Eric Phetteplace > Recent Status Updates

"Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear gray trousers."

Rereading my favorite book again for the 3rd or 4th time, starting on Bloomsday, really getting into it.

I suspected about the title but it has already referenced both Radiohead's song "There there" AND the Gertrude Stein quote about Oakland ("There's no there there", oft misunderstood) which is incredible. Love the Oakland details.

The figure of the vampire is such a hodgepodge: controls wolves, mind control, invisible in mirrors, turns into a bat, teleports out of tombs, allergic to garlic & crucifixes & sunlight, sucks blood, etc. I'm probably forgetting something. Enjoying the book overall but I feel like making vampires a more thematic evil with consistent attributes would be much better.

The pacing of this novel is all over the place. Whole childhood section seemed superfluous. Then suddenly a very interesting mystery builds, only to pull Jane away from it and back into the useless childhood context again. I'd be more frustrated if I wasn't just happy that things are happening

The structure of the universe and diction of the creation story is amazing. Ginnungagap—the primal void. Yggdrasil—the world treee. Body metaphors abound: the world is built from a giant's body, rocks are bone, earth is skin, blood is water. Surprising number of legal deities. Loki is a very interesting character to give such stature to, so much importance placed on the trickster figure.

Trying but it's immediately terrible writing. "Butlerian Jihad did you say! Let's give BACK STORY". "Isn't this a wonderful thing that I, Baron Harkonnen, have done?" This is bad writing for idiots. Build a story. You can just tell us the character's name in narrative rather than have them say it aloud in their first line. Or don't! We will figure it out eventually. I hate books that assume the reader is illiterate.

"...a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber." Some great writing paired with cringe dialog.

It's interesting Nabokov hated Dostoyevsky & there's something to his critique. "D was a playwright" rings true & it's definitely true D to his detriment describes appearances only the first time each character appears. So much else feels vindictive though. It's not bad that D was influenced by detective novels, nor that he used neurodivergent characters (N's worst argument), nor that some characters are ideological.

Well-written & I like the attempt to write a universal history of development, from the big bang to present. Cool perspective. Starting to disagree with most of what's said, tho. Panpsychism ("radial" energy), orthogenesis, anthropocentrism, ascribing intent to the universe. Interpreting species complexity as "freedom". Desperate attempts to stave off nihilism, his Christianity bleeding through.

Giving me Elie Faure vibes in that it's such a broad, fundamental conceptualization and written in incredible prose.

Not a good start with "immigrants and computer viruses aren't really perceived as threats anymore" on the third page. I fear this will be a bunch of cultural generalizations trying to define some zeitgeist in unconvincing terms.

Yeah this is just not my style. Going to finish it but begrudgingly. You have to have a real sicko fetish for marriage and social status to go along with the narrative.

Interviews over many years so there's a lot of redundancy. Chomsky is incredibly good on some FoPo issues, like basically all USA military involvement (Indochina, Central & South American, Israel), providing the details every leftist needs. But his positivism utterly lacks a real system. He can't abstract. It leads to an oppressive inability to articulate alternatives & a weak understanding of ideology.

Never read much Chomsky. I am reading a lot of interviews lately. The first chapter on propaganda is mediocre...Chomsky blames "the educated classes" of which he is a prominent representative and seems to think merely unearthing the truth does something. He admits policies are divorced from popular opinion...so why does popular opinion matter? The next chapter on Israel is much better, though.

I've liked both of Ben Lerner's other novels, and this one touches on high school debate a favorite pastime of mine, so I'm pretty sure I'll like this one, too.

Loved the early books, their terse diction & emotion, striking lines, but the middle period I'm in is really uninteresting. Less striking lines, positively boring mythological poems, simple stories, not nearly as enigmatic or deep. Almost every poem in Ararat is about death and family. I'm hoping she changes styles again because it's getting tedious.

Rambling, jumps around temporally, circles back as if he forgot to mention something. Some striking NYC scenes from the late 1970s are highlights.

I really like that Batuman is writing books with the same titles as classics, I think it's hilarious and very annoying.

I don't know if I'll make it through this one. Neither scifi nor detective fiction are genres I typically read and this is both. I don't like the hamfisted way scifi has to worldbuild, out of place sentences teaching the reader the laws of the world, awkward madeup terms, it's very hard to do naturally. The actual idea & terms (crosshatching, alterity) are kind of cool here but I'm still not loving it.

I loved The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories which was so varied & interesting so I thought I'd like this too, but so far the stories are pretty similar in structure and not creative linguistically. Anchor being edited by Ben Marcus, whose work I love, also must have contributed to that being such an exceptional collection.

A short novel alternating between narrative and related poems. Some fantastical happenings and the best parts are the most oneiric. I really liked the form of alternating prose and poetry, even if the poetry itself didn't always grab me.

Reading the MacDuff translation this time and almost finished. It does feel substantially different from Maguire & Malmstead so I'm glad I got it.

Trying to read this more as fiction & a description of an interesting, fantastical system than anything with truth value, since trying to evaluate Steiner's claims leads to frustration. His strict holism necessitates an idiotic understanding of experimental science and he states everything in his worldview as fact with no recourse to evidence. The book itself is mostly short lecture excerpts which also doesn't help.

The 2 opening essays, Against Interpretation and On Style, are simply fantastic. But a lot of the volume is about contemporary 1960s continental trends in art that are no longer surprising in the US, and drama/film I'm not interested in. Many essays are mostly book reviews—ones with more enduring value than your average review, sure, but still reviews. On the whole I feel this collection has not aged well.

Enjoying this pessimistic work in same way as Dialectic of Enlightenment, bleak & well written. The aesthetics chapter is GREAT. Still, as with all cynical theory, it feels like it wants to say things are worse now (we had options before! now we're stuck!) but lacks any relative analysis to establish this. Um feudalism was ruhl bad. & what if art was always desublimation? Missing Weber citations re: rationalization.

Very irreverent, silly, self-aware narrative despite all the horror & violence being described. Again, an interesting voice, though less unique than Milkman and perhaps a bit less consistent.

Enjoying this about as much as I thought I would so far. The faux mathematical style of definitions, axioms, & postulates is annoying & does not lend any logical persuasion. But Spinoza's conception of an immanent god essentially eliminates most religious dictates (no wonder he was excommunicated) & his exploration of the body, affects, thought, etc. are incredibly interesting & advanced for his time.