Alex > Recent Status Updates

I'll have to come back to this when I need to catch up on my reading challenge.

Completed the first collection. Not totally sold on Valenzuela, but I'm seeing the potential - for me to come around and/or for her to develop her powers. It may have been a mistake to pick this up directly after Faulkner. Censors is a total U-Turn then butt-kick into another universe.

"The Best Shod" was wonderful and bizarre, "The Snow White Watchman" was okey-doke, and the title story completely lacked any nuance, which I get may be the point, but you can so clearly draw a line (and not a very long one) from point A to point B with so little effort. I was pretty psyched for this. I pray I'm not dealing with a poor-man's Kafka. It's still early...

Jason is a dick.

Heading to Ann Arbor tomorrow to do some serious book shopping.

Completed Quentin. The story isn't progressing, but accumulating.

I did not expect this book to be so disorienting, though there is a bit more to latch onto in Quentin's chapter.

It's funny that in the preface to the 1st edition, Kant talks about how clear the Critique is supposed to be, when everything I've heard about this book is how difficult it is to translate/understand/interpret. He's already employed a few sprawling sentences, full of parentheses and asides, and this party hasn't even gotten started yet.

Gonna take this puppy sloooooooow.

George Saunders on Trump: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

Just realized my copy of Nightwood is the censored one. FUCK.

In my post-Hume daze I pulled the trigger on a copy Smith's translation of Critique of Pure Reason. I hope I did the right thing... Maybe I should consult the categorical imperative.

This dialogue between Hume and his buddy pretending to be Epicurus is slaughtering Plato's Socratic dialogues in style (though of course I'm reading this in it's original language) and strength. No straw men here.

Despite my near-religious listening to Partially Examined Life and The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, and my passion for philosophical fiction, I haven't read a whole lot of philosophy proper. Hume's prose is wonderful. He's pumping me up for more reading along these lines.

Nabbed a physical copy.

So damn close. And so easily distracted.

I'm gonna fuck this book UP. It's time to close the book on this... book. Must finish by tomorrow afternoon!

"While we have life, we have hope. While we have hope, we have courage. While we have courage, we have ingenuity. While we have ingenuity, we have flame-throwers."
Reactionaries Forever!

This is not the exact edition I'm reading, but it seems pretty close.

Finished with Benjy. Now we're into a more recognizable stream-of-consciousness approach. The Joyce comparisons make sense here. I'm going to have to pick up some Richardson after this one to further compare styles within the stream.

In terms of style and technique, this is utterly unlike anything I've read before. I'm very excited, if also a bit confused.

I gotta be honest, I'm not feeling the more realistic stories as much...

The stories are beginning to lean less on magic and more on realism. "The Pursuer" especially seems to be heading in the direction of Hopscotch.

I realize that the title was changed to Blow-Up and Other Stories because Antonioni made a movie of that story, but End of the Game was so fantastic, I wish they had left it alone.