Mesoscope > Recent Status Updates

Hey folks, just an FYI that I haven't received any notifications from Goodreads on site activity for many months. If I haven't responded to a comment you made, that's why.

It's pretty frustrating - I contacted support and I got a boilerplate reply that they're "aware of the issue," but it's probably been about a year since this core piece of functionality hasn't worked.

Sebald, in a nutshell:

"I spent six weeks living
in the wreck of a marooned barge,
staring at the walls as they gathered rust,
and I thought about the bombing
of Hamburg and Dresden during
World War II. Then I moved
into an abandoned zoo and spent
each day staring into empty cages,
imagining how it must have felt
to be a tiger in that time and
place, and I thought about
Poland during World War II...."

Still rather unclear what she's even talking about when she refers to the "disintegration of nation-states" that putatively occurred in the early 20th century.

The Eurocentrism of this book defies belief. She talks about the French Revolution as if the American Revolution never happened, and all of its ideas were new. Focusing heavily on autocratic states in WW II, I don't think the word "Japan" has appeared once so far. And, like a great many Germans, when she says "European" she means "French, German, and English," and when she says "global" she adds Russia and the US.

'...ich wollte mich rächen, ich wollte mich an den Schweinen rächen, aber man rächt sich immer nur an den Falschen."

Disappointing. So far, there is virtually nothing in this book that was not already known to me.

The introduction is somewhat unfocused and scattershot. I'd note that Gessen references Schmitt's "state of exception" but did not really understand it, or especially, how he tried to leverage it within the Nazi state.

Koeppen seems to believe Santa Ana is on the ocean - it is not. That seems to be a bit suggestive for his treatment of Americans more generally - he doesn't seem to quite have it. It's a bit weird to become the object of a stylized literary appropriation-cum-exoticisization. Usually we Americans are the appropriators!

Oof. Rumors of Koeppen's problematic treatment of race are not exaggerated. It's painful, and disappointing - I'm so much enjoying the book, otherwise.

'Erschöpfung perlte auf ihrer Stirn, jede Perle ein Mikrokosmos der Unterwelt, ein Gewimmel von Atomen, Elektronen und Quanten, Giordano Bruno sang auf dem Scheiterhaufen das Lied von der Unendlichkeit des Alls, Botticellis Frühling reifte, wurde Sommer, wurde Herbst, war es schon Winter, ein neuer Frühling? Ein Embryo eines Frühlings?'

I don't think anyone could mistake this book for objectively-written or dispassionate. I don't disagree with that per se, but she does tend to systematically idealize things that interest her, particularly shamanism.

I honestly didn't think there was another take on the trickster motif out there that would be worth reading. I've probably read at least 15 different takes on it by now, but she's got something new.

This book is extremely interesting.

Initial impression - Martin is extremely gifted as a field ethnographer and memoirist, but on shakier ground as a theorist. Like many anthropologists and sociologists, she seems to think that evidence of the porous nature of dichotomous categories means the whole edifice is naively reductive, and an arbitrary western construction.

I have seen two such sights, by sea and by land! But I am not to say it is a sea, for it is now the sky, betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin's point.

Well, that escalated quickly.

Expecting this to be pretty good, as the average Goodreads rating for this book is higher than the rating for King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet.

"'He tells me flatly there's no mercy for me in heaven, because I am a Jew's daughter; and he says you are no good member of the commonwealth, for in converting Jews to Christians you raise the price of pork." III, 5

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They are the ground, the book, the academes,
From which doth spring the true Promethean fire.

I'm 80% done with this book, and there are two signifcant characters who still have no apparent connection with the story whatsoever.

If there's one thing pretty much every German novel from the early 20th century agrees upon, it's that boarding schools are sheer hell, run by authoritarian and sadistic tyrants.

Was? Der Nationalcharakter ... wie? ... Überall klingeln die Straßenbahnen, heben die Schutzleute ihre weißbehandschuhten Hände, überall prangen die bunten Plakate für Rasierseife und Damenstrümpfe ... die Welt hat eine abendländische Uniform mit amerikanischen Aufschlägen angezogen. Man kann sie nicht mehr besichtigen, die Welt – man muß mit ihr leben oder gegen sie.