september and october reads (Patreon)

october is coming to an end so here is my reading wrap-up for the month (+ september)....feel free to comment about recent stand-outs and what's next on your list for november : )

psychoanalysis: the impossible profession by janet malcolm

journalist interviews psychoanalysts in early eighties nyc, the relationship between analyst and patient and different style-sects among the analysis elite

before reading i didn’t know much about psychoanalysis and now i love it and want it and find it quite sexy

spends a lot of time talking about transference..everyone is falling in love with their psychoanalyst..makes perfect sense when you think about it…they are listening to you soooo hard

interesting..oedipal theories were / are accepted with zeal, total clarity…the brain at ages three and a half to six is a supersponge for carnal symbolism….i buy it completely. pg. 158 is a banger

loved. five out of five bonks on the head

the language instinct by steven pinker

psychologist argues language is an evolutionary process not a cultural invention

dense! proceed with caution

speaks to laws of language as safeguarded by the brain – we all innately use elaborate geometric laws to form sentences, universally and without being taught – ‘universal grammar’

our upbringing affects the details of language acquisition but not language acquisition itself…cool

page after page of high-concept examples used to prove a hypothesis i was ready to believe immediately

❌ sapir-wharf hypothesis ❌

the idiot by elif batuman

selin is a turkish-american moron who…likes a guy…during her first year at harvard in the mid-nighties

very genuinely funny. love to see it

a lot of references to the early internet which was fun, email as a new and exciting development / plot device

gets across so well the placelessness of early adulthood…moving around…doing things for no reason, melancholically….and apart from your mom on the other end of a payphone there’s nothing tethering you to your old life and you can be anything now, and the wind is in your ears going whoooosh and someday in yet another life you’ll be struck by the memory of the smell of this air…..

good read after the language instinct. personality as linked to the language you’re speaking, nuance in translation

feelings around first intense teenage love felt true to my experience. ‘I wanted to write back right away, but he had waited a whole day, so I knew I had to wait at least that long.’ pg. 91

like it more the longer it’s been since i read it. great last line‘In the morning when I saw Ivan’s name in the in-box I almost started to cry. It reminded me of a kind of torture I had read about where afterward the captors returned your senses to you one by one, and you felt so grateful that you told them everything.’ pg. 130‘If you enjoyed something, you enjoyed it, whether or not you were also ashamed.’ pg. 374about her mom: ‘Almost everything that was interesting or meaningful in my story was, in her story, a pointless hazard or annoyance.’ pg. 420‘Then I wondered if it had always been women. Maybe in ancient times men had been into beads. Today, though, it was hard to imagine boys sitting around on beanbags, listening to Joni Mitchell, holding necklaces against each other’s necks, and talking about Svetlana’s sister. Some part of me worried that this was why women would never amount to anything, that we were somehow holding ourselves back.’ pg. 129

cosmic horror by james knight

if i have no mouth and i must scream was a lil poetry pamphlet..nice

grody. spooky. ‘their mouths are sore horror spaces’

‘emit the required sounds’, ‘an exhibition of sounds and agonies’ – made me think of day-to-day interpersonal horror

the plague by albert camus

eugh

i didn’t like reading this. wish i’d read it before it..happened

to be clear it’s not in like a covid was so hard :( way it just feels like...sinister..like a hollow replicant from another dimension…

lolita by vladimir nabokov

french adult weirdo is obsessed with child..beautifully

ugh. this fucking guy

youth-fixation, childhood-fixation, profound obsession with aesthetics….like ok clearly humbert didn’t love her he loved his own aesthetic manifesto which she was the avatar for

also feels very like..don’t be greedy, indulgent in fantasy..you get fat and bored on it..

soo luxurious to read

didn’t expect the neverending motel and sideshow american road trip lol that was fun

more than one passage made me feel like all my blood was drained out of my body

outline by rachel cusk

woman has…conversations….

made me feel so nihilistic for some reason..more in form than content. weird

compassionate gentle accounting for the internal worlds of strangers / acquaintances / insufferable people

total page turner and literally nothing happens‘Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of. While I spoke Paniotis looked more and more aghast. That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could have come up with, he said.’ pg. 94'...increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.’ pg. 92