Marley > Recent Status Updates

Right at the edge of my abilities but I keep learning

Dude definitely liked his Kafka early on and several of the early ones seemed like related drafts on a single theme

But past the halfway mark we start getting variety and weird little character moments

Messy, messy white queer theatre kids in 2001 deeply misunderstanding themselves and one another, headlong in the AIM and Livejournal era, deeply funny and uncomfortable and nostalgic and sad and real

I’m so worried where this is going but I’m reading every fucking word, these fucking kids!

This bit in Berkeley and a certain magic house is ADORABLE

The one with the lady turned into a bodiless apparition and only craves eating an orange and starts to consider possessing a cat!!

"A man...can carry almost everything he needs in his mind except food and pants."

This has been my interstitial, waiting-room, subway, passing-out unconscious, etc book for a year and a half, and it works wonders. One last session away, and it feels like an old friend.

...and I don't get why people are looking for clarity when this is clearly Scholastic poetry ABOUT the ultimate indeterminacy of the Word, with some awesome jabs at the State of Nature. If you want this to be easy as hell, read Heidegger's "Poetry, Language, Thought," some Nagarjuna, and Derrida's own short essay "Structure, Sign, and Play . . ." for practice. But me, I take this as pure slippery entertainment.

Seriously, I don't actually see what is so hard about this anymore. There are very cogent arguments about how anthropologists made a ridiculous neo-"noble savagery" out of oral culture, not realizing that oral culture already HAD all the characteristics blamed on writing; there's a great masturbation joke about Rousseau and symbols; there's the general thrust that words only get fuzzier the closer you look;

Reading this in installments is a lovely way to spin this out.

This is one of the more bizarre things I've ever read, despite/because of the brilliant bits included. There's a Bel Canto revival going on involving castrati in blackface, there are machines that the very in-the-present-moment can sing their hearts out into and leave their bodies behind (but the "fairies" that do so are easily trapped staring into rotary engines for eternity), and New York is postindustrial.

seriously, he keeps smells in his voluminous moustaches. <3

Still geometry-obsessed fanfic, even though brilliant.

are we SURE Timaeus isn't actually fanfic by Neoplatonist Pythagoreans? Even the form is all wrong (where's the back and forth? only in the intro as cred builder.). but on its own terms, this is glorious weird ancient science fiction that makes me itch for an Augustinian crossover with the book of Ezekiel. plus you find here the founding obsession of Heidegger: being and becoming, all its glory.

finally moving on this again. at which point I find his lunatic father raised him to speak Latin first, and hear him talk the virtues of solitude so as to avoid peer pressure, and then totally annihilate contemporary claims that America was Atlantis. This really is like the best blog ever written.

Also somehow this is vastly better going IN knowing it's a Western than having to discover that halfway through. Seriously this book tore Avatar to pieces in 15 pages flat without even the advantage of the film's yet EXISTING. (Not that you can't connect the dots from Dances With Wolves)

This is vastly better than I remember it from when it came out. Think both the existence of Mieville's later books (giving it a lot better context) and my own wider reading list (lately, FOUCAULT, but in general the sophisticated analyses of power I was only reading years later) gave this a lot more resonance, as well as seeing Mieville talk about the Revolution as Eschaton in his Crooked Timber piece. LOVELY now.

Can't believe how beautiful late Heidegger is on language. Still think he was a Nazi-collaborating prick. But THIS: "I never did more than follow a faint trail, but follow it I did. The trail was an almost imperceptible promise announcing that we would be set free into the open, now dark and perplexing, now again lightning-sharp like a sudden insight, which then, in turn, eluded every effort to say it."

SERIOUSLY: he's already watched his father die of lung cancer, fooled around with boys at summer camp, married a prodigiously brilliant poet after a cross-country bus ride to one of two states allowed for their ages/races, enraged his slumlord by siccing the inspectors, met Einstein in the park and talked model boats, written childhood sex fantasies based on Conan, and written 2 novels about wandering cities. SOLD.

I sort of knew what I was getting, but this is still smart as hell. The first couple chapters on torture really make it hard to weasel out of the institutional purposefulness of it all. And makes the present day direction of this country rather brutal to consider.

This might be the best thing he's ever written. He is clearly in control of his powers like never before, the whole thing might be about Ricoeur, and he still gets to revel in all the gorgeous concreteness of the Bas-Lag books. Plus, the coolest reimagining of hyperspace I've every seen (literarily speaking), some great subtle stuff about gender and sex politics, and a great sense of my favorite vein of 70s SF.

Wanted to knock this out before Embassytown comes out. Some very fun bits but clearly he's working out his relations to the uncanny and his influences thus far. And there's the one that's a more-Lovecraftean House of Leaves in 10 Minutes, which I wonder if he did just because he COULD.

Been reading this ever since that Nagarjuna translation had me revisiting the Blue and Brown Books. Those I enjoy with reservations, but this I really adore. Do not remotely understand how this is seen as cryptic. Do not understand how it is seen as behaviorist--it's not about what IS, it's about what language can touch.

I guess I can count this as finished. I leave it on my bedside for random-access sleepytime reading and have at this point pretty much covered the whole thing yet again. Still totally wonderful and one of my favorite things ever written.