Jack > Recent Status Updates

P. 131 “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough.”
This quote and the discussion of literature in relation to schizophrenia on pages 133–35 made the end of this chapter very enjoyable!

Did anyone else know that “autism” is a shortening of the term “autoeroticism” and was described as a patient’s retreat from the outer world to an inner, subjective world? Cool!

“Oedipus is a fucking drag.”

Is it effed up that I’m having so much fun with this book?

🚨 TRADE ALERT 🚨
I give:
2 hours of my time

Anti-Oedipus gives:
8 pages

Every time I find myself understanding something I read in this book I get suspicious

Irving is currently undercutting a very well-written moment by over-explaining and repeating it to DEATH

I am closing in on the end and feeling emotional. Trying to find “a little courage”

CEASE YOUR INVESTIGATIONS OF WHAT IM READING IMMEDIATELY

Pay me no mind

Mom picked this up for me on a whim at some sort of event. It’s pretty good!

The formula for a chapter looks like this: Irving writes beautiful, funny, sad scenes of boyhood for the first third. In the second third, Owen is shown to be precocious in some way and Johnny flashes forward to adulthood to emphasize the themes the former embodied. In the third third, Owen becomes Jesus Christ and is worshipped by those around him. The book would be better if restricted to that first third

Really going back and forth. I’m feeling very comfortable in the Gravesend setting. I enjoy the characters. But, at the same time, it’s more of a “coziness” than it is a town populated by ‘real’ people. Sometimes it feels like Irving wants to write something complex, but often it’s so archetypal that he undercuts himself. Always knowing how a character will react makes them a character, not a person.

Okay sorry but the Christmas pageant scene is an 11/10 on the melodrama scale. I’m getting secondhand embarrassment.

Often heavy-handed but its so charming that I can’t put it down

Having trouble getting into this, which sucks because on paper this is a book I should love

Okay there’s one kind of machine that cuts off continual flows (and then… and then… and then) and another kind of machine that’s totally incomprehensible.

Reading this kinda puts me into a chance, great for falling asleep with or a very weird sort of meditation

Kids playin in the closet

AHHHHH

It took me a full hour to read the preface and introduction… I will emerge on the other side of this book either the smartest man alive or a stark, raving madman

My grandmother’s new husband gave this to me, they read it to one another during “their courtship,” which I find very charming. It’s hasn’t hooked me yet, in part because the beginning is exposition-heavy, but I’ve heard good things. Hopes are high!

Going to finish today so I can start Anti-Oedipus tomorrow!!!

Even though I glazed over in the last 10 pages and I still need to read the introduction I’m calling this DONE because I want to read something else!!

Man I can tell AP Psych was just picking out whatever Freudian terms it found funny to teach us. Dude spends less than half a page on penis envy and here I thought it was some central concept to psychoanalysis

My erotogenic zones are tingling!

Gonna do at least 25 pages a day and finish before the year ends, so help me god

Block, you disgust me

Very cool to look up FW Bains mid-chapter, learn he was a fraud and then go on to discover the whole chapter is about fraud