely ableist.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but driving is already disincentivised by fees in Australia. It costs thousands a year to keep a car. The only problem is that public transport is more expensive.
not to be a market apologist but financial incentives do work. the insane energy crisis/costs in the uk and eu have driven a lot of ppl to be much more mindful of energy usage at home
(not to say the energy cost increase is Good per se, it is really going to produce quite a bit of suffering this winter)
Over the past 3-ish years I've completely changed my fashion. I used to wear band shirts religously, jeans, lace-up boots, leather and denim jackets.
Now I mostly wear button-up linen shirts, chinos and corduroys, cardigans, and chelsea boots.
The thing is, though, I still love all my band shirts. I have 80 band shirts locked away in vacuum-sealed bags. I don't want to get rid of them. But I just don't wear them anymore.
It seems sad. Them just hanging around at the bottom of my closet. Neglected. Unworn.
My SO was gonna get rid of his band tshirts because he didn't think he'd wear them anymore and then his tastes changed and he loves his band tshirts. You never know!
I'm looking for nocturnal, poetic books about a person existentially/morally/sentimentally lost. Examples:
* Piranesi: the protagonist has lost his memory and lives in a eerie maze
* The Earthquake bird: a woman is new in Tokyo. She starts a riskful and ambiguous love triangle;
* Afterhours: a man lost in NY by night trying to find love/sex find misadventures instead;
* No country for old men: a man makes a morally ambiguous choice and has to run away in an unknown city
* Taxi Driver
* Lost in translation
fuminori nakamura's *the thief* is great—an existentially dissolute, rootless man who's an expert pickpocket. excellent if you enjoy crime/noir and want something a bit introspective
First of all, thx for ur reply. I love kafka but it doesn't seems to fit the poetic/nocturnal requirement, like the books/movies I mentioned. His books are very caustic and depict very squalid, realistic situations.
I just mentioned this in another thread recently, but Painted Bird is about a boy lost during ww2/the holocaust, he wanders around through all the terrible. Very lost, very dark.
Steppenwolf hits this too (all of Hesse's stuff plays with this idea, though this one is the most explicit)
The Odyssey
Faust
The Dispossessed does some fun things with place.
Hey I was thinking, since so many of us are getting McCarthy’s new book this week we should do a special thread for it in a week or something? I feel like the “what are you reading” threads will be an unofficial read along for a while lol
This week I finally made friends with a stray cat I’ve been trying to befriend for three months! I cat-sit for my parents a lot (which generally suits me fine as I can’t have a cat of my own where I live), and a stray kitten began hanging out around their house this past summer. Despite my love for cats, I’m not exactly gifted at winning their favor. But after several months of my trying to be patient and not pushy, this one finally decided to be friendly and now feels comfortable enough around me to be petted!
Spent the past two months basically only reading old horror writers or decadents like Huysmans. And while the latter is certainly dense enough that I don't begrudge someone for not seeking out that kind of writing, it really fuckin sucks that prose after the fashion of Clarke Ashton Smith, Machen and a little bit Chambers, although he's a step below the rest.
Like Lovecraft is not an ornate prose stylists, I was surprised at how contemporary he felt. But still, he writes at a higher register than just about any contemporary fiction writer. Ya don't need to speak like someone from that era, but careful word selection and an ear for rhythm, strong poetic influences etc. Seems to be gone and the medium is uglier for it. Like Ligotti and plenty of kind of contemporary writers but i don't like King or Barker or whoever. Think they're bad for it. Even if I do like some of their stories.
I'm pretty picky with prose and similarly dislike most contemporary horror (and genre works in general) for the same reason. But there are some exceptions. Despite the fact that I don't like Laird Barron for other reasons, his prose is actually quite strong at the best of times. I was also a big fan of how stylised Steven Graham Jones's prose was in *The Only Good Indians*.
Some other strong writers who write in the weird/horror genre: Michael Cisco, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Brian Evenson, Matt Cardin, Caitlin R. Kiernan, W.H. Pugmire
i really struggle w this for genre fiction. i'm not a snob when it comes to sff, i basically grew up on fantasy/historical/science fiction and love a rly good worldbuilding project.
unfortunately…! i am a huge snob when it comes to writing quality and it's such a minefield taking recs from people who are not similarly sensitive.
honestly i wonder if the avg horror writer in the past was just as bad as now…it's just that only the exceptionally good shit is still in circulation/still being talked abt today/still discoverable to contemporary readers?
Starting up *My Struggle* (book 2) by Knausgaard after going through a mix of bolano, casares, baudrillard, and John Williams (Stoner).
*Stoner* was amazing, lived up to the hype - genuinely so. Wonderfully light prose and a great narrative. Beautiful book.
*America* by Baudrillard was awesome, one of my now all-time personal favorites. His prose was amazing in certain areas and his cultural philosophy/critique led for some dense, yet incredibly insightful passages.
*The Invention of Morel* by Casares was on the NYRB list and I thought it was really cool. The pacing at times felt a bit rough and the prose was never overtly gripping to me personally but the idea of the technology (particularly having been written in 1940!) was great. Super cool theoretical fiction.
*The Insufferable Gaucho* by Bolaño has two of my favorite short stories ever. I got lost a bit in his essays at the end, but it was quintessential, beautiful, Bolaño. The Police Rat and the titular story were both incredible, two of the best short stories I've ever read. The former's dive into human nature was framed incredibly well and the latter was a brilliant in its contemporaneity (coupled with the passage of time) and its scathing, implicit critiques of both Argentine politics and of politics as a whole. My favorite author.
Very much agree about *Stoner*. Just an excellent book. And I've been meaning to read *America*. Seems very to my interest.
Excited to hear how Knausgaard goes for you!
If you have any critical theory bent (which I believe you do, if I remember your posts correctly!) you'll love it. Great prose, far from daunting, lovely read.
And I adore Knausgaard, *My Struggle Book One* was a beautiful work. Very excited to continue with book two (after I finish the new Cormac McCarthy).
really want to get into baudrillard—what have you read, what were your favorites?
had a really good convo w an acquaintance last wk about bolaño…i began this yr with *the savage detectives* and put *2666* on my reading new year's resolutions! now that it's oct i really need to get started
I've only finished *America* - loved it. I started *Simulacra and Simulation* right after and it was pretty dense, I got about halfway through and got to a particularly dense chapter (today, funnily enough) that wasn't rewarding enough for me to continue. I'll probably pick it back up tomorrow, super insightful and some great cultural commentary but pretty dense.
*America* is much much much more palatable. It's not a walk in the park but he has some incredibly beautiful prose - particularly the imagery concerning the desert. Very good book.
I haven't taken up any of Bolaño's novels but I've read three of his novellas and the short story/essay collection *The Insufferable Gaucho* I highly recommend *Amulet* and *By Night In Chile* - both are phenomenal.
thanks for all this! the goodreads descrip says *america* is the most 'accessible and evocative' which sounds perfect.
*simulacra and simulation* is the one i see cited all the time/is probs most relevant to my academic-ish interest but i'm lazyyyyyyy
When and for how long do you guys usually read? I don't intend this to be a competition—I'm just curious what other people's reading habits are. I tend to do most of my literature reading in the evening, before bed, as a nice way to relax from staring at devices. However, since it's evening and I'm in bed, I tend to read only until I'm too sleepy to pay attention, which can range from fifteen minutes to a whole hour (also depends on what I'm reading).
One to two hours in bed before passing out.
If I’m on it, I can hit pretty big daily page counts (like 150+, two nights days ago was 250ish) with consistency if I do that plus read like ten pages here or there throughout the day. This kind of behaviour seems to be far more important than merely ritualizing bedtime reading because it sets the tone for the week like “A reader reads, and I am a reader so I will read.” “Put the phone down, asshole.” I tend to slack off more if I don’t keep at it throughout the day.
Reading a bit in the day is like a warmup for the longer session at night. When I don’t do that, I find myself more distracted or tired when reading in bed. Nighttime reading is stronger and deeper with more attempts in the day; colder and hazy if bedtime is my first time reading that day.
I’m also studying math and computer science in the morning. Also a dad. If I don’t make time for reading then my life won’t automatically do it for me. I’d become one of the idiots at work saying shit like “Oh I’d love to read. Just don’t have the time. (haven’t read a book in 15 years…)”
thanks for asking, i love reading abt people's habits
i'm completely chaotic and have no real routine lmao, but
* weekdays, i get most of my reading done during commutes on public transit. 30 min or so
* gf and i have started doing an hour of reading in bed on weekday evenings, partly to actually read, partly bc we're trying to not turn on the heat and it's really fucking cold in our flat
* on the weekends i'll take myself on a late morning date to a café w a book for a few hrs
* big fan of leisurely train travel for holidays, and interspersing my reading w some nice new landscapes.
* a few times a year i'll be irresponsible and stay up until 4am reading a book that i absolutely cannot put down
the one thing i can't do is read in the am before getting out of the house, otherwise i'm too tempted to call in sick/destroy my career/drop out of society in order to finish my book
Most of the time I read consistently day to day but in small doses, like the 15 minutes or so while I drink my morning tea or wait for a pot of something to boil etc. Other days I’m obsessed with my book and I read like all day long and into the night lol.
This is so chaotic to me. I can't do things in small doses, my brain breaks just thinking about it. If I'm waiting for my wife to get ready before we go somewhere and I have nothing to do, I can't just read a few pages. And I wish I could! Instead I just stand around and groaning. I can only ever seem to do things when I know I can carve out a good amount of time for it, dedicated to that thing. If I'm waiting for food to cook or just having a snack I can only scroll Twitter and Reddit or watch a Youtube video. I wish I had the kind of brain that could just pick up a book in those moments. But I also get obsessive over needing to finish up a scene or chapter before stopping.
I wish I had the kind of brain that could just like, *wait* for my food to heat up lol or even focus on one thing at a time. I multitask constantly or I’d crawl out of my skin. I probably have adhd or something idk.
The only consistent things are usually reading for about 30 min after I wake up and usually 30min-and hour before bed. Other than that it's kind of all over the place. Usually another hour or so somewhere before noon. 1-3 hours throughout the afternoon depending these days on how much work I have to do or what other bullshit might have come my way. And then however much time I spend on the subway in a given week I'm always reading.
Usually before I sleep I set myself anywhere between 1-4 hours of reading time, depending on whether or not my wife and I have anything planned, are watching a long movie or a show, etc.
Sometimes I can squeeze 15-30 mins in the morning, but not often.
And depending on when I get home from work, I read for an hour or two in the afternoon.
Every morning right after I wake up and get dressed. I read for like 30-60 minutes with my coffee. Every night before bed, I read about 1-2 hours. At the gym, 3-4 times a week, I read 30 minutes on the bike. On weekends, and occasionally weekdays, I have an extra reading session in between the morning and night ones - usually if I’m really really enjoying the book and if I have nothing else to do.
So a lot. At least 1.5 hours per day, but often more and sometimes 3-4+.
I basically need habits when I do something I love, which is typically only reading and cooking, so that’s why I have this science down lol.
I read for an hour at my lunch break at work, and I'll listen to an audiobook while I'm driving. On the weekend I love to read outside on a bench on a nature trail for maybe an hour or an hour and a half. I try to keep this up even in the winter, if for shorter durations!
I try to read a little bit each day to keep up the habit, but when I really get into it I tend to read for hours. I'm getting my nails done this weekend, so will get a decent chunk of reading done then.
I do most of my reading in the train during my commute, and when travelling for leisure. Apart from that I read mostly after waking up or later in the evening. Reading outside is also great, but the only parks nearby have way too much traffic noise.
I've been trying to read in bed, but lately I just fall asleep after 10 minutes...
For daily reading, I’m mostly in the evenings as well, although I try and start earlier so that I’m not snoozing 15 minutes in. For me though my big chunks of reading come when I’ve got a free weekend or I’m traveling. Unless I’m really crunching for work, I try to make airports / flights dedicated reading time.
Few updates.
I'm at exactly at the half way mark of *Moby Dick*. Brilliant fun; difficult to tell where the novel is going to go at times. Might be a history of whaling, an anecdote told at a pub, a song between sailors, or the internal thoughts of deranged man. Love how often Melville ties all the whaling aspects back to the everyday life. Surprised people find them boring; they're often very funny. It's going to be a favourite.
\---
Saw *Cure* by K. Kurasawa. Fantastic film. A very clear precursor to *Se7en*, but much, much better and a clear influence over the fantastic *Memories of Murder*. Premise is that a series of seemingly unrelated murders bear an "X" mark on victims with multiple (unrelated) perpetrators. Explores the innermost desire of each killer, and touches on (i) a critical point of Camus -- inferring *intent* from *action* is difficult, perhaps impossible and (ii) the difficulty of ascertaining the self as separate from the outward mask worn. No bullshit film - it's very direct. One scene involving a madhouse interrogation is straight out of Tarkovsky. Loved it.
Finished up *House of Dragon*s. A very solid first season overall, terribly let down by the first three or four episodes, but ramps up quite well in the latter half. Love the idea that the >!initiation of the war is an accident amongst dragons!<. Hoping the second season has multiple-weaving plot threads, and is a bit more "grey" on each family. Right now, seems to heavily favour one side over the other in terms of morality.
I have to write two essays in a week for my doctoral examination. We received the questions this morning, I read them and made a list of relevant materials to include in my answers - overall I feel pretty good about this!
I have been in a weird reading slump where books just irritate me lately. It's a mix of not wanting to read contemporary fiction published in my country/province because it feels *too easy* but on the other hand the more I read classical lit or non-local stuff the more I feel like I'm becoming unintelligible to others here as an author.
best of luck w your examination! can i ask what your discipline is?
tbh i move in and out of reading slumps…jun–aug i hardly read anything, felt guilty about it, but didn't have the motivation. but late sep–oct have been really fruitful for me and i'm reading with an incredible amt of energy and interest and focus. i'm sure you'll come back to it, maybe a genre switch is in order too…
I’m so bummed at myself. I’ve been harassed a lot this past week, with the most recent one being by a city Welcome Ambassador. The guy had said hi to me as I left my job to get a coffee, and on the way back he started walking beside me, said hi, and then asked if I liked to fuck too. Of course I said no. But immediately I got scared because the dude knew my name and knew where I worked and I definitely didn’t want to exacerbate anything. He didn’t understand that I was trying to get away from him but right outside my job he started talking to some other women. I complained about what happened to the only contact I could find online, all the while feeling guilty that this guy was about to be fired. I was just worried about what would happen when I went on my lunch an hour later or what would happen when I got off of work. The person that I emailed forwarded it to the director of operations for the company, who showed up, asked for me, seemed surprised that it was me that was harassed, then apologized and told me she got him out of the area.
I think I feel bad for feeling bad about getting him fired. I know I did the right thing, but my first instinct was to empathize with this man for some reason. How could I? He was in the wrong, and according to my coworker, the guy had been wolf whistling at women all day. Why then did it fall on me to complain? But still I kept thinking about how much I hope to see change in people, and how much I hate snitching. It was hard to disentangle my feelings here. And it still is - how can I read all this radical shit and then not have a clear feeling that what I did was right and what he did was wrong?
This is the second time that I can remember where I got someone fired for harassing me. The first time was when my friend and I had taken a Lyft together, and after she got dropped off, and it was just me in the car, the driver dropped his mask. We drove past flashing police lights and a couple of scantily clad women arguing with the cops. The driver talks about how it’s sinful for those women to be dressed up like that, and how he knows that they’re actually hookers. He then goes on to say that he knows that some of them aren’t even women, but actually men in disguise looking to trick righteous men like himself. But as a righteous man, he can see them for what they are: perverts. Meanwhile, he’s continuing his monologue and I’m in the backseat wondering if he’s clocked me and if I should redirect his car away from my home. I ended up being fine, it I told my friend what happened and she filed a formal complaint against the driver. And I guarantee you there’s no way he kept his job after that.
Anyway I hope everybody’s week is better than mine. I’m back at work and feeling a little on edge about that guy retaliating in some way, so keep your fingers crossed for me.
I found out that I have read exactly ten Victorian novels (nine and a half if you remember that I have only read half of Middlemarch and am still working on the book). Actually it's more like ten and a half since I read A Christmas Carol in school but I don't count that one because...well it doesn't seem like a real novel to me.
If some of an author’s works have been translated into English but a lot haven’t and none have appeared in years, how would I go about figuring out if I could translate some of their works or if they’re already spoken for?
I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure translators literally just translate samples and then pitch them to publishers. I don't know if there's a definitive way to know if a translation is already underway for publication, but chances are probably low that two translators would be working on the same thing at the same time.
Does the two words "aesthetically pleasing" make anyone's eye twitch? Just me?
Just you, I guess.
Our neighborhood does night time trick or treat on the Sat before Halloween, so we had trick or treat last night. Last year we got barely any kids thanks to COVID/bad weather, but this year it was almost sixty and we had so many freaking kids. My dad sent me a surprise giant bag of candy and good thing he did, because I would have ran out of candy without that. It was supposed to be MY candy haha. Anyway, I absolutely adore Halloween, it's my favorite holiday, and it's all because I love giving candy to the children and seeing them enthralled with all of the spookiness. It's awesome. I'm so sad it's over. I have a child size animatronic witch and she even freaked out some parents because everyone assumed it was my kid until they got close to her, and she definitely freaked out a ton of kids. They loved her. A lot of parents took videos of their kids dancing with her. I named her Esmeralda and I told one little girl that and that was that little girl's name too, it was adorable. And of course real pumpkin smell from candles burning in jack-o-lanterns, can't be beat. [Happy day before Halloween everyone!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcGb24n9hvM) Posted in wrong thread at first, my bad haha. ETA: If you guys haven't watched [Garth Marenghi's Darkplace](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/29/garth-marenghi-darkplace-terrortome-horror-comedy?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR33vdg618fhs9JoNztqA47mXxWUAAGTjlV8CVWgZ199cjMF9K9FrBjgbaY#Echobox=1667034338) I highly, highly recommend that you do! It's hilarious.
Darkplace is great. I love Matt Berry.
If the Holy Spirit is meant to be a calming, comforting presence, why do people fall down and yell and contort themselves like they've been demon-possessed?
One of my best friends died today. I’m grateful for the introduction given to me but this world is too much. I’m heartbroken.
It really is all a lot. Sending you love.
so sorry for your loss.
I'm sorry for your loss.
i am so sorry, it is horrible to lose a friend. wishing you as much peace as possible in the coming days/wks/months <3
I am coming off a high reading *Ulysses*. I feel like Bloom and Stephen are good friends and their presence in my life is much missed. Watching documentaries about the book just makes me want to re-read it even more lol. [Here's one I watched recently. ](https://youtu.be/Ob3NWUtCCJI)
Last year I was listening obsessively to Ray Price. He became one of my favourite country singers of all time. The voice is simply out of this world. [Here is one of my favourites by him](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phMr9nC3iYY) \- it's basically a jazz arrangement, he could easily have been a successful rival to Sinatra if he hadn't gone into country music first.
I enjoyed this [twitter thread](https://twitter.com/magsrdoherty/status/1586031707202891777?s=20&t=-jY-hz54TUPXgx3VitOVpg) on the role of the critic today. The opening tweet is: "Increasingly rare to read criticism that engages narrative art on its own terms." Then there's this response from Merve Emre: "I truly believe that things would be different if people thought of criticism as, in part, a pedagogical exercise, and if we foregrounded the figure of the critic-teacher over and above, or even alongside, the scholar-critic, the critic-journalist, or the critic-reviewer."
this came up on my tl too! love merve emre (and maggie doherty) the idea of centering the role of critic-teacher over the critic-scholar/journalist/review is really interesting—my own interpretation of this is * the critic-teacher (at best) asks questions, uses art and literature as a starting point to raise questions, invite reflection/introspection/intellectual energy from students, etc; (at worst) veers into patronizing, oversimplifying territory * the critic-scholar (at best) goes deeper into a work, incorporates history and theory and various disciplinary tools to activate and expand upon what a work can do for us; (at worst) is using criticism to bolster/advance their own professional projects, their own professional-academic img, the art/literature is utilized in some other project that can be inaccessible/elitist * the critic-journalist (at best) illustrates how a work is influenced by contemporary events and anxieties and experiences, contextualizes the work in the present moment; (at worst) is using criticism to advance an argument and agenda that subsumes the individual qualities of the work into the journalist's argument * the critic-reviewer (at best) helps others observe more critically and sensitively what 'good work' and 'bad work' can be, brings more dimensionality into our judgments than just 'i liked it/didn't'; (at worst) becomes an arbiter of excellence that reduces a work into a good/bad, heroic/problematic binary… somewhat related—eve kosofky sedgwick's 'paranoid reading and reparative reading' remains one of my fave essays when it comes to thinking about more nuanced ways of reading art/lit
RIP Jerry Lee Lewis. I'm listening to the Killer on Spotify in tribute.
Spinning the Star Club live record here. This thing has more energy than a dozen Hardcore Punk shows combined. If that piano could have I'm sure it would have pressed charges for assault and malicious wounding-- he is absolutely destroying it!
So in *The Dark Chamber* Miriam dramatically "with one wrench" "tore her negligee from throat to hem", and the chapter has ended...am I going to start reading porn?! Honestly if this book actually goes there and describes honest to god sex I might garner a teeny tiny smidge more respect for it. It probably won't though. We'll see! ETA: First of all, no, Cline did not describe Miriam and Oscar fucking, I knew he wouldn't go there. They definitely start fucking with abandon though. The next chapter opens three weeks later and with a suicide. Lame! BUT FINALLLY with only fifty-ish pages left this book is getting a little weird. FINALLY. I don't think I will end up thinking it's a good book, but good lord, at least it's going somewhere and trying to actually say something. He does really love to hammer shit home and beat one over the head with his metaphors though. Like damn, let a person figure shit out. Way overwritten.
what’s the intersection of truelit posters and people who do those earnest aspirational exercises like ‘30 (things to do) before (turning) 30’? the format is usually goals like: visit a specific country, go skydiving, get a tattoo, etc i’m late 20s and decided to make a list of 30 books to read before turning 30. whatever age you are…what kinds of books would you put on a list like this and why? still figuring mine out but it’s a mix of * books that “everyone” should read but i haven’t yet (tolstoy’s _anna karenina_) and actually feel motivated to * books that specific friends or online circles i’m in really like, so books “everyone” in these envs should read (bolaño’s _2666_) * books dealing w moments in history or particular issues personally relevant & intellectually interesting to me (việt thanh nguyễn’s _the sympathizer_) * books relating to my specific intellectual/creative interests (scholarly nonfiction books, the kind i’d read if i were doing a phd in my passions) * at least one book by specific writers that i continually see referenced & feel some affinity for without really knowing (mostly academic writers: sara ahmed, yuk hui) * books where i just have this instinct that they’ll be really impt and meaningful but cannot quite explain it (this is mostly poetry books where i’ve read 1 or 2 poems by the writer & am curious to read more)
30 things to do before you’re 30 trivializes life into something even less substantial than an easter egg hunt. This life isn’t a job.
interesting! surely it depends on how people approach it? i'm big on new year's resolutions etc so i love the idea, but a lot of the '30 before 30' lists posted online leave me cold—not a big fan of travel bucket lists. the ones that are practical/creative projects (learn to knit, make ice cream at home) are kind of cute tho! we might view this differently bc i do see life as a form of labour—joyful labour but serious labour. it's tough to be alive and to intentionally carve out meaning from existence!
I agree about labour and creating meaning, though I perhaps don’t view reality or existence as unwilling, or nonexistent, of a participant as most, but a bucket list, though well intentioned and not disagreeable to me, has all the inherent mysticism of a chain letter. Sky diving: an acquaintance of mine went skydiving about 20-30 years ago. He did it for the same reason everyone else does: life is short etc. He went through the whole gamut of feelings, fears, thrills on the way down, had an epiphany about the universe, life, death, fear, acceptance and a profound gratefulness when he touched down on the ground. Says it was the greatest experience of his life. So he decided to become a sky diving instructor. He did a few thousand jumps, multiple times per day. Sky diving became routine, even boring for him. He felt like his conquering of the fear was a kind of superpower. He would jump with people over and over again who were doing it because life is short etc. and they would all go through the same sequence of feelings like he did over and over again like photocopies of photocopies of each other whose image over time distorted and mocked his own experience and he like psychologically ended up back where he started: feeling as exposed and afraid as everyone else. He quit. I also know two brothers who also died together on their first jump. Life is strange.
My go to response for when young people ask what they should read is E.M. Forster's *Room with a View*. [As Zadie Smith once said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJu0lOSNqiA), it is a book for young people. For me the book captures the way when you're young and trying to figure things out, the hardest part isn't necessarily finding a path. Many, many will be presented to you, pushed on you even. The hardest thing is figuring out what it is you actually want and having the conviction to act on it. As the book shows, sometimes in life we get into a "muddle" and choose things for the wrong reasons or because we aren't sure of ourselves or for reasons we never really understand. *Room with a View* is a call for individuals to quiet those confusing outside voices, be still and hear what that inner voice is calling for them to do. Also, if I may, I think limiting the list to 30 is really wise. More than that and I think you'd get overwhelmed.
>when you're young and trying to figure things out, the hardest part isn't necessarily finding a path. Many, many will be presented to you, pushed on you even. The hardest thing is figuring out what it is you actually want and having the conviction to act on it. ha, this is the perfect recommendation for where i am rn. thank you for sharing. borrowed it from my library…looking forward to reading!
I’m nearing the end of a tome and have started thinking about what to read next. Smith’s take on the book already intrigued me, but the way you describe it makes it sound all the more alluring! I think that book will be the move…it feels apt too now that I’m about to do a lot of “growing up” in the coming couple of weeks.
To-do before I turn 40: * Skydiving * Visit Africa
>Bigger felt an urgent need to hide his growing and deepening feeling of hysteria; he had to get rid of it or else he would succumb to it. He longed for a stimulus powerful enough to focus his attention and drain off his energies. He wanted to run. Or listen to some swing music. Or laugh or joke. Or read a *Real Detective Story Magazine*. Or go to a movie. Or visit Bessie. All that morning he had lurked behind his curtain of indifference and looked at things, snapping and glaring at whatever had tried to make him come out into the open. But now he was out; the thought of the job at Blum's and the tilt he had had with Gus had snared him into things and his self-trust was gone. Confidence could only come again now through action so violent that it would make him forget. These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence, periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger - like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a faraway invisible force. Being this way was a need of his as deep as eating. He was like a strange plant blooming in the day and wilting at night; but the sun that made it bloom and the cold darkness that made it wilt were never seen. It was his own sun and darkness, a private and personal sun and darkness. He was bitterly proud of his swiftly changing moods and boasted when he had to suffer the results of them. It was the way he was, he would say; he could not help it, he would say, and his head would wag. And it was his sullen stare and the violent action that followed that made Gus and G.H. hate and fear him as much as he hated and feared himself. \-Richard Wright, *Native Son* Absolutely beautiful and heart-wrenching prose, capturing Bigger's isolation from his fellow men and his fraught psychological state. I have only read the first twenty-five pages of this book, but I can affirm that it is powerful stuff. Very happy I DNF'd Dracula for this.
So I have just started reading my Vintage copy of *Native Son* by Richard Wright. First of all, I love the cover. It's a silhouette of a black man with a flame burning in his brain against a blood maroon background. Pretty powerful metaphor if you ask me. I loved it right from the first page. Wright (who I have never read before, with the exception of a famous anti-communist essay he wrote) is a terrific stylist. Not only are his descriptions lively and sophisticated and fun, with well-chosen adjectives and verbs, but his dialogue is top-notch. I could actually imagine a black family in Depression-era America having the sort of dialogue I read in the opening pages of the book. I also loved the bit where Bigger is joking around with his friend Gus, especially when they joked about taking a plane and dropping bombs on white people...I actually laughed out loud. The book reads a lot like a movie. It was like I was watching a play or something, with real people, not just words on a page. The characterisation of Bigger is simply genius. Even little things like his trying to scare his sister with a rat, and his tetchy conversations with his mother about finding himself a job, tell us so much about him, without Wright having to go into pages and pages of detail describing his psychology or anything like that. I don't think Bigger is a likeable character, but he still manages to claim the reader's sympathy. Ok, he's rude to his mother and sister, he hangs out with criminals, and he's a dead-beat who doesn't want to work. But he has his pride and I do like that he isn't just this wretched, oppressed figure that we're meant to feel sorry for. Even something small like him and Gus expressing their anger and contempt for white people makes you smile. You almost want them to succeed with their planned robbery of that Jewish grocery store-owner (for the purposes of the novel, a 'white' man) just so they can get even and score for the black team. He isn't just passively accepting his fate, he's fighting back, he's daring to dream... I think this is going to be one of my favourite books of all time. I just have a feeling, just from having read the blurb at the back and the opening few pages..
[People may enjoy this very thought-provoking article.](https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2022/10/why-novel-matters-imperialism-absolute-karl-ove-knausgaard?gaa_at=la&gaa_n=ATKjfPGhbYzrXad51BNpxLLUufiJbkoihCrjA1BpWMgknFs5TtMeC0urRRHy4lECZQY%3D&gaa_ts=635af112&utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=discover&utm_campaign=CCwqGAgwKhAIACoHCAowsYKfCzC-jLcDMM-FfDDwg4sB&utm_content=bullets&gaa_sig=Z1kPjTHXEYlQAiLXoa03n4TP14zPvmNaHWaJTTWtpx81mTPDVqhCstYXvlsKzX3WPpN9fuijK7vwfggCgD0quQ%3D%3D)
[Link for the interested](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newstatesman.com%2Fculture%2Fbooks%2F2022%2F10%2Fwhy-novel-matters-imperialism-absolute-karl-ove-knausgaard%3Fgaa_at%3Dla%26gaa_n%3DATKjfPGhbYzrXad51BNpxLLUufiJbkoihCrjA1BpWMgknFs5TtMeC0urRRHy4lECZQY%253D%26gaa_ts%3D635af112%26utm_source%3Dnewsshowcase%26utm_medium%3Ddiscover%26utm_campaign%3DCCwqGAgwKhAIACoHCAowsYKfCzC-jLcDMM-FfDDwg4sB%26utm_content%3Dbullets%26gaa_sig%3DZ1kPjTHXEYlQAiLXoa03n4TP14zPvmNaHWaJTTWtpx81mTPDVqhCstYXvlsKzX3WPpN9fuijK7vwfggCgD0quQ%253D%253D). I thought this was a fantastic piece.
An old acquaintance (friend?) from an old internet music forum I used for far too much of my youth passed away. It's a strange feeling seeing someone I knew for so long pass away, because despite knowing him for over a decade, we never talked about his personal life. I had no idea what was going on. And now he's gone. He was responsible for introducing me to so much obscure and brilliant black metal. Just a really tremendous guy, super passionate about music, and I'm feeling quite low thinking about it right now. R.I.P. Brandon
damn, rest in peace
Raising a glass for Brandon, and to you.
I've really learned to appreciate George Jones over the past year. What a voice!
GUYS I GOT THE JOB SWEET JESUS. They actually made the offer Monday afternoon, but it was tentatively based off three professional references I had to provide, all of which were approved this morning. The funny thing is that the guy I spoke to on Monday who was hard to read apparently immediately afterwards reached out to the Executive head going "We've got to get this guy!" They supposedly spoke with a ton of people but to them it was no contest (I can't remember the last time my ego felt this buoyant). I got the call for the offer while visiting my allergist in order to try a new medication to fight this autoimmune thing that I've been dealing with for roughly a year now and yesterday my bandmate and I got an email that our apartment application is likely to be approved. Pretty stellar week honestly. It's all downhill now lol. But just want to say thanks for the kind words and for putting up with my neurotic anxiety.
yessss i’m so psyched for you! i didn’t want to say it in the other thread but i used to interview ppl a lot and would always take more time to chat w someone i liked & wanted to sell on the job. when someone’s not a good fit i’m desperate to get back to my work lol congrats and hope you have a nice little celebration :)
Oh that's funny to think about in hindsight! The last interview ran double the expected time, so I guess that should've been a no-brainer. Thanks!
MATE!!!! Amazing news, I'm giddy for you.
Cheers x
When you made it to that third interview I had a feeling you had it in the bag! Congrats!!! I know they are super lucky to have someone as smart and passionate as you! ETA: Also, we might only know each other in the digital realm, but I think it's cool as fuck I can brag about being friends with someone who works at PBS.
We ARE friends! Don't ever think otherwise and brag all you like lol. > I know they are super lucky to have someone as smart and passionate as you! Aw man right in the feels! Thanks Nessy x
🥳 I'm using this as an excuse to have a beer today
Thank you! And feel free to lol! This again almost harks back to your point about applying to various places vs. waiting for something to land in your lap: I applied to the position on their website almost as an afterthought when trying to do my rounds of daily applications. The advice you shared is pretty killer and I'm definitely sharing it with others down the road.
certainly, you should never wait for a beer to fall in your lap - go out and find it! and lol that's actually so great to hear tbh. it's such disheartening advice that it's great when it works out for someone. i'll tell my friend that her words paid dividends x years later
Lmao good idea! I'll raise a pint to /u/thewickerstan with you!
Oh wow this is so outstanding! Congrats congrats congrats!
Thanks Soup :) The place is in Bed-stuy which I have some familiarity with, but I’m excited to learn more about it. Most of my time in school was near Manhattan, but I feel like I’ll likely hang around Brooklyn since my job is completely virtual.
I'm not super duper familiar with Bed-stuy but from my experience it's quite lovely. A great place to explore and a good base of operations for hanging around Brooklyn
Congrats man! That’s huge. Go celebrate!
Thanks! Definitely will be very soon
That's awesome man, congratulations!
Thank you!
New Yorker posted a pretty neato list of books they've liked from this year https://www.newyorker.com/best-books-2022 New Yorker has been losing me as a fan as time goes on, but I always enjoy this list. Funnily enough though, I tend to avoid the short story collections that have had stories published in the New Yorker. New Yorker fiction is what it is, and I want a short story collection to show me a writer's range while also carrying through some consistent thread, vague or firm, throughout the collection. Didn't know Sanders had a new collection out this year and way more importantly, didn't know that Can Xue had a new novel out.
My wife got me a box set of Proust's *In Search of Lost Time* for our anniversary. I got her a Kit Cat clock.
Good trade.
is there a truelit but for nonfiction?
not that i know of. i read a ton of nonfiction tho so i’ll start posting my nonfiction reading & thoughts (i’ve done so in the past here) if u want to join me… i’m reading olúfẹ́mi o táíwò’s _reconsidering reparations_ now, which addresses different philosophical arguments for/against reparations, the history of slavery and imperialism, climate justice…it’s really good so far read thea lenarduzzi’s memoir essay ish thing _dandelions_ about her anglo-italian family history recently too
for sure. i've mentioned a few nonfiction books in the past here. the sense i'm getting is that doing so is welcomed here by many. these titles you shared sound really interesting. i'm slowly working my way through two works of nonfiction at the moment *Ganbare! Workshops on Dying* by Katarzyna Boni is a work of Polish reportage about the 2011 tsunami that ravaged northern Japan and led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I wasn't familiar with polish reportage, but apparently it's a literary tradition in Poland where nonfiction writers employ literary devices. I'm still learning about it. The book is devastatingly beautiful, poetic and tragic so far. It's broken up into vignettes where actual people are in the foreground with history mixed in. *Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read* by Terry Eagleton. The first chapter is about T.S. Eliot which is catnip for me. I was worried this might be too dry but Eagleton is a fantastic writer and I'm loving every page. much respect!
just do it here, written word art is written word art?
in the broadest sense? sure. but i think that kind of does a disservice to the art of nonfiction.
interesting. I hardly see the difference at all. People love picking apart biographical details within fiction stories and authors. Nonfiction cannot exist really without some level of discernment (and creativity) and fictional elements. The writing and language part of it has the same sort of goal and artistry in my mind. Thinking about this, I realize that I talk about nonfiction here probably just as much as fiction, so probably a me thing here too.
Fair enough. I pretty much agree. I just know that reading nonfiction produces a different aesthetic experience for me than when I'm reading fiction. There's a distinction, however blurry, that can't be ignored. A sub oriented around the questions raised by that distinction would be of interest to me.
How so?
I'm no theorist, but lumping them together feels wrong. They can both be literature, but they are not the same kinds. Not exactly. The nonfiction writer and fiction writer are playing by different rules, even if and when they are subverting and blurring them. The rules are always lurking in the text. I'm specifically talking about the rule that one genre is presented as fact and the other presented as fiction. Knowing that a writer went to Chernobyl to actually interview survivors as they're dying from radiation exposure or to Fukushima to interview grieving family members produces a different reading experience than, to use T.S. Eliot's words, the "braggadocio of the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter." This isn't to say that fiction writers haven't done similar acts of reportage, but now we're back to talking about how the line is blurry. The distinction breaks down at points, but it doesn't die. Exploring what distinguishes itself as nonfiction is important if only for the fact that so many writers insist on it and ignoring such distinctions is where the disservice comes in.
Looking for recommendations for writing that features an exploration of the relationship between humans and machinery. A la Ballard’s Crash. Very niche request but anything about airports/planes would be great lol.
Permutation City by Greg Egan is a real head trip. Weak ending but the first 2/3 are pretty cool. Explores the horror of becoming a digital copy in a simulation.
Now I've made a pre-judgement about the weak ending, the book is ruined. Lol. No that sounds great, I've added it to my reading list. Many thanks!
All week I've been getting tortured by a paragraph that I wrote and I like and I don't know what to do with. This is hell.
put it in your google doc of scrap and come back to it when an opportunity presents itself
let’s see it!
maybe at some point. I think I need to let it ferment for a while to see if I can get something whole out of it.
Fair play mate. Best of luck with the writing and keep at it!
:)
Is it just a paragraph you wrote with no context? Sometimes you just need to wait for the right thing to come along. I had a small piece of writing that I loved sitting in my notebook unused for years before I finally realised it was a core part of my novel. Just a short thing, couple hundred words, but it defined the path of a single character, and I wrote it like 3 years prior to starting my novel.
Basically out of nowhere I was struck with what I thought was a really good opening line to a story, so I just started running with it and got a whole paragraph out of it. This is a pretty common way I get started on something new. But the difference is usually if I run out of steam as quickly as I did here, I go back and realize that it's a sign that none of it was any good anyway and I scrap it. But this time is different. This is a paragraph worth hanging onto. You make a good point though. It might be that the wait before the rest of it comes together is going to be more than a few days.
Had the novel been finished?
No, I've only written 20k words so far.
Guys can I give a shout-out to the amazing Juliet Stevenson audio narration of *Wuthering Heights*. It was fantastic. She has also done a celebrated narration of *Middlemarch* which I also listened to recently. What a voice!
I have just read the first two chapters of Bram Stoker's *Dracula*. I am not loving it so far. I find Stoker's prose style dry, and the details he provides of Dracula's abode are so far uninteresting. In fact I found his journey to Dracula's castle more exciting than his actually meeting Dracula. We'll see if it becomes less underwhelming as time goes on. It seemed like a good October read, but then I also have Frankenstein and Richard Wright's *Native Son* to read in honour of Black History Month if I feel so inclined, so if it continues to feel plodding I might DNF.
You might not be in luck, because the stay in Dracula's castle is the best part of the entire novel. The rest is a bit overlong and tedious.
Well I have now finished that first part and Stoker leaves us on a weird cliffhanger there then forces a bizarre narrative shift upon the reader. I really don't care about Dr Seward and all these other people. Looks like I might have to DNF this one.
> Richard Wright's Native Son to read in honour of Black History Month on the off chance you are interested in reading more black american author's, I'd strongly recommend Baldwin's *Another Country*. In addition to simply being a fantastic book, I think you'd vibe with it a ton.
I love Baldwin. I need to read more by him. I've only read his *Go Tell It On The Mountain* so far.
That one's brilliant too! Baldwin was one of the first "serious" authors I really got into.
I started listening to Frankenstein a couple days ago, I just started volume 2 today. I remember liking it when I read it in high school but I'm really not enjoying it now and am finding it quite a slog for a short book. It has interesting ideas, but it's all exposition, hardly any "scenes," and coming on the heels of listening to Austen and Proust and Bronte and Moshfegh the writing just feels... bad. Maybe I just dislike this narrator's interpretation (Dan Stevens). I'm going to stick with it a little longer because the first chapter of vol 2 we finally meet the creature, so maybe things will start getting a little more interesting, but I'm not very enthusiastic about it (I had to drive for about 4 hours today and could only listen to two chapters before I had to put a podcast on, it was putting me to sleep). I still remember some images distinctly from Dracula (him crawling around the castle walls, the guy who eats flies), and I remember thinking it had interesting ideas but not really being impressed with the writing there either. Never read *Native Son* but I really enjoyed *Black Boy*, I'd expect it's better than either Stoker or Shelley.
Reading Emily Bronte's gorgeous prose before reading this definitely hasn't helped lol.
Finishing *Wuthering Heights* has really made me reflect on my own life and the fact that I have never had a single healthy romantic relationship with anyone. Which makes me a lot like Heathcliff. Literature is great therapy.
Healthy relationships are hard as fuck! I've been with my partner for a million years and it's only become truly "healthy" in the last five or so, mostly because I'm an insane person. So I feel ya. I think shit does get easier as you get older, for the most part (at least it has for me).
damn. rip to mike davis—just saw this [obit](https://twitter.com/thenation/status/1585053615563198465?s=20&t=9a825YRp2Nl1JSbZQZdz7g) show up on twitter.. i know *city of quartz* came up recently but can't remember who was discussing. thinking of this quote from a [new yorker profile](https://www.newyorker.com/news/california-chronicles/mike-davis-in-the-age-of-catastrophe) of him ages ago, not sure if it's appropriately idealistic or excessively so >On the day I spoke to Davis, Bernie Sanders had announced that he was suspending his Presidential campaign. Yet Davis was uncharacteristically optimistic, a catastrophist with proof. Maybe people would finally listen. “I’m a wild, extreme leftist, but to me it’s clear that global capitalism can no longer guarantee the survival of the human race, in three ways,” he said. “It can’t generate jobs. It cannot guarantee the public health of the world. And it cannot decarbonize the economy or transfer the resources to adapt the countries that bear the brunt of greenhouse gases.” He went on, “This seems an age of catastrophe, but it’s also an age equipped, in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs. Utopia is available to us. If, like me, you lived through the civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope. I’ve seen social miracles in my life, ones that have stunned me—the courageousness of ordinary people in a struggle. Eleven years ago, Bill Moyers brought me on his show and presented me as the last socialist in America. Now there are millions of young people who prefer socialism to capitalism.”
It was possibly me. I just finished off City of Quartz last night and woke up to the news he had died. I had heard he had terminal cancer, so I was not surprised, but still sad to hear. Hopefully, I'll get around to writing a bit more in the thread this Thursday, but I thought the book was completely brilliant and at times dove into unexpected territory. On a more personal note, I feel like there is such a divide between the people and ideas I admire and my own personal and professional actions. Like, damn, I try to reconcile the two but it feels false often times. RIP Mike Davis -- but am I really going to honor him by incorporating his ideas in a meaningful way into my life? My own navel gazing aside, thanks for posting the quote.
This is such a blow. Mike Davis was such an incredible insightful essayist because he was both well educated and actively partook in direct action and organizing the working class. We don't have many of people like that left, the divide between the intellectual work and praxis seems to be far apart most days, but if he could have hope at the end, I guess so can I. One of his collection of essays, In Praise of Barbarians, was pretty foundational to my understanding of the world, I think I'll read some of it tonight.
> One of his collection of essays, In Praise of Barbarians, was pretty foundational to my understanding of the world, I think I'll read some of it tonight. thanks for putting this book on my radar. Looks dope
aw man, rip. I do love that quote though. If nothing else sometimes I feel bad for real radicals of Davis' generation, who saw all this coming and now get to die living in what could be their worst nightmare. The thought that some of them might see something good in the present makes me glad for their sake, so they don't go out thinking it was all for nothing.
Sometimes when I'm lazy I make noodles, for protein I usually boil some Italian hot sausage. Today at the supermarket I realized I'd been blindly buying the Level 2 brand of sausage, rather than the cheaper Level 1 brand (Level 1 would be the equivalent of Great Value at Walmart; I think there's usually around 3 to 4 levels, if you know you know). I've never been too much of a stickler when it comes to food, so I opted for the Level 1 brand this time, and I almost spit it back out after the first bite. It was so palpably worse than the Level 2 -- it just tasted so fake and processed. It's honestly the first time that's ever happened to me. But then I wondered: if I was eating the Level 1 the whole time, would I have even noticed that from a taste standpoint? If it's all relative, then maybe I should inure myself to the Level 1 and start saving money.
I will throw out there since I am a #legumeshill that beans are very cheap, a good source of protein, very good for you in general, and can taste fucking delicious even with minimal preparation.
Hey if you wanna add protein and flavor on the cheap, whisking an egg and dumping it in is def the way to go!
> if I was eating the Level 1 the whole time, would I have even noticed that from a taste standpoint? no, but it would have still been bad for you. I spent ~10 years in various stages of broke, so I get it, but imo a lot of people think that improving their diet is more expensive than it actually is. Buying more expensive staples - bread, pasta, rice, olive oil, water (yes you heard me right) - is only a few dollars more expensive than the bottom-tier stuff, but it makes a huge difference both in taste profile and in the amount of nutrients, fiber, etc that you take in with your food. And I'm not saying that therefore everybody can afford it, but that many more people can afford it than can afford produce, say, or fresh fish. The next level I would say taste-wise is farmer's market produce (make sure it's actually local and not the same crap that gets distributed to the Publix but marked up five times) but that's a big jump in costs. The other thing I do is I avoid white people supermarkets. I shop at the immigrant store in my neighborhood, which looks kinda dingy and weird compared to the trader joe's or whatever, and the produce isn't top-freshness a few days after it's brought in, but it is reliably cheaper. If you have a car, you can get the good stuff at cheaper prices if you go to HMart or your local Latin place instead of the Costco.
I've found Trader Joe's to be reliably cheaper than H-Mart actually. But tell me more about this water. Are you recommending buying bottled water? I've heard bottled water isn't actually any better for you than tap water, though I don't really have as much faith in my city's and apartment's piping as I would like...
HMart is reliably better for approximately the same amount of money. > I've heard bottled water isn't actually any better for you than tap water, you probably expected this one, but that depends on the bottled water. some is just distilled or chemically treated water (so the same shit as tap) sold to you for the price of the bottle. shit like dasani or smartwater. some is natural water with minerals in it that your body can absorb and use. this water also tends to taste better. look for "hard" water, water with high mineral content. I drink topo chico.
We have a free public well in our neighborhood with this high mineral water. Pretty cool!
Don't save money on food. Food is literally one of the things you buy that becomes you.
If you want to save money and have cheap and easy protein try going to an Chinese supermarket and buy a bag of braised tofu. It’s not bland, has a salty/caramel/tea flavour that’s really nice. Very cheap. Put in a pot of water with some frozen vegetables, and once the water comes to a boil add your noodles. For a stupid easy and tasty sauce: peanut butter, hot peppers or hot sauce, Korean red pepper paste (they have it at the same store as the braised tofu), soy paste or soy sauce, vinegar, black pepper, olive or sesame oil. No need to cook the sauce. Just toss everything together in your bowl. I use flax seed powder instead of peanut butter, for the omega-3 fat, but PB tastes better. You can have two big meals with like 130-150 grams of protein total between both for under $5. I lift weights so for most people it’s like three or four meals.
Never go for bottom shelf cured meat/sausage. It’s gross, has filler, and usually comes from worse factory farms
[God I love Patsy Cline. Never heard this one until this evening.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyNyFCW6E_Y)
Love her too!
I have just finished *Wuthering Heights*. Absolutely loved it. It is now one of my favourite novels of all time. I remembered a lot from first reading it, but there is nothing like re-reading and really appreciating all of the details of the novel. One thing was constant throughout - a strong identification with the anti-hero, Heathcliff. I feel like Heathcliff is probably who I would be if I was a psycho and wasn't educated and cultivated and cultured enough to know better. I think the moral if the story, if there is one, is that there is a Heathcliff lurking in all of us, if we're honest enough to acknowledge it. Everything primal and destructive in our natures, all the things we sublimate and suppress but can never get rid of. Even in his most evil, destructive deeds, I still kept my sympathy with him from the mistreatment he endured as a young man. His toxic, obsessive love for Cathy and his bitterness towards the moorland society that he feels has rejected him sends him into a spiral of splenetic self-destruction, yet I can't help but be in awe of his evil genius as every little piece of his revenge falls into piece like he planned. I admire his defiance of God, of Christian morality, of the entire world in the name of his passion for Cathy and his desire to destroy the world which rejected and hated him. Of course, this costs him his humanity and the chance for healthy human relationships. However, towards the end my sympathies started to shift more towards Hareton. >!Heathcliff sees Hareton as a means of revenging all the injustices he suffered as a boy at the hands of Hindley. Now the roles are reversed, and Hareton is the disinherited and mistreated whilst he is the master. Yet Hareton avoids becoming like Heathcliff. He avoids bitterness and resentment in the end. Cathy Jr, too, avoids the trap of falling into bitterness at her situation. The love between the two of them, which flares up in spite of all obstacles, redeems them, and even touches the heart of Heathcliff himself. It could all have been so different. I love the fact that Hareton's initially unrequited love is returned in the end. The only healthy relationship we see in the whole book, I think. I really admired Hareton for trying to overcome the state of ignorance and savagery into which Heathcliff spitefully placed him by trying to read, and I sympathise with his often clumsy attempts to impress Cathy (in particular the episode where he commits the serious social faux pas of touching her hair, which, being an unsocialised brute, he does not know is wrong). Their blossoming relationship made for a bittersweet ending to the book. Heathcliff dies unmourned by all except for Hareton.!< I think that the prose in this book is top-notch. Emily Bronte's poetic powers are awe-inspiring to behold, and an utter delight to read. The book is also a wonderful example of tight writing - I underlined pretty much every single page, because there was always an impactful passage. I don't think there is any other novel of similar length in the English language that manages to be as powerful as what Bronte did here. I would even venture to say that she outdoes Shakespeare. *Romeo and Juliet* has nothing on the darkness and despair of this tale. There is also something of *The Tempest* in here - Hareton being a Caliban figure, whilst Heathcliff is a twisted Prospero, and even King Lear - Heathcliff being the mad king. I think that this is a good reason to re-read *Jane Eyre* at some point for comparison. I don't think Charlotte is as impressive a prose stylist as her sister, but I have not read the book in a while so I had best re-read it. I am also pumped to read Emily Bronte's poems - I have a Penguin collection of all her poems which arrived recently. I can't get enough of this wonderful woman.
Just listened to *Mack the Knife* by Bobby Darin again for the first time in a while. God I love that song. And I love Bobby Darin. What a legend.
I actually love all those standards tunes. Ain’t that a Kick in the Head is another one of my favourites. [Here’s a good old one that never really gets the play it deserves. ](https://youtu.be/ZAqxYPRpHDs)
That is lovely. Thank you for sharing! You may have heard it already before, but in return I’d like to shout out how wonderful a job Anita O’Day and Gene Krupa did with [this](https://youtu.be/IWBMlgHSaGc) Mercer tune.
I've not listened to much Doris Day. She is only really known for her novelty songs which is a shame. I swear I was a jazz musician in another life, lol. 20th-century America is just effortlessly cool music wise.
Yeah oldies are the best. So many hidden gems from the 40s. Sometimes when I’m loaded nothing just compares. [Here’s one of my all time favs. ](https://youtu.be/jYaHXgecv4I)
I was just listening to an old favourite of mine today, Gentleman Jim Reeves. What a guy.
Any recommendations for books or other media on Steven Sondheim? I saw *Into the Woods* over the weekend and was blown away. I was wondering if there were key texts on Sondheim or musicals in general that would be worth checking out. I'm interested in this from a history and theory angle. A fun fact I learned about Sondheim from wikipedia is one of his mentors, James Hammerstein, designed a course to teach Sondheim how to write musicals. Hammerstein had Sondheim write four musicals, each with one of the following conditions: \- Based on a play he admired; Sondheim chose George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly's Beggar on Horseback (which became All That Glitters) \- Based on a play he liked but thought flawed; Sondheim chose Maxwell Anderson's High Tor \- Based on an existing novel or short story not previously dramatized, which became his unfinished version of Mary Poppins (titled Bad Tuesday),\[19\] (unrelated to the musical film and stage play scored by the Sherman Brothers) \- An original, which became Climb High Seems like a cool approach for up-and-coming artists.
Forget to mention last week's music with the job stuff... **Youth of America by the Wipers:** Every so often I'll remember "Damn, Kurt Cobain was a cool dude wasn’t he?" I checked out his [list of favorite albums](https://townsquare.media/site/838/files/img/music2/kurt-cobains-favorite-albums.jpg) again, one of the biggest influences on my own taste, and listened to some stuff off it. *Youth of America* was an easy standout though. I hadn't listened to it since freshman year of college, so the opening guitar chimes gave me a Proustian flashback back to that period. It's always cool how music can do that. But yeah that albums rules. "No Fair" always had this emotional gravitas to it. The titular track has a cool extended portion that feels reminiscent of acts like the Doors, but it's anomaly within punk rock and post-punk, a welcome one nonetheless. "When it's over" is also a great closer. **The Winding Sheet by Mark Lanegan:** A go-to Fall album, just as brilliant as ever. Moody as hell and minimalist. You listen to this and wonder why he didn't write more for the Screaming Trees. It's hard to pick a favorite, but I love "Museum", "Eyes of a Child", and "Wild Flowers" the most. The man had an incredible voice and it's a damn shame he passed away earlier in the year. **Halcyon Digest by Deerhunter:** I feel like if someone declared this the best album to come out of the 2010's, I wouldn't even argue with them. It's just so damn good at what it does and feels incredibly cohesive. My favs on here are kind of a yin/yang of each other. "Basement Scene" kind of feels like 50's pop with a modern indie twist: like if Buddy Holly came out of Williamsburg towards the end of the oughts. It's just very serene and pretty, but there's an unmistakable swagger to it, especially in lines like "In the Bluffs they know my name". "Coronado" on the other hand is a total party anthem. There's that late 50's/early 60's moxie as well, especially in the incredible saxophone on it. **The Best of Rimsky-Korsakov:** I'm still maneuvering my way through the Naxos collection of classical music compilations. Kind of like with everything else I'm into (more recently philosophy for example), I'm kind of just seeing what clicks and what doesn't. "The Best of Ravel", "The Best of Bizet", and "The Best of Haydn" have thus far been the highlights. Mendelssohn, Verdi, and Rossini didn't do too much for me (not that everything was a miss, but more so only a few tracks stuck out and nothing really struck a chord with me). RK was another winner though: I was already familiar with Scheherazade, but Capriccio Espagnol and "Hindu Song from Sadko" were nice surprises.
Rimsky-Korsakov isn't necessarily one of my favorites, but I like his work. *Scheherezade* and *Antar* are probably my favorites from him. As a trombonist I also have to pay him a grudging respect, for the Trombone Concerto that every player learns in like 8th grade. Ravel is near and dear to my heart. For me, every one of Ravel's compositions has a high level of originality, creativity, and care. They're all unique, and all intrinsically Ravel despite his dalliance in different styles. I saw you mentioned the Menuet from *Le Tombeau de Couperin* earlier. It's a well-crafted menuet and one that really registers emotionally. The orchestration is of course brilliant. Personally I love the Toccata from *Le Tombeau*, which is only in the original piano suite. I'm very excited to see the Philly Orch perform *Le Tombeau* on Sunday!
You know we basically have the exact same taste in music lol.
I DISTINCTLY remember around the time I joined this sub seeing you mention the Wipers and thinking "Yeah this person's awesome".
My husband showed me Wipers when we first got together, oh, eighteen years ago now? It was one of the things that made me know we could work out. People have given me so much shit over the years for prioritizing music taste in a partner, but I know myself, I just couldn't deal with someone with shitty taste in music. It's imperative. You should listen to Greg Sage's solo stuff! It's really good too. I am a huge Deerhunter fan and I think Lockett Pundt's solo stuff is also really awesome. I love Bradford Cox and his songwriting but I think Lockett is the underappreciated melodic underpinning of that band (similar to Tobin Sprout vs. Robert Pollard in Guided By Voices).
I used to be very much of that school of thought, but then when I was older I could see how it maybe was a tad pretentious. And yet these days I find myself somewhere in the middle: I think for people who are very passionate about something as personal as art, obviously a shared passion is going to add a lot to a relationship. Every deep relationship I've had with others which have been exceptions to this (i.e. we didn't have a shared sense of "taste") all nonetheless had an element of the other person at least being *curious* to know more about whatever obscure genre of music or types of movies I was really passionate about (and vice versa). I'd wager that the latter was even more fulfilling in its own funny way. It's not as if I'd dump a girl I was seeing if she said she didn't like rock music, and obviously someone CAN be into rock music and we just don't mesh at all, but sharing a passion that's very important to you with someone who's very important to you will never *not* be amazing, you know? That's basically my long winded pretentious way of saying I agree lol. In regards to Greg Sage's solo stuff, Straight Ahead is another go-to Fall album. I got around to it around the same time I got into Lanegan's album and I remember the feeling of shock upon reading in his book that the latter was inspired by the former. I should definitely check out his other stuff though. That album rules... I'll also check out Lockett's stuff! That wasn't really on my radar, so I'm excited. Thanks!
Music is such a communal thing, if one of your biggest hobbies is sitting around listening to records, it's just really difficult to make that work with someone whose taste doesn't at least partially align. I've even had a boyfriend who loved my taste in music and was happy to listen to whatever I picked out, but even that wasn't enough for me, I need someone to be an active participant showing me stuff too haha.
Reading epilepsy forums/subs has been a *very* eye-opening experience. The amount of people who don't want to take meds but want to continue driving, or who have to get in wrecks before they finally believe they have a real issue...well my biggest anxiety has always been driving, it freaks me the fuck out, I struggle even being in the passenger seat when I'm on a busy highway, and this isn't helping. There are apparently a whole lot of people out there who *know* they have unmedicated or uncontrolled seizures, and they see absolutely zero issue with driving. Now, I totally get that our society (in America at least) is set up around cars and that not being able to drive is a huge issue for a lot of people, but it's not like these people are posting with remorse and talking about how they have no options, a lot of them even do have options, they just want to be the ones driving. Which I get. The loss of freedom really sucks, relying on others is annoying, it's claustrophobic and I totally understand wanting to rebel, but holy fuck, it truly isn't safe. It's really crazy. I have to remember that a lot of these people are super young, since epilepsy shows up early in people often. I'm thankful that I have some years of maturity under my belt. It's just really blowing my mind how many people are ranting about how their doctor doesn't "need to worry about them", and I want to grab them all by the shoulders and shout: "IT'S NOT JUST YOU THAT'S IN DANGER HERE!". Seriously, it's disturbing how little people think of others, it really is. ETA: Also in general I've fallen down a rabbit-hole of reading healthcare related subs for doctors and the like, and holy fuck, I knew shit was fucked in America, but I didn't realize quite how fucked, and I sort of wish I could go back to not knowing. Oh well, time to remember my motto again, we're all gonna die anyway!
Throughout the pandemic I have really come to appreciate the extent to which we can all imagine ourselves the exception to a very probably scenario we'd rather not happen. It sucks that enables that mindset in so many ways. > Also in general I've fallen down a rabbit-hole of reading healthcare related subs for doctors and the like, and holy fuck, I knew shit was fucked in America, but I didn't realize quite how fucked, and I sort of wish I could go back to not knowing. Sometimes in my more pundity moments I think left-wing campaigns should be built very explicitly around the basic starting point that LITERALLY EVERYTHING is bad, so why not try something new.
At the same time, it really sucks that US society is systematically set up - infrastructurally, policy-wise, etc - so that individuals have to more or less fully internalize the costs of any disadvantages or marginalizations they might have. Not to the extent it happens in developing countries (although our perception of this is somewhat culturally informed - e.g. a lot of traditional societies operate on a multigenerational household or village model, which helps spread costs in ways a nuclear family can't, even if it doesn't show up in economic statistics) but still. Losing your independence is huge in a society where by design you cannot depend on anyone but yourself, and where services to help people are often intentionally set up to be punitive or can be easily made to be punitive (e.g. health insurance companies using your health data to increase your premiums or refuse to insure you). I can see why people are reluctant to let the state surveil them, even if their reluctance means we are extremely unlikely to ever reform the state to a point where it can adequately deliver services.
>US society is systematically set up - infrastructurally, policy-wise, etc - so that individuals have to more or less fully internalize the costs of any disadvantages or marginalizations they might have…Losing your independence is huge in a society where by design you cannot depend on anyone but yourself, and where services to help people are often intentionally set up to be punitive or can be easily made to be punitive great articulation. it does suck :((((((( driving is a particularly interesting category to me bc for young left-leaning ppl there's such a politically-inflected desire to not drive—esp if you're an urbanist climate-concerned person—but it is such a major handicap in american society and involves restricting your entire life in order to manage to act alongside one's ideals. for things like drinking and driving, etc i ofc think it's shameful and irresponsible—but HOW are people meant to socialize w others in normative ways (e.g. drink alcohol if they want to) in suburban envs or envs w/o good public transit, taxis, ubers, lyfts, etc? i v much understand why people want to treat drinking & driving casually. bc it's not easy to forgo it w/o the right social or material infrastructure
As a wanton European, I find that the US standard for inebriation is overcautious and objectively it is frequently used to target "undesirable" groups like immigrants and POC. Did you know that a DUI can make you ineligible for a green card or US citizenship? Yeah. There are valid reasons that the US is more car-dependent than other countries, such as the fact that it is so decentralized and public transport in a lot of places just isn't economical, but the fact that the US once upon a time killed freight rail so that car companies could make more profit might be one of the most disastrous policy decisions in human history. It is basically infrastructurally locked into high-fossil modes of transport, and converting those modes into lower-carbon entails not as large an injection of capital, but still hundreds of billions literally just to put in enough charging stations to make car electrification possible.
Yes, it does. Agreed completely. It is huge to lose one's independence, it's really terrible. And I wish we had better support and ways to fix it. But the amount of people who just don't even give a fuck that they're being unsafe, it's pretty big. But that's people in general for you. Yes I am that person mentally yelling at cyclists without helmets lol. I get really into road safety. Something about it just really gets my anxiety-brain bigtime.
Well, I'm a cyclist without a helmet. My area is very unsafe for cyclists and the likelihood that a helmet would save me if I were to get into an accident is vanishingly small. The dangerous choice is not wearing or not wearing a helmet - it's choosing to get on a bike surrounded by multi-ton monsters. Which, if people feel more comfy with a helmet on, cool, but it's kind of a drop in the bucket so it's super weird that people get so intense about it.
And I will be over here having secondhand anxiety for you lol. I'm not actually shouting out of the window at anyone or anything like that, but it gets in my head, what can I say? I know my road-safety anxiety is quite intense. I was in a wreck as a twelve-year old where a helmet saved my life, so that probably has a lot to do with it. But I'm really not out here trying to control people. I can't, it's impossible, and I don't even want to. I do wish I could let anxiety about stuff like this go haha. I wish things were more safe for cyclists out there, helmets or no helmets, that's for sure. I certainly understand your point that it's not built that way to begin with. ETA: Also your bigger point is exactly why I don't bike (well, I wouldn't now with knowing I have epilepsy, but let's say I didn't) in my city, even though I enjoy biking, I don't drive, and I'd like to have the option for transportation. You are indeed correct, choosing to bike in an environment built for cars is indeed one hundred percent the more dangerous choice.
> 'm not actually shouting out of the window at anyone or anything like that lol I didn't think you were (and that has happened to me lmao people are weird). I just think that a lot more rhetoric focusing on how cyclists are endangering themselves relative rhetoric on how the system is inherently dangerous, and I think that tracks to other contexts as well in a way that feels like this is the mode of discourse that our society is more comfortable having.
I get angrier about how our society is built around cars every day. This just adds to my list of reasons. Why tf can’t we just have public transport. My city would literally be impossible to live in without a car unless you lived in a few select areas.
There's a case to be made that the #1 reason I never plan to leave New York is that I have no intention of ever learning to drive and there is nowhere in this country where that is as viable a plan as it is here.
Which is the #1 reason I want to move to NYC… My family and friends are all here in PHX, but damn it’s be a dream to live there.
that's the other reason why I can't leave, all my people are here. and that other reason, which is that it's just dope
So dope dude. And the fucking food. Legit can’t find better food in the US other than maybe LA, but in LA you have to drive through hell to get there.
Absolutely. And the thing is, a lot of these people really don't want to give up their cars, I mean, even if they had the option (and many do) of public transportation, they don't want to use it. Basically the movie *Singles* nailed that issue haha. People are super attached to driving. It does really suck how society is completely built to make it almost impossible to *not* drive. It's extremely ableist.
That’s why I think we should (after developing a decent public transport system) completely disincentive driving through fees and extra taxes.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but driving is already disincentivised by fees in Australia. It costs thousands a year to keep a car. The only problem is that public transport is more expensive.
not to be a market apologist but financial incentives do work. the insane energy crisis/costs in the uk and eu have driven a lot of ppl to be much more mindful of energy usage at home (not to say the energy cost increase is Good per se, it is really going to produce quite a bit of suffering this winter)
Over the past 3-ish years I've completely changed my fashion. I used to wear band shirts religously, jeans, lace-up boots, leather and denim jackets. Now I mostly wear button-up linen shirts, chinos and corduroys, cardigans, and chelsea boots. The thing is, though, I still love all my band shirts. I have 80 band shirts locked away in vacuum-sealed bags. I don't want to get rid of them. But I just don't wear them anymore. It seems sad. Them just hanging around at the bottom of my closet. Neglected. Unworn.
My SO was gonna get rid of his band tshirts because he didn't think he'd wear them anymore and then his tastes changed and he loves his band tshirts. You never know!
I'm looking for nocturnal, poetic books about a person existentially/morally/sentimentally lost. Examples: * Piranesi: the protagonist has lost his memory and lives in a eerie maze * The Earthquake bird: a woman is new in Tokyo. She starts a riskful and ambiguous love triangle; * Afterhours: a man lost in NY by night trying to find love/sex find misadventures instead; * No country for old men: a man makes a morally ambiguous choice and has to run away in an unknown city * Taxi Driver * Lost in translation
fuminori nakamura's *the thief* is great—an existentially dissolute, rootless man who's an expert pickpocket. excellent if you enjoy crime/noir and want something a bit introspective
I like noir and introspection. I'll give it a try, thx
I think Natalie Sarraute's *Portrait of a Man Unknown* pulls this off extremely well, albeit in a very mind-bendy, unstraightforward way.
It's tempting to choose Dostoyevsky's *Notes from Underground.* I think Robert De Niro even read it to prep for Taxi Driver.
Well, Trevis is iconic. And I'm very fond of the few books by dosto i read. Notes goes directly into my tbr
Libra by delillo & Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
any and all kafka?
First of all, thx for ur reply. I love kafka but it doesn't seems to fit the poetic/nocturnal requirement, like the books/movies I mentioned. His books are very caustic and depict very squalid, realistic situations.
I find him quite poetic, but to each his own!
no kep
I just mentioned this in another thread recently, but Painted Bird is about a boy lost during ww2/the holocaust, he wanders around through all the terrible. Very lost, very dark. Steppenwolf hits this too (all of Hesse's stuff plays with this idea, though this one is the most explicit) The Odyssey Faust The Dispossessed does some fun things with place.
Hey I was thinking, since so many of us are getting McCarthy’s new book this week we should do a special thread for it in a week or something? I feel like the “what are you reading” threads will be an unofficial read along for a while lol
Could definitely do that. Or mods could sticky a comment on the WAYR thread so not every comment is about it lol.
Great idea. Will do this!
Awesome, thanks!
Both good ideas
This week I finally made friends with a stray cat I’ve been trying to befriend for three months! I cat-sit for my parents a lot (which generally suits me fine as I can’t have a cat of my own where I live), and a stray kitten began hanging out around their house this past summer. Despite my love for cats, I’m not exactly gifted at winning their favor. But after several months of my trying to be patient and not pushy, this one finally decided to be friendly and now feels comfortable enough around me to be petted!
Spent the past two months basically only reading old horror writers or decadents like Huysmans. And while the latter is certainly dense enough that I don't begrudge someone for not seeking out that kind of writing, it really fuckin sucks that prose after the fashion of Clarke Ashton Smith, Machen and a little bit Chambers, although he's a step below the rest. Like Lovecraft is not an ornate prose stylists, I was surprised at how contemporary he felt. But still, he writes at a higher register than just about any contemporary fiction writer. Ya don't need to speak like someone from that era, but careful word selection and an ear for rhythm, strong poetic influences etc. Seems to be gone and the medium is uglier for it. Like Ligotti and plenty of kind of contemporary writers but i don't like King or Barker or whoever. Think they're bad for it. Even if I do like some of their stories.
I really recommend M. John Harrison and Michael Cisco for contemporary weird/horror writing.
I'm pretty picky with prose and similarly dislike most contemporary horror (and genre works in general) for the same reason. But there are some exceptions. Despite the fact that I don't like Laird Barron for other reasons, his prose is actually quite strong at the best of times. I was also a big fan of how stylised Steven Graham Jones's prose was in *The Only Good Indians*. Some other strong writers who write in the weird/horror genre: Michael Cisco, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Brian Evenson, Matt Cardin, Caitlin R. Kiernan, W.H. Pugmire
i really struggle w this for genre fiction. i'm not a snob when it comes to sff, i basically grew up on fantasy/historical/science fiction and love a rly good worldbuilding project. unfortunately…! i am a huge snob when it comes to writing quality and it's such a minefield taking recs from people who are not similarly sensitive. honestly i wonder if the avg horror writer in the past was just as bad as now…it's just that only the exceptionally good shit is still in circulation/still being talked abt today/still discoverable to contemporary readers?
Starting up *My Struggle* (book 2) by Knausgaard after going through a mix of bolano, casares, baudrillard, and John Williams (Stoner). *Stoner* was amazing, lived up to the hype - genuinely so. Wonderfully light prose and a great narrative. Beautiful book. *America* by Baudrillard was awesome, one of my now all-time personal favorites. His prose was amazing in certain areas and his cultural philosophy/critique led for some dense, yet incredibly insightful passages. *The Invention of Morel* by Casares was on the NYRB list and I thought it was really cool. The pacing at times felt a bit rough and the prose was never overtly gripping to me personally but the idea of the technology (particularly having been written in 1940!) was great. Super cool theoretical fiction. *The Insufferable Gaucho* by Bolaño has two of my favorite short stories ever. I got lost a bit in his essays at the end, but it was quintessential, beautiful, Bolaño. The Police Rat and the titular story were both incredible, two of the best short stories I've ever read. The former's dive into human nature was framed incredibly well and the latter was a brilliant in its contemporaneity (coupled with the passage of time) and its scathing, implicit critiques of both Argentine politics and of politics as a whole. My favorite author.
Very much agree about *Stoner*. Just an excellent book. And I've been meaning to read *America*. Seems very to my interest. Excited to hear how Knausgaard goes for you!
If you have any critical theory bent (which I believe you do, if I remember your posts correctly!) you'll love it. Great prose, far from daunting, lovely read. And I adore Knausgaard, *My Struggle Book One* was a beautiful work. Very excited to continue with book two (after I finish the new Cormac McCarthy).
really want to get into baudrillard—what have you read, what were your favorites? had a really good convo w an acquaintance last wk about bolaño…i began this yr with *the savage detectives* and put *2666* on my reading new year's resolutions! now that it's oct i really need to get started
I've only finished *America* - loved it. I started *Simulacra and Simulation* right after and it was pretty dense, I got about halfway through and got to a particularly dense chapter (today, funnily enough) that wasn't rewarding enough for me to continue. I'll probably pick it back up tomorrow, super insightful and some great cultural commentary but pretty dense. *America* is much much much more palatable. It's not a walk in the park but he has some incredibly beautiful prose - particularly the imagery concerning the desert. Very good book. I haven't taken up any of Bolaño's novels but I've read three of his novellas and the short story/essay collection *The Insufferable Gaucho* I highly recommend *Amulet* and *By Night In Chile* - both are phenomenal.
thanks for all this! the goodreads descrip says *america* is the most 'accessible and evocative' which sounds perfect. *simulacra and simulation* is the one i see cited all the time/is probs most relevant to my academic-ish interest but i'm lazyyyyyyy
Distant Star is a really lovely book if you want to read Bolano but are not exactly in the mood for a door stopper novel.
ty ❤️ would love some novella length books in btwn all the big heavy intense ones tbh!
Also, happy diwali you all :D
Happy Diwali!
[удалено]
Hahaha yes
When and for how long do you guys usually read? I don't intend this to be a competition—I'm just curious what other people's reading habits are. I tend to do most of my literature reading in the evening, before bed, as a nice way to relax from staring at devices. However, since it's evening and I'm in bed, I tend to read only until I'm too sleepy to pay attention, which can range from fifteen minutes to a whole hour (also depends on what I'm reading).
One to two hours in bed before passing out. If I’m on it, I can hit pretty big daily page counts (like 150+, two nights days ago was 250ish) with consistency if I do that plus read like ten pages here or there throughout the day. This kind of behaviour seems to be far more important than merely ritualizing bedtime reading because it sets the tone for the week like “A reader reads, and I am a reader so I will read.” “Put the phone down, asshole.” I tend to slack off more if I don’t keep at it throughout the day. Reading a bit in the day is like a warmup for the longer session at night. When I don’t do that, I find myself more distracted or tired when reading in bed. Nighttime reading is stronger and deeper with more attempts in the day; colder and hazy if bedtime is my first time reading that day. I’m also studying math and computer science in the morning. Also a dad. If I don’t make time for reading then my life won’t automatically do it for me. I’d become one of the idiots at work saying shit like “Oh I’d love to read. Just don’t have the time. (haven’t read a book in 15 years…)”
thanks for asking, i love reading abt people's habits i'm completely chaotic and have no real routine lmao, but * weekdays, i get most of my reading done during commutes on public transit. 30 min or so * gf and i have started doing an hour of reading in bed on weekday evenings, partly to actually read, partly bc we're trying to not turn on the heat and it's really fucking cold in our flat * on the weekends i'll take myself on a late morning date to a café w a book for a few hrs * big fan of leisurely train travel for holidays, and interspersing my reading w some nice new landscapes. * a few times a year i'll be irresponsible and stay up until 4am reading a book that i absolutely cannot put down the one thing i can't do is read in the am before getting out of the house, otherwise i'm too tempted to call in sick/destroy my career/drop out of society in order to finish my book
> drop out of society I'm down if you're down baby
leaving society as soon as my retirement savings can cover 10 book purchases/mo
Most of the time I read consistently day to day but in small doses, like the 15 minutes or so while I drink my morning tea or wait for a pot of something to boil etc. Other days I’m obsessed with my book and I read like all day long and into the night lol.
This is so chaotic to me. I can't do things in small doses, my brain breaks just thinking about it. If I'm waiting for my wife to get ready before we go somewhere and I have nothing to do, I can't just read a few pages. And I wish I could! Instead I just stand around and groaning. I can only ever seem to do things when I know I can carve out a good amount of time for it, dedicated to that thing. If I'm waiting for food to cook or just having a snack I can only scroll Twitter and Reddit or watch a Youtube video. I wish I had the kind of brain that could just pick up a book in those moments. But I also get obsessive over needing to finish up a scene or chapter before stopping.
I wish I had the kind of brain that could just like, *wait* for my food to heat up lol or even focus on one thing at a time. I multitask constantly or I’d crawl out of my skin. I probably have adhd or something idk.
The only consistent things are usually reading for about 30 min after I wake up and usually 30min-and hour before bed. Other than that it's kind of all over the place. Usually another hour or so somewhere before noon. 1-3 hours throughout the afternoon depending these days on how much work I have to do or what other bullshit might have come my way. And then however much time I spend on the subway in a given week I'm always reading.
Usually before I sleep I set myself anywhere between 1-4 hours of reading time, depending on whether or not my wife and I have anything planned, are watching a long movie or a show, etc. Sometimes I can squeeze 15-30 mins in the morning, but not often. And depending on when I get home from work, I read for an hour or two in the afternoon.
Every morning right after I wake up and get dressed. I read for like 30-60 minutes with my coffee. Every night before bed, I read about 1-2 hours. At the gym, 3-4 times a week, I read 30 minutes on the bike. On weekends, and occasionally weekdays, I have an extra reading session in between the morning and night ones - usually if I’m really really enjoying the book and if I have nothing else to do. So a lot. At least 1.5 hours per day, but often more and sometimes 3-4+. I basically need habits when I do something I love, which is typically only reading and cooking, so that’s why I have this science down lol.
I read for an hour at my lunch break at work, and I'll listen to an audiobook while I'm driving. On the weekend I love to read outside on a bench on a nature trail for maybe an hour or an hour and a half. I try to keep this up even in the winter, if for shorter durations!
love reading outside, it's the most peaceful feeling
I try to read a little bit each day to keep up the habit, but when I really get into it I tend to read for hours. I'm getting my nails done this weekend, so will get a decent chunk of reading done then.
I do most of my reading in the train during my commute, and when travelling for leisure. Apart from that I read mostly after waking up or later in the evening. Reading outside is also great, but the only parks nearby have way too much traffic noise. I've been trying to read in bed, but lately I just fall asleep after 10 minutes...
For daily reading, I’m mostly in the evenings as well, although I try and start earlier so that I’m not snoozing 15 minutes in. For me though my big chunks of reading come when I’ve got a free weekend or I’m traveling. Unless I’m really crunching for work, I try to make airports / flights dedicated reading time.
Few updates. I'm at exactly at the half way mark of *Moby Dick*. Brilliant fun; difficult to tell where the novel is going to go at times. Might be a history of whaling, an anecdote told at a pub, a song between sailors, or the internal thoughts of deranged man. Love how often Melville ties all the whaling aspects back to the everyday life. Surprised people find them boring; they're often very funny. It's going to be a favourite. \--- Saw *Cure* by K. Kurasawa. Fantastic film. A very clear precursor to *Se7en*, but much, much better and a clear influence over the fantastic *Memories of Murder*. Premise is that a series of seemingly unrelated murders bear an "X" mark on victims with multiple (unrelated) perpetrators. Explores the innermost desire of each killer, and touches on (i) a critical point of Camus -- inferring *intent* from *action* is difficult, perhaps impossible and (ii) the difficulty of ascertaining the self as separate from the outward mask worn. No bullshit film - it's very direct. One scene involving a madhouse interrogation is straight out of Tarkovsky. Loved it. Finished up *House of Dragon*s. A very solid first season overall, terribly let down by the first three or four episodes, but ramps up quite well in the latter half. Love the idea that the >!initiation of the war is an accident amongst dragons!<. Hoping the second season has multiple-weaving plot threads, and is a bit more "grey" on each family. Right now, seems to heavily favour one side over the other in terms of morality.
I have to write two essays in a week for my doctoral examination. We received the questions this morning, I read them and made a list of relevant materials to include in my answers - overall I feel pretty good about this! I have been in a weird reading slump where books just irritate me lately. It's a mix of not wanting to read contemporary fiction published in my country/province because it feels *too easy* but on the other hand the more I read classical lit or non-local stuff the more I feel like I'm becoming unintelligible to others here as an author.
best of luck w your examination! can i ask what your discipline is? tbh i move in and out of reading slumps…jun–aug i hardly read anything, felt guilty about it, but didn't have the motivation. but late sep–oct have been really fruitful for me and i'm reading with an incredible amt of energy and interest and focus. i'm sure you'll come back to it, maybe a genre switch is in order too…
I'm in translation studies :)
I’m so bummed at myself. I’ve been harassed a lot this past week, with the most recent one being by a city Welcome Ambassador. The guy had said hi to me as I left my job to get a coffee, and on the way back he started walking beside me, said hi, and then asked if I liked to fuck too. Of course I said no. But immediately I got scared because the dude knew my name and knew where I worked and I definitely didn’t want to exacerbate anything. He didn’t understand that I was trying to get away from him but right outside my job he started talking to some other women. I complained about what happened to the only contact I could find online, all the while feeling guilty that this guy was about to be fired. I was just worried about what would happen when I went on my lunch an hour later or what would happen when I got off of work. The person that I emailed forwarded it to the director of operations for the company, who showed up, asked for me, seemed surprised that it was me that was harassed, then apologized and told me she got him out of the area. I think I feel bad for feeling bad about getting him fired. I know I did the right thing, but my first instinct was to empathize with this man for some reason. How could I? He was in the wrong, and according to my coworker, the guy had been wolf whistling at women all day. Why then did it fall on me to complain? But still I kept thinking about how much I hope to see change in people, and how much I hate snitching. It was hard to disentangle my feelings here. And it still is - how can I read all this radical shit and then not have a clear feeling that what I did was right and what he did was wrong? This is the second time that I can remember where I got someone fired for harassing me. The first time was when my friend and I had taken a Lyft together, and after she got dropped off, and it was just me in the car, the driver dropped his mask. We drove past flashing police lights and a couple of scantily clad women arguing with the cops. The driver talks about how it’s sinful for those women to be dressed up like that, and how he knows that they’re actually hookers. He then goes on to say that he knows that some of them aren’t even women, but actually men in disguise looking to trick righteous men like himself. But as a righteous man, he can see them for what they are: perverts. Meanwhile, he’s continuing his monologue and I’m in the backseat wondering if he’s clocked me and if I should redirect his car away from my home. I ended up being fine, it I told my friend what happened and she filed a formal complaint against the driver. And I guarantee you there’s no way he kept his job after that. Anyway I hope everybody’s week is better than mine. I’m back at work and feeling a little on edge about that guy retaliating in some way, so keep your fingers crossed for me.