Splendid imbricate short fiction, culminating in a novella. I like to think of this text as the author's answer to Go Down, Moses. It is not to fault Splendid imbricate short fiction, culminating in a novella. I like to think of this text as the author's answer to Go Down, Moses. It is not to fault 'From a Great Distance' to say it lacks the intensity of 'The Bear'--because so does everything else other than the grand inquisitor sequence in Dostoyevsky. The subtlety here is rather its particular virtue, along with warm immanent critique of postmodern bucolic realism. Probably superior to her prior collections, also worthy of one's attention.
Recommended for those grateful for their invisibility, readers who never placed much value on chastity, and trash unsalvageable even by good education....more
Every country probably needs a book like this one, laying out its recent electoral past. Anderson's Brazil Apart is a similar effort. Such texts are vEvery country probably needs a book like this one, laying out its recent electoral past. Anderson's Brazil Apart is a similar effort. Such texts are valuable, but labor intensive, insofar as they work meticulously through the electoral process of a modern state, with attention to personalities, issues, and so on.
This particular text leaves off just before the recent election that brought fascist Meloni to the prime ministry....more
Another reviewer mentions that this text is like a modern leftwing platonic dialogue. That's a slick insight--and it seems that it's a dialogue with tAnother reviewer mentions that this text is like a modern leftwing platonic dialogue. That's a slick insight--and it seems that it's a dialogue with two persons in the Socrates role, talking to each other from slightly different perspectives, maybe Horkheimer is a Socrates surly about his impending decease, whereas Adorno is a younger, slightly less pessimistic Socrates, maybe just before his trial. The important thing to remember here is that neither fills the role of the regular platonist chump who clocks in just to repeat Yes, Socrates or But of course Socrates or Whatever you say, Socrates.
The text is very likely hypomneumata, but so is anything listed with a title that is 'Toward' something else. Overall, a number of cool insights, but nothing spectacular....more
The anti-Augustine, an anatomy of the confession form itself, maybe, to use Frye's terms, worming its way inside the form and then borrowing out, not The anti-Augustine, an anatomy of the confession form itself, maybe, to use Frye's terms, worming its way inside the form and then borrowing out, not nasty like a xenomorph but civilized like an attorney.
This might be some sort of heretical internecine genre war when the narrator proclaims that his reading preferences "ceased to like anything but confessions, and the authors of confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they know" (120). This is likely because "truth is a colossal bore" (101). In fact, "it's very hard to disentangle the true from the false in what I'm saying" (119). His typology is to "divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden. I'll let you choose the pigeonhole that suits me" (id.). The ultimate goal is a nihilistic conversion of ethics into aesthetics wherein "I haven't changed my way of life; I continue to love myself and make use of others. Only, the confession of my crimes allows me to begin again lighter in heart and to taste a double enjoyment, first of my nature and secondly of a charming repentance" (142).
This conversion of ethics into aesthetics exists at the root of the genre, insofar as Augustine regards the end of faith to be true happiness (q.v.). We know he's gunning for St. Augustine with this faux confession when he states that "God's sole usefulness would be to guarantee innocence, and I am inclined to see religion as a huge laundering venture" (111). But the repeated invocation of 'indifference' (Diogenes' adiaphora) places an additional menippean target on cynicism, which is fairly amusing, considering that menippean satire is cynic in origin. We also see other connections, prospectively, such as Saramago picking up on the argument about Christ's guilt (112) for his own Gospel.
Recommended for the enlightened advocates of slavery and those living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in history....more
You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You t
With passages such as
You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. (X.xxvii)
it's manifestly plain that this text is the original theophiliac deomance.
Some items of interest, such as the nuanced interpretations of Genesis and the interaction of Plotinus with scripture--but on the whole, a self-indulgent and dogmatic presentation that simply assumes its conclusions and pursues them recklessly in circles, such as in the dismissal of contrary opinion, e.g.:
This is the utterance of madmen. They do not see your works with the help of your Spirit and do not recognize you in them. (XIII.xxx)
We see the regular conflation of ethics with merely aesthetic ends in statements such as "I travelled much further away from you into more and more sterile things productive of unhappiness" (II.ii). There is also a tendency to equivocate through figure, however rhetorically elegant it may be: "Your omnipotence is never far from us, even when we are far from you" (id.)....more
The three great cartoon memories from my childhood are the horror of the death of Optimus Prime, the intensity of the 'riddles in the dark' segment ofThe three great cartoon memories from my childhood are the horror of the death of Optimus Prime, the intensity of the 'riddles in the dark' segment of the Rankin/Bass Hobbit, and the sublime mystery of the Black Rabbit of Inle. I'm not sure how well any of that would hold up now, were these rewatched, though I'm confident that the mystery at least would remain.
In approaching this one in print again as an adult, I see additionally that it is not just imitated by children's literature, but also, in the model of a post-apocalyptic band of survivors who trip from one local dystopia to the next before leaving each in ruins, traces a direct line of descent to items such as Fallout and The Walking Dead.
Recommended for rabbits of consequence and those whose chief rabbit has ordered them to defend this run....more
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