Will > Recent Status Updates

“hating her, I recognized my hateful humanness, and then but hated myself the more […] nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes”

“all praise to Instinct for making worms love other worms”!

Ch12 rocks. Clever, fun, exciting. At times really feels like a slideshow done by an odd child; at others strays into a cadence that feels too elevated (238, 251, 273, 286), but basically convincing. Timing of Rob reveal (272) feels great. Alison has her own imagined visit from the goon squad on 299, which is cool. Desert as pause also cool. Pauses are good topic for book so much about time.

out of characters :(

second-person makes reader feel implicated… cool

chapter 9 rocks. seeing the vision

stylistically alright, formally awesome (maybe in both the old-fashioned literal sense and the male teenage skateboarding sense), content fine but definitely shining moments!

So far style and content are only sorta interesting to me.

Very well written in that it’s easy to read.

Chapter 4, section 2 is fun and clever: starting to see the vision.

cannot stand the book so far: the prose is mediocre, it’s lewd and gratuitous, I can’t care about the characters. Also so romanticized: heavy on the read-too-much-Harry-Potter-erotica-in-high-school vibes, reads like Choi’s smutty fan fiction about how she wanted high-school to go. honestly embarrassing for an adult to have written this. Still early so maybe redeemable but currently i hate it!

Stuff about masturbation is great psychology. Of course her prolonged isolation has made it nonsexual; to her, it’s either spiritual, “… at times I do so [masturbate] almost without being aware of it, actually. At the dunes, perhaps. Just sitting, being lulled by the surf. There is an ebb, is all,” or utile, “I have done it while driving too…”
At least I read driving part as about utility.

Page 250, paragraph 2.

Brutal.

His melancholy so poignant

See comments for reviews of each story

I agree with what I take to be the central point of the Book VI, that violence is always tragic and can never be fully justified. But the image of an innocent slave owner killed by his slaves doesn’t feel like a great way to make this point


That being said the section isn’t totally without merit: the emergence of a revolutionary conscience is cool, ditto the ideas around the pamphlet and its creation of history

Book VI didn’t age as well as the rest of the book; in fact, it aged pretty poorly. That being said, I’m not done with it yet, and I have the impression Bird’s going to save it, as it seems Tom is on the cusp of developing a revolutionary conscious.

“What is the world around us but a great concert-hall, echoing with the music of birds and beasts, of wind, water, and foliage? what but a great gallery of pictures, painted by the hand of Providence? Nature is a painter—Nature is a musician; and her sons can do nothing better than follow her example.” Book V, Ch 3.

“As for the president, we would have him reserved for a nobler purpose; we would have him boiled down to a soap, according to the plan recommended by the French chymists, to be used by his successor in scouring the constitution and the minds of the people.”

Book IV, Chapter 7.

Outrageous. Absolutely hilarious. Genuinely one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.

Its musings on the soul and the body feel serious without being suffocating, and extremely prescient given the near ubiquity of bodies, orientation, space, etc in modern theoretical writing.

Veda becomes increasingly relatable. She will never live up to the self she aspires to and it tears her apart. It’s horrible that she inflicts this on her mother, but I can’t help but pity her. Her desire to be old money is trashy and contemptible, but her desire to play the piano is almost noble. I feel with her the agony of mediocrity.

Overall, the writing is fine. Some highlights: the shower as a ‘utile jewel’ right at the beginning, and the graveyard as a ‘marble orchard’ in chapter 11.

How sharper than a serpant’s fang it is to have a thankless child!

Mostly about pride, the kind money makes. The kind that ruins a person and their relationships. In this way (and others), a very american novel.