Melody > Recent Status Updates

“once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” and he called this in 1965 mind you

got this copy of a book from my buddy who used to teach english. i'm 2/3 the way through and he's annotated one single word in the whole thing and that is "phony", written in the margins and underlined

another comfort reread! my love for this book could kill a victorian orphan (sorry pip)

ah shit, here we go again. infinitely rereadable emotional support murder book how i love you

today’s combo for the craziest nap of my life: an edible + a fever + reading the steinbeck nazi book in bed

reading this in my dead quiet office and wishing i was in the woods. LET ME OUT !!!

thank god i didn’t read this four years ago when this book described my life because i think that would have destroyed me

this close to DNF… a montage of debauchery does not criticism make!

knocked the wind out of me. nevermind i understand now

i take back everything i said about the MFA voice because actually the way he writes about addiction and sobriety makes me want to wail

absolutely gorgeous so far HOWEVER even the non-poet characters’ inner monologues read like someone with a poetry mfa trying to write characters and it doesn’t feel intentional and it is indeed bothering me

knee jerk first impression a few chapters in: overhyped MFAcore NYT bestseller bait. hopeful that this book proves me wrong!

this week’s Sunday Slammer is coming along swimmingly :) first impressions: this book’s greatest failing is its TEDtalkism/the startup culture impulse to optimize every human activity, AND it often makes great points about how our gatherings are weakened by taking certain conventions for granted. sooooo maybe optimization isn’t always the worst! will report back’

starting this book days after the charlie kirk thing and subsequent jimmy kimmel thing for um no reason

Ford Prefect being the most spot-on autistic coded character i’ve read in years and also an actual alien visiting earth .… yuppppppp <3

stomach bug induced brainfog delirium is gonna make me finish this in like two hours isn’t it

how had i not stumbled across this before? not even two whole chapters in and i've decided this is required reading for any Talking Heads fan with an ounce of self-respect. perceptive, clever, with a lot of heart. peak David Byrne, peak urbanism, found me just as i'm spending more time on a bike than ever. i'll be listening to Fear of Music now, sorry can't hear you

DNF at roughly halfway just because i've already reread this a couple times and wanted to move on to something new! might circle back at some point though

“Then I asked myself: why is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because the movements are unfree. The deeper teaching of this dance lies in its absolute aesthetic bondage, its ideal unfreedom.”

frankenstein reread we are in for it now