sophistry > Recent Status Updates

“Love is so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing” (Leonardo da Vinci)

To possess his kind of automatic and, even more so, overwhelmingly apt introspective skills must feel absolutely insane. Observation is a lethal skill.

This book didn’t make the cut on my syllabus, meaning I will have to put it down for now as I have zero time for pure leisure reading. Nonetheless, reading it did not feel like a waste of time and I am excited to dig my head out of my ass to explore more contemporary lit!

I am struck by my adolescent intuition that detected a bond to Frida Kahlo. When I was 10, I was asked “If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who would you eat with and where would you go?” My response: “I would die to have dinner with Frida Kahlo. I would love to eat in her kitchen inside her home in Coyoacán.”

My desire to meet her in death has remained and will presuambly inflame.

How Aubrey Plaza would narrate an apocalypse. Compliment, obviously. Already intrigued by the lukewarm commentary on capitalism, but I am hoping that it becomes more explicit, though not pornographically so. I say that in hopes of an exploration of how apathy and robotism is embedded in the individualism that required in PR production management blah blah. Also hoping that its diaristic elements do not get exploited

The construction of demonology as a conversational ritualistic practice has been so clearly elucidated! Can feel my love for early and medieval Christianity resurfacing <3

It has taken almost a year for me to revisit this collection of stories; more so, The Kreutzer Sonata and Family Happiness wounded me beyond repair. I am ready for the salt again. The wounds always seem to reopen as winter approaches.

Also, a month after reading the Kreutzer Sonata, I had the privilege of experiencing the piece live, accompanied by Rita Dove reading her Sonata Mulattica. :,)

Growing desire to explore the idea of memory as a vehicle to building tolerance. Tolerance coupled with feelings of numbing preparedness, doomed anticipation…things like that….

I was instructed by a syllabus to read this masterpiece in a way that is, in mu view, blasphemously rushed. I reject that. I will be reading this on River Time and experiencing every ripple and wash. As of now, there is no room for anything but enjoyment and cathartic reflection. I do not see this changing.

I realized that I devote the most attention to Flannery by tracing her serendipitous appearances. Due to my sudden rapidly growing obsession with Springsteen (I am dressed like him for Halloween as I write this), I have been inevitably led back to her. I started with “A Good Man is Hard to Find” because of an excerpt of Zane’s book about the making of Nebraska, arguably one of the best albums of all time.

I was reading the stories “in order” for a month, but then put it down, as I realized this is a systematically limiting way to approach a book of short stories. I had been able to do this with Carver, Kafka, Chekhov, etc. but never Baldwin or Walker. Or O’Connor. They/she feel(s) different to me. Like a ghost of mine that I refuse to pay attention to. I want to give her attention (in the Weilian sense).

Even the preface holds more poetry than my soul can take. I have ingested so many products of BrainLoveNourishingGrowth tonight. Excited to read this in a non “calming myself down before bed” context. I assume it will calm me in ways that do not sedate my excitement.

I am bursting at the seams. My thrill knows no bounds.

Son of Satan (31-37) is one of the most profound examples of how one inherits machismo and how it can play out as a degenerative disease that eats away at the tissue that forms self-esteem and empathy. The Life of a Bum (56-69) feels like the epilogue:

“But Harry got nothing. No feeling of eternity. Or God. Not even the Devil. But you had to find God in order to find the devil. They came in that order.” (57)

A man’s willingness to plunge into a cavernous abyss of passion on full display. Sehnsucht at its finest. The words of Werther escape his psyche with desperation that makes one want to welcome them with flung open arms while kneeling with sympathy. I’ve never related to a protagonist more.

stories read 8/18
- god bless america : john o. killena
- the convert : lerone bennett jr.
- marigolds : eugenia w. collier

read The Senegalese by Hoyt W. Fuller yesterday; incredibly transportive read while awaiting to enter the play about African resistance (specifically in the Curaçao context) in Amsterdam

I left it on the plane and I feel like a piece of my soul is missing

Not reading in order; stories read so far:
- the lynching of jube benson : paul laurence dunbar
- on being crazy : du bois
- a summer tragedy : arna botemps <3
- the boy who painted christ black : john henrik clarke
- one Friday morning : langston hughes
- how john boscoe outsung the devil : arthur p. davis
- exodus : james baldwin

joined 2/15/25