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April 2025

	the bluest eye (morrison) ★★★★ ½ the passage on claudia's baby doll hooked me. another great part was when cholly watches that one man break open a watermelon; Toni Morrison writes cholly's assumption of masculinity so innocently that it's so clear that the violent men of her novel are not unique deviations from the norm but necessities of patriarchal white supremacy. and I especially appreciated how faithfully she wrote of children; their dialogue feels so natural and so accurate to children's logic that it shows how important it is to remember and to empathize with what it was really like to be a child -- beyond nostalgia.
	republic (plato) ★★ ½ I was reading a critique of pure reason and the deduction of the categories was so humbling I went back two millennia in philosophy. it felt like homework though… sometimes I have to sympathize with people who won't read anything canonical because it's all written by men. I also would have liked more of Thrasymachus, it was more fun when Socrates was being challenged because the others were just written to suck him off. while I wouldn't say it wasn't worth reading, it only reconfirmed to me that a chronological reading of philosophy is boring; if this was my first primary text I would have never read any philosophy again.
	orlando (woolf) ★★★★ I read more books in translation than in original english but Orlando reminded me of how much I must miss in translations; I couldn't read Virginia Woolf's prose in any other way. Orlando is on a greater scale than I normally enjoy but the time moves so naturally that it feels simplier than it really is. and pale fire and orlando have shown me that books about writers don't have to be self-important (wordsworth, solenoid by mircea cartarescu). and I thought that it was eloquently put when this was said of nicholas greene: "the more he denounced his own time the more complacent he became." I like how writers have always been annoying, it's just that now we have to see it unfiltered on twitter. also, I swear to god, in my notes I wrote "I might have poisoned my brain on anti-oedipus but this has to be their schizo on a walk," and then when I was later reading a thousand plateaus d&g directly reference "to take a walk like virginia woolf."
	the trial (kafka) ★★★ reminded me of the dreams I get where I'm too lethargic to react to anything. it was easy to think it was about persecutory delusions but that only made me as accusative as the court … I remember being mostly eluded by kafka in high school so I thought I would prove myself smarter this time but I did not.
	on the geneology of morals (nietzsche) ★★★★ read to understand deleuze. on the genealogy of morals is very easy to read, and it made it obvious that it's a little counterintuitive of me to read philosophy completely backwards. though nietzsche was a lot more fun to read after anti-oedipus than it would have been otherwise; I wasn't interested in reading him before because he was either represented through nazis or 15 year old nihilists and I don't think I would have been able to see beyond that. it was especially a pleasure to realize all the allusions in anti-oedipus to nietzsche, too, like the desert of the body without organs and the bad air of the analyst's room … this quote reminded me so much of a passage from AO and when I looked back I was so proud to see they cited him. but it was whiplash when he finally made it to the wider, material issue behind normative unhappiness and he thinks of race mixing and immigration … and he was so close after saying himself that guilt originated in debts/exchange …
	pale fire (nabokov) ★★★ ½ A lot sillier than I expected. redeemed postmodern fiction for me after cloud atlas. it is equally playful without the proto-millenial kind of self-awareness, and this time the obnoxious style of the fake author did not completely turn me off. actually, pale fire is a lot like the only good plot in cloud atlas (frobisher and Ayrs), and I'm realizing now that that was maybe the inspiration.
	gilles deleuze and félix guattari: intersecting lives (dosse) ★★ ½ I liked this funny picture of them.