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July 26
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Mike
marked as to-read:
Night Work: A Novel (Paperback)
by Thomas Glavinic
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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July 25
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Mike
read and liked
Gio's
review of Madness: A Brief History:
"just reread this and i have to jack down its rating from five to two stars! i read it the first time around when writing my dissertation, so i guess the always-last-minute three-year-long crunch dulled my senses and my intellect.
this is a rarefi...more
just reread this and i have to jack down its rating from five to two stars! i read it the first time around when writing my dissertation, so i guess the always-last-minute three-year-long crunch dulled my senses and my intellect.
this is a rarefied and intellectual-sounding (oh, i am being ungenerous; it is, truth be told, intellectual enough, even erudite) history of mental illness, in the first part, and psychiatry, in the latter. the first part, an intellectual history of the evolving idea of madness, is competent and fascinating, though it does require a good general grasp of western literature and philosophy, because it assumes quite a bit. i plan to make my students read it, but also to supplement their reading with lots of explanation (i'm sure they'll find it totally boring, but whatcha wanna do). you've got to have at least a working knowledge of, in random order, greek philosophy, descartes, euripides, homer, shakespeare, the bible, christian thought, medieval alchemy, the scientific revolution, darwin, and some such milestones.
the second part, on the evolution of modern psychiatry, leaves a lot to be desired. there's a good chapter on early modern psychiatry, but porter's summary of the vicissitudes of the treatment of the insane in the 20th century is sketchy and, at times, skewed. his treatment of psychopharmacology is already dated, and, in spite of a full chapter dedicated to giving voice to "the mad," there is no real understanding of the patients' point of view. freud is given really short shrift. foucault, in comparison, is treated like a prince. charcot is barely mentioned.
i'm quite disappointed about the zero attention given to the disproportionate mistreatment of women in mental health, and about the scant documentation of the real cruelty of contemporary (not just olden times') coercive psychiatry. porter is clearly sensitive to the potential psychiatry has for abuse, but he doesn't dig this specific spot deeply enough. since his book documents the arbitrary ways in which psychiatry cobbled itself together as a discipline, he should have been less timid in presenting the horrors that such a powerful tool can and does inflict on the lives of some of the weakest among us when it elevates itself from tentative and probing to dogmatic and legislative. ...less
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Mike
read and liked
RatsRGods's
review of Less Than Zero:
"Rich kids doing drugs. Ugh.
Actually, my view of this book was kind of distorted by this man I used to work with at this coffee shop.
He was a huge fan if this author. And he was also a writer himself (published in Hustler!). He was in his 40's ...more
Rich kids doing drugs. Ugh.
Actually, my view of this book was kind of distorted by this man I used to work with at this coffee shop.
He was a huge fan if this author. And he was also a writer himself (published in Hustler!). He was in his 40's and still trying to break out. He had a son that was autistic and had tons of medical bills but because he still wanted to be a struggling artist his family had to suffer.
So, he gives me the manuscript of one of his books (that was rejected by several publishers because, as he stated, "It was too cutting edge").
It was is a super bad version of less that zero but really really raunchy and dirty and goobity gobbledy goo.
He was also always quoting Dante's Inferno, but he only knew one line about all ye who enter here or whatever.
And he would always come into work an hour early and work off the clock so he could have everything already done before his shift started. It pissed me off so I started to make sure everything was done before he got there so he had nothing to do for an hour before his shift began.
Sure, it created extra work for me but the satisfaction was worth it. That showed him.
Once, I was taking out the trash and he comes up and grabs it out of my hands and I was infuriated. I know he was just trying to be a gentleman or some shit but I ran after him and snatched it back out of his hands and snarled "I can take my own damn trash out!"
He would also refer to all our cups in Starbuck's sizes (tall, grande, and something else) and that pissed me off because we didnt work at Starbucks!
He also thought this chick that we worked with was "deep"
because she said she liked some classic author.
And the girl was a fucking moron. Trust me, if anyone was fucking deep in that coffee shop it was ME. And that is not saying a whole lot. She would talk in this cartoon voice all day long and I wanted to stab her. There is nothing worse that having to spend an 8 hour shift with another adult that talks in a baby voice on purpose.
I think she even believed in "God".
And he also bragged that his daughter memorized the letter from Hannibal Lector wrote to Clarice in 'Silence of the Lambs'. or whatever.
We also had a chat about how everyone has an little OCD.
His was coming to work an hour early and many other things.
And I was all like "I never do anything regularly, I hate repetition."
And he was all like, "That's your OCD, you are obsessed with irregularity!" (true, but not when it comes to bowel movements)
And he kind of convinced me that everyone in Hudson, Ohio is on drugs and screwing one another (fact).
So of course, I read his book thing aloud to the rest of our co-workers and we had a good hearty laugh, the kind that makes your face turn red and your upper lip sweat.
I really regret not making a copy of that manuscript.
P.S. I know it doesnt need to be said, but Robert Downey Jr. was really hot in that movie. I also kind of had a thing for James Spader. But not now, because he's kinda fat.
(Who am I kidding? I would still hit that.)
P.P.S. You know what, Im not really sure I even read this book, or if I just think I did. Memory is deceiving....less
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July 24
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Mike
marked as to-read:
Alive in Necropolis (Hardcover)
by Doug Dorst
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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New comment on Simon's review of
Valmouth and Other Novels (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
(see all 2 comments)
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Mike
read and liked
Matt's
review of Still Life with Woodpecker:
"Ok, Jesus, I fell off the face of the earth for a while. But now I'm back! With a review, no less.
Tom Robbins is one of those writers, along with folks like Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, Georges Perec, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Ford, and...more
Ok, Jesus, I fell off the face of the earth for a while. But now I'm back! With a review, no less.
Tom Robbins is one of those writers, along with folks like Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, Georges Perec, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Ford, and a few others that I not only "get," but that I would love to share a drink with and shoot the shit. Many reviews I've read about Tom Robbins are split down the middle, the whole love him/hate him dichotomy. I fall into the former category. Having read two books of his now, I see that he follows a certain blueprint and his humor falls into a sort of shtick (one review called it something like "stoner cowboy hippie humor"), but I hummed along to his tune.
Robbins was first recommended to me in college by a good friend named Tony. As a matter of fact, he joined this website, rated all the Tom Robbins books (4 and 5 stars, as I recall), and hasn't been heard from on here since. Tony majored in philosophy, and also enjoyed ganja and hippiedom. I lay somewhere in the middle, but I digress. The point is there is apt philosophizing going on in the world of Robbins, but more crucial to me is the brilliant social satire Robbins conjures up. He pokes fun of the people that take things just a little bit too seriously. Other writers do that, sure, but not only can Robbins split your sides with his anecdotes and metaphors, but you find yourself nodding your head, saying, "Ain't that the damn truth."
I'm generalizing here, so a bit more pertaining to this book particularly. I think Robbins writes abnormally strong female characters. Not, like, physically strong like bull strong, but fleshed out in a way the suggests intelligence, legitimate sexuality, and a feminist gear for taking no shit from anyone for having a pair of breasts. I don't know what's the story with his other novels, but in the two I've read, this and Skinny Legs and All have featured women as the main protagonist. In Skinny Legs, her name was Ellen Cherry Charles. In this, she's Princess Leigh-Cheri. Are cherries an ongoing thing with this guy? Please, tell me. I want to know. Each of these characters were so engaging I wanted to scream, "Why can't I find these people in real life!"
The Princess writes her lover (The Woodpecker, a red-headed anarchist with a penchant for making things to boom) a letter, saying, "I'm not quite twenty, but thanks to you, I've learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?"
The woodpecker responds, and it's of equal importance, and more akin to my thoughts on the matter, but I'd prefer it if you guys read this book and found out what that is. It's a worthwhile cause. Robbins is ahead of the curve.
And he gets brownie points for mentioning the man-made "pyramids" in Collinsville, Illinois, which is where I happened to go to high school. Sweet....less
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July 23
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Mike
read and liked
Elizabeth's
review of A Mercy:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
The characters in this novel are diverse and could be very interesting if they were given the pages count they need. The characters consist of a Native American slave woman, a black slave woman who has a reputation of "madness," a young black slave girl whose sale to another man was urged on by her own mother, a pair of white atheists (who seem nice at first, but are really like all other whites, bad), a freed young blacksmith, and two indentured men. We learn bits and pieces about each of these people, but never enough to truly care about them. The small histories we are given whet the appetite for more details that are never delivered. After reading Beloved one gets spoiled by the closeness that we can have with characters like Sethe, Denver, and Paul D, but in A Mercy it felt that the characters were being held away from the reader, forcing them to be impersonal. Even in Paradise a novel filled with dozens of characters, the individuals at least seemed more alive than those in Morrison's new text.
Now for the Narrative. I simply do not know what to say as there is so little there. What is the point of the novel? Where do the characters end up? There is little development, and the heart of the story spans perhaps a few days with backlogs giving us a little information about how these people ended up where they are, but the sparse journey and the little history given do not add up to an interesting whole.
Sorrow gives birth to a baby-girl and finds wholeness within that event, but we don't know her. The white woman Rebekka turns violent and cruel, but her betrayal means little because we hardly get to know the good in her which her cruelty is supposed to contrast. And yes, the young woman who was urged to be sold off by her mother is able to pick her sexual partner as her mother intended, but that freedom is so curtailed by the failure of her relationship and the reader's lack of personal connection with her that it barely matters.
I wanted to love and adore this book as I do Beloved, but there is so little that the two books have in common. The utter intimacy that Morrison had to have developed with her characters in Beloved is not even attempted in this book. It is that distance that tears at my heart and makes me wonder if she will explore, and allow us readers to experience, that gut-wrenching sadness, anger, betrayal, again.
...less
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New comment on Elizabeth's review of
A Mercy
(see all 2 comments)
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Mike made a comment in the group IN GOD(ard) WE TRUST—The Book... topic:
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July 22
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New comment on Mike's review of
Nam-A-Rama
(see all 4 comments)
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IN GOD(ard) WE TRUST
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