Leland Cacayan > Recent Status Updates

Reading this book while getting my hair permed is the coolest I'll ever look reading in public.

It seems almost miraculous that, however unsteady, the Western interpretation of autism has reached the level of empathy and scientific understanding that it has achieved today.

So this book is actually horrifying and tragic

Never knew that the research of the autism and the call for reappraisement of special education ran concurrently with the rise of the eugenics and the fall of the scientific community in Vienna. History is like a scale, man

All nonfiction and no fiction makes Leland a very dull boy :(

After a lot of false starts, I've finally found again an audiobook that I can pleasurably listen to at the gym.

Fun so far.I think if I were one of the members of an agency dedicated to the containment of eldritch monsters, I'd definitely be dead the first day, no questions about it.

Really hard to read this one, but not emotionally or technically. This book is difficult because I can't make quippy jokes during my Goodreads check-ins without being an asshole.

Writing about writing, books about books...probably one of my favorite tropes

Finished up Ghosts. This one's ok. Same themes as the first, but the ending didn't land.

Finished the first novella, City of Glass. A clever little tale about storytelling

It's a great thing to be able to return to Auster again, even if it's a reread. This particular sentence struck me:

"As it happened, he was sitting on the toilet, in the act of expelling a turd, when the telephone rang" (9).

An almost overwritten sentence, but in its extravagance, it achieves humor. C'mon! How can you not like Auster!

Book makes me wonder about wealth and the luxury of therapy, and how people can go their whole lives without seeing a psychologist and be "normal." Didion seems so well adjusted and lucid to me, yet her sessions suggest repression, trauma, etc. Maybe those are all part of a normal pscyhe? Or everybody's just fucked up.

Eh, who knows, I don't. *Shrugs.

I wish I could think with the same clarity that James Baldwin writes because life then would be easier.

"The trouble is that I love myself too much. And so I've decided to let two try it, this business of loving me, I mean, and see how that works out" (93).

Like damn, Jimmy!

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Interesting to see how an artist can process their emotional baggage through art yet still have to engage in therapy to unpack it. If Didion struggled to figure things out with all her wisdom, what chance do the rest of us have, lol

If I'm gonna listen to a rich person complain about a dead or suffering loved one, I'd rather listen to Joan Didion. I listened to a little bit of The Maidens before getting tired of the flat language and British accent of the narrator.

Plus! Notes to John is narrated to Julianne Moore!

She looked at me like, what a question. "The only journey that matters in the end, Daughter of Noelle."

"Retinol?" I whisper. (p. 111)

//

Alright, this made me laugh.

Also, I can't imagine using that much skin care without your pores clogging and your facing breaking out in horrible acne.