it's so painful to read poetry and be entirely aware that it's only a translation, but I thought walter kaufmann's translation flowed relatively well. and I liked the end of part one. I like when women in old literature go crazy and they're suddenly given a personality/interiority, and I think it's well done in this production on youtube.

I really loved the stream of consciousness in the first chapter. it reminded me of the story "encounters" from dubliners when the old man was described as thinking in circles (lacanians when circles:). and, though I understand why the prose became denser, and I thought it was interesting when it culminated to poetics at the end of chapter four, nothing was as resonant to me than that first chapter. also, a portrait of the artist confirmed my theory that modernism did everything romanticism wanted to do but better; the contrast of the casual language of the dialogue and the narration overfilled with imagery is like if wordsworth wasn't lying about his admiration for common people.

tried reading finnegans wake and after spending hours on the first five pages I ended up here. my weakness as an english major are short stories, I find even poetry easier to get invested in. these were interesting, though. my favourite was "encounters." I liked how the prose didn't compensate for the first-person child's perspective, and I liked how Joyce only wrote in first-person for the childrens' stories, allowing more introspection to the children as opposed to the performative-ness of the adults. I also liked "a painful case." it appealed to me when mr. Sinico said "love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual relationship and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse." I also liked the immature father of "a little cloud," and I liked "a mother" as well. but I did start to feel impatient to get to Joyce's later works; even if I struggled with finnegans wake I was hoping for a little more of its playfulness in dubliners.

as it is becoming more and more embarassing to like zizek I have to call this a guilty pleasure. I needed a refresher on hegel and lacan so it served that purpose … though I was looking forward to the critique of post-structuralism only to find out that I haven't read enough Derrida. it was also definitely brave of The Village Voice to compare this to anti-oedipus in the praises on the back of the book. but I have become less partial to D&G's rejection of unconscious "belief"; I liked zizek's "subject presumed to" know/believe/enjoy/desire. I also thought he demonstrated psychoanalytic repetition through hegel pretty well, and the difference between hegel's and kant's sublimity will be useful for me. but I have to admit that I skimmed the last 10 pages because I didn't understand the choice to start using the most hegelanese at the point where I was getting exhausted of the book, though I did like the choice to start with comparing the logic of freud's interpretation of dreams and marx's commodity fetishism, that was a good hook for me. unfortunately, zizek wrote a good book and I enjoyed it.

it caught my interest at the passage on claudia's baby doll and then I read the rest in a fever. another unforgettable part to me was when cholly watches that man break open a watermelon; Toni Morrison writes cholly's assumption of masculinity and his hatred of women so sparingly, even innocently, that it becomes so clear that the violent men of her novel are not unique deviations from the norm but necessities of patriarchal white supremacy. and after writing this blog post I especially appreciated how faithfully she wrote of children. their dialogue feels natural and so accurate to children's logic that it shows how important it is to remember what it was really like to be a child.

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. but it did predict the deterritorialization of women in the work force and the reterritorialization of their inferiority 🤓 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 would bore me; if this was my first primary text I would have never read another work of philosophy again.

I read more translated books than books 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. I particularly liked when england's climate went "damp" at the turn of the nineteenth century… 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 nicholas greene was described by "the more he denounced his own time the more compacent 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 passage 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." in my review for genealogy of morals, I had a similar intuition for Deleuze and Guattari's references, and I'm proud of it…

reminded me of the dreams I hate the most where I'm too weak to move or react to anything. it was easy to think it was about persecutory delusions but that only put me in as accusative of a position as the court's... I remember being mostly eluded by kafka in high school so I thought I would prove myself smarter this time but I did not.

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 they explicitly cited it lol. 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...

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 probably the reference.

I liked this funny picture of them.

click here for my article. stalled reading this ever since I was a 15-year-old "socialist-not-communist" reading the manifesto for the first time. partly because marx is called hard to read but that's because no one really reads marx. despite hegel's influence, he is really clear without being too dry or too ornamented. and despite the indimidating length, he repeats concepts when they become relevant again; his dialectic is easy to follow. you can tell at what point I read anti-oedipus because I started to bother with tabs. It will be interesting to read more of the Frankfurt school after reading the marx before them and the deleuze and guattari after them. capital is also a good reminder that women have always worked, they were just the poor ones.

felt like peak literature after cloud atlas. it was a cute read. also refreshing to read a woman writer; you'll think you're a uniquely unidentifiable subhuman until you remember that everything you read/hear/watch is made by men. this book also reminds you that academics and their navel-gazing are really embarrassing; my interest in the career is purely another one of my humiliation rituals.

longest 400 pages of my life. so boring I thought I was losing the attention span I'm so proud of having. I like that studying english forces me to read beyond my taste, and I can always get something out of books I don't even enjoy. but I really struggled to feel anything for cloud atlas. I can do style without substance but not substance without style -- it was too much plot. I get why we're reading it for the postmodernism unit, but does postmodernism have to be so corny? I lost the little investment I had when the sci-fi dystopia turned out to be north korean. (hover to view spoilers) my one positive is that I liked the robert chapters, and the second at the end even slightly revived my interest. but timothy's were insufferable to read and it only gets worse. homestuck did it better!

reminded me of Upton Sinclair's the jungle. not only for the early 20th century eastern european industrial labourers, but Ondaantje's references to his own work with archives made me think of Sinclair's journalistic efforts; even the labor of the book itself is forced on our consciousness. at first, I wasn't sure about a poet writing prose, but I can tolerate the more vague, concise language than the tumblr writer verbiage I expected (which was maybe an anachronistic assumption). we also read it with Hayden White and the Lacanian-historian-literary-critic indulged me.

embarrassed I only read it now. like Frankenstein, the plot details feel a little too convoluted when its premise is already general cultural knowledge. but I enjoyed it.

I was supposed to read it for a book club but I got impatient and read it on my own. after reading anti-oedipus and losing faith in structures and wholes it was hard to be persuaded by Zwicky's gestalts. I felt like I could vaguely agree with gestalt thinking when she used the examples of the little graphs or of poetry and music, but it was all lost on me whenever she elaborated on her reasoning (though maybe that vagueness proves her point). I would begin to nod along when the opposition of calculative and gestalt thinking appeared like the opposition of the symbolic and imaginary (sometimes the gestalt even seemed like Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenizing), and this was nearly explicitly addressed when Zwicky assigned the calculative to Freud's second topography (ego) and gestalt thinking to the first (unconscious). but this only became an example of her failure to keep the opposition as strict as she suggests it is, because a couple of pages earlier she says the individual is a gestalt. and the lacan in me couldn't shake the conviction that ineffability is immanent to language... I would actually feel like she was making the same argument on the topic of poetry, but then she'd insist that poetry is outside of language. I was also suspicious of her insistence that the west went wrong when it began questioning gestalts, for being "puzzled" while the rest of the world "took them for granted"; I don't think critical thinking is exclusive to the west nor that we should reject it. I'm not sure how we would challenge the technocracy she is so vehemently against if we just took everything as they immediately are to us... I was surprised Zwicky never discusses cleanth brooks considering her interest in literature, because I noticed their wholes run into the same problems: science that isn't science but is science, and a liberal disregard for material conditions. on a final, lighter note, the experience of meaning often reminded me of this bird photography.

click here for my articles. deleuze and guattari answer the biggest question implied in lacan's third seminar: isn't there a benefit to never having symbolized oedipus? the first part was a rough read but it all clicked by the chapter "3 texts of freud." one thing I enjoyed was how they went further with the freud/marx lens by applying it to the form of the argument itself; I think it parallels marx's rejection of universal principles of economics (freud being deleuze and guattari's ricardo). anti-oedipus also answered to my suspiscions of how quick psychoanalysis was to represent the unconscious. It does feel like it should be thought of a little more abstractly... The inclusion of the preconscious was interesting too, since it's largely abandoned by lacan. I was also surprised that anti-oedipus actually convinced me against structuralism. Its optimism also surprised me knowing it was a response to the failure of may 68. I wonder what they would think about the reterritorialization of today's dsm-5... and their style inspires me to write.

it took me 7 months to read. I understood at most maybe 40% of it but I think that's fair for a first read … for the first third I relied heavily on gregory b sadler but I eventually got used to hegel's writing on my own + he speaks more concretely as the book goes on. after the reason section I got bored and didn't read a page for 2 months, but I turned out to be this picture; the following spirit section was very rewarding. and now I can not only better understand marx and lacan but most importantly, dutch modern artist piet mondrian.

lacan is known for writing obscurely but his earlier seminars are very clear. I like how he elaborates on certainty in psychotics and I feel like that was missing from the associated paper in ecrits, "on a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis." he makes his infamous statement here about how he makes himself deliberately difficult to understand, but I think he has a point, just a little bit, if you think about how confident people can be in their complete misunderstandings of freud...

read schreber's memoir so I could read freud's case on schreber so I could read lacan's third seminar so I can read deleuze and guattari's anti-oedipus...

click here for my article. denser than I expected. I like that jameson is clear about using "late capitalism" to refer to a purer, multinational capitalism because otherwise the term is usually thrown around redundantly. also, the word postmodernism actually means something to me now outside of the mouths of jordan-peterson-alan-sokal types. will reread when I'm more familiar with the literary criticism jameson is responding to.