Noah Damski > Recent Status Updates

Im bored, and so I read, as respite from the boredom.

I’m hesitant to get into his fantasy, so I’m reading this first. Fresh, intrapersonal memoir: it’ll be a quick read.

“-which perhaps means nothing or possibly means very much.” The conjectures of this book are interesting, but damn does Freud like to make absolute conclusions based on possibilities.

“He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady everytime I ever went on the air again.”

“You either take to somebody or you don’t. If you do, then you do all the talking and nobody can even get a word in edgewise. If you don’t like somebody—which is most of the time—then you just sit around like death itself and let the person talk themself into a hole.”

“The pet is either sterilized or sexually isolated, extremely limited in its exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods…They are creatures of their owner’s way of life.”

Great intro, jumps right into the sentiment of absolute chaos. Divides East and West Beirut to explain the groups vying for power on both sides.

Reading the chapter on American involvement in ‘82 and the unreliability reminds me entirely of the Paris Peace Accords re Vietnam in ‘73.

He uncovered an Alan Watts-esque ideology through art, I love him so much.

“We think of this zero—the geometric point—in relation to the greatest possible brevity, which, nevertheless, speaks.

Thus we look upon the geometric point as the ultimate and most singular union of silence and speech.”

Interesting point he tries to make, that the era of Impressionism before him was devoid of any theoretical science of art; I don’t know enough to determine if he was right or is being arrogant.

“Contrary to the static form-ideal of painting which prevailed in the past millennium, where the subjective object was immediately perceived as a whole and graphically recorded by the intellect, always directed objectively earth-ward, the moving form-ideal of today sets into motion the eye in any desired direction of the rhythmic non-objective creation.”

“The Aztecs called the place Teotihuacan, burial place of kings; the ancients said: he who has died became a god.”

The crux of this book so far is that the current state of our brains is not how it has always been; there was a time in which the right and left hemispheres of the brain could not recognize each other and so one’s thoughts were not recognized as coming from within.

I wanna branch out from American novelists and read educational topics but when I read this stuff I go through pages without understanding what I’ve just read.

One thing I picked up from reading history is to read from secondary authors rather than primary authors—journalists and professors rather than historians. So I’m trying this with psychology now, every chapter here is an opinion on Jaynes’ thoughts.

I have all these unfinished books on my profile and idk if I’ll go back to them where I was, restart them, or simply discard them bc I had stopped reading them at one point to begin with.

I have finished 8 books in the past 2 months, meanwhile I finished only one recreational book over the whole past school year.

Kafka does a great job with this. I’ve become agitated and rattled along with the protagonist, as the story marches on.

It’s a tad bit weird and I understand Mishima was loco, but I’m pretty impressed by the writing. And of course the setting.

"His eyes had been staring at her, but with a look that was far away, as though she were a spot on the distant horizon, even though she stood only a few feet in front of him."

I uh. Im bored of this book. Popeyes + Auntie Anne's + a mirror that just works like a regular window

Malone is diagnosed with Leukemia and he’s a wee bit butthurt: “He realized Dr. Hayden was a Jew, and recalled when he had failed medical school. It was a Northern school and his class had a lot of Jew grinds. They ran up the grade average so than an ordinary student has no chance. The Jew grinds had crowded J.T. Malone out of medical school and ruined his career as a doctor—so he had to switch to pharmacy.”

I am throwing myself into my new class, “Ukraine and Jews.” I was recommended this by Delaney like 5 years ago but whatever, time moves slow for me.

I much prefer Germanic history to Slavic history. Russia bores me. But I am excited for this book to learn about the unique Turkic groups from the Ukrainian steppes.

I loved “Rabit, Run,” Updike’s predecessor to this novel. I am choosing to give up on this novel because it feels as though nothing has changed in Rabit’s character, even though 15 years have taken place between these two novels.