kay > Recent Status Updates

Been reading this on and off for like four months now, keep forgetting about it. Some excellent ideas obviously (Ontology of the Cinematographic Image is a perfect essay) but almost feels like reading Marx a lot of the time, kind of miserable. I should watch some Renoir

Essay #2 perhaps a touch suspect in characterization of both Arbus and her subjects, but I'd be lying were I to deny I was thoroughly enthralled throughout

We're so back

"Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy is about,"

With every essay, I am afforded a new eye through which to see the world

I should read Leiris. Maybe.

I should read Camus.

The essay entitled Simone Weil, in spite of its brevity and base function as a footnote to The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer, is somewhat extraordinary. Possibly the final word on how the audience ought to treat the artist.

An essay a day, etc., etc. The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer, while weaker than the first two essays, is deeply fascinating: a close-to-total assessment of the artistic problems of the western world reached through the examination of the life and work of an Italian author I'd never heard of. Unreal! I wonder if I've ever felt more intellectually enriched than I feel at present.

On Style is nothing short of an essential piece of criticism, if frustratingly abstract ("the will" is never offered a real definition, only a circular/relative one)

approaching the four month mark. i would not say that i am enjoying this book, not exactly, but the exceptionally sluggish pace at which i have been reading it has made the weight of its history feel very tangible, as if it has assumed a real place in my real life. which it has. because i've been reading the book since fucking january

GRACE is by far the worst story of the book; so much so that it took me a whole week to complete its 20 pages. interminable, turgid -- simply not of interest. unfortunate! excited to dig into THE DEAD nevertheless...

a painful case ranks among the easier stories in this collection, but it is also one of the better ones -- a modernist framing of the human condition in which our yearnings operate in perfect tandem with our losses; we only wish for something when it is taken away from us. a novel observation? maybe not, but joyce makes it with a certain dramatic adroitness that makes the whole thing feel nothing short of revelatory.

a little cloud -- portrait of the (wannabe) artist as a gigantic loser

two gallants .. wow!!

a very pleasant post-mortem to start. not immediately a terribly remarkable thing, but i anticipate that will change pretty swiftly

"you knew she is a fish but you let her get away. you never got her. darl. darl. darl."

so very tragic, and beautiful also; so goes the faulknerian ethos, i reckon. really excellent so far