Thomas > Recent Status Updates

Don't know how I feel about the omnipotence of the narration, but I am enjoying it so far.

Ten pages into this tome, and it is already a very promising read.

Book is a mixed bag.

This book believes in gay social contagion, which is interesting in the fact that the exact moral panic is now happening with trans people.

War is absurd. Good Vietnam-era commentary but suffers from what hbomb cleverly screams “GENDER!”

I got to read Beloved

Damn, I gotta watch more good old films.

This reminds me of my gaming history class. Similar questions on the merits of truth versus vision, now add in memory and you get all sorts of questions.

The technology of the 90s and 2000s is so fascinating to me, born in 2004, because it had that awe that "present advances" such as AI LLMs and content slop just give the opposite impression.

We can go back to 2021/22 before AI took over everything. We can go back to 2007 before the smartphone. Or we can go back to the 80s, the 50s, to the golden age - the early 20th century of literate culture.

I say we bring back teaching about the 'History of Western Intellectual Culture' with an emphasis on its effect on gender and racial minorities, and the beautiful world of the early 20th working class.

My only gripe is that the erotic poems of the 18th century *are* just as important as Kant or Montaigne. Not intellectually, ha ha but historically. Literature has always been home to porn. Important historical fact!

It is definitely self-masturbatory for me to keep reading new entries in this topic: The Decline of Reading.

But it's usually good work, and it is a very important topic.

My knowledge on Germany post WW2 is embarrassingly lacking. While I enjoyed the nuance of Jünger and Remarque, a very clever of scene; here, wrapped with the West German student protests, the dynamic of Heidegger and Celan are out of my league.

Grass, from what little I read on Wikipedia, clearly believed that denazification did not go far enough. Clear from the fact that 'the war years' are from the POV of open and closed Nazis.

Each story is like its own guessing game. Not just on protagonist but also on when it’s even taking place cause it’s rarely the actual year the perspective of narrative is set on.

To throw the Communists under the bus is slimy, even if they opposed the Weimar Republic. The SPD also employed and allied with groups who would eventually fall in with the Nazis, their own regrets realized too late. It isn’t a clean story, but elevating the SPD at all times while pushing down on the Communists isn’t a solid impression. Both of them were flawed parties.

Grass’ portrayal of Jünger, the more “foreign” when it comes to his war memory, gives the man a tint of clearly having been traumatized by the war even if his supposed lack of portrayal of said trauma is offensive to men such as Remarque.

Next book in my graduate seminar. Have to present this one and honestly I don’t know how I’m going to manage.

Merely contemplation or an attempt?

Me: Hmm this is a fascinating book but the topic of homoromanticism is really missing in this book. Oh well, I mean it was written in the early 70s.

Fussell: Don’t worry mate, I got you a whole chapter on being gay.

Reading this for my honors seminar.

This book makes me so frustrated with the audacity of its antagonists.

Being a tenured professor is a very comforting and stable job, something which Stoner clearly sought - and now has - in his life. Yet, not everything is as he envisioned, but the sadness is not profoundly bleak - only a mild disappointment. He is content - just about.