Aaron > Recent Status Updates

It’s just so good

Here we go again

310 pages to finish before I fly back to the States this Thursday. Done with the Hitler essay. Please let the final leg of this marathon be an entertaining one.

ヽ( ￣д￣)ノ I beg you, Karl Ove… please shut up… please get to the point…

Grinding, grinding along. This book was rushed and unedited. Knausgård is not spellbinding nor interesting in his literary analysis. I can see now why he never understood poetry. He can’t let it be. He is beating this Celan poem to a pulp and any salient points are lost in a wad of questions and definitions. This is truly painful reading.

I gotta say, I need less of Karl Ove and Gier musing and joking with one another. I'm with Linda; their friendship is a bit much.

"Now everyone thinks art is to do with reason and criticism, that it’s all about ideas, and the art schools teach theory. Which is decay, not progress."

I am enjoying this so much. It’s just about all I can think about at the moment. Unfortunately, this last one seems that the translation and typesetting was rushed to meet a deadline. There have been around ten typos thus far including an accidental line break, missing quotations, and incorrect words. It’s really disappointing given how impressive the Archipelago editions have been.

"If everybody would leave him alone for just a little while, he thought, he
wouldn't cause anybody any more trouble. He would turn to steam and float up among the treetops."

Part one down. I reread it once I got to the end to ensure I was really getting what was going on. This book has a lot of energy and momentum and I have no clue where all it will go. Excited to learn more about the academic, Amalfitano.

After returning to Knausgård, I return to Bolaño. I feel that I’m finishing up the literary journeys I began in my 20s when I started college now that I am one year away from 30. The Savage Detectives blew my mind when I was 20 and I hope the experience with this is comparable.

Coming back to the turmoil of his father’s alcoholism. This feels like a sequel to the first book.

His stuff on being young is the best. I’m basically hypnotized, mentally living his life and simultaneously drawing up memories of my own adolescence that parallel whatever he describes.

“The existence of intersex people is pointed out only to obfuscate the facts that an overwhelming proportion of Homo sapiens are either male-or female-sexed and that gender expression in humans is overwhelmingly bimodal in nature and strongly correlated with sex. These undeniable facts are summarily problematized as supporting normativity and are therefore suppressed by queer Theory.“

About halfway through this and I feel compelled to come out and say I’m absolutely loving it. I saw a bunch of hate from the shitheads at r/thecinemassacretruth about it and I am now convinced they have nothing but a superficial relationship with James’s creative output. Regardless of whether or not you find him cringe, he is a veritable underground filmmaking legend and a legitimate outsider artist.

The unique sadness you feel as a small child is so intense and horrible, especially when it results in ruminating over a misunderstanding. Ellmann recreates this masterfully here with her ebb and flow that construct a life so mysteriously that we only see pieces moving by. Pieces passing us by; however, when we glance back we see something fully constructed.

It’s crazy to have group up in the thick of the media blitz around Afghanistan and Iraq. I am constantly surprised when reading about it to see that not only was it a complete clusterfuck the whole way, but plenty of people understood it to be the entire time.

I recommend the podcast Blowback to the uninitiated. This book is excellent so far too. The bio of Tillman adds a personal touch to the war story.