Shawn > Recent Status Updates

"I have now gone through the bible as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie, and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow." Absolutely savage

"Rome, once the proud mistress of the universe, was originally a band of ruffians. Plunder and rapine made her rich, and her oppression of millions made her great. But America needs never be ashamed to tell her birth, nor relate the stages by which she rose to empire." Oh, honey . . .

“He had not to search long, for presently the unicorn came near . . .” He had not to search long feels like the central statement of the whole collection thus far.

Does turning off interest-based ads actually do anything? It feels like Goodreads has become absolutely brazen with shoving ads in my face since I last used the site 2 years ago, but maybe I'm misremembering.

"And I try not to cry, but instead I bawl. It's the leaning that do it, not just when they rub their head against yours, but when they lean into you and rest a weight you can barely hold, but the trust make you forget the burden."

So like I get that this novel is demonstrating what happens when people fail to resist totalitarianism properly, and the prose is fine, but I can only hold out for so long when a novel is completely without humor while also presenting the protagonist as the dumbest person in the world. Errant wrath and dissociation won't save her children, and calling this "a mother's fight to hold her family together" is a gaffe.

"So Sir Francis Beekman wanted us to get out and look at the tower because he said that quite a famous Queen had her head cut off there one morning and Dorothy said "What a fool she was to get up that morning" and that is really the only sensible thing that Dorothy has said in London. So we did not bother to get out." oh my goodness, I can't remember the last time a book made me laugh like this

Truly the only way that anyone could miss that this is an allegory for class struggle is if they haven't heard of communism yet lmao. In other words it's perfect high-school or even middle-school reading, but at the same time I'm amazed that schools have ever been allowed to teach it.

Honestly not really feeling it so far. Don't get me wrong, there's any number of lines that could be slotted into any given stretch of prose and be standout phrases, but I apparently can't stand common meter, nor do I enjoy any of the really short poems, or just how few syllables there are in so many lines. This all makes for too light and clipped of a reading experience.

This might actually be the best prose I've ever read. Holy shit

God, what an absolute thrashing Gaddis would have delivered if he'd lived to this point in time. Then again I'm happy for him that he didn't live to see it.

Cool, now I'm probably going to waste half an hour researching who the hell R.J. Hollingdale is, and more importantly who the hell he thinks he is, to abridge Nietzsche's "scathing commentary" and avoid "an enjoyable but otherwise senseless exercise in ingenuity" when Nietzsche's scathingness was the only enjoyable feature in an essay that has otherwise not aged well.

"But there is a sense in which all such well-wrought urns contain the ashes of a Phoenix. The urns are not meant for memorial purposes only . . . The phoenix rises from its ashes; or ought to rise; but it will not arise for all our mere sifting and measuring the ashes . . . We must be prepared to accept the paradox of the imagination itself . . ." This is already a banger.

"She turned to dress, and her round heart-shaped buttocks stared at me like a reproach." Yeah, I don't know about this one, chief.