Forrest > Recent Status Updates

The entanglement between Solnit and Benjamin continues, Baudelaire watching again from the periphery, sometimes circling one, then the other, then weaving between them like a child at play. How strange that I should be reading these two books, with seemingly no connection between them, on the surface, at the same time. This might be a sign to reread Flowers of Evil.

Benjamin's analysis and critique of film in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is not so interesting when addressing the work itself as it is fascinating when one looks at the audience and the change it engenders in them vis-a-vis their appreciation of static art.

After reading this, I definitely need to read Flowers of Evil yet again. In fact, I should make that a regular practice. I can't stand French as a language (everything is an exception, sorry, but give me German and Latin rules all day long), but if I were ever to attempt to learn it again, it would be for this sole purpose: Reading Baudelaire.

What an amazing synchronicity! I'm reading Walter Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire in Illuminations, I turn the page in Solnit's work and what is there? A beautiful paragraph about Benjamin in Paris and his work on an unwritten book "on the linked subjects of Baudelaire, Paris, the Parisian arcades, and the figure of the flâneur". My reading has created a pocket universe!

I find Benjamin's Marxist analysis of Baudelaire much more convincing than his Freudian analysis of the poet.

The Freudian analysis of Proust and Baudelaire feel flimsy, at best. I get the analysis of memory, but the Freudian dream-connection just hangs by a weak thread.

Sadly, I know very little about Brecht's work, though I know something about the man himself. I had a professor in college who was a Brecht expert. I don't have space here, but I'll try to remember his Brecht as Communist/Nazi in my review. It's a pretty funny story.

Absolutely one of the best summations of the spirit of Kafka's work.

Three pages in a half hour! Man, I'm cruising through this! Good thing I took four months off of studying Latin to refresh my German!

As much as I love Kafka, it's apparent that I need to read more of him. I guess The Collected Stories (all of his short stories) and The Trial aren't quite enough. I feel like such a poser . . . Maybe I should read him in German to feed my ego a little.

Back on the trail with this book. The irony is that while I was on vacation in Europe, I walked further in a week than I would walking seven or eight weeks here in the US.

My recent trip to Germany is done. Time to pick up Latin again'!

In his essay "The Storyteller," Benjamin parses out the different characteristics, not of structure, but of the worldview of storytelling (as in: around a campfire), the short story, and the novel. He reflects on collective vs individual memory, the impatience of modernity (don't get me started), and how the absence of death and the view of eternity it provides has shaped fiction, in general.

Now we're starting to hit the sections on being stuck as a creative artist and how to work through some of that stickiness.

"The Task of the Translator" presents several thoughts on translation, including the very interesting question of one's linguistic machismo when translating. Should the translator impose his language on the one being translated, or should he allow the language being translated to inform and even form his own?

After a 63 page long introduction (which is really quite good), I'm finally into the actual essays, beginning with the downright funny, yet acutely insightful, "Unpacking My Library," which every book-lover should read, but, more especially, every book collector.