AARON’s Reviews > The Catholic School > Status Update

Part II: Ch. 10
The narrator is keenly aware of the changing machinery and tech around him (machinery becoming technology, in fact) which suggests to him that humans themselves are meant to be modified: "sculpted, engraved... the body thus becomes a virgin expanse, ideal for experimentation..."

Part II: Ch. 9
The modern inert, game-show "intelligence":
"AND MY CULTURE? My endless and inquisitive knowledgeability in such subjects as film titles... nicknames of soccer players... made me a sterile little champion out of some TV quiz, who stays at home, that is, the guy who answers the question from his easy chair, the kind of know-it-all... when it’s time to play Trivial Pursuit.”

Part II: Ch. 8
One-page chapter... 💀

Part II: Ch. 7
Some Dante, some Calvino. More reflections on sex, curiously, claims it is more enjoyable... afterwards, in reflection, and in accomplishment...

Part II: Ch. 6
There is a symmetry to sex and it is discrepancies in desire, time, memory, fitness, suitability, etc, that makes the physical act asymmetrical and therefore violent.

Part II: Ch. 5
Pornography, sexual freedom, hypersexualization is slavery. We also have (finally) the first (passing) mention of the Circeo massacre. 160 pages in, which, I had thought, was what this book was all about, dawg.

Part II: Ch. 4
What is a man? "It means being the way one ought to be... a non-being or... a being-for, a potential being, a volition, a guiding principle... You aren’t born a man, you become a man. There is no such expression as 'Be a woman!' equivalent to 'Be a man!' In our destiny, this too was written: the male defines, distinguishes; the female accommodates, shares... aspires to union, we aspired to separation”

"Part II: Ch. 3
One kid plants an agave plant and two others drown it in bleach. So cold.

Part II: Ch. 2
Disparate reflections on the narrator's "pallid" and "ephebic" classmates.

Part II: Ch. 1
More puerile, Baudelairian thoughts on sex