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april 2023
May. 3rd, 2023 05:06 pmFear and Loathing (& Other American Stories), Hunter S. Thompson. 1996. 283pp. Local library.
An edition including Thompson’s stories on the Salazar riots and the Kentucky Derby. On the cover he wears a bucket hat and reminds me of a chef I once roomed with who was arrested at our house at 3am. Mixed feelings here. After reading Naked Lunch I would return to it and think, why isn’t this Naked Lunch? Missing Burroughs's sense of open-eyed, almost obsessive dedication to the real human condition among the horror.
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Sor Juana, Or, The Traps of Faith (Las trampas de la fe), Octavio Paz. 1988. 564pp. Local library.
Patient, thorough, elegant. A memoir as much about the subject as about her world, as much about her art as about her lifetime, admiring but daring. The subject as a membrane permeated by history who at the same time is illustrated, in appropriate moderation, with a fierce and striking speculative interiority that exceeds the abilities of most novelists. Paz’s sentences, even in translation, have the power to turn the most profound mysteries of the world into clear bright running water. The first writer I hope to read someday in the Spanish original, perhaps after Sor Juana herself.
p285 "Jealousy, absence, death: different names of solitude. Alone — and because she is always alone — she invents these situations; in turn, the inventions help her to unburden herself and come to know herself; the life of her imagination is also a means of introspection."
p274 "Introspection leads to irony, and irony is a way of being alone."
p359 "The space revealed by Sor Juana [in her magnum opus Primero sueño] is an object not of contemplation but of knowledge; it is not a surface over which human beings move but an abstraction we apprehend, not the celestial or infernal beyond but a reality that cannot be conceptualized. The soul is alone, not before God but before a nameless and limitless space."
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Naked Lunch, the Restored Text, William S. Burroughs (ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles). 1959, this ed. 2001. 304pp. Local library.
I think fewer people than popularly imagined will get anything useful out of Naked Lunch, including very intelligent people with good taste. It is difficult not to suspect that its place in history is partially due to stochastic factors. Centrally, even Burroughs would call it not a novel but a kind of chaos-magic text. Simultaneously reading about “literature of disillusion” in SOR JUANA felt especially relevant. The despair of meaninglessness is the underlying scream of the novel which justifies it. In the whole endeavour one of the most human details was in the appendix. Here I learned for the first time how the novel only exists because after Burroughs blew his brains out with heroin and every other drug contemporaneously available (and if I may be crude also blew out the brains of his wife, with a gun), his loving friends flew to Tangiers for him to assemble a decade of insensible notes into a rough configuration that would honour him and make him some money. I have found myself possessed to talk about it at any opportunity.
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Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer. 2004. 399pp. Borrowed from roommate.
A lucid and very readable introduction to ideas which I look forward to exploring in greater depth elsewhere. Certainly worth zipping through. Krakauer says he's interested in how people come to believe seemingly strange things through religion; this book does not actually explore any explanations for that question in great depth. But Mormon history turns out to be the best kind of history — the type that causes you to say, "I can't believe everyone somehow forgot that happened."
+++
Liberation Day, George Saunders. 2022. 233pp. Pages bookstore, Calgary, AB.
After the title story I wrote: “The sublime sensation of being brought to the brink of revelation and perpetually denied it in its entirety.” Then several stories noisy with voice in which I could not hear the crucial higher dimension. In the final stories Saunders opens it up again a little but not to my taste as powerfully. Provoked excellent discussion at the book club I read it for. A co-clubber noted that in the stories I liked, a certain dignity is afforded to the narrators despite their humiliating circumstance, and in the stories I did not like that dignity is undercut too deeply by the impatience of that signature jumpy glib style. Perhaps by coincidence, most protagonists of the former stories, she noted, are men, and most protagonists of the latter are women.
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Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. 1985. 351pp. Local library.
McCarthy is one of the writers whose style sinks to the bottom of my gut and remains there. I only read McCarthy in near total silence to hear the rhythms of my own body in the reading. Stunning like a bolt gun. Terrible.
+++
Movies:
♫
An edition including Thompson’s stories on the Salazar riots and the Kentucky Derby. On the cover he wears a bucket hat and reminds me of a chef I once roomed with who was arrested at our house at 3am. Mixed feelings here. After reading Naked Lunch I would return to it and think, why isn’t this Naked Lunch? Missing Burroughs's sense of open-eyed, almost obsessive dedication to the real human condition among the horror.
+++
Sor Juana, Or, The Traps of Faith (Las trampas de la fe), Octavio Paz. 1988. 564pp. Local library.
Patient, thorough, elegant. A memoir as much about the subject as about her world, as much about her art as about her lifetime, admiring but daring. The subject as a membrane permeated by history who at the same time is illustrated, in appropriate moderation, with a fierce and striking speculative interiority that exceeds the abilities of most novelists. Paz’s sentences, even in translation, have the power to turn the most profound mysteries of the world into clear bright running water. The first writer I hope to read someday in the Spanish original, perhaps after Sor Juana herself.
p285 "Jealousy, absence, death: different names of solitude. Alone — and because she is always alone — she invents these situations; in turn, the inventions help her to unburden herself and come to know herself; the life of her imagination is also a means of introspection."
p274 "Introspection leads to irony, and irony is a way of being alone."
p359 "The space revealed by Sor Juana [in her magnum opus Primero sueño] is an object not of contemplation but of knowledge; it is not a surface over which human beings move but an abstraction we apprehend, not the celestial or infernal beyond but a reality that cannot be conceptualized. The soul is alone, not before God but before a nameless and limitless space."
+++
Naked Lunch, the Restored Text, William S. Burroughs (ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles). 1959, this ed. 2001. 304pp. Local library.
I think fewer people than popularly imagined will get anything useful out of Naked Lunch, including very intelligent people with good taste. It is difficult not to suspect that its place in history is partially due to stochastic factors. Centrally, even Burroughs would call it not a novel but a kind of chaos-magic text. Simultaneously reading about “literature of disillusion” in SOR JUANA felt especially relevant. The despair of meaninglessness is the underlying scream of the novel which justifies it. In the whole endeavour one of the most human details was in the appendix. Here I learned for the first time how the novel only exists because after Burroughs blew his brains out with heroin and every other drug contemporaneously available (and if I may be crude also blew out the brains of his wife, with a gun), his loving friends flew to Tangiers for him to assemble a decade of insensible notes into a rough configuration that would honour him and make him some money. I have found myself possessed to talk about it at any opportunity.
+++
Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer. 2004. 399pp. Borrowed from roommate.
A lucid and very readable introduction to ideas which I look forward to exploring in greater depth elsewhere. Certainly worth zipping through. Krakauer says he's interested in how people come to believe seemingly strange things through religion; this book does not actually explore any explanations for that question in great depth. But Mormon history turns out to be the best kind of history — the type that causes you to say, "I can't believe everyone somehow forgot that happened."
+++
Liberation Day, George Saunders. 2022. 233pp. Pages bookstore, Calgary, AB.
After the title story I wrote: “The sublime sensation of being brought to the brink of revelation and perpetually denied it in its entirety.” Then several stories noisy with voice in which I could not hear the crucial higher dimension. In the final stories Saunders opens it up again a little but not to my taste as powerfully. Provoked excellent discussion at the book club I read it for. A co-clubber noted that in the stories I liked, a certain dignity is afforded to the narrators despite their humiliating circumstance, and in the stories I did not like that dignity is undercut too deeply by the impatience of that signature jumpy glib style. Perhaps by coincidence, most protagonists of the former stories, she noted, are men, and most protagonists of the latter are women.
+++
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. 1985. 351pp. Local library.
McCarthy is one of the writers whose style sinks to the bottom of my gut and remains there. I only read McCarthy in near total silence to hear the rhythms of my own body in the reading. Stunning like a bolt gun. Terrible.
+++
Movies:
- In Bruges (2008) dir. Martin McDonagh
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) dir. Miloš Forman
- Nightsiren (2022) [Světlonoc] dir. Tereza Nvotová
- Pinball: The Man Who Saved The Game (2022) dir. Meredith Bragg, Austin Bragg
- Satan Loves You (2023) dir. Sean Horlor, Steve J. Adams
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