Nick Jones > Recent Status Updates

Tsunetomo’s blend of personal philosophy with samurai code is interesting. There are passages that evoke the western stoics, but there is less of a filter on the grime of the world. There’s an incident called the ‘Nagasaki Fight,’ where a man accidentally splashes mud on a samurai of another clan. Tsunetomo praises the samurai for taking revenge immediately, rather than waiting to take action (?)

The first essay “Big Red Son” is a comprehensive narrative of DFW’s attendance at the Adult Video News Awards. He writes with a tongue in cheek cynicism that is wholly justified against the setting. It’s gross and funny and indicative of the heights of extreme desensitization America reached by 1998 — and that continued to grow thereafter to the catastrophic level we see today

Very similar in tone to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and in organization. It’s separated by passages in the same way; reads as journal entries, the samurai’s personal philosophy of life.

Kinda silly, a little spooky :P

Very humorous hohoho. It seldom makes me laugh out loud but I do enjoy it like candy. What makes the book great, in my opinion, is the shifting of the tonal paradigm. It rests at a baseline of very lighthearted absurdity, but every third or fourth chapter, written without seem, will be one of the most beautiful and realistic love stories or a haunting description of the inside of a bomber under flak

Just finished the Tale of Melibeus. A work of prose in a collection of poetry. It’s prefaced by an argument the host (Chaucer) has with the landlord of the inn, who accuses Chaucer’s of “utter silliness” and “rhyming to the devil”.

The story is a a series of morals posed by the wife of the titular character, along with her many citations, in an attempt at calming Melibeus and preventing an all-out war.

02/08/24: it’s too difficult and requires much more research of contextual details than I am willing to endure in one sitting, so to speak. I’m going to come back to it in chunks, read some easier books, classics, and return to Ulysses in between. I’m doing the same thing with the Canterbury Tales but for an almost opposite reason.

Funny and sad! Very lonely guys banding together to be lonely together in an abandoned building near the Sardine house.

Good! Taking many notes and trying to become an anxiety free psychological super soldier.