Jesse
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.
“The belly is a demon. It doesn't remember how well you treated it yesterday; it'll cry out for more tomorrow.”
“That knife's a breadwinner too. After all, you can be put in the cells for keeping it, and only a man without a conscience would say: lend us your knife, we're going to slice some sausage, and you can go fuck off.”
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.
“Useless, you say? But pleasure is always useful, and wild, boundless power—if only over a fly—is also a pleasure of a certain sort. Man is a despot by nature and likes to play the torturer. You like it terribly.”
“A true gentleman, even if he loses his entire fortune, must not show emotion.”
Being science fiction, I began this novel under the assumption that it would have more to offer in the way of ideas than its popular genre counterparts. I blame works of magnificent creativity like [b:Star Maker 525304 Star Maker Olaf Stapledon https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328048540s/525304.jpg 1631492] for this misconception.I tried to allow myself to enjoy the predictable flow of the story, and mostly succeeded in doing so, but found that there were a few things standing in the way. For the most part the heavy-handed social commentary was to blame. It was painful to read and worked completely counter to what the simple and entertaining narrative achieved best. The small portions of direct address from the narrator had the same issue.I also couldn't help but be disappointed by the predictable conclusion, complete with painful HEA reunion of essentially discarded characters.
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.
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
Loved the first half, but it gradually became a little too far fetched, domestic, and reflective. Some of the themes were also quite tired, but the comic-related content evoked a wonderful nostalgia.
It's been a long time since I last consumed a novel as voraciously as I did Norwegian Wood. One for the emotions rather than the intellect, but not in a negative sense.
Toru's final sexual encounter was possibly a little far-fetched in my eyes, but it helped reinforce the role that sex played in the novel more generally.
Refreshing to read a novel that feels so energetically modern. The timeless problems of family, relationship, and loneliness, are woven poetically and inseparably into the fabric of modernity and of the lives we find ourselves living now, in the age of Google and Trump.
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.
“Our higher officials are fond as a rule of nonplussing their subordinates; the methods to which they have recourse to attain that end are rather various.”
“... a thin little woman with a pinched-up face, drawn together like a fist... “
“Who's crying there?' he added, after a short pause—'Mother? Poor thing! Whom will she feed now with her exquisite beetroot-soup?”
“The estate had only recently been put on to the new reformed system, and the new mechanism worked, creaking like an ungreased wheel, warping and cracking like homemade furniture of unseasoned wood.”
“There's no help for it, Vasya! A son is a separate piece cut off. He's like the falcon that flies home and flies away at his pleasure; while you and I are like funguses in the hollow of a tree, we sit side by side, and don't move from our place. Only I am left you unchanged for ever, as you for me.'“
“The whole person of Arkady's uncle, with its aristocratic elegance, had preserved the gracefulness of youth and that air of striving upwards, away from earth, which for the most part is lost after the twenties are past.”
“People are like trees in a forest; no botanist would think of studying each individual birch-tree.”
“A man's capable of understanding anything—how the æther vibrates, and what's going on in the sun—but how any other man can blow his nose differently from him, that he's incapable of understanding.”
“When a person went to the doctor–there was only one, and he specialized in everything–there was only one medicine. After he had diagnosed you he prescribed the medicine. You took the slip to the pharmacy to have it filled, but the pharmacist never could read what the doctor had written, so he gave you the only pill he had, which was aspirin. And it cured whatever you had.”
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).
p. 20
“The the eyes were horrible. Looking at them I got the feeling that they were not genuine eyes at all but mechanical dummies animated by electricity or the like, with a tiny pinhole in the centre of the ‘pupil' through which the real eye gazed secretively and with great coldness. Such a conception, possibly, with no foundation at all in fact, disturbed me agonisingly and gave rise in my mind to interminable speculations as to the colour and quality of the real eye and as to whether, indeed, it was real at all or merely another dummy with its pinhole on the same plane as the first one so that the real eye, possibly behind thousands of these absurd disguises, gazed out through a barrel of serried peep-holes.”
“‘Not hens' piniony under-wing feeling?' I questioned keenly. The Sergeant shook his head abstractedly.”
“‘It is nearly an insoluble pancake,' he smiled, ‘a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.'”