E.Y. Zhao > Recent Status Updates

I’m doing it… the cold-water shock is lessening… it’s fascinating how wordiness and abstraction actually move us away from verisimilitude of affect! Maybe a naïve insight, but I don’t read much postmodernism.

In the first 10 pages Fiedler declares American novels fundamentally sexless and I’ve been scrambling to refute him. We got clocked.

In Rome reading this instead of Ferrante or Ginzburg — perverse!

Some months ago, I inadvertently took a break from fiction by cruel depressed white ladies, and that’s where my life went all wrong

This book confirms my newly vivid suspicion that no one ever says what they think, in fact they’re saying the opposite, and I should just act as if I live in upside-down world. Am I projecting too hard? Probably not healthy to read a thousand pages of Dostoevsky at a time…

Myshkin’s personality changes so much between parts 1 and 2…? Reading for Nastasya Filippovna atp let’s be fr

OK so read some of Bakhtin’s book abt Dosto and it confirmed what I felt about the reader’s lack of “place” in the polyphony (re: Spivak). SCOUNDREL NOT A THIEF! Not enough space for Dmitry’s speech before he goes to jail but…look it up.

Big identification with Grushenka this time. Have I judged Dostoevsky too harshly for all his heroines being “noble prostitutes” when he’s just externalizing the structural place of Woman…why has this taken me so effing long to come around to…internalized Puritan misogyny? Prudery (see previous entry)?

One day after Father Zosima section, think I’m returning to vegetarianism.

After reading Spivak “The Burden of English”: finally sinking in that some strangeness in reading Dostoevsky derives from his (lack of) assumed reader. No legible racial or class assumption b/t us (either of connection or disconnect (w Tolstoy and Turgenev maybe I’m a cosmopolitan bourgeois “target audience”?))

Year of rereads. In conjunction with Spivak.

Fathers and teachers, I am pondering: “What is hell?” I think: “Hell is the suffering of no longer being able to love.”

Reread —

Paying closer attention to how nuts the plotting and characterization is. And how that rattles my brain so hard it creates openings for Dostoevsky’s philosophy to permeate. And how every crazed action we take toward our deepest desires only obstructs us…

Finally got my hands on it!!!!

Rereading as I approach 29 on a housing hunt with a New York salary that barely keeps me in Lindt 70% dark chocolate

love to get really into autofiction 10 years after the fact

This is so fucking fun

I’m still searching for the great contemporary psychoanalysis novel

Sit down, Breton

Aurora Mattia has entered the greatest living American writer convo for me

The “burning of Moscow” becoming a real slog…?!

This guy didn’t need the Internet to fry his attention span; prescient king!

Over the last few days, whenever I’ve gotten irked about something minor, I think about Prince Andrei lying on the battlefield at Austerlitz looking at the sky, and it’s cured me.

Yes Albertine, leave his sad lying ass

Vinteuil’s septet: one of the most stunning passages about music, memory, and art I’ve ever read.

We are so back ha ha !