It's hard to describe what I find so singular and blissful about reading Walser. He's so unique, in the slightly enraging way where you know it's impossible for you to write like that. The individual sentences within his prose are like the winding rants of a Bernhard protagonist that turn back, diverge, negate themselves to return to or deny their premise etc., but put into the subjectivity of an excitable pervert rather than a miserable old bastard. His writing captures the sense you get sometimes, when you're just on a walk and kind of overwhelmed with all the fractal sensory detail and moving societal parts around you, that life is like a big huge rich layer cake constantly, though you can only intermittently gain access to that feeling.
This one is about going to a school to become a servant, in terms of direct plot. Plot is used loosely here because, like Kafka, Walser really operates well in the realm of presenting surreal logics of settings and characters, and weird conceptual leaps, in a very "plain," matter-of-fact way. So it's based partly on the fact that he did this in life but also kind of a philosophical representation for the wild jittery excessiveness of consciousness and wanting to put it to a particular end, becoming submissive, because you're not really sure what you want to do on your own. The state of youth maybe, but it can come back at any point in your life I think!
"Relatability" is lately considered a sort of characteristic-of-age, solipsistic and superficial way of engaging with or evaluating art. But simultaneously it's also true that what got me on the path of world literature was a sense that they reflected elements of my inner life that the mainstream film, music, TV, age-appropriate anglophone novels etc. I was implicitly pushed towards basically denied. This is of course a prominent feature of Proust, particularly for a subjectivity that's a little gay, a little neurodivergent.
But it feels simultaneously limiting and selling short Proust's work to pitch it in that way, surely hetero neurotypicals also have a moment to moment experience so rich with the movements of consciousness and sensory detail... right? I really gobbled this up, like I was a 14 year old reading again. Another contemporary tendency is for short sentences to denote "immediacy," when they just come across as stilted and artificial to me... Here though, I swallowed many of these half-pagers whole. It's just how I think, which, again, where else are you going to find it?
So this is kind of a weird object to exist: a novelization released alongside Werner Herzog's 1979 adaptation of Nosferatu, itself a remake of a movie from 1922 that was based on a slightly shuffled up version of the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker to avoid copyright issues from hewing too closely to the text. I've read Dracula, I've seen Herzog's Nosferatu, I've even seen Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula from 1991. But still this weird story adapted a thousand times over compels me. An interesting thing about this novel is that it kind of sees the outbursts of vampirism and plague as a needed release valve for a rationalist Western European culture that had become stodgy, dull, exclusionary and conformist. Maybe making a bit more explicit what lurked as underlying themes in the original work, and framing them in a more sympathetic or understandable way. I enjoyed it! No idea how hard this is to find beyond stumbling on the paperback.
It's 1999, and Albania has spent the last century going through two world wars, the rise and fall of Communism, and the establishment of a new, UN and NATO-led order is on the horizon. Amid this chaos, something strange seems to be working in the shadows... Starting with a fascination with old mythology and folktales, a small-town painter working at the local arts centre begins to get the feeling that the truly ancient old laws, of blood feuds and revenge, may be taking advantage of the power vacuum to stage a comeback.
I really enjoyed this one. It's funny that I found it in Stephen's house and started reading it even though he hadn't read it himself; it really reminds me of the tempo and feeling of his "...Of The Killer" games. Kafka comparisons are always a bit stale/overdone, but I did also like the way that this book makes similar logical leaps or transformations in space to represent the character's inner shifts or incoherence, while also maintaining a consistent realism on the moment-to-moment level no matter how surreal the situation gets. I also like fiction about artists who are kind of lame and not very successful in general lol.
I really loved the first half of this. It represents the minutiae of waking up, dragging yourself out of bed, taking a shit, making breakfast, commuting to work, navigating tedious social interactions at work etc. in a way that reveals a lot about the character and also represents the way thought operates (or doesn't) alongside those routine tasks in a really interesting way.
The second half was also good but started working a bit more vigorously towards "plot" or "meaning" than frankly I would have cared for... I wanted to spend more time in the main character's boredom, resentments, small pleasures, routine, etc., than see a significant break with them. Still, it's a really compelling window into representing character at the minute level of thought and action, to surprising depth. Made me want to read more Isherwood! Maybe I will come around on the English.
Furthering my interest in literary pornography/porn-as-literature studies, this was a pseudonymously-published erotic novel (as Sally Mara), that applied the tropes of the captivity porno narrative to the Easter Rising of 1916. So, a creamy-skinned and virginal English postmistress, Gertie Girdle, must use her wiles to seduce the Celtic brutes who have taken over the post office (while she was in the loo, of course), to create enough of a distraction for the British Navy to reluctantly arrive. God Save the King!
This was really funny as satire of the predictable plot structures of pornography as well as the ways power operates within erotic content. But Queneau is also, of course, having a lot of fun with literary references and language (chapters from Gertie's perspective are written in a goofy pastiche of the Molly Bloom monologue from Ulysses, for example) so it doesn't become too disgusting or grim. This all probably went over the heads of the intended audience for the first printing, though; apparently sales were poor.
A wonderful dream-like collection of surreal vignettes loosely framed by short autobiographical passages on alienation from the "day world," and making a life for oneself in the night. A real Yume Nikki-like of a novel. I was impressed by how the dreamy sections generally avoided prose cliches of depicting dreams and instead were surprisingly material, detailed and grounded in the surrealism. I really enjoyed it in a similar way to Dorothea Tanning's novel Chasm.
A grim novel of deprivation and absurdity to the extent that the afterword says that while some read it as allegorical or magical realism, it is probably also drawn significantly from the author's actual experiences. However, it's also a very heartfelt and philosophical work, written by someone trying to synthesize his earlier utopian beliefs (particularly drawn from the Russian Cosmists, so, catnip for me) with harsh reality. Workers from a variety of walks of life gather to dig the foundation pit for a hypothetical all-proletarian dwelling, headed by a suicidally depressed urbane architect. What level of suffering and sacrifice is acceptable to demand for the future of society and future generations? If you make this tradeoff, what kind of world are you condemning them to live in? Would they want that? How can you know what they'll want? Some of the characters are always thinking about this (to the point of slacking off), to others it only occurs to them in moments of uncertainty or horror, others seem to avoid thinking about it at all. A really interesting back and forth of the limits of scientific thought, rational planning, and what is unknowable or indeterminate.
Instead of flights of fancy and bliss, this book makes love seem usually unpleasant. But, when Barthes says "A figure is established if at least someone can say: That's so true! I recognize that scene of language", I had to admit I was doing a lot of this while reading this book. I often don't like who I am when I fall in love-- I become even more neurotic, reactive, unreasonable... it seems like a similar stupidity passive effect to being angry... both of which are states which can be subsumed under the "passions." A lot of love is waiting, thinking, re-thinking, and disappointment, even in the midst of its consummation, even with the love object present. I loved the sources on love he brought together, truly a wonderful/weird sensibility that I feel a kinship with as someone who feels a crush as extreme, often unpleasant, but also vital, also exhilarating existential wrangling. Read, at the very least, for clarity on things as specific and scrupulous as why "I feel the same" is a blatantly inadequate response to the love-cry(!!) of "I love you!"
I was really excited to read this one and really wanted to like it as someone who sees my own output as like, satirizing or joking about work to articulate an anti-work position. And the first few chapters were great on how comedy can both propose gradual reconsideration of the existing work-oriented capitalist order, reinforce it by offering a positive vision of "fun" or community at work, or just straight up blow a hole in its fictions. The section about the historical development of comedy clubs, and how comedians at one club held a somewhat successful strike even though most of them weren't being paid, and were expected to be thankful for the "education" they were receiving being allowed to perform, was also really cool to read about.
But the middle third becomes a slog because it is dominated by the topic of high profile comedian cancellations. This was tough for me for two reasons: A) it seemed only tangentially related to to the topic of comedy in the sense that comedy is a workplace where sexual harassment and hate speech and so on is excused due to seeing the work as "creative," "speaking truth" or coming from a place of "tortured genius." However, (and this part of the book spreads out to accommodate this) this is basically true of any "creative" career, academia, and even like, the self-conceptualization of middle management. And B) Even when I agree with the critique of, ie, Louis CK, Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais, etc... all these cases have been discussed to death for better and for way way worse online, so it feels honestly like a better use of my time to never hear about them again.
But these sections also have the weakest argumentation, imo, because it often relies on labeling the objects of its criticism with pop-psychology Bad Person dismissal terms (someone's oeuvre is "narcissistic" or "toxic", a particular ideology or relation to comedy is a "disease") rather than actually articulating their specific elements, while also relying on the move of seeing the artistic output as something that either logically emerged from or logically resulted in that person being abusive, which is like, not a move I care to make! Sure, Ricky Gervais played an annoying, pompous, self-victimizing asshole boss on the UK version of the office and then became a weird self-victimizing "anti-cancel culture" warrior, but what do you say about Steve Carrell, whose reputation is (so far as I know) fine, but whose scrubbed up, friendlier version of the same character and framing of it in the US TV show is a much more demobilizing and problematic depiction of work rather than a critique??? I think the fact that you can't make broad moral claims or conclusions in this area is the whole purpose and task of arts criticism. But anyways.
There was another chapter about skit comedy and netflix streaming as a type of "care work" in the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic which I also found really interesting and a good connection to make. A positive of this book is that it does consider housework and the normative reproduction of society in general to also be places where "work in comedy/comedy about work" emerges. This is hyperspecific but I kind of wish it did that wrt the work neurodivergent and disabled people also have to do to shore up others' self-esteem in public life, by not being "too abnormal" or making anyone uncomfortable. But the Chapter on Telehealth therapy over the same period being connected to the "therapeutic listening" quality of humor and self-help podcasts was kind of baffling (and again mostly more tangentially related to the topic): there was a nice wrap-up paragraph about how these things are all sustaining and helpful, so I expect to reach the second half of the chapter that will trouble this for obvious reasons (The use of mental healthcare as worker discipline at jobs and schools, the exploitative data collecting and advertising model of BetterHelp which is so entangled with those same podcasts etc) when I turn the page, but no, that's it, the end! The conclusion was like, fine, with some sort of by now uninspiring proposals about "play" and "collectivity" as the positive qualities of comedy, but I really wanted more analysis of comedic depictions of work or comedy themed around work itself, and more of a statement at the end.... idk! Read the chapters I thought were good if the topic interests you but I could really take or leave the others.
A biography of Gray Barker, an early UFO zinester who shaped much of the lore and imagery surrounding the US UFO phenomenon, as well as other paranormal incidents, like the Mothman and Flatwoods Monster. McKee creates a charming but also troubled portrait, you can see how the alienation of being a gay guy in West Virginia in the 1950s-1980s contributed to his fascination with UFOs, the paranormal, and the often-derided "contactees" (who were rejected by those seeking a more dignified and scientific meaning behind the UFO phenomenon)... This could manifest in both uncommon empathy for those with other "atypical" lifestyles and beliefs, but also being well-adapted to a lifelong state of plausible deniability... he loved a good hoax but would always leave it for the reader to decide... draw your own conclusions! Another fascinating thing about this book is the attention the author gives to formal publishing and self-publishing technologies, and how they developed and influenced the spread (and economics!) of UFO-related publishing from the earliest documents and newsletters in the 1950s to deluxe hardbacks, hand-cut zines, and back again. The Saucerian's antagonisms and drama are also hilariously recognizable to any contemporary fandom. A cool book that ties many unique and very interesting threads together!
A bunch of deep-ass Art History Classic™ analysis of some great paintings where scenes of miracles, eternal life, etc are mingled with the tradition of realism in European painting-- where the material and here and now inevitably intrudes and interacts with the ideal. The chapter on Breugel's Land of Cockaigne obviously appealed the most to me, and did not disappoint, but even the ones on artists and works I felt less strongly about were really informative, philosophically knotty and rich. He ties all this into a politics of leftist pessimism/cynicism, which was a little tough for my natural utopian thinking to take but again, really meaty and provocative. It made me realize how impoverished, in the sense of reducing visual or multimedia works to like... syntactical "content" which then determines analysis, a lot of criticism is across the board nowadays, since everything has to be a 1000 word post that leads up to the Why X is the Y We Need Right Now (or not) argument. It felt like a challenge to read some stuff that makes deep formal and psychological observations/leaps/questions instead... can I do something like that?
The other stories here were "A Man and His Dog" (1918), "Disorder and Early Sorrow" (1925), "The Transposed Heads" (1940), "The Tables of the Law" (1944), and "The Black Swan" (1953). I'm typically not much of a short story reader but I do really love Thomas Mann and also "Mario and the Magician" is an early fictional depiction of hypnosis, so it's relevant to my research for my next novel lol... Anyways these are all more novella-length. I was surprised how much I got into them even though the basic subject matter of most of them... dogs? A pastiche of early translations of Indian myths? The book of Exodus??? ... were things that I would typically say are almost certainly uninteresting. But no, I do just really like the way he writes about the experience of philosophy and thought alongside daily life, internal contradictions, embarrassing impulses, etc, no matter what his sensibility is put towards. "The Tables of the Law" surprised me; I'm familiar with "realist" takes on bible stories and often find them even more tediously cheesy than the original text. But this one introduced a perverse and very human cynicism and self interest, to Moses, but also to God Himself, that broke through my initial resistance to the topic. "The Black Swan" is also notable for having a scene where I had to dog ear the corner of the page for it being so horny. I think people really sell short how weird and also funny Thomas Mann is, this made me want to go in on my long-threatened The Magic Mountain reread soon.
Jane Jensen is kind of a genius IMO? I got totally obsessed with Gabriel Knight 2 when I played it with Stephen, and putting it next to Phantasmagoria, which, while equally visually weird and wacky plotwise, just does not really have the sauce when it comes to writing or characters, and leans back a lot on predictable or even offensive 80s/90s horror movie tropes (the hickish idiots subplot is truly, truly unbearable). Jane Jensen's writing avoids all that while weaving together a bunch of fun characters in a plot that incorporates the gleeful tourism guide style omnivorousness that's so charming about Mirrors, as well as a historical mystery involving King Ludwig II suppressed homosexuality that extends into the present via an immortal werewolf lover. It is as goofy yet charming as playing the game all over again. It really makes me want to read some of her other novels (including pseudonymous gay romances!)
I LOVED this but it's so hard to know what to talk about. It's 1130 pages long and basically does not have a plot beyond following how the various people surrounding the establishment of a group to plan some great celebration of Austrian culture in 1914 (uh oh!) basically waste their time and defer making any sort of decision. Which sounds awful, and as a pure satire it would be tedious. Discussing it with Stephen, he was like, well the difference between like flat satire and what's going on here is that flat satire is just like, ha ha, this guy is dumb! (and not me) whereas this novel more directly confronts the horror that, contextually, anyone can be truly clueless. Alongside the march to disaster, which you care about because these characters, up to the most craven and irritating, are depicted so dimensionally and humanely, there's bizarre moments of joy and pleasure, and agonizing moments of insight only just missed. So it's a political "types of guy" novel in a similar sense to The Magic Mountain, but also to a surprising extent a lot about gender and desire and granular day to day experience... a bit of grist for trans readings and anti-family readings as well. It's one of those novels that can only be summed up in the experience of reading it! Try it!!! You might like it!!