Reamde by Neal Stephenson

fucking christ what is wrong with me

Dubliners by James Joyce

I last read Joyce when I was perhaps 13 or 14, no doubt at the recommendation of my sister with her famous list, etc. But I have some memory of my grandfather spotting me reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and commenting something to the effect of, bravo, I didn't appreciate Joyce until I was much older than you, maybe with a note of skepticism in his voice. And he died when I was 13, so it was certainly far back there. He was right, incidentally. I didn't get much from the book at the time. I think I probably could have done a good job explaining the concept, precocious as ever, but I doubt that I truly understood it. I certainly didn't appreciate or enjoy it as I would now. Joyce was around my age when he wrote the thing.

Well, now I am old enough, and more than old enough to appreciate and enjoy Dubliners, which I am perhaps desecrating by listening to — but then Joyce explicitly endorses oral delivery of his later work, so maybe the same applies to this. As you may have heard, it's very good. Joyce has that Shakespearean quality of feeling that one could dwell in his work forever and never exhaust its linguistic riches — that, somehow, the whole of language inhabits the work, which you could explore until you died yet keep finding new insights and pleasures. And like Tolstoy, you feel that the stories do not relate events so much as they are the events themselves. That Joyce's choice of language is perfect — every word is that way because it must be so. That Joyce never falls short the perfect way of expressing the story. On top of all that, this collection from the early twentieth century feels utterly modern, not dated in the slightest other than obvious references to the particularities of the day. The story about the political hands drinking and kvetching is the closest it comes to feeling irrelevant, but even that I can recognize from my limited experience as a canvasser.

He wrote all this in his early 20s. Somehow, that fact and watching Celeste speedrunners on YouTube makes me want to "be better" yet again.

Seek by Denis Johnson

I was all set to induct Denis Johnson into my pantheon of adventurous, artistic weirdos, when suddenly, wham, there's "The Militia in Me," 1995.

Denis Johnson was a fucking boomer centrist, which is to say he was a fucking liberal, which is to say that, if he were around today, he'd probably be a Trump guy.

The piece is the purest example of the utter howling uselessness of boomer liberalism, the equivocating between the tyrannical federal government and the militia loonies who object to libertarianism because they want to kill the gays. They're the same fucking side, Denis. They're white, male authoritarians who fetishize guns and strength and, given the slightest provocation, they will merge seamlessly into a single fascistic whole, and when you, belatedly, raise a note of objection, when you realize that "country people" coming to power in the US looks just like what you saw in Kabul in 1996, they'll blow your brains out with the rest of the weak. You fucking gormless idiot.

For boomers, "oh I did drugs in the 60s, I'm a-ok with the gays, I've got my lefty bona fides" is an acceptable idea. An entire generation that, except for a handful that morphed into university professors, had no concept of the left whatsoever. The left isn't your private little epiphanies about the self and grace. It's not the space to do so, free of government intrusion. It's a check against the domination of capital; it's democratic control of our lives; it's justice; it's the sole, sad hope we have in the face of extinction. You spoiled, useless, blind, complacent yokel. 

This whole collection sells blinkered equivocation as sophistication.

But then, by the time you died, you were probably sitting on a tiny nest egg of your own. All those checks from the Paris Review. I always overcomplicate things. You were a white guy, a reformed junkie, with prestige and capital, who lived among others like you. This is nothing more than class interests. I'm embarrassed I thought it could be otherwise. Tell these assholes you'll take their shit away, whether power or toys, and the mask of centrism drops, revealing pure reaction - the defense of existing hierarchies, atop which they squat. We have to break them.

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

Melancholy, concerned with time and memory. Sometimes time collapses on itself, folds two moments a half century or longer apart into a single instance. Holocaust a looming presence throughout, lurking in the wings of memory, omnipresent but best not stared at directly.

Systematic return to the places of friends and ancestors in an effort to, what, piece together one's own murky identity?

Slippery, plays with the distinction between fiction and non.

Memories disappear without a trace, only to return in full, vivid force years later at some subtle prompting. Sometimes it is unclear whether these are memories or fantasies so palpable that they supplant immediate reality.

There are some real humdingers of sentences, nary a word out of place, like an elaborate ironwork, but I am mostly inured to the beauty of language and they do not satisfy me as they do Alison. But perhaps this can come back, as some other forgotten pleasures have lately hinted.

Recurring themes: nature, looking down at things from the Swiss Alps, being a teacher in small Central European towns, decrepitude and the wearing of time, blurring of time and space and memory, living inside someone else's memories, the Holocaust, the question of belonging to Germany, Jewishness, returning to the same place decades later, loneliness, homelessness, feeling dwarfed by industrial infrastructure, preserving from the dumb, obliterating present a few relics of the past, involuntary memory a la Proust, and other stuff like that.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Obviously, it is extraordinary that a person in her early 20s produced this book, but it would be a disservice, a slight, to the author to abstain from full throated criticism on that account. At times, this does feel sophomoric. People are too much types. Magical deaf-mutes. The camaraderie of outcasts. On the other hand, it is nice for once to read a book interested in empathizing with its characters rather than dragging them through all manner of hell.

Beginning this book: huh, wonder why schools assign To Kill a Mockingbird instead of this. Midway, reading a lengthy disquisition on black identity and Marxism: oh, I see.

Depiction of childhood feels very real and accurate. So do the sudden, inexplicable reversals of fate or bursts of violence, the deep unnameable wounds that transform characters forever in a flash and that they never mention. All very On Brand for the south. This was probably Julia Pearce, whose name I forgot.

Description of Dr. Copeland's awakening through education reminded me of Stoner by John Williams, which contained the best description of the transformative power of education I have read.

Definitely grown-up Harper Lee. Sad as shit.

I take back the bit in the first paragraph about magical deaf-mutes. McCullers makes clear that Singer's magicalness is projected onto him by lonely, needy people. Also, there's no real camaraderie of outcasts. Instead, very realistically, they misunderstand one another and clash all the more. You spend the whole novel hoping that Copeland and Blount will find each other, and then they do, and then they loathe each other. Very accurate depiction of left factionalism, white obliviousness, and the need for identity politics.

NB I listened to this. The sin. But it lent itself very well to narration. Same with Kafka - the conversational prose, only Kafka plods while this skips charmingly with a Southern vernacular. Same was true for short story collections from Saunders or Johnson, which I have always struggled with in print - something about having to absorb a new cast of characters and background for each story. In fact, I am worried the internet has permanently broken my brain, making it harder to process written text. Get the fuck off reddit.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra

Exploits Russian cliches for maximum bleak pathos. Very much an outsiders' commentary on Russian tragedy and suffering. Plays to the American high-brow. Excellent command of language and character.

The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

First Conrad in, what, 15 years?

Started liking this a lot more once I realized it was satirizing everyone.

Scene that goes back and forth between Mr and Mrs Verloc's minds right before she kills him is extraordinary.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Tenth of December by George Saunders

Lots of class anxiety.

Peppy face of bureaucratic inhumanity.

Flights of fancy as escape from dismal reality. Despite chatty, ebullient style, characters' dreams and suffering taken seriously.

Sanguine American self-delusion. Chipper.

Superficial similarities to David Sedaris, but good.

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Has Stephenson always been this bad of a writer, or am I reading him too closely to good people? He digests Big Ideas into nuggets, across which he drapes a tissue-thin plot and a few gratuitous action scenes.

The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

Zama by Antonio di Benedetto

The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson

This is going to be a thing isn't it

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Ghostly globalization.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

So good.

The White Album by Joan Didion

The panic and dread of an upper class observer with extreme sensitivity and need for control.

A fundamentally conservative person living in a time of rapid social change, seeing only disintegration.

Much of her writing is so good that you forget that what she's actually saying is bad. Bad as in either incorrect or immoral, and sometimes both.

Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Ryszard Kapuściński is the spiritual father of every Vice story that's like, "ooowee, watch me gambol with the unruly foreign poors." Just look at this bio.

The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits & Encounters

Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally

King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero by David Remnick

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta

Dispatches by Michael Herr

Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer

pg 25 tiny, bombastic cock jerks himself off for having contradictory feelings about things and the wherewithal to know it. Achieves all over the anti-war movement.

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré

Radical Chic by Tom Wolfe

While these people ARE ridiculous, the man to mock them is not one whose prose is thirty percent descriptions of suits.

Homo Zapiens by Victor Pelevin

Hey, what would you say are the odds that a guy like this who writes long psychedelic manifestos about marketing and technology, semi-disguised as narrative fiction, is a misogynist?

Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution by Julia Alekseyeva

Mostly non-ideological slice-of-life bio of a woman of the first generation of the Russian Revolution, who somehow lasted all the way to 2010. Told by her great-granddaughter, a Harvard PhD a year younger than me with health problems relating to Chernobyl. Lola, the great-grandmother, was born in 1910 to a Jewish Ukrainian family and survived the epicenter of probably the greatest bloodletting in human history (by volume, not proportion) as a young, spirited, indomitable communist. Book does a weird thing at the end connecting millennial socialism with Bolshevism, weird not because inappropriate but because it's just alluded to in like a single panel and then it's done. Unclear whether Lola's "a few bad apples spoiled it all" Khrushchevism is really Lola's or Julia's. Alekseyeva also treads lightly over her subject's time working as a secretary for the NKVD in the 1930s and 40s. But I like that it's a perspective from within that first revolutionary generation, which was by far the best (and is deliberately contrasted to the two later, intervening, fundamentally conservative ones), plus quotidian, loyalist life in the midst of now pretty mythologized mass violence. Wish she had talked more about the Party's draw to Jews stuck in profoundly antisemitic milieus. On the other hand, her disinclination to interrogate the whole Party thing much at all is part of the appeal.