Status Updates From Billy Budd, Sailor & Other ...

Bartleby haunts.
So many ways to spin meaning out of 35 pages.
Is it about the necessity of stopping action before it achieves momentum, patterning becomes enmeshed, then it fits perfectly as a contemporary political explainer.
Is it about isolation and the wasted best efforts of well meaners who can’t pierce the fog of depression, then it’s an elegant capstone on the mental health crisis.
It’s got so much.

Melville’s prose is heaven, swooning.

Billy Budd slips from ode to courtroom drama to a third place, the flattening of people and their history via art and subjective carelessness. The further Melville backs away, seeking an objective view, the muddier and more tragic it becomes. Time becomes myth, then is forgotten. The most Kiarostami-coded piece of written fiction I’ve found.

Piazza is clean, melancholy.

"What are you knotting there, my man"? "the knot" "so it seems; but what is it for?" "for some one else to undo" peak conversation

"this is to be wondered at. Yet not so much to be wondered at." so true

"his brow was of the sort phrenologically associated with more than average intellect" niesamowity opis

Nice book

Good book