The book starts out slow and there are a ton of characters to introduce and get you acquainted with, so that takes a biAh, a good old psycho thriller!
The book starts out slow and there are a ton of characters to introduce and get you acquainted with, so that takes a bit of time. Something happened during the barbecue, for a major part of the book I believed that it was sexual, but then I thought it was worse, or not. It's very confusing to try to figure out what happened.
Without figuring it out, though there's a better understanding of the characters. They are all tormented by what happened, and although none of them are sure how exactly it happened, only 3 people really know when the end comes, they are all still blaming themselves. Every one of the 9 people blames themselves for what happened. Hell, even the kids blame themselves! That's the hook for this novel.
Erika is disturbed and had a bad childhood. Same with Oliver. Their childhoods define them so much that both of them have almost never been able to get past it. At one point in time, during therapy, Erika even offers to send her own psychologist links to articles she found! People go to therapy to not have control, with Erika, it's only to validate what she's already read. Being accountants is probably the best job for both of them. The certainty of numbers is soothing to both of them.
Sam and Clementine are the sweethearts here! With two cute little daughters and Clementine playing the cello, you want them to be fine, no matter what happens. Erika has been through stuff, she can deal with it. But not Clementine. That's what Oliver says at the end, and that's true. They were surprised because nothing bad had ever happened to them. The first bad thing that happened to them ruined them, broke them, in some ways. (I totally think Nicole Kidman should play Clementine in the adaptation that Reese Witherspoon and Kidman are planning)
Vid and Tiffany are the fun and sociable ones. Vid is an interesting character. With his perfect calm during a really bad situation, his ability to fit in any social situation with ease, his love of classical music (which seems so off-character) and how he met Tiffany. It's all really disorienting. Vid feels like a real person, and that's awesome! Tiffany is beautiful, I was able to find so many similarities between Tiffany and Celeste from Big Little Lies. Especially this one line when Tiffany says that she has to dance around the money she earned, because her own family and other non-working wives would want to brag about the deal they got on a dress, whereas she could pay full price for a dress without any remorse.
Celeste had this same thing with money, she had married up and she always had to dance around how much money she had, with her mother, with her friends. Interestingly, this doesn't bother both women. It's just how it is.
That was Erika's experience of fatherhood: the solid, silent weight of someone else's dad's hand on her shoulder. That was the sort of father Oliver would be.
The sunlight shone on the wall behind him and made his eyes look very blue in the shadowiness of his face. He looked simultaneously very young and very old, as if all the past and future versions of himself were overlaid on his face.
One should never arrive in an unknown place at night, everything is undefined, every object is easily exaggerated.
This is a beautiful line. Every time
One should never arrive in an unknown place at night, everything is undefined, every object is easily exaggerated.
This is a beautiful line. Every time I am booking a ticket to some new place, I remember this line. I remember the dread and uncertainty of arriving at night. Despite knowing that arriving at night is unwise, I arrived in Italy late one night in 2019. It was a timely reminder of my lack of wisdom; a line like this makes the lesson a memorable one. Seeing the confused characters in this book, my first instinct was to clamp down on their inability to decide and brand it rashly as immature indecisiveness; then, gradually, I would see the lens fog up and doubt creep in. Were they really indecisive, or do they appear unclear to us only in hindsight?
I watched the movie adaptation before reading the book. The movie was great. Dark and ominous right to the last scene, the unstated parts of the movie were exquisite; the setting was great and I felt the irritation caused by Nina’s family to Leda and Nina’s inexplicable presence among them. The first thing I noticed about the book was that all the characters are mothers, daughters, or soon-to-be mothers. Leda has 2 daughters Marca and Bianca. Leda talks often about her own mother. Nina has a daughter Elena. Elena thinks that her doll is her daughter, and she calls her various names. Nina’s sister-in-law is pregnant and expecting her first child. The doll is lost for a brief period of time; indeed, that is the central thread in the story. The doll is lost, and a long time later, it is found. During the intervening time, things get confusing. Leda is curious despite herself. She claims to have brought books and claims to want to read them, but she can’t take her eyes off Elena and Nina. Undoubtedly, Elena reminds her of herself: the young Leda; the unfulfilled scholar.
A short letter where Seneca talks about how anxiety about the past or the present is not very useful. It is better to just "get on with it." This book
A short letter where Seneca talks about how anxiety about the past or the present is not very useful. It is better to just "get on with it." This book was surprisingly brief, and I did not get a lot out of it (except for some very quotable paragraphs.)
Reasons for anxiety will never be lacking, whether born of prosperity or of wretchedness; life pushes on in a succession of engrossments. We shall always pray for leisure, but never enjoy it
Seneca is a genius, and to appreciate his genius, I would recommend the longer, but just as important, Letters from a Stoic (Seneca).
Two memorable quotes:
The condition of all who are engrossed is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labour at engrossments that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest things in the world—loving and hating. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own
Is it really such pleasure for a man to die in harness? Yet very many have the same feeling; their desire for their labour lasts longer than their ability; they fight against the weakness of the body, they judge old age to be a hardship on no other score than because it puts them aside. The law does not draft a soldier after his fiftieth year, it does not call a senator after his sixtieth; it is more difficult for men to obtain leisure from themselves than from the law. Meantime, while they rob and are being robbed, while they break up each other's repose, while they make each other wretched, their life is without profit, without pleasure, without any improvement of the mind.
2 of the 6 essays in this book are boring and have too many references to realistically be read at any time other than when the book was *Rating:* 3/5
2 of the 6 essays in this book are boring and have too many references to realistically be read at any time other than when the book was published or by someone who is completely immersed in the history of American photography and its evolution. I picked up this book hoping to find something profound about the photographic medium, and I found some of it in the discussion here. However, the book was hard to read and requires a lot of patience to really get through completely, because Sontag's points are often not stated clearly or lucidly, she makes the reader work to get to any insight at all. And often, I felt that the insight was coming from within me and not from within her writing. I guess that this is also intentional.
* In Plato's Cave
A very good essay. This touches on why photography is strange and how it has come to replace the experience of reality as the only way to prove that one has experienced anything. Experiences are measured by how "photogenic" they are, just like people. But this essentially means that these people look better in a photo than they do in real life. Her indictment of the constant photography that tourists engage in is that it is an activity which relieves the anxiety of being in a new place and in unfamiliar surroundings. Her claim is that reality has been replaced by a photograph of reality. The closing paragaph of the essay is very good:
#+begin_quote Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world—all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. ... Mallarmé said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph
#+end_quote
* America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly
Abandoned. This is an unending parade of names of artists and their art works without any substance.
* Melancholy Objects
Abandoned. Another chapter with too many references and citations. I don't quite understand what the point is or why this chapter is even here.
* The Heroism of Vision
The idea that photography beautifies has been very succesful. If something beautiful was not photographed, then it would be like the thing never happened. Regret for not capturing a beautiful moment overpowers the happiness of having been able to enjoy the moment in the first place. Photography will always have to come up with newer and newer extremes because a visual once considered artistic will soon be accepted into the mainstream and soon be seen as an amateur cliche, that no professional would create. This is what happened with the supposedly humanistic photos of poor people. They were brandished as a sign of a least common denominator of humanity among all humans. And yet, the real value of these photos is not the subject but their supposed context. A photograph is always a slave to the caption and the context in which it is presented. It can nevr transcend the caption. Painting has the capability to transcend the subject and the caption. Ironically, /even/ if a photographer were to set out to create deliberately rough-edged and ugly photographs, whatever they produce will be either dismissed as bad art or as exceptionally beautiful art. There is no excepionally ugly photography. This is because the presumption underlying every single exposure is that the subject is worth photographing and worth looking at. And a consumerist consciousness has never been able to get beyond the limitation that "an ugly subject is worthy of attention."
* Photographic Evangels
The evangelists of photography are professional phoographers who insist that photography is an art. And to justify the "artsiness" of photography, they use many different and contradicting explanations.
They claim that photography must, first and foremost, be realist and depict what really exists. However, it is clear that photography is a disclosure and only that which is hidden can be disclosed. Hence, photography does what all art does: It unfamiliarizes the familiar. In this view, notably the photographer has no role to play.
In the opposing view, "every portrait is a self-portrait of the photograoher." That is the self of a photographer is embedded somewhere in the photograph. Hence, photography becomes an art form of pure self expression that can even transcend painting in the avenues that it provides for expression.
These 2 views might be alternately in vogue. They happen to be direct opposites and contradictions. For anything to be considered as art by a modern mind, it has to be transgressive. While photographs were initially transgressing on painting, now they are not. In the 1970s, they were adopted by museums for shows. This creates an anxiety among professionals who want their work to be considered a mainstream fine art, rather than a mere craft, but also want it to be transgressive of the mainstream. The lack of a signature photographic nature complicates this further. The subect of a photograph holds much more power than the photographer. A photograph of a Polish Jew taken by even the most amateur photographer holds value for us today, due to the sombre subject matter and the torture and humiliation we belive the subject must have endured during the Second World War. The same applies to photos of old people. There is no "connecting thread" between different bodies of work of a photographer, the way in which Picaso's paintings might be recognized irrespective of the period in which the painting was done.
Thus, we have disdain for a signed photograph. A painting has the same value to an experienced viewer irrespective of its age. However, photographs raise in value simply because they are old. All photographs belong to the same body of general work. A museum photograph can be discussed in a continuum with the amateur's photo. This is not possible with paintings by Vermeer and an amateur. Photography is not an art in and of itself. It is a medium which can be used to make art. Painting and poetry are arts only. Language is similar to photography. By making a photograph of something, the photographer turns the subject into art. Because of this curious nature, photographs have no heirarchy; no concept of schools of work; no concept of good or bad taste. Viewer's tastes might vary, but they will vary on the basis of each photograph. Photography is the broadest and most strictly modern form of art: It is permissive and inclusive of everything to be viewed as art.
* The Image-World
There are two worlds: The Real world and the Image world. Paintings will always inhabit the real world. Even the best Realist painting can not be compared to an amateur's snapshot in terms of the accuracy that was captured. Thus, the existence of photos is not surprising at all. In a world where the reality of the Real world is getting more complicated and uncertainty is increasing, the simplicity of the Image world and its absolute certainty that things will happen in the samw way again and again, as depicted in a photograph is worth pursuing. The technology of photography has reduced everything to a photograph; even experience. Now, when an experience is "too real," we tend to say that it was like you were in a movie! Plato was convinced that images were destroying our ability to relate with the real world. He referred to Painting when he said that. With Photography, we get something that inverts our understanding of reality and images. Images are the new reality. Photography is the perfect art form for a Capitalist society that is based on consumption. For the alienated work and racism that it fosters, it provides consumption as the balm. And photographs are the perfect middlemen for consumptive cultures.
Just as consumption will increase forever, images must also be produced at a much faster rate to keep the consumption bonfire going.
The camera is an amazing tool for surveillance: It poses as spectacles to the masses, while really being a looking glass for the rulers. So, the rulers will rarely try to prevent you from photographing anything in the Western world where everything is beautiful or can be made so. In China, the state surveils through long established traditions of action and movement and collective amnesia of the past. ...more
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