Jesse Hilson > Recent Status Updates

We’ve gotten to the lengthy chapter breaking down Notes from Underground, which according to Frank, was the germ of the entire five-volume biography. He was just going to write about the novella, then realized he had to give biographical, literary, philosophical, and cultural context to Dostoevsky’s writing; hence the biography.

He just essentially discovered roulette and Apollinaria Suslova, and a great feeling of sourness has descended upon these pages. A forecasting of masochistic masturbatory doom.

Skipped the chapter on The Insulted and the Injured because I haven’t read it yet. Sort of cheating but who cares.

Confusing book without some background in French history, which I don’t have. This is raw testimonies from people involved in the Paris Commune in 1871, not much hand-holding or explanations. One angle I’m getting is that when there’s a revolution, it risks slipping into its own authoritarianism and backfiring

Not really into this, but I will finish. It’s speeding by.

The jargonicity of the non-sequitur.

It’s brilliant and funny and sick, a remix of texts selected by an intelligent guy. “Womping” (or “writing on my phone”) produces a book like this, a book we should all try to write, and maybe did, not for its content but for its form.

This is going to be a grotesque slog. It’s funny though. It’s mainly a sort of cut up technique with blocks of text about movies, architecture, serial killers, music, coding design, etc. The textual layout is half the story. It’s clever. Then there’s the menacing unabashedly AI artworks that look like video games in hell

A real-life horror novel.

Already one of the scariest books I’ve read in a long time.

We’re at the beach hotel in Balbec where the narrator is noticing and categorizing, in splendiferous fashion, all the other guests. It’s great.