Francesca Penchant
From the beginning, I knew I'd have to increase the audiobook speed by 150% to get through his pretentious delivery.
This book has some useful lists of commonly swapped words, of common spelling mistakes, etc. And some funny and fascinating parts. But too much of Dreyer's book consists of lists of mistakes he deems okay with no explanations of why. Maybe it's because these mistakes have graduated into general usage, but I would've appreciated that explanation. And too much of the book consists of examples of mistakes you must not make EVER. Because he said so.
Not everyone should write a memoir. Wade through the memoir sections for some interesting experiences about poly.
There's a lot to like about this book. I liked the plot, feminism, historical awareness, dystopian setting, and afterword. Not a fan of the writing style.
“To have had the happiness of loving a place, and there to have known the joy of living and letting live; to have had such vertigo from a feeling that you could pass your shivers to others, and then dare to return, to hope to revive the dead without thinking for a minute that the irrevocable hour turns everything that we live into dust and nothingness, that the past is a mass grave, and that, outside of our heart, everything down here is a sepulcher!”
This novella is a great find: a perfect example of French Decadent prose. Make sure to read the afterword by translator Eva Richter, whose love and knowledge of Decadent literature revives the heart.
“After school, I dash off to the local library and find a book about human intelligence. I flip through the pages and come face to face with a terrifying chart. At the top is listed the average IQ of PhDs. I am way lower than this number. Tentatively, I go down the list. College graduate? Closer, but still no cigar. My blood pressure is rising. Semi-skilled laborer? In my dreams. After some time, I finally find my range: ‘Lucky to graduate high school,' it says. In a fit of panic, I throw the intelligence book as far as I can with an audible ‘F**k!'”
This passage describes the author's dawning realization, before college, of the discrepancy between his dreams of attending Yale and what his low IQ tests predicted for him.
My interest in reading this book was to find out how artists and writers like I could use human intelligence research to nurture our work. It provides many ways to do that.
It is an effective book because Kaufman has skin in the game; he describes his own experiences (alongside his research findings), as a kid whom teachers labeled “special education,” and how he overcame the predictions of that label because an observant teacher intervened. That teacher gave Kaufman hope and self-confidence, while his parents were giving him the opposite by following what experts were telling them.
Kaufman went on to achieve miraculous things that school year, and later, because he had found passion, inspiration, positive mindset, self-regulation, deliberate practice, his domains of talent and creativity, and his mentors: things that studies say produce high achievement.
But I can relate to Kaufman's experiences, because when I was a kid, my doctor told my mother that I was “mentally retarded”—because I drew people without fingers. Just circles for hands.
Luckily, my mother thought he was an idiot. And, luckily, she saw my intelligence.
And I'll add the complication that my doctor was a white male and my mother and I were females of Puerto Rican descent—a complication that Kaufman highlights throughout his book: that IQ tests—and testers—are biased against people of color.
Early on, Kaufman makes the point that IQ tests were created by people. Fallible people. Fallible white European male people. Fallible white European male people who created these tests relatively recently, in the nineteenth century, in ways that were, at times, completely arbitrary.
He describes Alfred Binet (1857–1911), a French psychologist, as the inventor of the first practical IQ test. To give you some perspective, Binet worked at La Salpêtrière in Paris, a hospital known for its public displays of their female “hysterics.” Even though Binet acknowledged the limitations of his IQ test versus the remarkable diversity of human intelligence, teachers and school administrators have given IQ tests inordinate power over children's futures. And, thus, self-appointed (and community-appointed) authorities and evaluators label unconventional children as disabled.
So it's gratifying that Kaufman concludes, “We are all capable of extraordinary performance; the key is finding the mode of expression that allows you to create your own unique symphony.”
Like Kaufman, because an adult saw my intelligence and believed in me, that gave me the fire to go on to college and grad school and complete projects that I've been passionate about.
As a kid, when I drew people, fingers weren't necessary. Because the person I drew had her hands in fists.
Basinger knocks this one out of the park. Her thesis: Hollywood movies of the Golden Age not only dictated female conformity, but more importantly, did the exact opposite: they depicted women breaking all the rules, hence making audience members' dreams reality. This is why women's films were so popular among women. Before the perfunctory “happy ending” moral-of-the-story of marriage and children, these films showed women doing everything—and everyone—else.
Sped through this Hollywood Babylonia about Barbara Payton, a talented actress whose need for self destruction was stronger than her need to act. Payton, through ghost writer Leo Guild, describes her tragic life with such campy relish that it becomes entertaining and funny. Formative moments in Payton's childhood, when she first learned to provide favors to boys, and later men, lead to her ultimate fall into prostitution. If you like this book, I recommend Hedy Lamarr's “Ecstacy and Me,” which Guild also ghost wrote.
I loved the thorough research and classic-film details of this meticulously crafted biography about Mary Astor's “mother-love sacrifice:” her embarking on a custody battle with her ex-husband, who threatened to expose her diary. Here's a quote from the book that explains the import of Astor's diary extracts that were published in the 1930s: “Although the writing ... was ... ‘an over-emotional account of a romantic interlude,' never had so frank a document concerning a Hollywood personality's amorous adventures been made public. Astor spoke offhandedly about open marriages and extramarital affairs, presenting a woman who lived far outside the social norms of American morality. Thus, those diary extracts made for extremely steamy reading.” Egan is evenhanded and understanding throughout. And at the end of the book, after Astor had been through many, many difficulties and her film career was played out, I was stunned to learn that she was only 46 years old. An extraordinary woman.
In The Lonely City, the author explores artists whose work and/or lives represent urban loneliness—Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanis, David Wojnarowicz—during a lonely time in her life.
The last paragraphs of the book are very moving:
“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars.... But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting? About desire? ...About experiencing unhappiness? Why this need... to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turning inward from the world at large?
“In her discussion about [her sewn fiber-art piece] ‘Strange Fruit,' Zoe Leonard made a statement about this business of imperfection, about the way life is made up of endless failures of intimacy, endless errors and separations that anyway culminate only with loss. ‘At first, the sewing was a way to think about David [Wojnarowicz]. I'd think about the things I'd like to repair and all the things I'd like to put back together.... After awhile, I began thinking about loss itself.... All the friends I'd lost. All the mistakes I've made. The inevitability of a scarred life.... The attempt to sew it back together. This mending... provided something for me. Maybe just time or the rhythm of sewing. I haven't been able to change anything in the past,... but I've been able to experience my love and loss in a measured and continuous way. To remember.'
“There are so many things that art can't do. It can't bring the dead back to life. It can't mend arguments between friends.... All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions.... It does have a capacity to create intimacy. It does have a way of healing wounds. And better yet, of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing, and not all scars are ugly. If I sound adamant, it's because I'm speaking from personal experience.... The way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing, by way of this contact, the fact that loneliness, longing does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.
“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities. And there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions, too, with a similarly homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect.... We are fed the notion that all difficult feelings—depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage—are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment. Of doing time... in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.
“I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone.... I think it's about two things: Learning how to befriend yourself, and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are, in fact, a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion which can and should be resisted. Loneliness is personal and it is also political. Loneliness is collective. It is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules. And nor is there any need to feel shame. Only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars,... this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness. What matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open. Because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.”
Recommended—Entertaining. Quick read. Really liked the character of Bertha Cool.
I'm craving a big slice of vanilla cake with lots of frosting now. And hotcakes with five pats of butter, and syrup. And coffee with cream—not that watered-down half-and-half, but thick, yellow, whipping cream. And cigarettes. Lots and lots of deep inhales of relaxing cigarettes.
It wasn't very memorable, but great entertainment. Loved this snapshot of 1939.
“Every day we try to kill one another.... We hate life. We hate ourselves.”
The Lover has the things that make the best stories: suffering and pleasure.
“He was no fool like other people (they who believed his promises when he knew better than to believe them himself); and knowing it, he yet craved the drink that would bring the whole ruin down upon him again.
“And what of the passing and lost, the uncounted and unrecoverable days used up in those depths? The time that went down the drain and never came back? What thing was there in all the world that could ever repay you for those days...?
“And wasn't that using up life frightfully fast, or—worse than fast—unaware? Time was all you had, all anyone had, and you weren't counting, you let it slip by as if the unused day or week might offer itself over again tomorrow. But it didn't and couldn't—it had been used even though you hadn't used it. Had you no better use for precious time than that? What are you if the chief good and market of your time be but to drink and sleep? Hadn't you in youth often cried out what a day to be alive? And how many days had there been, since, when you weren't even able to long for death? Why ask how many? You could never say, you had lost count too long ago. The lost lost days, so many that you were something a good deal less than your thirty-three years, many months less, whole gaps and periods of your life taken out in blank—most shameful and wanton waste of all, because nothing could ever give them back again. Compensation for your loss, recovery of time itself, lay only in re-entering that blank once more where time was uncounted and time didn't count, drinking yourself out of the middle of the week and into your timeless time-out.”
—The Lost Weekend
Nathanael West is my new favorite author. He is bleak, deadpan, cynical, and tortured, all refuges of the hyper-sensitive artist. Miss Lonelyhearts isn't as well-crafted as Day of the Locust, but West gets big points in my book for referring to Krafft-Ebing and Huysmans. He also refers to Des Esseintes's memorial to his virility here: “Alas, after much good fun the day comes when you realise that soon you must die. You keep a stiff upper lip and decide to give a last party. You invite all your old mistresses, trainers, artists, and boon companions. The guests are dressed in black,... the table is a coffin carved for you by Eric Gill. You serve caviar and blackberries and liquorice candy and coffee without cream.”
There are some affirming ideas in this book.
“The outcome cannot matter.... You will keep making your work, regardless of the outcome. You will keep sharing your work, regardless of the outcome. You were born to create, regardless of the outcome. You will never lose trust in the creative process, even when you don't understand the outcome.”
“Not expressing creativity will drive people crazy.”
“Done is better than good.”
“When it's for love, you'll do it anyhow.”
“Since when did creativity become a suffering contest?”
“What would you do even if you might fail?”
“You are worthy ... regardless of the outcome.”
When you have writer's block, be like Tristram Shandy and get dressed up.
“Dress for the novel you want to write.”
Loved soaking in the film references and info, but was let down by Oswalt's pat conclusion that there's more to life than film. Oh—spoiler alert!
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.”
—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
An entertaining curiosity, especially if you're interested in the lives of artists and writers. I admire novels with experimental structure, but, I'm sad to say, many don't stick with me.
Profound book. Profoundly sad. Profound investigation of unhappiness.
The thesis that runs through this book is how the physical, emotional, and incestuous abuse that Hayworth's father inflicted in her teen years stamped the rest of her life.
Rita Hayworth was naturally shy and introverted, but was forced to dance from the age of 12 to earn money for her family. She traveled on the road with her father to perform alluring Spanish dances with him as a partner. To make matters worse, she was expected to take care of her father's sexual needs in her mother's absence.
The rest of her life was a quest for love, safety–to be taken care of. She sought out controlling, often abusive men, yet eventually would rebel against them by cutting them out of her life. She felt that she had to be a highly sexualized love goddess onscreen, while constantly wanting to escape Hollywood.
There was no solace for her in the end, because she developed Alzheimer's disease at a relatively young age.
(I listened to the audio version of this book.)
“I looked at her with love and almost with terror, as I contemplated what I was ready to suffer for her sake.”
This is a beautiful novel. It is a great solace to discover a new, vibrant book from the canon.
This book, published in 1848, makes a perfect companion piece to Émile Zola's Nana (1880). They both depict prostitutes, a popular subject of the French nineteenth-century Naturalists.
There are many similarities between the two novels, but Dumas's depiction of his character is more romantic than Zola's—because he is describing his own real experience of having been “l'amour du coeur” of courtesan Marie Duplessis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Duplessis).
On the other hand, Zolas's character, Nana Coupeau, is a composite of various nineteenth-century demi-mondaines, such as Blanche d'Antigny, Anna Deslions, Delphine de Lizy, and Hortense Schneider.
Zola also drew inspiration for Nana from a Parisian courtesan he met, Valtesse de La Bigne. For example, both Zola's character Nana and Valtesse de La Bigne had elaborately decorated beds. De La Bigne's bed is shown on her wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valtesse_de_La_Bigne.
Valtesse de La Bigne is also the inspiration for Valtesse, a Seattle burlesque troupe (https://www.valtesseproductions.com/), which shows our enduring interest in courtesans.
Pleasant and interesting
I liked Speedboat. I liked the humor and the author's ability to capture a mood, a place, a time. I liked its unique form. But after a while, the narrator felt glib. After a while, the anecdotes felt trivial. So, it was pleasant and likable, but stayed too much on the surface, and I like novels that make me feel more, or at least dazzle me with their authors' cerebrations.
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.... To work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.”
This book is for plotters and non-fiction writers, authors of wilderness and science.
On any given page, the author writes about things like the daughter of his daughter Laura, the nuclei most prone to fission, and the Japanese name for explosive balloons that shut down the Hanford nuclear plant. His writing is drowning in facts.
If you are also one of these writers, you'll like this book.