Jesse

Tales of Earthsea mystified and delighted me when I was in primary school, but I didn't think I'd find The Left Hand of Darkness equally engaging at 31.

The politics, relationship/s, gender commentary, and pacing were all chef's kiss, and the interspersed folk tales/legends were lovely little treats.

I'm giving Le Guin the benefit of the doubt with regards to the narrator's frequent anthropologically-flavoured misogynistic remarks. Genly Ai is a representative of a (our) patriarchal culture; it's precisely these biases that the ambisexual Gethians provide a foil for (in spite of the persistent use of male pronouns).

I was vibing with the free indirect speech early on, but as Stephen's sense of self importance grew, my interest waned. The uncritical portrayal of this adolescent self-aggrandisement is no doubt realistic, but I'm not sure I could take another page of his lectures on esthetics. I also felt that the same effect with regards to religion could have been achieved without dedicating half the novel to sermons.

Ouch.

A day in the life of several married women living in the fictional middle class suburb of Arlington Park, culminating (in true Cusk style) in a dinner party.I found the opening sections compelling—every exchange was stuffed with tension and subtext—but the waters were gradually muddied with less elegantly-handled class commentary. It grates slightly to read someone of Cusk's background picking at the threads of aspiration culture, class mobility, and internalised misogyny in this way.Outside in the shop a sudden crowd had formed at the till, of girls with sunglasses pushed back on their heads and girls in tiny vests, girls with hair chemically coloured, curled or straightened, fat girls with white elephant's legs in short skirts, girls who were morose or screamed with laughter or talked into their mobile phones.But it's not all misses on that front:None of them, not even Joe, understood what it was to be so proximate to oblivion. They were hallmarked, like silver: they saw the world as categorised, not chaotic. But she, Christine, was only one generation removed from abandonment: she, the offspring of a scrap, a piece of litter blowing in the wind, felt always the presence of the enormous darkness from which she had come.A flavour of resentment (born of wasted potential and sacrifice) underscores each section, punctuated with impotent acts of rebellion, which works to unite the women, but also homogenises their characters, making them increasingly difficult to distinguish.The feelings expressed around motherhood are expectedly and refreshingly honest, but I felt most sentiments had already been excellently covered in [b:A Life's Work 522426 A Life's Work On Becoming a Mother Rachel Cusk https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1312001649l/522426.SX50.jpg 930836]. And maybe it's because I'm accustomed to Cusk's sparser Outline-era voice, but I found the maximalist descriptions of shopping centres, suburban streets and parks uninspiring, and often cringily grandiose:A young man in an anorak flew his kite, his legs astride on the grass, his arms braced against the powerfully tugging strings as if he were holding on to the world itself.Some more bits I liked:Juliet never thought about school until the moment she walked through its wrought-iron gates. It was Benedict who thought, in order to be extraordinary. He ran off their joint life as if it were a generator fuelled by Juliet, and then he separated himself and thought.All men are murderers, Juliet thought. All of them. They murder women. They take a woman, and little by little they murder her.It was hard, harder than she'd expected it to be, to take the vigorous, joyful, wild body of Katherine and clothe it in a school uniform. Until that moment the possibilities for Katherine had seemed endless.Katherine's femaleness had seemed like a joyful, a beautiful thing. It had seemed invincible, even in its halfformed fragility. She had not realised what she was. She had only delighted in it, in her female being.Now, though, she was different. She knew she was a girl. She returned from school full of a kind of programmatic agony. Her soul was in training. They had told her what she was, and now she knew. She didn't play with the boys in the playground, she told Juliet. Juliet asked why not, and Katherine shrugged.None of the girls do, she said.Amanda felt that if she were not married, it would not have been required of her to go to the butcher.These visits seemed to emanate from a core of physical embroilment, from a fleshly basis that sought out other flesh by which to feed itself. It all seemed somehow grotesquely related, the conjoining and making of bodies and the dismemberment and ingestion of them.The room, the house, even Arlington Park itself, increasingly wore for her the lineaments of a lived past into which future possibilities were unable to intrude; of a fundamental sadness that was the unalterable relic of experience.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from Candide, but something about the way Maggie Nelson dropped Voltaire's famous quote about killing an admiral to encourage the others into Bluets made me feel like I was missing out having not read something of his.

Candide comprises a series of unfortunate events constructed to test (or ridicule) the philosophical premise that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” If Voltaire had called the novel Fuck You, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—Philosophical Optimism is Trash and So Are You I would have been better prepared.

It was at its best for me when contemplating happiness (and, briefly, suicide). I imagine the maxim ‘money can't buy happiness' may already have been tired in the 17th century, but either way it's well-expressed here.

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley—in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered—or simply to sit here and do nothing?

It's giving By Grand Central Station. Heavy on the Wittgenstein and Plato, but light on the narrative or thematic cohesion. Nelson makes the decision to restrict details of her lover to the type of sex they were having (for fear of displacing her memories with her writing, as with childhood photographs), but what results for me is a paradoxical combination of deep, powerful longing and nonchalance that I struggled to connect with.

At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette. One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don't get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don't get to choose.

Once Belcourt finds a way to relegate his academic discourse to the framework of a novel rather than explicitly referencing every theoretician in the text, it's over for you hoes.

Can men have meaningful, long-lasting friendships? Hustvedt says yes, but also probably one will want to fuck the other's much younger wife.

It's a testament to Hustvedt's skill as a writer that she's able to so accurately render a self-satisfied, casually misogynistic middle-aged fine art academic. I think.

If there had been just one more exhaustive description of Bill's whimsical fairytale diorama cube installation artworks, I wouldn't have made it.

What a great way to round out a year of reading. Displacement and alienation, loneliness, trauma, love and war, absurdity and allegory, ritual and tradition, faith. It's terrifying, moving, and enlightening. Statovci repeatedly knocked the air out of my lungs. The translation is excellent—the language cohesive and economical. The more surreal moments reminded me of Bulgakov's [b:The Master and Margarita 117833 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327867963l/117833.SY75.jpg 876183], grounded in a more sinewy, visceral narrative.The cat wanted a story whose protagonist's life began from a set of impossible circumstances, a story that would be so heart-wrenching that it might make him shake his head at the state of the world. But he wanted the story to end in such a way that he was able to applaud the protagonist's ability to take matters into his own hands—despite the fact that the protagonist had learned that skill specifically so that he could shake off the burden of other people's pity—and in order to reaffirm his own beliefs. Anyone can change the direction of his life, any time at all, if only he has enough motivation: that was the moral of the story. The cat found it easier to believe this than to think about what it actually meant: that the word anyone actually referred to a very small group of people, that time has no direction, and that motivation is rarely the salient difference between people.

The story had a few high-impact moments, but despite the feminist themes and tone, the reliance on horror/fantasy tropes gave a sense of superficiality, and the pacing felt off. Art-wise, the illustrations often felt like drafts—scratchy dark ink blocked in with bold gradients—which made some of the action difficult to follow. I wanted to love this because I love Carmen, but it wasn't meant to be.

The grief trumpets its triumph. It is raving. It craves violence for expression, but can find none. There is no end. The drowning never ceases. The water submerges and blends, but I am not dead. O I am not dead. I am under the sea. The entire sea is on top of me.

For me, good poetry has an element of universality; the act of reading/interpretation becomes itself an act of authorship (à la Barthes). But the emotional charge in By Grand Central Station seems tied to Smart's personal experience in a way that limits its accessibility. It feels both shockingly public and elusively private.

I wanted the text to be either more or less coherently grounded in the reality of the events Smart was chronicling (events that require research in order to follow with any degree of clarity). At times the narrative context is handed directly to the reader, but at other times it's completely obscured (often in its place Smart asks us to build impressions on a sparse framework of intertextual references), while the sense of it being crucial to the text's interpretation remains frustratingly present.

There's no denying the power of the cutting imagery that flashes throughout this work, but ultimately I just wasn't moved by this in the way that I thought I might be.

Horrifically bad writing. I was literally convulsing as Jessica Andrews smashed me over the head with re-hashed versions of the same overblown metaphors:

I told myself the scrabbling way in which I lived was more real and yet I didn't feel solid at all. I got snagged on everything, my knees black with bruises, twigs and leaves caught in my hair.

I thought I had chosen London as the place where I would make my own life, but its edges were sharp and cruel and I got caught on them, bloodying my ankles and wrists.

And nonsensical similes:

The music is thick with joy and it presses into me like wet sand.

The streets are viscous with heat and piss, bodies spilling from doorways, wrapped in sickly tendrils of weed.

And combinations of the two:

You held a flame between your fingers and I wanted to swallow you, but I was afraid of the taste of my own desire, like bleach and petrol, peaches dipped in salt. You knotted your want into a rope and threw it to me. I shivered in the dawn, counting dead stars, then I reached out my hands and took it.

Midway through the novel comes this unnervingly meta moment:

‘I'm finished,' says Isaac and I pull his exercise book towards me. I asked him to describe his favourite hobby and he has written about eating pizza.‘I love pizza because it is cheesy and tomatoey,' he reads. ‘It is chewy and stringy and soft.'‘Can you write a simile?' I ask him. ‘If you had to compare pizza to something, what would you compare it to?'He thinks for a while, chewing the end of his pen. ‘Pizza is like a soft, warm bed,' he writes, and I smile.

But sadly it isn't a true moment of self awareness; Andrews continues to use her creative writing powers for evil, referring to the love interest in the second person like the whole novel is a self-conscious creative writing exercise that got out of hand.

Not only does Andrews describe the world she's created in garish (read “vivid and lyrical”?) unnatural gradients and hues, but the characters of this world speak this way too. The love interest writes her a message at one point:

It has just rained and the sky is the colour of a cantaloupe melon. The clouds are bruised lemons and I'm sitting beneath an orange tree. I'm writing in my journal, wondering who collects the oranges when they fall from the trees and what happens to them afterwards.

Still, she couldn't stand his inquisitiveness. Everything he asked her was a plea for affection. He didn't care for her, not really. He only wanted to seduce her by seeming to care, so that she would care for him. Children are selfish, she thought. They rob you of life. They thrive as you toil and wither, and then they bury you, their tears never once falling out of regret for what they've stolen.

Marek, the misshapen and pitiful son of of an abusive and self-flagellating shephard, learns that ascension is achieved not through religious servitude, but (as we knew all along) nepotism. But can anything fill the void left absent of a father's approval?

For the most part, a captivating, repulsive, absurdly humorous work of fabulist fiction. The first half pounds along, driven by shocking events and revelations (achieved by subtle, well-timed shifts between characters' perspectives), but the pace of the second half slows considerably—hijacked by the will and whim of Villiam, who holds the reader hostage at tedious dinner table conversations.

The conclusion brings a rush of change and resolution, but it feels disconnected, hurried, and lacks impact. I expected a neat and considered pay-off owing to the fable-like tone, but was left wanting.

Still loved it, though.

It was wonderful to read a novel that centered trans poc characters, and the sharp energy and inventive, vibrant world created by Waidner was, for the most part, a thrill to read. However, for me, the story sat in an uncanny valley between convention and experimentation. The slippery dream logic often strayed towards deus ex machina, which, along with the chaotic pacing, gave the feeling that the narrative was being supplied off the cuff—like the entirety of the novel comprised Cataclysmic Tabloid #43.

I'm not usually one to balk at long novels, but I would have enjoyed this one a lot more had it been around a third of the length. I'd be happy on one level to see someone pull out a cleaver and produce a bastardised version, leaving the narrative framework that a western reader would feel safest with and leaving dense and unfamiliar modes of address, stories and references in a messy heap on the floor, but I'd know somehow that the true heart of the novel would be left there with the offal.

I couldn't find peace with the seemingly redundant meta-commentary. “There's no harm in starting the story right here, that is, the way we're doing it right now,” it's stated early on. “Not much need be said about [whomever/whatever], as the story doesn't really concern [them/it],” begging the question of why this subject was dragged up in the first place. These explicit goiters of inefficiency, as George Saunders might refer to them, layered on frustration for me that was not shaken off by any later re-incorporation or reveal.

I am grateful for the exposure to themes of partition, despite the opening of part three being maybe the most lost I've ever been reading a book.

I wanted more on Bahu and her Reeboks.

Thick
I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine. p6

Fixing my feet became a way of life for me, an undercurrent of thousands of messages that form the subconscious playlist of our identity. It plays alongside other whispers like, “work twice as hard” and “keep your legs closed” and “don't talk to strangers” and “don't be a stranger” and “remember who you are and where you came from.” p11

The personal essay was an economic problem and a social problem dressed up as a cultural taste problem. p13

Speech becomes rhetoric, or a persuasive form of speech, only when the one speaking can make a legitimate claim to some form of authority. It can be moral authority or legal authority or rational authority. At every turn, black women have been categorically excluded from being expert performers of persuasive speech acts in the public that adjudicates our humanity. p14

In the Name of Beauty
... beauty isn't actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order. p26

As long as the beautiful people are white, what is beautiful at any given time can be renogotiated without redistributing capital from white to nonwhite people. p26

That Nyong'o was atop a list of the world's most beautiful people does not invalidate the reality for many dark-skinned black women any more than Mark Zuckerburg making a billion dollars as a college drop-out invalidates the value of college for millions. Indeed, any system of oppression must allow exceptions to validate itself as meritorious. How else will those who are oppressed by the stem internalize their own oppression? p31

“I just like what I like” is always a capitalist lie. Beauty would be a useless concept for capital if it were only a preference int he purest sense. Capital demands that beauty be coercive. p34

Whatever power decides that beauty is, it must always be more than reducible to a single thing. Beauty is a wonderful form of capital in a world that organizes everything around gender and then requires a performance of gender that makes some of its members more equal than others. p36

But if I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market. And my faith becomes a salve for the white women who want to have the right politics while keeping the privilege of never having to live them. White women need me to believe I can earn beauty, because when I want what I cannot have, what they have becomes all the more valuable. p38

Dying to Be Competent
Professional legitimacy/prestige. Not being believed due to a perceived lack of “competency” - perceived even as an unreliable source of information on one's own body (miscarriage).

Know Your Whites
I found the central argument of this essay difficult to grasp: the necessity of blackness to define and stabilise whiteness.

Myers Park people donate, their money and their time, to good causes. And these perfectly civil people live in intentionally cultivated, nominally diverse, in-town panopticons that need no guard in the central watchtower but whiteness. p57

Whiteness, the idea, the identity tethered to no nation of origin, no place, no gods, exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne. ... For that situational dominance to reproduce itself, there must be a steady pole. That pole is blackness. And so the paradox of how we could elect Obama and Trump is not in how black Obama is or is not. It is, instead, in how white he is (or, is not). The Obama-Trump dialectic is not progress/backlash but do-si-do; one dance, the same steps, mirroring each other, and each existing only in tandem. Like whiteness itself, Obama was because Trump is. White voters allowed Barack Obama to become an idea and a president because he was a fundamental projection of the paradox that defines them as white. p60

... it did not matter that Obama had faith in white people. They needed only to have faith in him: in his willingness to reflect their ideal selves back at them, to change the world without changing them, to change blackness for them without being black to them. p61

... naming white innocence “fragile” belies its fundamental nature, which is domination. The performance of fragility can only be done to great effect because whiteness necessarily dominates and oppress. Whiteness isn't then fragile, but blunt; not vulnerable, but resilient.

Black Is Over (Or, Special Black)
Prestige/perception differences between “ethnic-black” and “black-black” students/academics.
Post-race references misguided as they “[pose] that ending blackness was the goal of anti-racist work when the real goal has always been and should always be ending whiteness.” p80

The Price of Fabulousness
Much like we interrogate what a woman was wearing when she was raped, we look for ways to assign personal responsibility for structural injustices to bodies we collectively do not value. p83

Of course, the trick is you can never know the counterfactual of your life. There is no evidence of access denied. Who knows what I was not granted for not enacting the right status behaviours or symbols at the right time for an agreeable authority? p84

Black Girlhood, Interrupted
It was over a plate of ribs at my aunt's dining room table that I learned that being a woman is about what men are allowed to do to you. p89
When adults say that black girls, not yet adults, are more knowledgeable about sex than their white female peers, they are saying that a girl child is responsible for all the desires that adults project onto her. p94

Girl 6
For many black people, buying hair in the local beauty supply store is how we experienced immigration—Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese shopkeepers selling us colonized beauty from the heads of poor women in nations that the West has deliberately kept poor. We wear globalism on our heads. p103

Saunders rallies against the idea that the best writing flows from the author fluidly, riding on wings of sudden inspiration. Instead he argues that the real process lies in incremental revision, and that finding your voice as an author comes from the intuition guiding these countless small changes and refinements.

The main satisfaction in reading this, for me, was gaining a greater appreciation of what it is that made these Russian masters so good at their craft.

Only women knew the strength it took to love men through their evolution to who they thought they were supposed to be.

Both bloated (in its prose) and devoid of the fabric that, for me, gives a multi-generational tale its weight. The subject matter is highly-charged, but the characters that move throughout feel more puppet than person.

I can accept character-as-stand-in for the purpose of making broader comments on the nature of home, security and violence, but so much of the book's impact hinges on a lack-lustre emotional payload that these positions would be better expressed in a work on non-fiction. As if to reinforce this, the strongest image from the book, and the one that will undoubtedly stick with me the longest, comes from reality—the haunting and devastating story of Omayra Sánchez.

The ending adds to the sense that these characters have not been real with a saccharine against-all-odds, redemptive resolution that reinforces that love and family are the Infinite Country, but at the cost of undermining the themes of generational trauma, and the impact of the book as a whole.

“Fear—of being drawn to another man whose phlegmatic nature will limit and distort mine—or for whose sake I will limit and distort myself.“

It's refreshingly intimate to read a text that hasn't been crafted for an audience. You can no longer indulge in speculation at the author's intention—instead you're released to gaze at the fragmentary insights, de-focusing your vision (as for a Magic Eye), and marvelling as a picture of a life emerges.

I recognised the brutality of unchecked self-criticism as it presented itself here. Garner deals constantly with criticism of her work and her worth as a writer, but remains her own harshest critic.

I am the only person in the world who carries round an inventory of my crimes. Everyone else is busy with their own.

When I was not yet ‘a writer' I used to write colossal, twenty-page letters to people. Now I communicate on the backs of postcards. This thought made me feel quite cheerful, as if I had imperceptibly, over years, and not by the exercise of will, rechannelled wasted energy into a more useful course—but now I mess with the taps, I keep them turned off, or let just a tiny trickle escape.

I like people when they are in a great mass, thousands of lonely or rather solitary blobs, each one with ‘le front barré de souci'. (The forehead crossed out with worry)

Power dynamics, class consciousness and privilege, social and intellectual coming of age, and consent. Crucially, this story is told not from the fierce inflexible position of a woman whose actions begin to destabilise the entrenched misogyny and entitlement of wealthy USYD colleges, but through Michaela's pragmatic, empathetic and nuanced lens. Hers is a voice that considers and balances all the social, political, and personal pressures she is under. It's a voice that, when not added to the pyre, is taken from her.

Reid's writing is searingly intelligent. Humorous and cutting in her insightful portrayals of the reductive feminism on display in these institutions:

Eve signed up to represent Fairfax in drama, with a piece promisingly titled: What Women Want. Self-proclaimed feminist content usually fared well with the judges, who were looking for ‘diverse voices' and, being former college residents themselves, usually looked no further than recent Sydney private school graduates.”

‘I was so disappointed in her when I found out.' This was not something Eve had expressed to me. I admired how expertly she was manipulating her disappointment—fashioning it into a personal joke, which I would spoil if I treated it seriously, much less defended myself.

* I acknowledge others' point that comparisons to Rooney here are reductive, but I feel she is the gold standard for many in this space. Blame Meg Mason for invoking her on the inside cover!

Siddhartha, but make it seagulls.

So much for swearing off books featuring adultery. Four stars in spite of the fact that I now know my repartee will always be inadequate.

I took this book with me to the barber to read while I was waiting. My barber noticed it and asked me what I thought, but before I could respond he started to expound on what he thought were the “problems” with Solnit's first essay. I sat quietly as he listed, without realising it, all the reasons that this book, and feminism in general, threaten him and his perspective on the world (i.e. the best bits).

Five stars; minus one for having to find a new barber.

Oh yes, life is so poetic, Milan. Tereza was indeed wrong to hold Tomas' infedility against him—it is her fault that he was too scared to leave someone who loved him unconditionally and asked so little in return. Yuck.

Beautiful (in that brutal, tragic way we all love so much) and thought-provoking, up until the final story (which happens, also, to be by far the longest).

Filled with metaphors that harness the raw senses and impressions of the South with horrifying and unexpected potency. “Her mind is a pink meshbag filled with baby toes.”