Jeff > Recent Status Updates

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.

I didn't realize this is the one were Bertie and Jeeves take on the fascists

Excited to read this for book club (join us! https://www.meetup.com/book-club-curi...). Debra Granik's 2018 film adaptation Leave No Trace was one of my favorite movies of that year so hopefully the book will also be good and interesting.

I'm pretty sure I've been killing myself spiritually with my reading choices lately so time to take a break and read another Jeeves novel. Sorry-not-sorry for everyone who has to deal with me chortle, guffaw, cachinnate, and titter my way thru this absolutely hilarious nonsense.

Currently halfway thru my generally annual reread of Bolaño's masterpiece on evil, literature, the abyss, and the tragi-comic efforts we make to keep ourselves from toppling into it. Probably my last generally annual reread tho I said that last year as well, but I've lived with this book and The Savage Detectives (which I reread earlier this year) for half my life so why stop now?

So far not homoerotic like the impeccable TV show but still surprisingly sensual, queer, and attracted to its monsters.

just doing this for The Frogs. brekekekex koax koax!

I lost my copy halfway thru!

Where do all the bookworms in Portland hang out?

Austen describes an apple orchard in bloom during a nearly midsummer outing to Donwell Abbey. The critical apparatus to the Oxford World Classic's edition helpfully endnotes this as "a notorious error [...] Depending on the variety, apple trees blossom late April to late May."

Notorious! Never change, literary scholars.

At the parts about Mrs. Elton which are just muted savagery against the tasteless nouveau riche. Y'all complain about your boomer dads who can't express an emotion but then get wet for Mr. Darcy WHEN MR. KNIGHTLEY IS RIGHT HERE. Jane Austen understood what a generation that mainlined Tumblr media criticism doesn't: likeable characters aren't ones who aren't a little shitty, but ones who are shitty with vitality