april reads (Patreon)

my work by olga ravn, slaughterhouse 5 by kurt vonnegut, forgetting things by sigmund freud and others

weather is breaking up north! blue skies for the past few days...i bought a white midi dress? how unusual

while reading dead souls i got struck by an idea for a video and wrote the whole script in two days..i can't remember the last time that's happened..it will be the best video i've ever made..want to have it uploaded before june

last month i said i'd be starting with clarice lispector but i tried the apple in the dark and just couldn't focus for all the meandering...i wasn't in the right mood. will give it another shot. sorry lispectorheads. apart from those twenty pages..here's what i've got for you

my work by olga ravn

woman struggles before, during and after the birth of her first child

super unpleasant to read..obviously pregnancy is body horror..i'm looking at all of you who also know the fear

jumps between essay, fiction, poetry..multiple endings and beginnings, all informing one another..very cool

perhaps domestic labor isn't endlessly divisible...narrator’s husband aggressively takes on the duties of 'motherhood' and is very! irritating

with ravn's previous book (the employees) which i enjoyed hugely i think i’m slotting her in my brain’s Influence file...in her writing i can see how she thinks + how the pieces connect..nice

‘She found herself caught between wanting to create art that was accessible to all, and creating the art that she was able to create which always revealed the part of her that was not normal.’

‘“You’re so sensitive,” he said affectionately, putting the hat on the child. Anna was repulsed. Sensitivity was a shackle.’

‘We were asked to reframe our catastrophic thinking. Not, for example: “The ferry will sink” but instead: “It’s normal for the ferry to rock when it’s very windy, and it’s normal to feel nervous in such a situation.” The state-funded psychiatric treatment for anxiety is basically a visualization workshop. I’ve seen it happen. The atrocity of it working. The humiliation.’

‘I’m not writing about something I read somewhere, about a philosopher who visits his mother with dementia in a nursing home, and his mother tells him she’s in pain: “What hurts?” he asks, and she answers him, “My mother hurts.” And he wrote that Alzheimer’s patients often forget their own children, but almost never their parents.’

forgetting things by sigmund freud

freud says most forgetting isn't caused by random information discard but by repression + avoidance of negative feelings associated with its recall

the crux of adhd symptoms / pathological demand avoidance i imagine

papa freud is also a birthday-wish forgetter..validation..

when i finished reading this i immediately sent an email i’d been putting off for two weeks and then promptly returned to the exact mode of being i'd been operating under before

ice by anna kavan

an impending apocalypse of ice..an unnamed man stalks an unnamed girl with silver hair

liked this a lot...such true-feeling dream logic..super uncanny...clear premise: 'In a peculiar way, the unreality of my outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.'

this was a sort of adam and eve story for me..archetypical Man/Woman pairing..the man is blindly pursuant and violent without reflection while the woman is enslaved by her own helplessness, her young and beautiful moods...the endless battle..'It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.'....

meanwhile the humanity around them is suspicious, hostile, largely unreasonable..yeah!

ice apocalypse! what a concept. cool descriptions

easy recommend. a little something for everyone, weirdly

slaughterhouse 5 by kurt vonnegut

ahh

what can ya say!

i read this in two sittings..1. at the laurieston in glasgow and 2. on the train home from glasgow in the dark..i was reading from a first edition copy that i bought that morning from some mr. magorium-ass secondhand bookshop...so it was a very intense and vintage-feeling reading experience

one of the greatest books ever written? right? right??

a series of genius insinuations..+ the last thirty pages..idk..i was experiencing a long..whatever the opposite of an orgasm is

truly felt so ‘moved’

dead souls by sam riviere

disillusioned poet has long conversation with disgraced poet in a travelodge bar....there are no chapters or paragraph breaks..i saw a reviewer describe the reading experience as 'looking for a place to sit in a mall'

if you’re not at least a little familiar with the goings-on of some insular ass publishing sphere you might find it boring..(written about the uk scene..but reviews say it might as well be about the ny scene..it's all the same everywhere, i imagine..worlds of self-congratulatory academics..where 'quality' is determined by reputation..where we all have forgotten what it is we are doing here in pursuit of status and, idk, opportunities for mutual masturbation....fuck, man, fuck!!!! but have fun at your poetry recital for nobody)

i gotta write about my time with penguin someday. maybe behind a paywall is the place to do it. you get me ;-) heh ;-)

reflection at the end soldered the whole thing shut..the biggest tragedy of them all is that the narrator is obsessed with these people he despises and can't free himself of the obsession...yeah..ain't that the truth

'Even reading a poem was like watching something retreating – it was like watching a worm disappearing into a crack in the wall, and poetry in general was working its way, like a worm, slowly but undeterrably, towards its removal from life...a poem was the removal of a thing from the world rather than the addition of a thing to the world, Solomon Wiese said, poetry was the gradual replacement of things in the world with their absence, and to write a poem you had to want this to happen, it required a certain vengefulness.'

fan fiction by tavi gevinson

'tavi' 'gevinson' looks back on her teenage friendship with 'the most popular girl in the high school of the world', 't' 'swift'

so impressed by this. i loved the tone shifts..culture critic to like blasé gen z shitposting to stiff email etiquette...similar to the olga ravn book in that way, online speech as a literary form in itself...i love that idea...put emoticons in da text

'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past :-('

i am admittedly not that interested in t swift apart from her sheer outlier-ness..she didn't resonate with me as a teen..i think i was too focused on my anti-identity at that time to let her into my heart haha

so my fascination with this is really in tavi's exploration of the 'trauma' of fame, its feeling of precarity: '...feel like a loser, go away, write something vulnerable and thorough that proves some people wrong about something, post it, receive praise, and ambivalently return to “the work” while waiting for the other shoe to drop. (In my head, the sky is full of many pairs of shoes.)'

tavi mentions the eroticism of being accepted by the most popular girl..i wish she went into this a little more..but that's just my taste

i, too, remember the first time i met a figure of personal reverence at a soho house (my first editor at penguin..again..another time)

email 'tavi' descends into like flagrant disrespect..as she wrestles with the symbolism.. 'Dear Tay-lore >:P' killed me

really cool! go tavi! i want a book from her

animals eat each other by elle nash

young woman becomes the unicorn of an ostensibly sadomasochistic couple..exploration of how young and unwell people get themselves into..predicaments..

honestly i think these characters reminded me of people i found depressing growing up..which could have made for an epiphanic reading experience..but i didn't feel that anyone was redeemed..or even explained

not much else for this one, sorry

in my film life i enjoyed both perfect days and evil does not exist

and saw challengers last night: hahahaha. that's my review. i wish i could have seen it sitting between two male best friends. i love a movie where the credits pop up and the crowd gets all buzzy and giggly

have you read any of the above..anything stand out to you this month..what are you reading next? lemme know

sav