Crito > Recent Status Updates

Perpetually looking for Political DeLillo.

Anyway so far this treats reading Capital like law & order treats playing video games.

"...and the cat is the abundant reservoir from which I draw secret clairvoyance, warmth, fantasy, self-control. [...] But I remember that "catless" period of my life, which lasted about two years, was a time out of joint, a barren epoch."

Appreciating this as a bound volume. Usually it seems you're caught between "here's all 1.5k pages of this poet's lifework, hope you like it," or "here's 90 pages for $20.99 MSRP, there are 18 more," or "here's a greatest hits album of dubious selection." This is just five straight bangers and I fw that.

for #700

That's Some Trees and Tennis Court Oath. Good stuff. In my weaker days I would have logged them individually.

'"What the hell," said Weed Atman, as a throb of fear went right up his asshole.'

This was supposed to be the bad Pynchon

"Zoyd Wheeler" "Pia Zadora" "The Cucumber Lounge" we are so back

'As a matter of fact even the language isn't of primary importance. The really important things are the ideas that lie behind it. If the ideas behind it are genuine, there's no need to embellish the language for the poem to be a good one. That's what they mean when they talk about "not letting the words harm the meaning".'

"Nowadays their reading seems to make them even worse than they were to start with. And unfortunately it isn't merely a case of their being led astray by what they read. The books, too, are spoiled by the false interpretations they put upon them. They would do better to leave books alone and take up business or agriculture. At least they wouldn't do so much damage."

"The Lord Yvain heard her distress
and cries, which words cannot express
because nobody ever took
such grief and put it in a book."
Chretien is so fucking funny dude

Quietly moving how at this point Quine has been citing points "indebted to Davidson" every 5 pages or so. Likewise considering Davidson dedicated his later Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation to Quine "without whom not".

Philosophy and theory get dinged by people for using jargon beyond a fifth grade reading level and yet finance guys come in and talk about investments getting haircuts like we're supposed to take it

I can appreciate the pages of expository conversation since it will unexpectedly insert an image like:
"'It doesn't surprise me in the least,' said Geralt, finally managing to stab a marinated olive with a toothpick."

Man, continental phil is when you're reading something that goes so damn hard and then you reach page 108 and they hit you with "I propose we turn to psychoanalysis..."

Actual goal I think is to finish all the multi-volume works I've left unfinished: Proust, Ferrante, Dream of the Red Chamber, possibly even Alexandria Quartet.

Will continue with the political theory as well.

Was skeptical of Franzen but there are some incredible types of white people in this. We got a manic pixie Harvard scientist who used to be a punk; then in another chapter we find she has weird boobs or something and the next chapter she's hatecriming her Taiwanese coworker. Amazing.

Everyone skips or skims On the Christian Commonwealth, which, yeah same, but there's some good stuff in part 4 you might miss if you just cut it at part 3.

So I was curious about why Lovecraft on the cover quote here says this is one of the greatest tales ever written.. so I looks on the first page and apparently America is an ethnostate in this.

Bookmarking Sartre's discussion of whether or not being a sissy is a factual given.

Unrelated fact did you know Sartre was 5'0

Hazel Barnes, in the TL footnote, explaining that she changed the pronoun used for Sartre's description of the object of sexual desire from he to she, because it's more "natural" that way:

"The year was marked by ominous signs: fires blazed in the sky, there was a violent earthquake, and a cow talked - there was a rumor that a cow had talked the previous year, but nobody believed it: this year they did."

"Nah Grumio there's no fucking way that cow just talked."
*1 year later*
"Holy shit this is bad"

"I honestly believe that no country has ever been greater or purer than ours or richer in good citizens and noble deeds; none has been free for so many generations from the vices of avarice and luxury; nowhere have thrift and plain living been for so long held in such esteem."

Uh, has this joker heard of the United States of America??

"It may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it—or else the poetry is artificial poetry."

Be still my Confucian heart.

Takes about ten pages longer than Dalloway to drop a racial slur, but we're talking hard r with this one so it remains as English as ever.

lookin forward to the third sex

Break for now, but lemme take a second to appreciate her phrase "female 'homos'"

Ends book I on the most exciting 10 pages on Stendhal I've read.

Also neat of the previous owner to highlight exactly zero pages except where it says "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," I would never have caught that nugget otherwise.

For you filmheads out there I got a letterboxd
https://letterboxd.com/Crito/

ready for part 2