Mom read this to us at least a couple times at Christmas when we were little and I always think about revisiting it but am scared to for fear of weepiMom read this to us at least a couple times at Christmas when we were little and I always think about revisiting it but am scared to for fear of weeping. Well this year I got brave and went for it and goodnight. How in the world did you manage to read this out loud to us, Mom?? I am crying right now just thinking about it, and I know you are way more of a tender vittle than I am!! ...more
I read this with a group over 12 weeks in August, September, and October of this year. I would love to write something intelligent about it but don't I read this with a group over 12 weeks in August, September, and October of this year. I would love to write something intelligent about it but don't know if I ever will. I think whoever you are you should almost certainly do this book in a group, though. It's . . . pretty incredible....more
Between this and Wertz’s latest I am in hog heaven this summer. Both books are mothers as well as perfect babies, a thesis maybe I will flesh out in sBetween this and Wertz’s latest I am in hog heaven this summer. Both books are mothers as well as perfect babies, a thesis maybe I will flesh out in some dazzling writing later this year. Or maybe I will keep my thoughts to myself who knows. Either way! This book! Fuck me!! ...more
This audiobook is incredible, I’ve been listening to it on repeat like a song. I think I’ve listened through four times now. Highly highly highly recoThis audiobook is incredible, I’ve been listening to it on repeat like a song. I think I’ve listened through four times now. Highly highly highly recommend if you are someone struggling with feeling like shit more of the time than seems manageable. Soothing, instructive, informative, transformative.
Update June 2023: Still listening. I just bought a copy of the physical edition so I can underline it and bend its ears and draw stars.
Update October 23: Still on repeat. So good.
Update December 22: I hope I can write about this. I don't know when I've been able to devote so much time and attention to a book like this. One full calendar year. Wild. Cannot recommend this highly enough, or something like it that works better for you. If you are frayed like me, find something like this. It's been wonderful. I feel a lot better....more
I read this in August and was bowled over by it. It's just a really well-told memoir that is also in a nonjournalistic sense some very vivid and movinI read this in August and was bowled over by it. It's just a really well-told memoir that is also in a nonjournalistic sense some very vivid and moving labor reporting, with the additional bracing element of a clear-eyed view into the tarchoked heart of industry. Or an industry, anyway, the oil industry. But also just industry. The industry of men.
It reminded me of John Carpenter's The Thing, a movie where a group of men are living isolated together in a work station and a terrible mutating alien goo or something takes over and they all become terrifying monsters and attack each other until spoiler at the end Kurt Russell is like I am putting an end to this and blows up the whole work station. I think. I have seen this movie twice but I thought it was stupid the first time and didn't totally pay attention, and the second time I watched it with a lot more interest in seeing how it worked rather than snerffing at how it didn't but it is still a little stupid to me and anyway I don't retain great plot synopses even of things I worship, so maybe go read the Wikipedia if you are truly interested in knowing what HAPPENS in The Thing.
Point being it's a movie about isolated figures whose purpose for existing gets really narrowed down to a not very human container and their humanness drains out, gets overwhelmed, becomes monstrous. Which is what happens in Ducks.
So I've been thinking about that since August, how this book and that movie complement one another in this conversation about workplace environments that I am personally always pretty deeply obsessing about; and then the night before last I got to return to my old book club, where I haven't been since 2019, and where I spent a glorious evening cawing and bleating and trilling and being with a bunch of humans, a bunch of warm vibrant cosmic bodies in space and time, and I was like whoa. This is it, this is everything.
Which, that is the part that I hadn't been thinking about with this book, how the opposite of what happens in this book is this thing we can look at in our social and public relationships, and how necessary this social/public element is to our efforts to not be or become monsters, and how fun it can be, how electrifying.
So this book is GREAT, in short. It is NOT a fun or uplifting story. It is an important, difficult memoir, told without rancor or self-service. Amazing. Amazing to digest art like this. Helps me imagine the world can be more than is the case, and hope for better things, what rises from ashes....more
I read this alone two summers ago, and reread it this month with a group of women, some of us familiar with the stories of Genesis and some of us compI read this alone two summers ago, and reread it this month with a group of women, some of us familiar with the stories of Genesis and some of us completely unfamiliar, and I noticed that there's an extent to which this book kind of can't hit for you if you are in the latter category, maybe? Like if you haven't been exposed in some explicit way to these ancient parables, a strange and curious eye turned gently onto them is maybe not going to pack a lot of punch for you. Like why not just read any silly story. But for anyone who's been exposed, I feel like this is a pretty fascinating book. Finck's Genesis isn't so much a "feminist adaptation," which category it gets tucked into in blurbs, less the story of "God" as a woman, and more the story of a woman as a creator. Any woman. The woman who happened to be telling the story at the moment when Finck caught up to it. Herself, that is to say. And how in one telling, one possible interpretation of this bizarre tapestry of stories with no narrative integrity the way we like to think about our stories as having, in one telling there is an onus on this creator to be gentle and let go of everything she thinks she's responsible for, and just keep showing up in the garden every day not only meeting snakes, but meeting them at the door laughing. No more floods. I love this book. It probably would have been better for Finck to give up on the rigor of retelling all these weird specific stories and spend more time digging into the intersection of creation/creator/the word/light/lilith, but that's my taste, I am less a Genesis fan and more an ookie little meanderings fan. Which is why I love Liana Finck's work in general and this book in particular....more
So I'm reading this book The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free, which is a pretty delicious report on basically (for my money) *the* New YoWow.
So I'm reading this book The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free, which is a pretty delicious report on basically (for my money) *the* New York fantasy--to live by one's wits, in Woolf's formulation, elegantly and sparely, surrounded by writing and women and brilliance and glitz. Right!?? That is the fantasy. Hubba hubba.
And because the Barbizon is where Mademoiselle magazine housed its summer guest editors, and because in the summer of 1953 Sylvia Plath was one of the lucky girls selected, there is a nice big Sylvia chapter that I could hardly get to the end of before I needed to reread The Bell Jar.
I had read The Bell Jar for the first time many years ago. I read it when I was a very young woman. Maybe still nineteen, even. And I was in and out of, at that time, hospitals. Soaked through with the awful knowledge that I was known by no one and couldn't be seen because it wasn't worth anyone's effort. I felt the constant unbearable weight of the disgusting itch and bulge and stench of the body crushing me and I despised it; not infrequently I found I badly wanted to die. I never did, of course, but reading this book at that age was . . . I didn't get it. Because I was in so much private pain I couldn't extend the generosity of imagination to understand anyone else's and Esther Greenwood struck me as melodramatic, privileged, and self-absorbed. Her issues seemed the issues of someone petty and shallow, not the ugly, alone-in-Florida misery I was experiencing. She was lucky, she was lovely, she was uplifted, and I had no compassion for her and very little curiosity.
And so for more than twenty years now I have been saying I read The Bell Jar too late--I thought it was a book for very very young women and that I had just been a little too grownup to be patient with it. I thought that if I'd read it when I was a soppy frivolous teen I could have connected with it better maybe.
And so holy crap it came as such a revelation to find out how wrong wrong wrong I have been for so long. This book is a bullet, and a heart and a brain, and when you read it it just kills you, it just pulses there in your palms, the bloody essential organ of pain that was Plath's young womanhood. It is incredible.
And it is so funny. It is so so funny. I had no idea when I read it the first time, how to read it. This is a really, really beautiful piece of work that it feels terrible, terrible to read, knowing.
I'm sorry I was petty and shallow and vain, Sylvia. Self-absorbed and melodramatic. I'm sorry you were, too, and I'm sorry that this is all there is of you now, this brilliant excruciating record of your beauty and what it meant to you. It means so much....more
Well, I finished American Pastoral last night. I don't have the most distinct memories of this book from when I first read it twenty years ago, but I Well, I finished American Pastoral last night. I don't have the most distinct memories of this book from when I first read it twenty years ago, but I know t it kicked me off on a Roth deep-dive that I remained obsessively faceplanted into until I had consumed it all, his every title, Columbus to (at that time) The Human Stain. It was the summer after we graduated college, the summer before we moved to New York, and I remember this being an excellent summer and an excellent summer of reading, specifically. The feeling of loving reading Roth stays with me. I remember lying on my stomach and housing these heaping bowls of peanut butter ice cream, the colorful tapestry that shaded the giant windows in our little second-story sunporch where we slept on a mattress on the floor, my cigarettes and my cats, just a hell of a fucking summer of going in whole, going in deep on this writer's work and world. Something of Roth absorbed me, and I was absorbed into it. Returning to this novel today I find it sour sour sour and understand something of what attracted me when I was young. Roth is a writer consumed by the ways women can be detestable: I was a woman; I knew myself to be detestable. I loved reading Roth because he made the world feel real by confirming what I most feared--that a person can be unlovable, can be undeserving of love, can fuck up so badly just by being who she is that there is no coming back from it and all that happens from any kind of rational, self-respecting position is that waves and waves of suffering and misery are created by this simple essential elemental truth: that it is possible you are a bad person, you have done everything stupid and wrong. Returning to it today I don't have as much patience for this attitude. As a work of literature, American Pastoral is a very maximalistically absorb-you-into-it novel, heavy and dense like a bottomless cosmic kugel for your hungry lonely horny scrawny brains, if that's who you were as a young woman. Beautiful. But as a philosophy it's poop. Worse, it's a poopy diaper. It's basically that thing Virginia Woolf talks about (but she talks about it specific to women writers) where if you don't divest yourself of your petty bitterness it will overwhelm you eventually, it will smear your name, it will spoil the pleasure of your company. Twenty years ago this wouldn't have been coherent for me, I needed the venom I needed the peanussy lil shits of the world like Philip Roth to demonstrate how one might shuck off tedious, cramping old beliefs and just really let it fly how angry you are, how angry you are you have been held down like this for so long. Messy and time-consuming, but necessary for some. At a time when I was pretty clueless, doing myself real damage, it gave me some spine. Today I'd give it three stars. It needs help if it wants to swim in these modern waters. I don't know if he'd care but I think there could be a pretty beautiful story here. It's awful to think of the pain of your parents. It's awful to contemplate a mother's grief, a father's regret. It's beautiful how he tries to, even if it comes through nasty, even if it comes through so sad. American Pastoral is insightful and wise in many ways and still I think pretty gorgeous, but Roth is a baaaaaaaaby about ladies and it is embarrassing when someone has this attitude. Especially if they think it's justified, like that is just the worst. Which, you know. I grew up in this country, too. It's helpful to study this stuff....more
It's funny that he's like ugh now even BOOKISH PHARMACISTS are afraid of "the real combat" of art. Like what is he talking about with "even." The onlyIt's funny that he's like ugh now even BOOKISH PHARMACISTS are afraid of "the real combat" of art. Like what is he talking about with "even." The only people who care about the "real combat" of this stuff are the people who would say something like that in the first place, which is to say, not pharmacists.
I for my part do have a great interest in the struggle that terrifies us all, Roberto. Come at me. Cow and spur me, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench....more
Heaven. This was one of the big formative ones for me, and it's funny to return to it now and see that it's not from the "great works of literature tiHeaven. This was one of the big formative ones for me, and it's funny to return to it now and see that it's not from the "great works of literature timeless to age and culture" category of kids' books. It is instead a very particular and peculiar story about a very particular and peculiar child who for whatever reasons enough of us particular, peculiar children clicked with that this book became a classic. Funny too to full-bloodedly be an adult obsessed with scribbling furiously into notebooks all that I observe and must report upon re the people I meet and spy on. Was I this way and this book affirmed me? Or did this book shape me, who knows, point being, heaven, sheer heaven. An overly thinky, set-in-her-ways child who loves orderliness and occasionally sinks into awful self-pitying funks, but who has faith that there are people to love her all the way through and with a firm, fixed conviction that her mind is very interesting and worth her time and effort, as well as worth the time and effort of anyone who'll be lucky enough to be counted one of her few dear friends. Straight into my veins. ...more
I don't know if this is one of those situations where I have too much to say and so can't settle in on exactly what to say, or whether it's because I I don't know if this is one of those situations where I have too much to say and so can't settle in on exactly what to say, or whether it's because I just haven't sat and tried to write with real thoughtfulness about a book in a while, but I have been trying to get to the heart of what I think and feel about this book since reading it for the first time in August and I am still struggling.
But I'm returning it to the library today and so I must come up with something.
Well OK to get started, it's another memoir/survey, a format I am very into in theory, and which was also the structure of Radtke's first book, Imagine Wanting Only This. In that earlier work she set out to understand something of what it means to go to ruin, the decay inherent in existence, the weird feeling you can get if you meditate on a place in time after your own death. It's an interesting exploration, and if it's a little self-absorbed, a little clunky, a little grad-schooly, you (or I) can extend her the benefit of the doubt: She's only thirty when that book comes out. I thought it was impressive and I fought people about it and still will.
In this book, she sets out to tackle the somewhat less theoretical subject of American loneliness, rooting the exploration in her own experience as a Midwest preteen in the late nineties seeking connection through the internet, stories about her father operating a ham radio in his own youth, and her time living in Las Vegas and New York City, weaving in more journalistic sections that touch upon cowboys, television's male antiheroes, Hannah Arendt, Yayoi Kusama, and Harry Harlow's demented animal torture, all in an effort to crystallize something of loneliness, what it means to long to belong.
I think this is brave and important work, but I find her efforts here garbled and unfocussed. She is still learning how to train the eye outward, and then inward, and then outward again and as a result the book lists, bulges, drags, and staggers its way through what might largely be an issue of too much material. I picture a version of this book that spends less time (and space) arranging headlines, more time digging in to its primary subject--Radtke's own loneliness, and the pain of it, trusting readers to connect to her through their own pain without the bolster of statistical and psychiatric/medical "proof" that loneliness is painful.
And so then as far as the art I maybe have complicated feelings. I really don't like the art this time, even though it is made the same way she made Imagine. This time for whatever reason I felt the stiffness and artifice of the grayscale digital tracery pushing my eyes away from the pages. I resented its use of imagery as symbol--make a drawing from a photograph of a real person who is alone and the drawing you've made is now of no one. This doesn't "show" loneliness in any meaningful way, any more than showing someone in a crowd shows camaraderie, and page after page of it was . . . well if nothing else it was boring. And then sometimes (for my money) the imagery brutally and unearnedly punishes the reader. Fuck the monkey stuff in this book. This book brings neither the depth nor the perspective that could forgive its rubbing its readers' faces in cruelty like this.
Anyway if the art weren't digital, I realized, but still clumsy like this, I would probably be pretty defensive of it. I love clumsy selfish immature handmade stories, it's my basic art philosophy that we all on some level need to make them in whatever form in order to peel them out of our hearts like the sour clogs they can fuck us up by being. So maybe digital tracing is just not my comics aesthetic.
And so then I read it rather quickly about a week ago in anticipation of getting together with a couple friends and talking about it, and I didn't dislike it as strongly. Maybe it should be read quickly. Maybe it's a better book if you read it on your phone. I don't know.
In conclusion, I'm not mad at this book but I am disappointed.
Oh and then one other kind of related thing, the Bad Art Friend stuff is making its way through my internets right now, and this morning I finished the Times article so I could talk to Megan about it and this really struck me: "I feel instead of running the race herself, she's standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities." I really feel this quote. I am jealous of Radtke! I want to publish my self-absorbed pretentious comics memoirs about all my theories and feelings, lol. And she has written two! To no little acclaim. I want to do that, too. So to the extent that that blinders me, I am just putting my cards on the table.
Anyway I hope this is not a shitty review, I am TRYING to learn how to be more forthright about my negative opinions without needing to couch them in blustery hilarity or spiteful painful privacy or whatever other twisted ass ways I have sucked down and/or blasted all over you rudely my gripes. Please accept this effort as my best for today....more
I keep a handful of titles by my personal comics idols on my desk and along with Bechdel and Gill and Wertz and Barry and Bell and Pierre is permittedI keep a handful of titles by my personal comics idols on my desk and along with Bechdel and Gill and Wertz and Barry and Bell and Pierre is permitted one male and that is Van Sciver. God damn is he good. God damn....more
I feel like I’ve just lived a whole lifetime in these past two months rereading these utterly thoroughly heartI lost it when Percy shows up. LOST IT.
I feel like I’ve just lived a whole lifetime in these past two months rereading these utterly thoroughly heartcrackingly astonishing works of beauty beauty beauty....more
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