Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions

Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions
Begin: 02/22/07
End:N/A
Quality: One Out of Ten.
Reason: Unread. Danielewski.
Genre: Fiction; literary fiction
Number: First.
Thoughts:

hated it. I couldn't even get through it. Yuck. I thought it would be good. I thought it would be interesting. I thought, well, that it wouldn't suck.

I guess I should attempt to explain why it was so difficult to get through it. Every page contains upside-down text in the bottom margin and right side text in the top margin so the first page of Hailey's story also contains the last page of Sam's story upside down. Each page also contains a sidebar with a date and lists of world events. Their is a publisher's note that recommends reading eight pages of one then eight pages of the other story.

I got about 100 pages through each story before giving up on it. I just had trouble following it. It was written in this prose-verse form that while had a line or two that was poetical or inspiration, still was confusing.
I liked the idea of the book but I felt that the book itself was severely lacking.

William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida
Begin: 02/20/07
End:02/21/07
Quality: One Out of Ten.
Reason: Unread. Beginner's Series.
Genre: Philosophy; Non-Fiction
Number: First.
Thoughts:

Weird. No wonder this is one of the problem plays. It's weird with two very distinct plots. We have Troilus and Cressida and their mangled relationship. We also have the troubles within the greek army, especially Achilles. And that whole last section with all the battles, was very lost on me.

I never really knew what to feel about the characters.

One of the reasons that I had wanted to read it was because it was popular during the Vietnam era due to the cynical view of people's immorality and disilusionment but it was just confused during the whole damn thing.

And i think that's all I have to say.

Marc Sautet's Nietzsche for Beginners

Marc Sautet's Nietzche for Beginners
Begin: 02/20/07
End:02/21/07
Quality: One Out of Ten.
Reason: Unread. Beginner's Series.
Genre: Philosophy; Non-Fiction
Number: First.
Thoughts:

I love this series but this particular one really was incredibly obtuse and completly useless to me. Unlike some of the other books in this series that I have read (i.e. Marx, Sartre) I came into this one has an actual beginner. I have never really read much about Nietzche although I have always wanted to do so. And I have to say that after reading this book, I don't feel like I understand Nietzche any better than when I first began the book. And I am still at a loss as to why Wagner figured so prominently in this work. The author seems to hate Nietzche and I had a hard time following what the hell he was talking about most of the time. I did notice that it was translated so maybe that has something to do with it but overall I found this to be a horrible horrible book and a complete waste of time.

Bash Dibra's CatSpeak

Bash Dibra's Catspeak
Begin: 02/19/07
End: 02/20/07
Quality: Three Out of Ten.
Reason: For Vladamir's Sake.
Genre: Pet Care; Non-Fiction
Number: First.
Thoughts:

It was okay. I was expecting quite a bit more. I was expecting some insight and most of the stuff he talked about I felt was pretty obvious stuff. I did find some of the Simple Solutions to be helpful but overall I was not all that impressed with this work.

Frank Herbert's White Plague

Frank Herbert's White Plague
Began: 2/07/07
End: 02/20/07
Quality: Six Out of Ten.
Reason: Unread. Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.
Genre: Fiction. Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.
Number: First.
Thoughts:

About a month ago, I decided that I wanted to read more post-apocalyptic stories. It's just the sort of thing that I decide on a regular basis which usually ends up meaning my reading lists expands exponentially every couple of days, but I digress. I was looking over a list that I discovered on wikipedia and found one by Frank Herbert. I have been a huge Frank Herbert fan for many years, due to his Dune Series. I have been picking at his other fiction for a while now and decided to go and grab a copy of this particular work, White Plague.

The novel begins in Dublin. A microbiologist, John Roe O’Neil, has just moved to Ireland to conduct research. His wife and two children are killed by an IRA bomb. This sends him over the edge of sanity and he creates a disease which kills only women and sets it loose in Ireland, England and Libya. The rest of the novel follows three plot track lines, O’Neil arriving in Ireland to sabotage whatever work the Irish are doing to stop the plague, the governments of the world dealing with the pandemic crisis and a group of scientists working on the cure.

I liked this novel overall. I think Herbert raises some very interesting and complex issues. I really enjoyed thinking and reading about the sociological impact of a pandemic of this magnitude would cause throughout the world. I found Herbert’s political and philosophical musing, either coming from a character or from the narrator, to be worthy of some ponderings. Yet, at the same time, I didn’t think it was really the best writing that Herbert had produced. I think that the novel was just not big enough for its britches. I mean that Herbert just tried to fit too much into a 500 page novel and that sometimes it got tangled down beneath the weight of all that Herbert was trying to get across. I also felt that this would have been much more interesting to me if Herbert had written the novel starting from the point where the
Governments had found a cure and the shift in culture that occurs because of the magnitude of differences between gender populations.

. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone but a Herbert fan or to a post-apocalyptic fan but even then…I didn't feel it was quite as strong as it could be.

Here’s the list of post-apocalyptic fiction….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apocalyptic_and_post-apocalyptic_fiction

Majorie Garber and Nancy J. Vicker's Medusa Reader

Majorie Garber and Nancy J. Vicker's Medusa Reader
Began: 2/06/07
End: 02/14/07
Quality: Eight Out of Ten.
Reason: Medusa!
Genre: Criticism. Culturual Studies. Art History. Mythology.
Number: First.
Thoughts:

I don't know why I thought this book was going to be one complete anaylsis of the Medusa myth. I was a little dispointed, I have to admit, that it was an anthology. I have been eyeing it
on amazon.com for quite some time. That being said, I have to say that I really enjoyed it. I mean a lot. It did take me a while to get through it. I breeze through a number of the opening stuff because it was the usual slew of greek classics that I have already read before but some of the medieval writings as well as some of the academic writings were a little tough. They weren't bad. Well, not all of them anyway. Louis Marin's Head of Medusa was rather pointless to me as was the piece about Freud's Office.
I learned quite a bit. I was inspired and I do believe I fell in love with Medusa all over again. I was kinda hoping they were going to have something about Wonder Woman vs. Medusa but it was written a few years before that epic battle so I should not be surprised by the absence there.

I think I also reading need to write out, to work out, to sketch and deduce my own feelings towards the medusa at some point in the very near future. I have never really fully developed my ideas. I am also going to have to use this work as a reference and get much more of the writing that is only partially shown here. I especially liked Emily Erwin Culpepper's Ancient Gorgons and Helene Cixous's The Laugh of the Medusa. I also got really exicted because both Monique Wittig and Audre Lorde were mentioned. I also found the part about the connection between Medusa and Lesbians rather fascinating. Lot's of stuff to work out and think about, to refine in my own thinking, to chisel down to a fine blade of thought.

Jeffrey Rosen's The Supreme Court: The personalities and rivalries that defined America
Began: 2/03/07
End: 02/05/07
Quality: Three Out of Ten.
Reason: NPR/Diane Rehm. Supreme Court.
Genre: Non-fiction. Law
Number: First.
Thoughts:

I really thought I was going to love it. I have been reading about the Supreme Court obbesively for quite a while, since i graduated high school and yet I have never read a single book about them. Weird, huh?

I liked aspects of it, but overall I was not impressed with the writing. I can't exactly put my finger on what I didn't like about it but their was definitly something that was putting me off.
But I found my attention wandering very often and myself not really caring which is odd considering that I love the Supreme Court.

I did learn a lot about constiional law and history which I didn't really know before. and I think it gave me a little more respect for the conservative judicial view.

I also found that a lot of the important cases that I agree with, I don't like the arguements that created them while those that I hate, I like the arguements.

Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird

Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird
Began: 1/31/07
End: 02/01/07
Quality: Six Out of Ten.
Reason: Unread
Genre: Non-fiction. Philosophy
.Number: First.
Thoughts:
Hot Damn! This shit is depressing. I think I need a round of prozac after this novel. While I did enjoy it, while I felt it was an important and powerful novel, it was still hard to get through it. I mean Kosinksi’s portrayal of the cruelty of man to man was just so overpowering. It literally is just episode after episode of brutalization. And Kosinski does not skimp on the sins. You get your share of violence, rape, bestiality, incest, terrorism, murder, child abuse, ect.

Their was one brief moment of hope, a startling few chapters where he is picked up by the Russian Army and loved but they soon are forced to give him up to the orphanage where the abuse and brutalization begin anew.

I was never sure whether Kosinski regards humans as just bestial animals prone to cruelty, that normally they wear only a thin sheen of morality. My only thought was that Kosinski was just illuminating the psychological and sociological effects of war.

The image of the painted bird was particularly powerful to me. The beginning of the book is rampant with images of animals, especially birds. Nature is seen as a rather dark and diabolical presence. And man is seemingly just another aspect of that. One of the care-takers of the boy traps birds for a living. He occasionally will cover one of the birds with paint and set it loose. It will fly away to be among it’s own kind at which point they will attack and kill it because they do not recognize it as such.

This not only gives the reader a foreshadowing of what is going to take place throughout the storyline but is very much the overarching theme of the story. This boy is seemingly painted by god or genetics or what have you and thus his own kind (Home Sapiens) do not regonize him as such and so attack him.





And this is not a view that I have that much ideological difference with. But for me anyway, he seems to just see the black view and nothing else. Not that I can really blame him. I never lived through nazi occupation.

I found the image of the painted bird fitting for the novel. Here is a boy who is seemingly painted by god and sent among his people, only to be hurt over and over again by them because they think he is a gypsy. It never really says what his ethnic background is that I recall anyway.

I also perhaps found it interesting in light of America’s current obsession with war and nation building. Perhaps, we should force every president to read this book to show them the psychological and physiological impact of war. I think it was especially appropriate to cast the protagonist as a young child.

Donald Palmer's Sartre for Beginners

Donald Palmer’s Sartre for BeginnersBegan: 1/31/07End: 02/01/07Quality: Six Out of Ten.Reason: UnreadGenre: Non-fiction. Philosophy.Number: First.Thoughts:

I love these books. Have I mentioned that little factoid? It’s so good. I don’t know what it is about the union of philosophy and comics but it’s just amazing, well, in my mind anyway.

I have tried reading about Sartre and understanding him a few times and I think this is one of the better texts. I think this time I got a pretty good grasp on the subject.

Some ideas/thoughts that I really liked…

-Each human being is alone, “abandoned,” and free. Each human being creates and re-creates his or her essence in every moment through his or her choices and actions.

-Sartre’s view is that we never, or hardly ever, confront reality (Being-in-itself) directly, but only through the medium of human institutions, which in fact camouflage rather than reveal reality. Human thought is in fact usually about thought. It is a system of infinite self-referentiality, unequipped to refer beyond itself to real existence. It is for this reason that Sarte has Roquentin say that the word existence designates nothing.

-According to Sartre, most people choose an aspect of themselves, and then claim that because of their feature of their personality, they have no choice but to behave as they do.

-The self is an ongoing construction recreated in each moment through our choices.