Ian Taylor > Recent Status Updates

Mailer shouldn't have called this "abominably written." It's quite good at the macro level. But Baldwin did just use the word 'boyish' three times in a sentence when describing someone lol.

First!

oh man

reads like a cooooooooooool glass of water

Finally looked up 'Avuncular' and realized he's been calling himself a chopped unc this whole time

Ok, still mostly bloviating but Ben can be really funny. The sperm donation scene was great. Would love something fully comic in this voice. Maybe it is, and that's what I'm not picking up on.

Book length substack post about the author's own literary celebrity. Reads smoothly at least. Perhaps there are some profound meditations on life and art buried in here, but I'm finding the window dressing tedious.

el maestro regresa...

I like that this is like a management textbook for guys who think they're too smart for management textbooks.

Getting kind of demented

Subject matter is whatever but his prose is so good. Minimalist in a dreamy way instead of a curt and aggressive one.

LOVE rambly Russian prose like this. Dead Souls really got me into it, and either Dostoyevsky is a better writer than Gogol or this translation is better (probably both are true) because it's even more enjoyable here.

70 pages in and almost nothing has happened but I'm enraptured. How can you be bored when the sentences flow so nicely!

Like a hard-boiled Dubliners set in Los Angeles. A bit over the top sometimes but I fw it

Basically about a bunch of guys with autism 1700 years ago, but from whom we could learn a lot.

"Information is basically autistic." - Roberto Calasso

I think this guy might be a fascist but he's spitting some facts

Most erudite old head speech of all time

Really cool but I can tell this is gonna be one of those books where I have to pay attention to every sentence or I get lost immediately. That's fine.

The reason Paul Thomas Anderson made Inherent Vice into a movie and not this is because the protagonist is a woman.

Ooooooh yeah bud

Almost done this boring ass book and then I'm going to read Pynchon again for the first time since I was 18

Enjoying this, but definitely has the craziest "Hard-Ass Cover to Dry Academic Contents" ratio of anything I've ever read.

You already know what it is

Now we're getting to the good stuff

310 pages in We are just getting to the Sixties