Alex > Recent Status Updates

The closest thing they had to my edition, which is a double-volume, features illustrations by Frank C. Pape, and was published in 1927.

Ladies of the Queen and An Essay on Bail are both 5 Star chapters. This is my frustration with Vollmann. He keeps coming within a hair’s breadth of being one of my favorite writers before suddenly receding into awkward bloat again (well, who am I anyway?). He’s a tease. He’s a whore.

If the entire book could maintain the quality of Ladies of the Queen, it would be a five-star for sure.

This seems to be the most personal Vollmann I’ve read thus far, the others being You Bright and Risen Angels and Europe Central. Those novels had very personal moments, but they were either in the context of a cartoon (YBARA), or too fragmentary to do their gooey work on me (EC).

Reading any fiction immediately after Infinite Jest is likely a mistake, but I'm not hating this so far. It's already clear that it looks at addiction from a different angle, I'm just worried it will turn out to be a romantic one. And the bits where Tyler tells strippers and prostitutes they're good people are kinda cringe-y. Couldn't we do that with character development?

Just watched They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, about to finish Infinite Jest. Thinking of Orson Welles as Jim Incandenza and vice versa. The Other Side of the Wind as a Failed Entertainment as the fictional Infinite Jest (V?). John Huston playing J.O. (a stand-in for DFW) as a stand-in for Welles. Metempsychosis.

The Gately hospital sequences are too good.

Home stretch.

I'm picking up a lot more on the themes of deformity this time through. It's pretty in-your-face, leading me to realize what a poor reader I was prior to being the lit-obsessed soul this book turned me into 4 years ago.

Finally getting to hear from C.T.

The chapter describing the rise of the Trumpish Johnny Gentle also features the phrase “fake news.” Fantods are howling.

Picked up The Book of Disquiet for a bit yesterday because I was in a bad mood.

Well damn.

Rousseau is all over the place. It's hard to take him seriously. In a lot of places he reminds me of the way I thought as a teenager, though obviously he's a far better writer than I was as a teenager, or am now.

This was my unwieldy beachread on our honeymoon last week.

This is the closest thing on GR I could find to my 1908 hardcover, which is obviously not on Kindle...

Surliness can be quite therapeutic.

This book is a psuedo-intellectual mess. I propose an alternate title: Truisms, My Personal Taste, and Those Unethical Young'ns.

I’ve been reading this for way too long.

Jesus, that chapter.

I didn’t really get why folks call this a “novel of ideas.” Then Naphta showed up.

I got through Walpurgis Night in Faust as a preamble to reading Walpurgis Night in this. It probably wasn't entirely necessary.

Everything keeps pointing me back to Faust.