c > Recent Status Updates

the fact that i am reading this ENTIRE tome for quals is a testament both to my own strength of character and also to the remarkable structural failings of academia in not producing a single decent book review of said tome

“What power do human ideas have to change their surroundings, and how are people in turn shaped by their habitual relationships with the world? Put another way, what is the nature of history when nature is part of what makes history?” GO THE F OFF!!!!!!

does the logic of entanglements force us to flatten meaningful difference in an attempt to find tangles, entanglings?
but still i love the idea of the decomposition

i’m saying this now and hoping it will change: i think haraway is such a clown and i’m annoyed already

literally bats that the vast majority of narrative sympathy is being heaped on a convicted pedophile priest because “three years seems so harsh frowny frowny why do they keep saying abuse frowny frowny” literally what editor okayed this shit

me grabbing pd james by the lapels* and shaking her: THERE ARE PLACES IN ENGLAND THAT ARE NOT CAMBRIDGE AND OXFORD YOU MUST KNOW THIS!
*do those robes they make you wear at oxford have lapels? who cares

“Ray is crew-cut, reliable, myopic; he is full of liquids” top 10 sentences of the century

now picture this: you, being me, have promised in a conference proposal to talk briefly about this book. it may be the only part of the proposal you have to do. you start reading this book and realize that there are approximately 500 trillion main characters and it would actually prove that old heresy of paraphrase chestnut true. like yeah i’m enjoying this book i guess. bite me

literally i am going to scream i cannot believe this book practically opens with “who would ever care about ME, p. thomas prendergast whiffenpoof fauntleroy iii, phd of merton college, oxford?? who would ever care about MY little consecrated plot of land at OXFORD?” i want to read this book but if i read one more book that starts with a smug coterie reference to x or y elite private university i will scream

not an update just got the percentage horrifically wrong. am in an english program etc

orlando getting so unspeakably horny over the archduchess touching his leg that he has to leave the room AND kick her out of his house? god bless

most relatable character in all of literature is the gilded turtle, exhausted by its own majesty and heft, dead in the hall

i want to be the man who grows the marrows :(

i need to know how it ends but i need you all to know that despite this, i still believe stephen king should be kept in a cage far away from women

can someone please tell stephen king that it is so much easier to write scenes not involving children and sex than to write them? ever single day i get up, go about my business, do not write children’s sex scenes, and it is so simple and easy to maintain this lifestyle. god bless

today in white people who really, REALLY wanna say the n word a lot

now i’ll check back in at ~60% but i think i’m revising my theory that no book should be anywhere near 1000 pages

god i always forget about the raw, stanky, catholic je ne sais quoi of a stephen king sex scene. the sexual neuroses set off kill bill sirens down to my lizard brain

i often read and enjoy books which are written by someone who thinks that they are very smart and that certain groups of other people are very stupid. i do this when it is apparent to me that the author is indeed very smart and that they are right, in some useful way, in identifying the other groups as stupid. this is not one of those books. one trembles to imagine connie willis’ take on millennial pink

i can already tell that i’m going to have been very annoyed by this book by the end. but maybe my instincts are wrong! maybe the fact that flip is an insanely cool working class legend and i still can’t remember the main character’s name is intentional and not a sign of a very tiresome read 2 come

aubrey featherweight is my drag king name

oh she wanted a movie deal! ma’am i see you

a dude who’d been staring at me for what felt like way too long in the airport asked me what i was reading and when i told him what this book is about he left me alone. in every arena a fantastic book

okay so i’ve decided that this is absolutely a vanity project because of the way it’s dragging. why you’d want to be vain about writing a faux-victorian novel in the 2010s is beyond me, but go off i guess

i have literally no idea what to make of this book, which is quite... vacantly pretty, but also presents itself as a book with quite serious political engagements that must be dealt with, and aren’t. logging this for myself going forward: self-reflexive mystery story narrator inhabiting characters as narrative positions; what’s up with the parentheticals?

i cannot communicate to you in words how funny this book is

this book could be improved by the addition of a couple hundred more commas. just pepper em in! they’re good for ya

alexander von humboldt would be very unimpressed by how not voraciously i’m working through this, i think

1) /nice/
2) sometimes I sit around and I'm just like 'wow, imagine the amazing stuff past generations could have done with the resources I have at my fingertips and am not taking proper advantage of. They were all so astoundingly smart and resourceful!' and then I realize that they were all filthy rich and learned ancient Greek at age 8. van Humboldt was very cool though