Really thought I'd be able to crack to the end of Nixon Agonistes this month, but the penultimate section is boring/infuriating/disturbing (analyzing liberalism through Woodrow Wilson’s interventionist international policy and then applying it to the Vietnam War) and getting through the whiplash of “man woodrow SUCKS. nixon SUCKS” to “the vietnam war was fucking awful and fuck the western world forever” took me a solid two weeks.
I did finish a few other books, ordered, as always, by enjoyment. I'll plan on reviewing Metaphor: Refantazio for next month, since I've enjoyed it a lot and it has some stuff to chew on thematically.
( The Silent Woman, Malcolm )( What My Bones Know, Foo )
( Scattered All Over the Earth, Tawada )
( Girlhood, Febos )
Separate from any specific book, I've been thinking about what makes Freudian/psychoanalytical reads so compelling to me when so much discussion around therapy and mental health basically feels like a minor form of torment. I cannot deny that part of what I enjoy is that Freud and psychoanalysis are highly literary (analysis of spoken word, body language, the slippery relationship/transference between analyst and analysand) and esoteric--not just in terms of being specialized, but also in terms of the clear distinction between those in the Know and the Foolish Outsiders who know only the corrupted, twisted versions of Freud. I love feeling like I'm one of those striving for secret knowledge.
Psychoanalytical reads, in the right hands, feel surprisingly accepting of even severe personal faults... maybe it's the current mode in popular discussion around mental health, which inevitably have a moralizing quality (YOU NEED TO BE GOOD! WORK HARDER! JUST KEEP TRYING!!!!) and express a need for a hygienic relationship between victim, violence, and violator. Public discourse will always seek to clearly define acceptable/unacceptable behavior and purge the unacceptable. once the conversation around mental health became more broadly popular, it inevitably took on the sadism built into the public discourse. Obviously this is not to say that there are not psychoanalytic reads that are not also secretly bloodthirsty or attempting to shoehorn a false interpretation onto a situation--famously, it can produce reads that no one asked for and shot through with all of the faults we expect from a reading originating in an early twentieth century European man and then kept in vogue by Americans who charged the big bucks. But the chief thing I get out of the vocabulary and tools is a better sense of how identities/consciousnesses are not discrete entities bound by arbitrary ties that can be broken off at any time and set free but interpenetrated by the consciousnesses of others, some beloved and many beloathed, and the way we invest our identities into people and movements. It's also useful to me to set aside questions of, well, blame and focus on instead describing what I see before me, neatly validating impulses and thoughts and annoyances I already had. Yippie!
Psychoanalytical reads do make me think of what types of conclusions I can draw using different modes of thinking... kind of an obvious thing to realize but I've been pretty dissatisfied with some common types of literary logic and patterns and part of the dissatisfaction is like, wow, yeah, the master's tools! our complicity! upholding the status quo! the problem is systemic! we can change it if we divest! I mean, where do you even begin: the lens, the metaphor, the logic of the marketplace infiltrating into a novel, a medium about human feeling and living and words? So I'm drawn to psychoanalytical thinking because it reminds me that I got myself into the writer problem by being a guy who doesn't know shit about human beings and knowing more only got me deeper into it.
if I can pull it off, next month will have a triple feature: one post for video games/movies, one post for the month's read, and a year's end book post, where I evaluate my reading goals and announce, to my audience of at least four people, my ambitions for next year's reading list... until then, book hos
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