AARON > Recent Status Updates

Part III: Ch. 6
This is finally picking up. More formulation of masculinity: potency, abnegation, domination.

Part III: Ch. 5
Don't send your kid to all-boys school lol in fact, avoid compulsory education altogether

Part III: Ch. 4
Still hardly a novel but dazzling prose and meditation -- metaphysics, introspection, the Incarnation. Best chapter so far.

Part III: Ch. 3
In which the narrator attends Mass.

Part III: Ch. 2
Finally some proper prose, actual scene-building (first time, in almost 300 pages) and it's a transexual sex act... O tempora, o mores! Mentions Stendhal at least.

Part III: Ch. 1
Some more commentary on education. Hatred, we also learn, at least can make somebody very motivated.

Part II: Ch. 15
Interesting reflections on justice, forgiveness and history. Does forgiveness redeem the victim or eradicate the past? The author asks, parallelly, if his book in an attempt to draw attention to the crime preserves its violence.

Part II: Ch. 14
The veneer of autofiction is disappearing

Part II: Ch. 13
In the ranting of Mr. Golgotha, some talent is on display in capturing his idiosyncrasies and thick, accentual voice. We learn: one part of yourself gratifies the desires of the flesh... and the other half suffers for it.

Part II: Ch. 12
Priests, Buddhist monks, the only perfection is a total separation from the world

Part II: Ch. 11
Something about the attraction of a someone overlaps into an obsession to become that very person.

Part II: Ch. 10
The narrator is keenly aware of the changing machinery and tech around him (machinery becoming technology, in fact) which suggests to him that humans themselves are meant to be modified: "sculpted, engraved... the body thus becomes a virgin expanse, ideal for experimentation..."

Part II: Ch. 9
The modern inert, game-show "intelligence":
"AND MY CULTURE? My endless and inquisitive knowledgeability in such subjects as film titles... nicknames of soccer players... made me a sterile little champion out of some TV quiz, who stays at home, that is, the guy who answers the question from his easy chair, the kind of know-it-all... when it’s time to play Trivial Pursuit.”

Part II: Ch. 8
One-page chapter... 💀

Part II: Ch. 7
Some Dante, some Calvino. More reflections on sex, curiously, claims it is more enjoyable... afterwards, in reflection, and in accomplishment...

Part II: Ch. 6
There is a symmetry to sex and it is discrepancies in desire, time, memory, fitness, suitability, etc, that makes the physical act asymmetrical and therefore violent.

Part II: Ch. 5
Pornography, sexual freedom, hypersexualization is slavery. We also have (finally) the first (passing) mention of the Circeo massacre. 160 pages in, which, I had thought, was what this book was all about, dawg.

Part II: Ch. 4
What is a man? "It means being the way one ought to be... a non-being or... a being-for, a potential being, a volition, a guiding principle... You aren’t born a man, you become a man. There is no such expression as 'Be a woman!' equivalent to 'Be a man!' In our destiny, this too was written: the male defines, distinguishes; the female accommodates, shares... aspires to union, we aspired to separation”

"Part II: Ch. 3
One kid plants an agave plant and two others drown it in bleach. So cold.

Part II: Ch. 2
Disparate reflections on the narrator's "pallid" and "ephebic" classmates.

Part II: Ch. 1
More puerile, Baudelairian thoughts on sex

Ch. 12
Seeks to anatomize the shifting culture of the 1960s

Ch. 11
It's one of these: “Evidently, he didn’t know Arbus well enough (Who can claim to have ever really known him, that young man? Not even I can boast that I understood him, and perhaps I won’t succeed, right up to the last page of this book)..."

Ch. 10
The authors spends most of his time deconstructing compulsory education

Ch. 9
The middle class anxiety about their own identity, eager for a self-awareness and immediate knowledge of both the poor, abject "Borgotaro" or the aristocratic heir

Ch. 8
Something about self-identity, assuming and stepping into it, cultivating it, purchasing it, rejecting it...

Ch. 7
Teenage body insecurity and adolescent trivialities. No idea who the narrator is or who they're talking to or has in mind.

Ch. 6
Focuses on athletic competition as a measure of manhood making fighting, conflict an exam or evaluation in and of themselves.

Ch. 5
Narrator climaxes to Boccaccio’s The Decameron, the meta-theatrical game is then assuring the reader that the onanism wasn’t some “literary contrivance.”