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Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson. 1998. 149pp. A gift from a friend.
How pleasurable to hold beautiful ideas in your body and examine them one beside the other as they expand and diffuse and to run the sense of your mind over their contours. There are tensions in the central narrative piece that could become bathetic but Carson’s discernment and restraint imbues them for the most part with a salvaging self-consciousness that is crucially never mean or dismissive: I know, it hurts. Me too. Let’s go. (Sadly excepting wings and metaphors of wings, which almost 20 years on are inescapably done for me.) Keen and saturated.
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Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist, Alston Chase. 2003. 432pp. Internet Archive copy linked here. DNF.
Several unusual themes are present in the Unabomber case that are approached here with a useful balance of seriousness and cynicism: Kaczynski’s intellectual background and philosophy, and the suspicious psychological experiments at Harvard he underwent as an undergraduate during the fascinating period at the end of the 1950s in which all of research psychology was essentially a department of the CIA. Reflections on the writer’s own Harvard experience nearly contemporary with Kaczynski’s are also illuminating: he too is a lapsed professor who (blink and you’ll miss it) briefly worked in intelligence. Some rhetorical bombast, a greediness for conclusion (“He longed for wilderness. He longed for justice. He longed for revenge”). Also some underbaked political assumptions. All this I associate with independent scholars writing for the popular press, ex-intelligence guys, and also uncles at Easters before the pie. These tendencies worsen so significantly in the second half that I cut a laudatory one-liner I rather liked from this diary entry, and ultimately didn't return to the last fifth or so of the book.
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Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner. 2011. 181pp. Little free library.
Astonishing! Sharply (painfully) observed, hilarious, tricksy, crystallized without becoming rigid. Maybe there isn’t such a type of crystal. Imagine it. Faceted and fractal. As poets must do, Lerner tussles here with how a person could possibly get meaning from the relation of imaginary events in sequence (“novel-writing”). Living in time translated to reading of living in time. Quite silly. And then, just as skillfully, presents its own counterargument—when performed so precisely, this mysterious endeavour, for some damn reason…
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In Cold Blood, Truman Capote. 1965. 343pp. Charity book sale.
A nuanced portrait of two violent men assembled very patiently. Banal and measured in a manner that ultimately produces a haunting discomfort. The account of the actual events that finally emerges out of Perry Smith’s confession is especially affecting in its unsensational confused escalation. The beatific portrayal of the Clutters does them disservice; they‘re made plastic and symbolic, less real than their murderers. The reason violence is existentially horrific is not that it sometimes occurs to nice white people. For example at times you feel Nancy’s death is meant to be tragic not because like all of us she was an alchemized heterogeneity of human experience, infinitely complex, unique in all history, impossible to replicate, but because the townspeople will be deprived of her cherry pies.
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Movies:
How pleasurable to hold beautiful ideas in your body and examine them one beside the other as they expand and diffuse and to run the sense of your mind over their contours. There are tensions in the central narrative piece that could become bathetic but Carson’s discernment and restraint imbues them for the most part with a salvaging self-consciousness that is crucially never mean or dismissive: I know, it hurts. Me too. Let’s go. (Sadly excepting wings and metaphors of wings, which almost 20 years on are inescapably done for me.) Keen and saturated.
+++
Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist, Alston Chase. 2003. 432pp. Internet Archive copy linked here. DNF.
Several unusual themes are present in the Unabomber case that are approached here with a useful balance of seriousness and cynicism: Kaczynski’s intellectual background and philosophy, and the suspicious psychological experiments at Harvard he underwent as an undergraduate during the fascinating period at the end of the 1950s in which all of research psychology was essentially a department of the CIA. Reflections on the writer’s own Harvard experience nearly contemporary with Kaczynski’s are also illuminating: he too is a lapsed professor who (blink and you’ll miss it) briefly worked in intelligence. Some rhetorical bombast, a greediness for conclusion (“He longed for wilderness. He longed for justice. He longed for revenge”). Also some underbaked political assumptions. All this I associate with independent scholars writing for the popular press, ex-intelligence guys, and also uncles at Easters before the pie. These tendencies worsen so significantly in the second half that I cut a laudatory one-liner I rather liked from this diary entry, and ultimately didn't return to the last fifth or so of the book.
+++
Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner. 2011. 181pp. Little free library.
Astonishing! Sharply (painfully) observed, hilarious, tricksy, crystallized without becoming rigid. Maybe there isn’t such a type of crystal. Imagine it. Faceted and fractal. As poets must do, Lerner tussles here with how a person could possibly get meaning from the relation of imaginary events in sequence (“novel-writing”). Living in time translated to reading of living in time. Quite silly. And then, just as skillfully, presents its own counterargument—when performed so precisely, this mysterious endeavour, for some damn reason…
+++
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote. 1965. 343pp. Charity book sale.
A nuanced portrait of two violent men assembled very patiently. Banal and measured in a manner that ultimately produces a haunting discomfort. The account of the actual events that finally emerges out of Perry Smith’s confession is especially affecting in its unsensational confused escalation. The beatific portrayal of the Clutters does them disservice; they‘re made plastic and symbolic, less real than their murderers. The reason violence is existentially horrific is not that it sometimes occurs to nice white people. For example at times you feel Nancy’s death is meant to be tragic not because like all of us she was an alchemized heterogeneity of human experience, infinitely complex, unique in all history, impossible to replicate, but because the townspeople will be deprived of her cherry pies.
+++
Movies:
- The Red Shoes (1948) dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
- Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) dir. John Cameron Mitchell
- Vagabond [Sans toit ni loi] (1985) dir. Agnès Varda
- Molly's Game (2017) dir. Aaron Sorkin
- The Card Counter (2021) dir. Paul Schrader
- Y Tu Mamá También (2001) dir. Alfonso Cuarón