Jeff > Recent Status Updates

According to Wikipedia, Pierre was met with pejorative review headlines like "Herman Melville Crazy." A few chapters in all I can say is Herman Melville Crazy (complimentary).

"Death found him composing the posthumous works of his heteronyms." This book is funnier, smarter, and bleaker every time I read it.

I don't think Bolaño's humor is appreciated enough.

On my 12th (give or take) reread my poor copy is finally falling apart 😭

Andy Serkis narrated audiobook. His Gollum hits differently when he is shrieking right in my ear while I'm listening to this at the gym.

Freedom of speech is great, but could we consider banning some male authors from writing from the perspective of women characters?

Just reading Pierre here and also Powells how the fuck do you not have ANY edition of this book in your system?? Herman fucking Melville! Embarrassing how often I go there and they don't have what I'm looking for. The Strand would never God I miss the East Coast.

Psychological ambiguity as objectivity. Giving voice and personality to the great men of history while keeping their true inner selves out of reach. Can we ever really know the men behind the propaganda and image-making and mythologizing? Why is this the question Boomers care about?

Patricia Highsmith supports gay wrongs. In 2026 we don't need friends of Dorothy, we need friends of Ursula.

I'm also on letterboxd! send your smutty film recommendations my way https://letterboxd.com/jefflandale/

"At once the wound gushed blood as black as clouds, as when a woman from Maeonia or Caria stains ivory with purple to make a horse's cheek piece, which is stored inside an inner chamber, and great numbers of charioteers are longing to possess it [...] - Menelaus, so were your handsome thighs all stained with blood, so were your handsome calves and shapely ankles."

Homer is so horny for his bloodstained boys.

Been reading and rereading Homer since I was 12 but this year after watching a bunch of gay erotica from the 60s - 80s the Iliad is opening up in a whole new way. Kenneth Dover will be vindicated.

Nearly 100 pages in and the plot is "can millionaire writer who we insist isn't like RICH rich overcome his writer's block from his wife dying? The writer's block is impotence." The dead wife's characteristics are great tits and gives blowjobs. This reads like bad Murakami. I am dying send help

The back cover made this sound like an English de Sade, but so far it's broad comedy with some ominous gothic foreshadowing.

"Then, as discreetly as a pimp who has conveyed a customer to a whore's crib, he left." I'm starting to suspect I haven't missed anything by not reading King before.

feels animated by the same spirit as 40k: shove a bunch of cultural, technological, religious, and ideological signifiers into a mixer and then strain it thru a grimdark fascist cheese strainer. except in this case it's all russian so i'm only familiar at best with like half of the ingredients. this is gonna be a ride!

'Ah, Stilton,' I said, and, what is more, I said it airily. The keenest ear could not have detected that the conscience was not as clean as a whistle. One prefers, of course, on all occasions to be stainless and above reproach, but, failing that, the next best thing is unquestionably to have got rid of the body.

not gonna finish this re-read. i love serge and thought with everything fashy going on now would be a good time to revisit his gulag novel, but the romanticism, quietism, and honestly the marxism of the characters aren't resonating.

Goodreads won't let me leave updates that are a few thousand characters long, so I guess I'll save it for a review? Lots of interesting stuff here but also signs every few pages that the author got the confident sloppiness that Harvard and the ivies trains their students in.

I would die for the Blackwood sisters. They'd probably oblige. 6 out of 5 stars.

I'm mad Goodreads doesn't let you do multiple reviews of a book.

Got this at Sydney's recommendation! Lots of thoughts so far.

The part where Bertie and his cousins set up an underground betting ring centered on which village parson gives the longer Sunday sermon may actually be too British for me. The rest is good so far.

I grabbed the wrong Jeeves omnibus for this family trip so now I'm learning what happens when Bertie Wooster gets sick of everyone (correctly) thinking he's an idiot and (correctly) thinking Jeeves is the go-to person to solve every problem. More problems ensue.

every few paragraphs there's another stupid and brilliant turn of phrase. "About half past ten next morning, just after I had finished lubricating the good old interior with a soothing cup of Oolong..." or "He started to get pink in the ears, and then in the nose, and then in the cheeks, till in about a quarter of a minute he looked pretty much like an explosion in a tomato cannery on a sunset evening."

"Never before had I encountered a curate so genuinely all to the mustard. Little as he might look like one of the lads of the village, he certainly appeared to be real tabasco."

Reading 1920s British slang gives the exact same pleasure as Lewis Carrol's nonsense poetry.

Starting to suspect I absolutely do not jive with Cyril Edwards' translations. This is also the worst critical apparatus I've seen in forever. Haphazard and confusing endnotes, a baffling glossary, an intro he admits he let someone else write parts of, a map that leaves out at least one key location... It may be the translation's fault but the (anonymous) poet's voice is vile and has the depth of a puddle of piss.

There's no excuse for endnotes this bad.

I'm so excited I found this! Most poets want to create a body of work; ambitious poets want to inspire a movement of followers. Pessoa, manically enterprising, tried to write a whole movement himself, inventing poets, writing their poems, drafting their biographies, even doing their astrological charts. Did he complete this mad enterprise? Absolutely not. Are the results uneven? Yes. Do I love him for trying? Dearly!

A little vacation from the contemporary modes of masculinity that's pre-aggrieved and as predatorily attuned to stimuli as a spider. Tremulous little noli me tangere bitches. Chandler's masculinity allows for gestures of grace and compassion - often tragic and ineffectual, but nevertheless human moments where the machinery of law, crime, and the weight of the past are paused and there's a chance to escape it all.