Status Updates From Ugly Feelings

On my quest to read more non fiction

From page 208: Quicksand's use of irritation to challenge the assumption that, in order to politically or aesthetically matter, feelings must be located below the surface or "under the skin" plays a key role in furthering this polemical assertion.

Half-way through Chapter 4: Irritation hehehhehhehe It's also an affective reading of irritation in the novel Quicksand .

Finished "Chapter 7: Paranoia" earlier today but didn't get to update here because (1) I skipped three chapters and going back to them just now, and (2) power was out the whole day in town. AAAAAAAAAA. Ngai's critical/ theoretical tone is growing on me---that's a win!!

From the same page It (the film, Single White Female , depicts female compoundedness as actively strengthened through these disidentificatory and antiproprietory practices, if not directly by the ugly feeling that inspires them.

In contrast, the film mobilizes envy to demonstrate the capacity of female subjects to form coalitions based on something other than 'similar love for the same object,' to emulate attributes without identifying with them, and to function as examples that do not properly exemplify, actively defining and redefining the category they would seem only to passively reflect."

"the kind of exaggerated emotional expressiveness I call animatedness seems to function as a marker of racial or ethnic otherness in general" (94)

As I start the second ugly feeling---animatedness---later, I just want to say that I do feel stupid reading such a dense theory book. Hahaha! WTF. But I guess that's all part of the experience that is, RESEARCH. So help me God.

...tone's generality and abstractness should not distract us from the fact that it is always "about" something... [The Confidence Man], whose atonal tone we have seen to be ultimately "about" the simultaneously orderly and noisy character of tone itself.