Katie > Recent Status Updates

we’re so back baby

ON GOING HOME 🏡

I wonder if anyone has an uncomplicated relationship with visiting their parents?

ON MORALITY ⚖️

“I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory minds of conversation.”

This reminds me of A Psalm for the Wild Built (“good! So do I!”)

I CAN’T GET THAT MONSTER OUT OF MY MIND 👹📽️

This is an oversimplification of the essay but I do think it’s funny Didion’s whole argument is that movie producers are simply not as clever/creative/intresting as they think they are therefore most movies won’t be good- “what we have, then, are a few interesting minds at work; and a great many less intresting ones.”

ON SELF-RESPECT 😤

Like Joan Didion I too did not make Phi Beta Kappa

ON KEEPING A NOTEBOOK 📓

This essay made me deeply anxious on how scattered all my thoughts are (notes app, google docs, random notebooks, goodreads progress pages). I feel like every time I try and consolidate things it just gets worse.

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM ☮️

the center cannot hold!!!!

MARRYING ABSURD 💍

“but Las Vegas seems to offer something other than “convenience”; it is merchandising “niceness,” the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it, how to make the arrangements, how to do it “right”

(Interesting to read about Las Vegas weddings with such an earnest tone, I feel like in modern day you mostly hear about them sort of as a bit?)

CALIFORNIA DREAMING ☁️

Felt like I was reading about a right wing think tank (which is maybe the point?)

LIFE STYLES IN THE GOLDEN LAND 📽️🛩️🥪

Another one I had to google (Howard Hughes)

“It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, the the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.”

COMRADE LASKI, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.) 🔒

“…I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manager to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, where they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity of as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”

WHERE THE KISSING NEVER STOPS 💋

“Joan Baez was a personality before she was entitled a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in the sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.”

Okay go off Joan Didion 💅🏻

JOHN WAYNE: A LOVE SONG 🤠

I did have to google who John Wayne was for this one

Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream ✨

I hadn’t heard of this Lucille Miller’s case before. I liked this essay a lot, made me think of The Glass Castle and the promise of the CA desert in Jeanette Walls life.

I found a fun article that Debra Miller, Lucille’s daughter wrote about her relationship to this essay that talks about going from hating the essay -> finding Didion a genius

“Nothing is more punitive than giving a disease a meaning”

“Imagining someone as more than human does much of the same work as imagining them as less than human. Either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else’s”

Mona Awad I’ll love you forever I’ll like you for always I think you’re a genius but I cannot finish this book

I cannot believe I have to wait 19 weeks to get this hold back to finish this book

*** spoiler ***

I’M SORRY HIS PASSPORT?? 1% AGO I WAS LIKE IT’S FINE IF I DON’T FINISH BUT NOW I SIMPLY MUST KNOW!

“I don’t tell them I think trauma lives on in animals the same way it is shared through generations in people. I don’t say I think everything on this island knows what these fucking barrels were for.”


[ I only have 2 days left of this audiobook but 5 hours and 7 min left to listen and the odds are not great on my finishing but this book has been spooky and beautiful ]

WRATH KF THE RED-EYED WIZARD:

office culture is so fucking weird!

KING OF THE PIT:

Just a guy on drugs but fun!

“This song is so good I forgive my mom and dad for being terrible parents.”

HORSE GIRL FEVER:

Titular story, didn’t actually love this one. Fun title though.

HANNAHS:

“How many more Hannah’s did I have to live until Jesus came to the earth and harvested us like root vegetables and carried us up to heaven? I closed my eyes and waited for Judgement Day or my bus stop, which ever came first.”

There’s a quote on the back of this back that Maloney really thrives on the ending of his stories and I have to agree- this is a banger of a last sentence.

GHOST 👻:

I am such a sucker for a first person narration of someone that is unraveling. It occurred to me reading this that when I mean that I almost always am talking about women, so it’s interesting reading from a man’s POV. The Abe Lincoln thread throughout made me laugh.

MARY CARMINUM: “I think I’m in the mood to clap” FUCK- reads like Mona awad but more depressing (those turn out okay, this def does not)

THE SOLITARY ONES: 🚂 (jesus that was creepy) (stay in the fucking car)

THE SLOWNESS OF PLEASURE: probably my least favorite, the most vague

NO TEARS: Johnson and Johnson, no tears. I thought this one was absurd and funny. 🐦‍⬛😢

THE CONTINIOUS EQUALITY OF THE CIRCUMFRENCE: ⭕️⭕️

A HOLE HIDES A HOUSE: sort of like if Hansel in gretel were in hell 🏠🕳️

HELL: 🪶

ARCHITECTURE: not sure I understood this one! ⛪️

THE WOLFS BREATH: who’s going to kill you!!

Teicher vs. nietzsche: okay that was fucking insane, I’m sort of obsessed ⚽️🐈‍⬛

THE DEAD: 🌑 (this sort of freaked me out but you gotta talk to kids about what the fuck is going on)

ELENA-MARIE SANDOZ: every bricking sorry I’m like this can’t be as fucked up at the last time and then it IS and more 📩🎬🎥

“The world greatest art thief must call his mother every night to let her know he’s okay. If he doesn’t, she’ll worry. He tells his mother about their trips, except for the thefts.”

I cannot emphasize enough how much fun I am having listening to this book, this guy is a freak for real

**** spoiler below ******


I’m sorry only a SKELETON LEFT jesus FUCK Suzanne Collins

(I’m sorry I can’t stop using goodreads as a diary I am listening to this book, normally these are thoughts I would write on a post it or in the margins)

I’m gonna be honest I do not understand how they are not in the arena yet