Francesca Penchant
This is the most shocking book I've ever read, and i've read a lot of shocking books. Sebastian horsley has done a lot of things. He's been a crackhead, a gigolo, he's eaten his own shit and had affairs with both men and women. He's tried to kill himself.
The book gets bogged down when his life is mired in drugs, but all in all it's funny, entertaining, and outrageous.
Good design saves lives. I tell people about Tufte's redesign of the Challenger disaster data to describe the highest purpose of graphic design. Tell it to those who say, “Make it look pretty.” The Challenger was a tragedy that could've been averted. O-rings break down at low temps, and it was cold when it launched, and so it launched and blew up.
The scientists who tried to prevent the launch of the Challenger presented NASA with a tome of data and tables and words that should've been clearly presented with a simple graph.
Valuable information about positive psychology, but of course, it isn't much more than a pleasant read if you don't actually adopt the techniques. Also, I was kind of annoyed that it was so skewed toward people in business and parents—it made a lot of assumptions about the reader, which is so common in these general-interest psychology books.
Helpful guide about learning to make your stories more accessible. But, I got exasperated with the conventional scenes that she uses as examples.
I would have liked more examples from classic literature, instead of popular movies. For example, if you're not a huge fan of action movies, when she says something like, “Die Hard is the perfect story,” it's going to be perplexing.
Also, she gives short shrift to avant-garde literature by saying that people only read it to feel smart. I get really excited when an author challenges literary conventions, so I would've liked it if she hadn't dismissed us like that.
I really enjoyed this book—learned so much. It is a magnificent achievement, although its focus on corruption, racism, violence, and selfishness made me feel pretty depressed by the time I finished.
“Women need to become literary ‘criminals,' break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.”
Kathy Acker blows me away. She has influenced many writers, and is among the most important postmodernist authors. Her writing is a mix of obscenity, violence, and literariness.
“In Memoriam to Identity” (1990) is inspired by the writings and lives of Rimbaud and Faulkner; in one passage, she rewrites Faulkner's “The Story of Temple Drake;” in another, she retells the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine.
Her writing is challenging. She ignores rules of story, grammar, punctuation, and good manners. It is immediate, as if she wrote in an automatic way, spewing out thoughts, obscenities, ideas, scenes, memories, knowledge, nonsense. Here's a passage from “In Memoriam to Identity:”
**“R[imbaud] wrote Delahaye about all that had happened to him and what he, R, wanted:My friend, You're eating white flour and mud in your pigsty. I don't miss Charleville. I don't miss being a bored pig where the sun dries up all brains but sloth. Your brains or feelings're being dried up: dead pig Delahaye. Emotions are the movers of this world. Me: I'm thirsty. What I'm thirsty for—whom I'm thirsty for—I can't get so I drink poisons. I've got to free myself. From what? Pain? Oh—for more poisons. Maybe more poisons'll come and I'll go so far, I'll emerge. Something is trying to emerge from this mess. I don't know how.**
Acker used literature to rebel against everything. She wrote, “Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.”
I was worried by how “general interest” the beginning was, but was relieved that the book delved much deeper than expected. Full of interviews and studies.
This book is a barrage of questions to think about when writing characters. Some are useful, but overall their point of view betrays a conventional and gender-biased approach to characters and plots.
For example, the author asks questions of female characters that he doesn't ask of male characters.
From the beginning, the author focuses on female bodies: “Let's say the murderer is a woman. Some other questions might arise: Does she have large or small breasts? Her waist? Hips? Legs?” He doesn't also say, “Let's say the murderer is a man. Does he have a large or small package? His chest? Hips? Legs?”
And when he asks, “Are her clothes revealing?” he doesn't also ask, “Are his clothes revealing?” Or, for the non-binary, “Are their clothes revealing?”
Again and again, the centrality of straight, male characters is assumed. For example, “Let's take a scene where a man and his wife are having lunch.” It's implied that a straight man is the protagonist, just as a straight woman would be the assumed protagonist if he had also written, “Let's take a scene where a woman and her husband are having lunch.”
He often describes women as “girls,” as in, “A poor girl marrying a rich man...” (No, he's not describing the custom of child brides.) “A poor woman marrying a rich man...” would've been more accurate.
Again and again, the author makes cultural assumptions—the main character is male, has a nine-to-five job, has a boss, is middle class, is straight, is married—that give the whole book an oppressive conventionality—not something I want in a book that's supposed to be about creativity!
A great high five of a book!
“Thumb your nose at all jeerers, know-it-alls, and critics” (Brenda Ueland) and read this ode to all of us pantsers, INFJs, and INFPs who start fast and fix later.
“You should lower the bar from ‘best-seller' to ‘would not make someone vomit.'”
“The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy.”
“Amateur writers who take years and years to write their rough drafts are sentencing themselves and those around them to a constant barrage of ‘novel guilt.' ... By compressing all the procrastination and ensuing self-loathing into thirty manageable days, you'll be more pleasant to be around the rest of the time.”
Starts out like The Postman Always Rings Twice and then turns into a nightmare. Goes on forever.