Morgan > Recent Status Updates

After a comparatively dull section on Dead Souls, we’re back to sparkling wit and a sense that the words are slipping too quickly.

Gems and stratagems in here.

“Gogol’s play is poetry in action, and by poetry I mean the mysteries of the irrational as perceived through rational words.“

“The old translations of “Dead Souls” into English are absolutely worthless and should be expelled from all public and university libraries.”

I fucking love this

A breath of fresh air after the depressing experience of Zweig’s memoir. I am smiling and laughing. I love David Mitchell.

Rushing through just to get to the end

I'm getting right sick of Zweig. On a micro level, this book is insufferably romantic, utopian, and every Real Life Person becomes some particular Archetype (of kindness, sensitivity, cosmopolitanism etc). Zweig is a fanboy! This is surely NOT real life. It's Zweig little fantasy.

On a macro level, I can't really respect Zweig as a man. Stuck in his ways, he failed DISASTROUSLY to see the writing on the wall.

Oh hod WWI is about to start and I’m scared

Ok the worst part about this book is how Zweig always speaks in superlatives. He’s always saying “everyone” believed this, or things “always” happened, or “never” happened a certain way. That cannot be reality, he just had blinders on.

Sometimes Zweig is saccharine, overly romantic and prone to cliches. Panama Canal, the joining of two oceans! Looking into the eyes of someone who looked into Goethe’s eyes once!

Sometimes Zweig allows his nostalgia to override everything else and he gets cheesy, corny, overly romantic in a Hallmark-movie like way about how “good it was back home.” It’s not original. It’s just overwrought. The chapter about talking to an old lady who as a baby was held by Goethe is similar.

I’m just now seeing the real genius of this memoir. Yes, it’s a chronicle of a bygone world. Yes, it has a sad and elegiac character. But the growing up! The Bildungsroman aspect of it, the individual voice of its author coming into his own, regardless of the time and the place but deeply enmeshed in it nonetheless, is the hidden crown of this book. I love Zweig’s voice.

Prep for upcoming theater performance

Def some magical realism going on

Roaming the streets of San Francisco getting no closer to solving the mystery.

I can’t keep track of all the weird one-off characters.

They just cut off Hippolyte’s leg. I’m gonna have to DNF this book for the medical trauma content. Didn’t know this was a trigger of mine.

Will read a summary and maybe the ending and that’s it.

Ok so now Emma’s been seduced by a rake.