Status Updates From The Sick List

The suicide of educated people is the logical destination of educated being, I thought. Roithamer demonstrates the annihilating course of the pursuit of an idea, I thought, and by doing so, demonstrates the annihilating tendency of educated being.

As a thinker, Roithamer demonstrates the recursive and destructive power of thought, of a kind of thinking that is governed by the pursuit of ideas, a kind of intellect that believes we consist of nothing but ideas that surface inside us and that we want to realise, that we must realise, or else we're dead. [continued in comments]

The worth of intellectual culture is as ineffable as it is boundless, where the strongest argument for it, by its own account, amounts to an argument for nothing, I thought. It gestures to a space of possibility and spends the rest of its time filling that space with writing, thoughts about writing when not writing, and talk about doing when not doing.

The giraffe scene is on page 78.

a reread

And then on page 97, this snide little Bernhard wannabe has the audacity to vent about overdone "negativity" in Horacio Castellanos Moya's Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador.

Noted: he leaves translation and translator(s) out of it. . .

Ansgar Allen's The Sick List is must-read academic life meets Thomas Bernhard in a fancy new world of giraffe spittle, stall squatting, dehydration, and catatonia. Discard your life and read this novella.

Every Gordon should read this novella.

perfect for Thomas Bernhard fans destroyed by academia

I was enjoying this one-paragraph wonder at 2 a.m., but then due to fits of uncontrollable laughter--the weird kind with strange noises where you doubt your ability to breathe and fear the neighbors may call the authorities--I had to stop reading, calm myself, and turn off the lights. So far, it does for academic mentoring and textual analysis what Auggie's Revenge and FFYLD have done for the adjunct experience.