neonanima | Entries tagged with books

two people in my writing group are working on memoirs. one has led a fascinating life—met muhammad ali and the jackson 5; attended a martin luther king jr. rally; told patty labelle she would never make it on tv with her writhing wildcat performance—to such a degree that i asked if if people constantly tell her "you should write a book!" she said yes.

the other is writing about the long-term sexual abuse she suffered from her older sister. it's a struggle to critique memoir involving such deeply traumatic personal memories. i suggested exploring her family members as characters, and not plunging the reader right away into the eye the abuse and all the emotions surrounding it. she said she wasn't sure how to portray another person's feelings and thoughts, not being that person.

the group is very diverse both age-wise and in how much experience they seem to have writing, in varying formats. yesterday my first submission, the first half of a short story, was on the agenda and am i little disappointed with the feedback i got. it mostly consisted of "writing is detailed," "descriptions are vivid." i need and miss the merciless viciousness of competitive writing majors. i'm flushing at the thought that i'm accomplishing some of what i'm trying to, but if i don't get my feelings hurt soon i'm going to have to go looking for another group.

over the last few days, a blunt, hot pain has been showing up to gnaw at my hip/groin area. sometimes both sides, but usually the right. i might have pulled something at the gym, or i may need to stop napping on my not highly sleepable sofa.

speaking of the gym, i've noticed an uptick in my endurance on my last two trips. i even gently jogged for a minute at a time on the treadmill. the longest i've been able to maintain a jog was five minutes, several years ago. i do solid twenty-minute batches of cardio, i just don't have a runner's lungs.

i'm trying to make a decision on finally changing my surname. someone on the internet somewhere mentioned changing their last name to break generational trauma, and that swayed me from the plan i'd always had to take my mother's maiden name. i found a strain of distant cousins with dark eyes and dark hair, professorships, and an absence of violent crime or accidents that i could find. i found someone who'd invented a solar cooker and giddily emailed him to see if he was the same person i'd unearthed from a late-1800s marriage on my mother's side.

i finished brave new world before i put down any thoughts about the audiobook i finished before that, the master and margarita. i wasn't in love with either. margarita had many stretches of undeniable delightfulness and i love a highly sarcastic, magical-realism misadventure. maybe if there had been more of the talking cat and more of the relationship between the master and his pontius pilate novel, i would have been fully converted. i've run into this issue with stanislaw lem, nabokov's bend sinister, and some russian films: i don't enjoy russian political satire. i can't tell if this is because i don't relate to it or if i find it uninteresting. yet i'm fascinated by russian culture and propaganda. maybe more of the latter before i try more of the former.

brave new world didn't make an enormous impression, either. the prose was much weirder and more interesting than i expected for such a widely loved novel. it would take a supernaturally talented writer to create an engrossing book about a sterile and untroubled dystopia-utopia, to be fair. where late the sweet birds sang was written decades later and is about cloning rather than a highly calibrated test-tube society, but i seem to remember it being preoccupied with similar things that, to me, didn't seem as scary or concerning to me as disinformation-fueled corporatocracy. it's hard to appreciate dated dystopia fiction outside of the ultimate nightmare prophets, orwell and philip k. dick. (maybe this is the year i finally get through a william gibson novel.)

current internet ambiance

Glumlot - Jean Rollins-esque, eerie and surreal AI videos

"The Argument of Afro-pessimism" - Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 2020

6 hours of disturbing unsolved mysteries

Something Was Wrong S20 - catfishing/manipulation podcast

Chappell Roan

i joined a local writing group. i asked to observe a meeting first, because i didn't know what to expect, and they let me. it was on zoom and the group's moderator was in, i think, south america. there were three other people-- a 60s-ish man with white hair and a woman around the same age who talked about how her recent writing inspiration has been the need to tell past generations stories, because she's observing a roll-back of women's rights as someone from the generation that fought to get them. the third writer was quiet and said she wrote literary fiction. i only read part of the white-haired man's story, because we were streaming the two-day moz conference at work and it was in pacific time. i pretended i had a therapy appointment at 6:30.

i enjoyed their company and just listening to them talk about each other's work. i've been trying to actively appreciate writing for its own sake and seeing it like playing on a local softball team. because doing is the fun part. i keep encountering these messages in the wild about how striving and wanting are the best parts of any ambition. i watched fleischman is in trouble, which is all about being almost forty and having to remind yourself to keep growing as a person. and there was a trailer for baby reindeer that stood out to me, where the main character says something like "i thought achieving my dream would make me happy, but now it seems like it has to be a choice between the two." and in the new season of hacks, ava's advice to a fledgling comedienne to enjoy the place she's in right now, because it's the good part.

i'm working on turning the rough draft of a new short story into a first draft, which is due to the writing group sunday. having a deadline for it is exciting. knowing that multiple people will read it is exciting. i'm looking forward to seeing if this awkward waking dream about being a queer girl in our current cyberpunk dystopia means anything. the main criticism i've received about my work is that my characters' motivations are murky and there's no forward momentum and i'm allowed to specifically ask for critique about that, which is so great it feels like cheating! that wasn't allowed in college (i don't think)!

went to a park today. it's next to a river and there were people wading, fishing, sitting on the bank with their feet in the water. there was another park on the other side of the same river that i think is still being built, as it was just a chapel, a winding little path through thick woods, a couple of fields, footbridges, and one road lined with construction equipment.

sitting on the patio the other day, i watched a skink skitter along the wall. it had what i think was a moth in its mouth, occasionally chomping but not seeming to make much progress in his dinner. it snapped its stiff, tiny jaws and stared with its black bead eyes without seeming to see. i was reading justine by lawrence durrell, which is dense with philosophy and psychology, descriptions of alexandria, and ornate language. at times it's perfectly what i want in fiction--stories within stories, elaborate guesses, and revelations that only pose more questions, all gesturing toward the delicious and disastrous unknowability of other people. the way durrell describes characters is so layered, revealing them but always alluding to darker, unknown depths. i could be happy picking up even a sliver of this skill from reading him.

saw furiosa on saturday with margot and snek. we invited the wider friend circle in the signal group chat, but one couple is dealing with the latest in ongoing brain tumor treatments, one is in canada, chris and fantasia were getting married at the courthouse. chris sent us a picture of their hands layered over each other wearing their wedding rings and said "sorry we couldn't make it, we were a little busy." i was surprised at how aged his hands looked. they were so red, cracked, and wrinkled. i think i never really looked at them. margot said she liked that their wedding rings didn't match, and reflected their individual tastes instead. i want the bitterness to fully dissolve and to be happy for them. it doesn't really even have to do with him, but the pathological belief that anyone who desired me did so through a veil of dishonesty. like only fundamentally untruthful people, who saw something other than who i am, have ever wanted me.

today i went to kinokinuya to buy pens. there was a specific powder-pink uniball jetstream i bought there when they opened that i lost and haven't been able to find on the internet. weirdly, the online uniball store wouldn't let me add anything to my cart. i rebought the pink jetstream along with a few others sized 0.5mm or smaller, as i have a grand lust for this pen precision that's new to me.

after, i went to a park i'd never visited before. there was a pokemon raid with the lollipop clown space-pokemon that just debuted. there were also several wooden bridges. i can never get enough views of wooden bridges curving into the woods. there was a little marshy area with tall, bright green water grass and mallard ducks idling in the muddy creek. one of them had a cinnamon colored head instead of jeweled green; i wondered if it was another species because it looked a big bigger than the others i know female mallards are brown-speckled all over without a solid-colored head.

i finished ling ling huang's natural beauty and i'll tell you what i told goodreads:

My library loan for the audibook expired and I was going to let this fish go, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. A book intertwining beauty industry capitalism and child-of-immigrants assimilation is almost too insufferably on-trend with contemporary literature, but I enjoyed this a lot and didn't find the take too forced or the main character too morally pure, as is usually the case with today's books about marginalization.

Things I loved: Huang's vivid and engrossing details, such as the narrator's special pianist technique she learned from her parents and the various, horrifyingly plausible organic beauty treatments (eels that suck toxins out of the skin, papaya seeds in the vagina, pores encrusted with tiny diamonds, a cult-diet called Dianaism mandating one emulates the fashion and dietary examples of the famously bulimic Princess Diana, mink pubic hair transplants), the intersection of beauty standards and cultural assimilation as body horror.

Things I didn't like: The whole "I don't do the thing I'm a virtuoso at anymore because my family died in a car crash on their way to see me perform!" is a hard-to-forgive cliche. However, the narrator's relationship with her parents is the heartbeat of this book and I can't say Huang doesn't give new life to the trope. The climax is very rushed and by-the-numbers, designed purely to hurl us toward an ending that, while beautifully conceived, doesn't feel earned.

i say the main character wasn't too morally pure, but she was also far too passive to really say she chose any of the morally gray things she gets involved in. i remain sick to death of this trend in female main characters.

i'm also reading balzac's old goriot, or père goriot as my edition calls it and it's a riot. an absolute parade of moral tennis whiplash, savage superficiality, and idiot passion conquering entrepreneural reason. crimes of the heart galore. wealth and fortune given and gutted in dramatic fashion. balzac did almost nothing in his life but feverishly write, according to the introduction, and that mania definitely comes across in the narrative movement. i've been writing a lot in the margins to try and pay better attention to how in the hell a story actually works. taking the time to write out things like "character learns information from a conversation he wasn't supposed to hear" and "this character's dilemma is a parallel of this other character's dilemma."

they say that to achieve lucid dreaming, you start by getting into the habit of asking yourself "is this a dream?" i'm hoping that learning to storytell is the same, that if you begin actively noting things you've learned not to think about, you will start to gain control of the dream.

wednesday i drove from savannah to jekyll island. i went to driftwood beach, where it looks like there was a war between the trees and the waves but everyone lost. the trees are all dead and gray, most toppled and half buried in the sand. the wind or water or maybe the saltwater wind carved thin, delicate, swirling lines into the bark. the exposed roots spiral and splay out like they're trying to become tentacles. it was astounding, alien, and melancholic. it seems hard and carved out, ancient and fossilized. even the water seemed dry.

i would have stayed for hours, but it was so hot. the short walk from my car to the shore was a muggy ordeal. i tried to lay in the blue beach tent i brought and read the oresteia, but even inside with shade i was soon soaked in sweat and could only bear it for about 20 minutes. i really want to go back when it's not so unbearably hot.

after, i went to the sea turtle rehabilitation center. they had a snake inside a tube on an operating table observation area, but i couldn't tell what they were doing to it. one of the employees said they might be grafting the skin of another animal (frog? turtle? fish? i can't remember) onto its infested wound and that this was significant because it hasn't been tried before.

most of the turtles in hospital tanks were there because they were underweight and/or weak. one of the rehabilitators fed chunks of seafood to a green sea turtle named olivine. normally they have a plant-based diet, but they were trying to get olivine back to a healthy weight with protein.

i drove from there to harris neck wildlife refuge. by this time it was late afternoon, after 5. there was no one there, but i took a map and started down one of the trails toward a pond. it was miserable. my chafed thighs were burning. the flying insects were gigantic and nosy. i couldn't go more than a few steps without having to violently swat them away, only for two or three more to buzz in my face and my hair, so i went back to the car. i did see a racoon peek out from the road, and went onto a dock with a beautiful view of the hot blue sky and a vast marsh. i saw a long, thin creature rise up out of the water as it glided along the surface, swiveling its head like a periscope. it must've been a snake, but from where i stood it had the eerie silhouette mystique of loch ness monster pictures.

there were a few billboards i wish i'd gotten pictures of. one was a set of three, each giant pictures of blue sky and white clouds. nothing else. the other was a big white sign saying only "coming soon," half torn off and flagging in the wind.

before going back to the airb&b, i stopped at roadside place called peach world. they got me with their many billboards promising all kinds of peach-flavored things, namely peach smoothies. i really wanted something cold and sweet after all that sweltering nature. they had all kinds of peach-infused things like peach hot sauce, peach candy, peach keyrings, and peach bread. i got a peach smoothie in a plastic cup with little peaches printed all over it, then left.

my last day there, i planned a few more things before leaving town. i tried to visit another wildlife center, with owls and cougars and alligators. it was a very similar experience to harris neck, though. i'd only gone out onto an empty dock and looked in on the aquariumed turtles and snakes in the visitor center before i gave up. i'd started down a trail when a bug flew into my mouth just as three schoolbuses of elementary school children showed up. i got back in my car.

i ate at a lovely, tiny place called café taureau where i had an iced coffee with quiche fromage and fruit and a cinnamon scone.

i almost made it home without buying new books, but then i decided to see if there were any 2nd & charles stores around, since the last one near me shut down during the pandemic. i decided to go a little out of my way to stop at the store in augusta. it was much better than the last few i've been to. a lot of college and high school kids must be offloading their syllabus books, because i've never seen so many copies of the red badge of courage or thomas hardy works in one place. i bought last and first men, portrait of the artist as a young man because they had the norton critical edition, and a volume of transmetropolitan.

during the ride home, i finished listening to the house of mirth. sort of like how succession is the american interpretation of english dramas of court intrigue and royal politics, house of mirth is the american interpretation of a hardy, forster, or bronte novel of manners and society. the manners are infused with the sort of exploitation and greed those novels are too polite to touch on, though. you can see in lily bart some of the future's flawed, listless novel heroines-- those ones i was just complaining about, who trifle with shitty men and self-destructive behaviors, but lily is legitimately a victim of society's expectations and breeding. it's normally hard for me to sympathize with these "beauty is a curse" takes, but there was really a time when a woman's beauty was a kind of medusa's gaze that turned them into an object.

next i started a voyage to arcturus, which was immediately weird and wild. an interstellar adventure by way of dusty alchemical potions and a spiritualism-era séance. my decision not to bother with post-wwii literature for a while continues paying off.

i'm glad i took my detour, because the drive from savannah to augusta was gorgeous. georgia really is a beautiful place. i thought about how many hours i've spent on georgia roads and how the verdant layers of plush, green treetops always impresses me. there was a moment where it seemed surreal and ridiculous that this is possible: i can drive through these places, through towns where strangers live, past crops that strangers tend and land that strangers and their families have owned for decades. even just a large, empty field of wild grass moves me sometimes. there is so much life happening there with nothing to do with me or other people. just greenness soaking in sunlight, food chains churning, tiny specks of life living just to procreate.

last weekend i went to the goth dance night with snek and margot. it wasn't really goth music, everything either had or was remixed with the appropriate amount of thumpy-thump. we met some young gothlings who were enamored with margot and snek. one of them said she was an actress who was in a karate movie, one was a programmer, another asked snek for life advice and showed off his trilingualness. the karate actress asked if margot and i were sisters. no one has ever told us before that we look alike. i wonder if it's possible we've adopted each other's expressions and started to resemble each other like long-term couples do. we left talking about how strange it still feels to meet new people.

i finished all night pharmacy, a not-terribly-written but tiresome book about a girl who thinks a lot about her russian immigrant jewish generational trauma, describing her own coping mechanisms while being deeply uninterested in and self-aware of them. it was on a list of books i made when i was fantasizing about which books i'd compare my novel to when i was pitching it. so far, both the novels on the list were like a lot of contemporary books i've read by female authors. tales of flawed young women that are boring despite the spooky and semi-supernatural events that happen to them. somehow, no matter what these women do, they seem so passive and impossible to care about. the authors are trying to capture a sense of malaise and late-capitalism hopelessness, i guess, but they're afraid to give these first-person narrators any real, deep flaws that don't arise from extremely sympathetic circumstances so as not to undermine whatever larger message they're trying to convey about Trauma or Injustice and i'm just. so over it. i decided not to read anything published any later than 1985 for the rest of the year.

i started an audiobook of crime and punishment, which is the antithesis of all that. things have mostly happened to the main characters so far vs. him taking action, but it's still vivid and rich and interesting. i just finished the scenes where raskolnikov dreams of an old mare being beaten, then overhears a conversation about how an old woman about to bequeath all her money to a monastery should be killed and robbed. i love the way the dream imagines violence as so senseless and cruel, conflicting with the cool and dispassionate way he's reasoning himself into murder. the dream is a way to make this conflict tense, immediate, and gruesome even before raskolnikov has done anything. this is what i want, what's missing from all these "women's wrongs" books i've been reading. astounding things happen to them and they're numb to them. i don't know who decided that these characters who can't relate to each other and respond to tension with avoidance and introspection are the best way to convey the mood of our time. i know it's an unfair comparison, crime and punishment being regarded as one of the best books of all time, but something to keep in mind. things happening is always better than things happening in the past, things almost happening, or things not happening out of dread and anxiety and disassociation.

i scheduled a solo vacation. i had a blast when i went to portland by myself, but there's so much to do there that i made it through about half my itinerary. i'm worried that i'll just be lonely on this trip. all i want to do is sit in cafes and read, sit outside and read, lay on the beach and read, take one or two long, scenic walks. hopefully write. i desperately need the time away from work but i'm dreading how much work will have piled up while i'm gone.

My bottles of Delina and Oriana from Parfum de Marly came. They're beautiful, heavy glass with flowery filigree borders around the slightly scooped-in rectangular shape, with round silver caps that have little jewels on top, as well as little tassels around the neck that match the bottle color.

A bunch of new fragrance samples arrived in time for me to play with them over the long weekend. I don't love many of them so far. Blanche Bête is a nice, warm, milky vanilla; Another 13 is a sexy, salty musk. Not worth the very expensive full bottles. La Rhapsodie Noir is the one that smells most attractive and interesting to me in the vial, but I haven't worn it yet.

Saturday I picked up groceries and visited two perfume stores. The first ended up being a little place filled with non-descript plastic bottles of things with handwritten labels. Body and hair oils, lotions, things like that, presumably. There could have been literally anything in them, so I left as soon as I came in.

At the second store, the sales guy sprayed several bottles for me. Prisme Rouge (pleasant but even online the prices are obscene), Ariana Grande Cloud (nice, buttery sweet but airy gourmand, not too memorable), Al Haramain's Oud Amber Gold and Oud Amber Rouge. I ended up buying the Oud Amber Gold. When I got home, I looked it up and saw I paid about $50 more than online prices, even though he kept talking about their "wholesale prices." And of course the bottom of my receipt declares, "No Refunds!" Lesson learned, I guess. I left a negative Google review.

I pitched a tantrum when I got home because I'd bought groceries primarily to have milk for Cheerios and the shopper refunded it. A can of cat food landed on my head when I slung it out of a plastic bag and I felt stupid but not silly enough to laugh at myself. This was before I even discovered the perfume cost.

My goal for the weekend is to finally watch Seven Samurai. The download is taking ages. Something's happened to public torrenting - I don't think it's purely because less people are seeding, because even popular files like this one with a lot of seeders take me days to finish. I think Comcast has figured out how to make the internet exponentially slower on VPNs or something. Nothing in the world is going to make me pay for more streaming services, so I'm watching a lot of things on Kanopy and Tubi, as well as getting used to watching Plex's standard-definition offerings and lower quality rips on the international waters.

Went to watch Saltburn at Margot and Snek's house with Baron. Baron showed us pictures of himself as a teenager that we insisted on seeing after he told us that his fashion sensibility back then was inspired by Michael J. Fox in Family Ties. He was so ridiculously beautiful that I hope I didn't make him feel bad by cooing so much about it. We talked a lot about the movie after it was over, which is always wonderful. I liked it a touch less this time around because I'm starting to think that all these "eat the rich" movies are designed to be cathartic experiences so people won't feel the need to actually eat the real, live rich. Also the charm of Jacob Elordi and his weird micro-mouth is totally lost on me.

I finished the Gold Fame Citrus audiobook, which had lovely prose but a dull main character and was a bit obnoxiously in love with itself at times (when she belabors an almanac of fictional animals, when she describes a bunch of fictional, absurd reality TV shows as if reality TV shows weren't the easiest thing in the world to mock). Now I'm onto Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen. I loved Death in Her Hands, so looking forward to this one. Not really on purpose, I keep reading almost exclusively female authors.