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| 0385549970
| 9780385549974
| 0385549970
| 3.92
| 1,934
| Mar 12, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entra
2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entranced by the bitter cynicism behind the book’s concept; it’s a character-heavy drama about one of those people who have been popping up in the news semi-regularly in the last decade, a person of color who gets famous by writing gritty essays about the systemic racism and oppression he’s been experiencing his whole life, but who is eventually proven to have been lying the entire time and just making up the stories he’s been presenting as “true” to a fawning audience of guilty white liberals, his reputation destroyed while ironically accomplishing nothing except handing yet more ammunition to the far right, who use the now disgraced journalist’s fabrications as yet more evidence that “the Wokes” are a bunch of hypocritical, lying snowflakes. And indeed, that’s what a huge portion of this book is legitimately about, and there’s no way of getting around the fact that Boryga (a Latino academic writer, just like his fictional stand-in Javier here) means for this to be a scathing indictment of the Woke Age we currently live in, whether he’s taking down the noble yet deeply flawed middle-class people of color who embrace angry polemic politics as a means of hiding their own gentrification aspirations (as best seen here in Javier’s college girlfriend, a fiery far-left liberal with unresolved daddy issues from being raised by a cop in a pleasant suburb of Albany, but who after graduation insists on moving to a nice section of Brooklyn where they have community gardens and organic vegan restaurants, instead of Javier’s insistence on moving back to his crappy childhood neighborhood in the Bronx, insisting that she can’t be a gentrifier because “she’s not white”); the misguided white academics who mean well but ironically are the ground-level disguised racists who create these situations in the first place (such as Javier’s high-school guidance counselor, who pushes him to apply for a full-ride scholarship to a thinly disguised Oberlin University by “playing up” his background as a fatherless Latino from the Bronx, but then bristles and literally tries to cover his tracks when Javier interprets his thoughts too literally and replies, “So I should write an essay about how I’m brown and poor, then?”); or the sociopathic marketing bros who are very happy to swoop in and skim off the top of these Woke times for easy profit, ethics be damned (such as the new young editor of a thinly disguised Village Voice, Javier’s post-college employer, who has been nationally praised for saving one of the last leftist weekly newspapers still left in the US, but has done so by basically turning the entire publication into a clickbait farm). All of those things are true about this book, and Boryga very deliberately means for these people in real life to be offended by his novel, and that’s something important for you to know before picking it up, if you happen to be one of these people yourself. But what really blew me away here is that the book turns out to be about a lot more than this, and tells a more complicated and nuanced story than the easy headlines it’s been recently generating make it seem. First and foremost, for example, it’s ultimately the story of one particular person, the complex and multifaceted Javier at the heart of the controversy, a Puerto-Rican American who Boryga deliberately shows as coming from a long line of paternal con artists, and who is raised by his drug-dealing father (at least, before the drug-dealing father gets shot one day after an argument at a neighborhood picnic with one of his clients) to always be hustling, to always look out for himself, and to always understand that the picture you present of yourself to others will always be more important than the picture you have of yourself on the inside. That immensely helps this book from turning into a parade of cliches, because we understand that this is ultimately the story of one unique person and not just an indictment of the entire system (although it’s that as well). And more importantly, it makes it a much more engaging and entertaining read than if these had all been cartoon characters going through their 2D, cardboard-cutout motions. And then there’s the thorny issue at the heart of these kinds of incidents, of how much of a person of color’s actions can be chalked up to the environment around them, and how much of their actions should be laid squarely at the feet of the person themselves, and the things they deliberately choose to do in life when they in fact didn’t need to do those particular things if they hadn’t wanted to. And Boryga does this in a very clever way, by simultaneously following the fate of Javier’s childhood best friend Gio, who is raised in a very similar way but with just a few changed details (both of Gio’s parents are dead instead of just his father, for example; he’s a little more embarrassed than Javier about his love for reading; he’s a little less afraid of the neighborhood gangsters, even while having the same exact ambition for money and fame that Javier does). As Gio heads to prison at the same time Javier heads to university, and then both of them reunite again in their late twenties, we can watch the complex and difficult-to-pinpoint ways their lives and attitudes both intertwine and intersect, Boryga doing so to hammer home the fact that all of us are simultaneously capable of great good and great evil all the time, and that the way we behave can’t just be broken down into simplistic statistics like education and background. Plus there’s the fact that Boryga very purposely points out that there are very real and valid things to come out of our Woke Age too, as best seen in the way Javier legitimately now sees his old Bronx neighborhood in a different light once he graduates college and moves back, noticing for the first time how few grocery stores with decent produce there are there, how many fast-food places there are and how few healthy restaurants, how many cops there eternally are on their streets and how exactly those cops behave, versus the gingerly and always respectful actions of the police back on his university campus when dealing with the mostly upper-class, mostly lily-white populace of the school. That’s perhaps the one element here that most saves this from being a disappointing screed; for while Boryga absolutely has damning things to say about far-left liberals and the almost unsolvable mess they’ve created in the 21st century, he’s also careful to point out that there are valid reasons why it’s all become such a mess in the first place, and that there are very legitimate issues being brought up in this community that shouldn’t be ignored or shrugged away. But what was the saving grace for me in particular -- and longtime friends will immediately understand why I loved this aspect of the book so much -- is that it’s a classic “anti-villain” story along the lines of Breaking Bad; so in other words, if the more well-known “anti-hero” in literature is someone who at first seems like they’re going to be the baddie, but then ends up being the protagonist of the story, an anti-villain is the exact opposite, someone who seems like a decent person at first, but whose behavior becomes more and more disgusting the further the story continues. And while I’ll let the end of this book remain spoiler-free, I can tell you that by the end of this novel, Javier’s actions are fucking reprehensible, the behavior of a person who has decided to insult and alienate every person who’s ever been important in his life, merely for his unquenchable chase for likes and retweets on social media, and the easy fame and glory that comes right after it. To me, that’s what really saves this book from being easy fodder for the alt-right; for by the end, Javier has stopped being a stand-in for his entire community and has instead become his own unique brand of monster, making it impossible to extrapolate his actions into a damnation of every far-left liberal who’s ever existed, even as Boryga has legitimately damning things to say about the “cancel culture” that has built up around these far-left liberals over the last twenty years. It’s a mesmerizing book, told in a mesmerizing way, and that’s why today Victim becomes my second read of 2024 to eventually show up in my annual “best books of the year” list, coming later this December during the holidays. It will make many of my leftist friends mad, that’s undeniable; but the point Boryga so deftly makes here is that maybe you should be mad, for all of us creating a situation in the US so that there are no other choices anymore than to be either a communist or a fascist, foretelling an inevitable coming violent civil war that will be happening starting this November precisely because of it. Boryga argues here that maybe it’s time to step back and take a more complex, nuanced view of these subjects, and to stop letting our society be run through easy outrage and the cheeseburgers that are easily sold by exploiting this kneejerk anger. As a political centrist who’s been consistently told over the last twenty years that I should shut up and keep such opinions to myself, this book is a welcome breath of fresh air that particularly needs to exist in this specific time and place, and I encourage all of you to read it with this attitude in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
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Apr 20, 2024
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Apr 20, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 1982153083
| 9781982153083
| 1982153083
| 3.68
| 88,608
| Feb 07, 2023
| Feb 07, 2023
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Goodreads, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels dese
2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Goodreads, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels deserve to receive a lot of shit, for being guilty of one of two major problems: either the writer in question got too brainwashed by their professors and now write nothing but that special breed of tedious, precious, go-nowhere character dramas that are the bread and butter of academic writing programs, the ones so focused on illuminating characterization that they forget to add any kind of interesting plot or compelling stakes whatsoever; or the writer (almost always a man in the second case) goes in the totally opposite direction, and tries to rebel against this style by instead creating the literary equivalent of conceptual art, turning in a head-scratcher so obtuse and abstract that no one besides doctoral students can even get through it in the first place, and certainly not even those doctoral students are actually enjoying it. When I was a kid in the ‘70s, gazing at the bookshelves of my friends’ parents and glancing through their Steinbecks and Roths and Atwoods and Irvings, I looked forward to a middle age when I too would spend most of my time reading books that instead got the balance between character and plot exactly right; but now that I’m in my fifties myself, I’ve discovered that those kinds of books have largely disappeared, taken over by an obsession over ivory-tower echo-chamber novels in which the same whiny suburban middle-classers keep going through the same whiny middle-class self-made genteel crises, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve recently found myself drawn more and more to such genre novels as crime, romance and science-fiction, where in the 2020s you now have the best chance of coming across books that both present compelling characters and have compelling things happen to these characters. So it’s always a delight to come across an MFA book that really does things right, this week for example with Jen Beagin’s newest novel, the un-put-downable portrait of a fuck-up in crisis, Big Swiss. I’ve been a fan of Beagin’s since her 2015 debut, the mesmerizingly weird Pretend I’m Dead (my review), came out at a point when my small press was still open and I was reviewing books professionally; but she’s really outdone herself here, taking all the themes of that book and ratcheting them up to eleven in this one, even while retaining the sly black humor and sneaky roundabout way of talking about trauma that marked that first book. The story of burned-out middle-aged hipster Greta, who moves to the upstate town of Hudson, New York (which according to the book is where all the burned-out hipsters move once they can no longer stand Brooklyn), the story is ostensibly about her taking a low-wage job transcribing session recordings for a costume-wearing sex therapist who seems to have only transitioned to that career so that he can get paid to be a mansplainer, as Greta develops a crush on a female Swiss-American patient of his who seems capable of giving the what-for to this therapist in a way Greta can only dream of saying to people in her own life. Of course, this being Beagin, that’s only the tip of the iceberg; with Hudson being as small as it is, naturally Greta and “Big Swiss” (as Greta thinks of the woman in her head) end up accidentally meeting, at which point Greta begins manipulating their conversations by subtly using the information she’s gleaned through the woman’s confidential therapy sessions, so that before long they’re in a lesbian relationship even though neither of them really consider themselves lesbians. So in this, Greta is a great example of what I like to call an “anti-villain,” by which I mean that if an anti-hero is someone who traditionally seems like a baddie at the beginning of a novel but then ends up being the noble hero by the end, an anti-villain is the opposite, someone who seems harmless enough at the beginning of the story but then keeps doing more and more reprehensible things as the story continues (but for more, see Breaking Bad, which is now easily the most famous anti-villain story that exists). As our hapless but rootable loser protagonist just keeps digging her own grave deeper and deeper with each passing chapter, we can’t help but to cover our eyes in cringing embarrassment over the looming disaster all of us (including Greta herself) can see on the horizon, even as we continue peeking through our fingers because we’re just too interested in knowing what comes next. What’s perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book, though, is that although Beagin fills it with the kinds of delightfully quirky random details we expect in any indie-lit novel, the kind of stuff that’s usually thrown in randomly just to try to make the book as interesting as it can be -- for one good example, that Greta deliberately chooses to live in a Colonial-era farmhouse on the edge of town that hasn’t been renovated since the 1700s, which she literally must heat with a wood stove and with a kitchen that has a literal beehive in the ceiling that she refuses to eradicate -- right in the last 50 pages of the book, when her boss forces her to go through some therapy sessions herself as a form of atoning for the confidentiality-breaking crimes she’s committed (which isn’t exactly a spoiler -- pretty much everyone in this book besides Big Swiss herself understands that Greta’s self-destructive actions are fated to end in disaster), suddenly all these quirky, supposedly random details all come together, and magically begin demonstrating exactly the past moment of trauma Greta herself went through in her own childhood, and which she has been in such deep denial over that it’s all instead been coming out in these symbolic forms. That’s amazing, that Beagin can both give us our cake and let us eat it too, giving us a story whose first 75 percent is this neurotic laugh-out-loud comedy in the style of something like Kristen Wiig’s Bridesmaids, but then pull out the rug from under us in the last 25 percent and show that the entire thing was actually a clever, secret setup for what’s actually a deeply sad and intense level of pain running as an undercurrent through it all without us even realizing it. That’s exactly what I love, novels that can both entertain and move me, that give me complex and nuanced characters but then put them in situations I can’t get enough of, with stakes that eventually become so big that they’re literally a matter of life or death. That’s how you write an MFA novel, people, and that’s why Big Swiss today officially becomes my first read of 2024 to eventually make my “Favorite Reads of the Year” list coming later this December during the holidays. Creative writing students, take note -- this is the kind of story you should be shooting for, no matter how many times your gently miserable philandering middle-aged professor insists that you should be writing novels about gently miserable philandering middle-aged professors. For those like me who like their artistic projects thoughtful, entertaining, and intense enough to stick in your head for weeks afterwards, you’ll want to pick this up as soon as possible. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 15, 2024
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Apr 15, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0300117434
| 9780300117431
| 0300117434
| 3.90
| 9,859
| Jan 01, 1946
| Aug 28, 2006
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) co
2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) contemporary novel Damascus (my review); and that reminded me that I actually got interested in this writer around the same time many years ago that I got interested in his peer Tennessee Williams (after my brother first moved to New Orleans, a city I've now gotten to visit eight or nine times myself), but that I couldn't find any decent filmed versions of his magnum opus The Iceman Cometh (they're too old, or only available on DVD), and that I had always meant to get around to reading the written version someday. Well, that day is here! Originally written in 1939, it wasn't produced until 1946, but it's actually set back in 1912 when O'Neill was in his mid-twenties; so while ostensibly about New York in the years before World War One, O'Neill uses artistic license to also comment on the Great Depression that was in its final years when he wrote this. It's set at a dive bar in Greenwich Village, a place that's supposed to look like an even cheaper and dirtier version of that neighborhood's real-life McSorley's (still open in 2024!). O'Neill explains in the play's introductory notes that it's a Raines Law type of hotel; and yeah, I had to look that up too, and that turned out to be a Victorian-era law originally meant to cut down on public drinking by adding new restrictions to when bars could be open, but with an exception for hotels, who could serve alcohol at any time to their guests, as long as it was in a back room during times when it's illegal to the public. That led to an explosion of ultra-cheap, horribly disgusting "hotels" created on the floor above a bar, roach-infested single-room occupancies, where the rummy inhabitants could drink virtually 24 hours a day, by way of the the bar downstairs running a curtain halfway across the room during closed public hours, and thus counting it as a "back room." It was a destination for the lowest of the low, the "lumpen proletarians" as Marx called them -- the washouts, the violent, the mentally challenged -- which of course was catnip to O'Neill, who is just as well remembered anymore for being a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of an American Communist revolutionary movement right after the successful one in Russia in the 1910s; an early friend of party founder John Reed (and who in fact had an affair with Reed's wife), he was well-known throughout his career for his radical, polemic, far-left plays, which he combined with the relatively new Realist movement (or "social realist" if you like) first seen among people like Anton Chekov and Henrik Ibsen in Europe a few decades previous. Before O'Neill, Broadway theatre simply wasn't set at places like dive bars, full of prostitutes and mob enforcers and sad old former anarchists turned into fatalistic drunken sots (the character O'Neill obviously designed as his stand-in, while writing this a full 20 years after his youthful adventures with the Communist Party); and much like his peers Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, it was only in the "legitimahhte THEATAHHHH" where this kind of boundary-pushing transgression was being allowed during the Mid-Century Modernist years (don't forget, this didn't premiere publicly until after World War Two), so that got O'Neill a tremendous amount of press and prestige simply for being in the right place at the right time, including four different Pulitizers over his career and the Nobel Prize. But as I unfortunately discovered when working my way through the oeuvre of Williams as well, a little less than a decade ago, what was so daring and shocking and naughty at the time has in many cases not aged well at all, and now come across like a lot of stagey, outdated melodramatics that have long fallen out of favor with an audience that's now exclusively trained on naturalistic performances seen in movies and streaming series. That's certainly the case with Iceman, which can no longer traffic in the titillated shock that one of the characters is actually a pimp (!!!), and when stripped of that becomes just an interesting but not great story and overtold and with too many characters and with all of them with their knobs turned up to eleven at all times. Oh, and did I mention too many characters?! 18 of them, as a matter of fact, 16 of which are bar regulars, and are all on stage at the same time for an entire four hours, just basically repeating everyone else's dilemmas but through a slightly different filter, like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to the Super Bowl with like a group of twelve Springfield male regulars, and only a single joke is given to the entire group of 12 throughout the episode and all 12 have to react the exact same way at the exact same time. That's certainly what Iceman feels like: you have not only the spirit-broken anarchist and O'Neill stand-in Larry, but another anarchist from Europe who used to publish a radical newspaper, and some young anarchist whose mom used to hang out with Larry when they were young; then you also have two veterans of the Boer Wars, one from each opposing side, and a Boer War reporter, the three essentially serving the exact same role as the trio of anarchists; and then you also have three prostitutes who don't have any differentiation whatsoever, a mentally challenged bartender who serves as their pimp, and a lothario con man who's the "sure, I'll marry ya, sweetheart" boyfriend of one of the hookers; then on top of that, you have a washed-up alcoholic former cop, a washed-up alcoholic former lawyer, and a washed-up alcoholic former owner of a gambling house, who yet again essentially all serve the same role in this play; and then finally you have the bar's curmudgeonly owner Harry, his brother-in-law, and another bartender. Sheesh, O'Neill! Get this down to six characters and a runtime of two hours, and maybe you'll finally have something then! But of course all of this is skipping over the greatest element of the play, and the reason it had so much power to shock and move people back in the mid-1940s when it first came out; and that's Theodore "Hickey" Hickman, an indelible archetype of Modernism in the same way Arthur Miller's Willy Loman from these same years is, and what saves this play from being just a drab exercise in talky political activism like so many of O'Neill's other plays are. This is one of those moments where I'm glad I never read this until my mid-fifties, when I've had a wide and deep enough education about literary history to deeply understand what was influencing O'Neill when he created this character, and what was going on among the various political strata of American society when this first got written. For example, without this education, I wouldn't have realized that O'Neill describes Hickey so to look exactly like George Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis's 1922 Babbitt (written 13 years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman), a sort of portly and perpetually jolly fellow who was basically born to run a car dealership or another type of heavy hands-on sales-heavy business. And indeed, Hickey is a full-time salesman, who at the end of every year-long circuit around the country he does, ends up back at this bar to celebrate the owner's birthday by basically blowing a couple weeks' pay on giving everyone in the SRO an unlimited tab for about three or four days, making it the Wino Christmas that everyone there eagerly looks forward to every year with salivation. It's important to remember that leftist social-realist authors such as O'Neill really didn't like people like Babbitt at all, and in fact didn't even really like Lewis for coming up with the character or writing a book about him. Lewis was sort of the Jonathan Franzen of his time, who wrote witty dramedies about the foibles of the upper-middle-class during the Roaring '20s years, right before the stock market crash and the Great Depression; and socialism-friendly authors like O'Neill rightly saw people like Babbitt as the people who made the country's economy tank in the first place, the very people the socialists and communists were fighting against, which made Lewis a ridiculous timewaster of an author in the eyes of many leftist authors in the '30s, just past his commercial height (Lewis had five national bestsellers in a row in the 1920s, and then none ever again), and it says a lot about what we're supposed to think of Hickey that O'Neill modeled him after this extremely well-known character who by then had become shorthand in society for "comfortably fat middle-classer who caused the economy to crash." But here is where it gets even more interesting; because soon after Hickey shows up again for his annual visit (which happens fairly early in the play, which is why I don't consider it a spoiler), he announces that he's given up drinking and become a new man, and that although he'll still be buying drinks that year, he's determined to get everyone there to eventually see the light and try to walk the straight and narrow path again. And here's another place where I'm glad I didn't get to read this until I'd had a lot of other fundamental books under my belt; because it's only now that I realize that O'Neill makes Hickey talk here almost exactly -- I mean, sometimes word for word -- like Dale Carnegie in his How to Win Friends and Influence People, which only came out a mere three years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman! That's not a coincidence! See, as I learned last year after reading it myself (my review), history has largely forgotten this, but the entire self-help genre and movement (which you might also see called "personal development," as manifested in modern years by people like Tony Robbins) can demonstrably all be traced back to Carnegie's 1936 original and it alone; a salesman who eventually became renowned for the live seminars he put on for sales trainees, he single-handedly invented this genre by basically doing a transcript of one of his live events, which immediately caused a sensation that has since led to a billion-dollar industry almost a century later. And leftist, socialist writers like O'Neill hated Carnegie too; because the self-help, personal-development movement, ultimately coming from a sales mindset like it does, is in a way sort of like elevating free-market capitalism into a form of religion or lifestyle, which you can see fully played out in our late-stage-capitalism times by such "Dale Carnegie on steroids" authors as Tim Ferriss (my review). So that's fascinating, to take this character who looks like Babbitt and give him a Carnegie "Come to Prosperity Jesus" moment, because to contemporary audiences of the first production, these would've been strong signals that there's something incredibly shady about this character. And indeed, there is, and it's such a legitimately unique and shocking moment that I'm going to let it remain a spoiler, even though it's 78 years old; but I can tell you spoiler-free that it's one of those kind of truly memorable endings that elevates the entire story that came before it, and it's a known fact that we mostly remember stories by their endings and not what came before, so it's easy to see why people went so nuts for this play when it first came out. It sounds like literally what it was, if you took a dreary, politically focused social-realist author but weaved in a Crying Game or Sixth Sense-type shocking ending to their latest book, not in a gimmicky way but in one that profoundly helps explain and strengthen what's been said in all the four hours that came before. So yeah, by all means, let's call this one of the three foundational plays of American Modernism, like Wikipedia told me people do, along with Miller's Death of a Salesman and Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. All of those legitimately are powerful works, and they're worth celebrating for the stir they caused at the time, which of course eventually led to the Grove Press obscenity trials of the early 1960s and the eventual elimination of "public decency" bans; but we can do that celebrating while also understanding how the world has passed on from these kinds of works in the 50, 75, 100 years since them, and how what was groundbreaking at the time can come off as unintentionally hokey to us anymore. That's not a contradiction for someone like O'Neill, but rather a reason to continue reading and celebrating him, for laying the early, admittedly clunkier groundwork not only for the boozier side of his more sophisticated literary family tree (among people like Charles Bukowski or Joshua Mohr who I mentioned at the beginning of this write-up), but the more academic (like early David Mamet or Sam Shepard). It comes with a warm recommendation in this spirit, even if you should keep your expectations low. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
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Mar 02, 2024
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Mar 02, 2024
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1556010044
| 9781556010040
| 1556010044
| 3.34
| 41
| Jan 2002
| Jan 01, 2002
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did not like it
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2023 reads, #101. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outl
2023 reads, #101. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outlined for the last six months (the project being an attempt to advertise my skills as a freelance romance editor); and to get myself more into the mindset of the alt-right guys who run the "New Sparta" post-apocalyptic settlement where my story takes place, I've started tearing through a bunch of books I once found grouped together on the Pirate Bay under the title "The Red Pill Collection." This particular title is one of those incel "how to trick women into sleeping with you" books; there are a lot of these kinds of books in this Red Pill Collection, over a dozen altogether, so sort of nakedly shows what's on the mind of most of these young alt-right men, along with bodybuilding and personal finance among other niche interests. This one is at least unlike the other incel books I've now read in that it doesn't try to soften or normalize its very aggressively sexist message by even the tiniest bit; author Gary Brodsky just flat-out hits the ground running right at the very beginning by letting us know that women are easily confused morons who mostly are only good for breeding, and here's a guide into tricking their lizard brains into opening their legs for you, so you can implant your seed. It's crude, and it's offensive, I'll give you that; but now that I'm in my fifties and have like half the testosterone in my bloodstream as I used to in my twenties, I can also look back with extremely clear eyes now and understand just how much of my twenties were in fact dedicated solely to this subject, of getting my penis into as many warm, wet holes as I could back then (no matter how that manifested from one night to the next). This is simply a part of having a huge amount of testosterone and estrogen in your system; these are hormones specifically designed to encourage breeding, so make you kind of crazy about the subject so that you're going around humping everything that moves. So is it actively evil to have such a naked flat-out guide to this subject written out in black-and-white form like this? Eeehhhhhhhhhhhhnmmmmmaybe not really? Isn't much of the free time of most people in their twenties already devoted either to rutting like pigs or convincing your body with your own hands that you are? Aren't a lot of the rituals of our twenties already based around these opportunities to indulge these hormones? What you think the answers to these questions are will also tell you whether you should read one of these undisguised Red Pill-oriented guides to the subject; but certainly the advice in a book like this works, I can confirm by being in my mid-fifties and now having four decades of sexual activity in my life. You can have a lot of sex using these tactics that will mostly be kind of unsatisfying (but admittedly with a few high points), often substance-fueled and blurry and happening in the middle of the night, which you then immediately regret the next morning; so if you're in your early twenties and this is exactly the kind of sex life you're looking for, then more power to you, I suppose. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 09, 2023
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Dec 09, 2023
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Paperback
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| B0059864N0
| 3.00
| 2
| unknown
| Jun 30, 2011
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it was ok
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2023 reads, #100. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outl
2023 reads, #100. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outlined for the last six months (the project being an attempt to advertise my skills as a freelance romance editor); and to get myself more into the mindset of the alt-right guys who run the "New Sparta" post-apocalyptic settlement where my story takes place, I've started tearing through a bunch of books I once found grouped together on the Pirate Bay under the title "The Red Pill Collection." This particular title is one of those incel "how to trick women into sleeping with you" books; there are a lot of these kinds of books in this Red Pill Collection, over a dozen altogether, and the more of them I read, the more I'm realizing that all of them are based fundamentally around a handful of very general wrong assumptions about the world, which then makes all the advice worthless since it's all based on assumptions that were wrong in the first place. To begin with, although many of these incel books use the same language about romance that general society does, stating that the goal is to be in a "relationship" where you are "dating" and promising that this book will teach you how to do that, the books never define these terms in the way the rest of society does; for while most of us would think of elements like emotional intimacy or the ability to show vulnerability as some of the hallmark traits that come with dating, these books invariably define a "relationship" as "the moment you can finally convince her to let you put your penis in and rub it around until you have an orgasm," at which point your "relationship" is technically over and it's perfectly fine to go find another "relationship" if you want, or maybe try again for another "relationship" with this particular one. That then leads incel writers to encourage their readers to think of the entire female gender as basically interchangeable vaginas with legs, to be purchased, used and discarded like any other consumer item freshly shipped from a Chinese factory, instead of being treated as the unique, interesting individual each one is (and that incels can manage to understand about fellow men, making it even more maddening that they can't seem to be able to imagine women in the same way). And then they also get something right about the human condition -- we humans really do prefer to spend time with other humans who are confident, courageous, have specific opinions and sometimes feel passionate about them, while we tend to dislike wishy-washy, timid, cowardly pushovers -- but instead of acknowledging that as a universal about the human condition that both men and women feel at all times about all other men and women they spend time with, the incels state that this is proof that all women wish to be dominated, manhandled and have all their obligations to make decisions taken away from them, never seeming to understand that there are like twenty steps in behavior between "doormat" and "bullying asshole," that you don't have to automatically swing wildly from one extreme to the other. With these kinds of basics about the "rules" and "tricks" to dating and successful relationships being so wrong from the start, that makes all the conclusions later made about these basics wrong as well, and the advice given just sometimes ludicrous stuff that would sound like a biting parody of the alt-right if it wasn't in fact true. In fact the simple solution to all of this is just to treat women like the individual humans they are, just like these incels are seemingly able to do for all the men around them in their life. Young men's brains get scrambled sometimes by all that testosterone coursing through their blood, obsessively compelling them to copulate and breed as often and as with as many partners as possible; this causes them sometimes to look at women as some sort of inscrutable race of space aliens, and a lot of these incel books take that assumption as their beginning, this idea that women will never be able to be understood by men, so here instead are just some easy tricks you can perform that will somehow magically produce the results you want (i.e. penis in vagina), however those tricks might mysteriously work, who knows how. The real key to "successful relationships," or at least as it's being defined here as "lots of highly satisfying sex that might or might not lead to long-term monogamy," is actually the opposite, and to understand that women are simply men but instead filled with estrogen instead of testosterone, which changes a little bit about them but otherwise are creatures who think, behave, act, and prioritize the same exact things as you and me. Treat a smart, attractive woman like the complex, unique human being she is, and you're setting yourself up for having her be attracted to you right back (that is, like DeMarco rightly points out, if you randomly happen to pass a few genetic tests with that particular person over the stuff their lizard brain reacts to, which must be passed before that person can be legitimately sexually attracted to you). Granted, I'm in my "post-male-menopause" years (or whatever you want to call it) of my mid-fifties, and I have something like half the testosterone in my bloodstream now as I did as a young man; in fact, it's only been in middle-age as my testosterone level has slowly gone down that I've begun to be able to see women in this more clarifying light in the first place, so maybe there's something inherently about the effects on the brain testosterone and estrogen have that's always going to make this subject tough for young men and young women for the entire rest of time. Whatever the case, I can definitively state now after a full adult lifetime of sexual activity that following the advice in these kinds of books may occasionally (or even regularly) result in the kind of mediocre, often substance-fueled, halfway-satisfying blurry sex in the middle of the night that you only kind of remember the next day and you instantly regret, but that to have the true intimacy (and truly mindblowing sex) of a legitimate romantic relationship, you need to do the opposite of what these books say and actually learn how to treat the women in your life as fully complex, sometimes maddeningly individualistic human beings, with all their individual assets and faults, and who fundamentally want the same exact things out of both life and a sexual partner as you do. (It's not hard to find young women who are horny and just want to fuck all day long, because like the men, every single one of them are and do; the challenge is in convincing them to trust you enough to reveal that information.) Take the advice in these kinds of books with that long-term view in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 09, 2023
not set
|
Dec 09, 2023
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| B004OA6KVK
| 2.00
| 1
| unknown
| Feb 01, 2011
|
it was ok
|
2023 reads, #100. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outl
2023 reads, #100. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outlined for the last six months (the project being an attempt to advertise my skills as a freelance romance editor); and to get myself more into the mindset of the alt-right guys who run the "New Sparta" post-apocalyptic settlement where my story takes place, I've started tearing through a bunch of books I once found grouped together on the Pirate Bay under the title "The Red Pill Collection." This particular title is one of those incel "how to trick women into sleeping with you" books; there are a lot of these kinds of books in this Red Pill Collection, over a dozen altogether, and the more of them I read, the more I'm realizing that all of them are based fundamentally around a handful of very general wrong assumptions about the world, which then makes all the advice worthless since it's all based on assumptions that were wrong in the first place. To begin with, although many of these incel books use the same language about romance that general society does, stating that the goal is to be in a "relationship" where you are "dating" and promising that this book will teach you how to do that, the books never define these terms in the way the rest of society does; for while most of us would think of elements like emotional intimacy or the ability to show vulnerability as some of the hallmark traits that come with dating, these books invariably define a "relationship" as "the moment you can finally convince her to let you put your penis in and rub it around until you have an orgasm," at which point your "relationship" is technically over and it's perfectly fine to go find another "relationship" if you want, or maybe try again for another "relationship" with this particular one. That then leads incel writers to encourage their readers to think of the entire female gender as basically interchangeable vaginas with legs, to be purchased, used and discarded like any other consumer item freshly shipped from a Chinese factory, instead of being treated as the unique, interesting individual each one is (and that incels can manage to understand about fellow men, making it even more maddening that they can't seem to be able to imagine women in the same way). And then they also get something right about the human condition -- we humans really do prefer to spend time with other humans who are confident, courageous, have specific opinions and sometimes feel passionate about them, while we tend to dislike wishy-washy, timid, cowardly pushovers -- but instead of acknowledging that as a universal about the human condition that both men and women feel at all times about all other men and women they spend time with, the incels state that this is proof that all women wish to be dominated, manhandled and have all their obligations to make decisions taken away from them, never seeming to understand that there are like twenty steps in behavior between "doormat" and "bullying asshole," that you don't have to automatically swing wildly from one extreme to the other. With these kinds of basics about the "rules" and "tricks" to dating and successful relationships being so wrong from the start, that makes all the conclusions later made about these basics wrong as well, and the advice given just sometimes ludicrous stuff that would sound like a biting parody of the alt-right if it wasn't in fact true. In fact the simple solution to all of this is just to treat women like the individual humans they are, just like these incels are seemingly able to do for all the men around them in their life. Young men's brains get scrambled sometimes by all that testosterone coursing through their blood, obsessively compelling them to copulate and breed as often and as with as many partners as possible; this causes them sometimes to look at women as some sort of inscrutable race of space aliens, and a lot of these incel books take that assumption as their beginning, this idea that women will never be able to be understood by men, so here instead are just some easy tricks you can perform that will somehow magically produce the results you want (i.e. penis in vagina), however those tricks might mysteriously work, who knows how. The real key to "successful relationships," or at least as it's being defined here as "lots of highly satisfying sex that might or might not lead to long-term monogamy," is actually the opposite, and to understand that women are simply men but instead filled with estrogen instead of testosterone, which changes a little bit about them but otherwise are creatures who think, behave, act, and prioritize the same exact things as you and me. Treat a smart, attractive woman like the complex, unique human being she is, and you're setting yourself up for having her be attracted to you right back (that is, like DeMarco rightly points out, if you randomly happen to pass a few genetic tests with that particular person over the stuff their lizard brain reacts to, which must be passed before that person can be legitimately sexually attracted to you). Granted, I'm in my "post-male-menopause" years (or whatever you want to call it) of my mid-fifties, and I have something like half the testosterone in my bloodstream now as I did as a young man; in fact, it's only been in middle-age as my testosterone level has slowly gone down that I've begun to be able to see women in this more clarifying light in the first place, so maybe there's something inherently about the effects on the brain testosterone and estrogen have that's always going to make this subject tough for young men and young women for the entire rest of time. Whatever the case, I can definitively state now after a full adult lifetime of sexual activity that following the advice in these kinds of books may occasionally (or even regularly) result in the kind of mediocre, often substance-fueled, halfway-satisfying blurry sex in the middle of the night that you only kind of remember the next day and you instantly regret, but that to have the true intimacy (and truly mindblowing sex) of a legitimate romantic relationship, you need to do the opposite of what these books say and actually learn how to treat the women in your life as fully complex, sometimes maddeningly individualistic human beings, with all their individual assets and faults, and who fundamentally want the same exact things out of both life and a sexual partner as you do. (It's not hard to find young women who are horny and just want to fuck all day long, because like the men, every single one of them are and do; the challenge is in convincing them to trust you enough to reveal that information.) Take the advice in these kinds of books with that long-term view in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
|
Dec 09, 2023
|
Dec 09, 2023
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 4.31
| 1,202
| 2008
| unknown
|
did not like it
|
2023 reads, #97. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outli
2023 reads, #97. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outlined for the last six months (the project being an attempt to advertise my skills as a freelance romance editor); and to get myself more into the mindset of the alt-right guys who run the "New Sparta" post-apocalyptic settlement where my story takes place, I've started tearing through a bunch of books I once found grouped together on the Pirate Bay under the title "The Red Pill Collection." This particular title is a compilation of forum posts by the eponymous Pook at the popular incel website SoSuave.net, put together by another forum member by the pen-name of Gubby, and I have to admit that it's a kind of perfect Platonian example of both everything I'm fascinated by in the alt-right men's movement and everything that drives me crazy. Just to begin with, although this book talks a lot about "dating" and "relationships" and what an incel can do to have these in their life, the way these events are described in the book are way off from the societal standard, with not one word spent on topics like emotional intimacy or personal vulnerability, but rather the entirety of a "relationship" being defined as "when a penis goes in and out of a vagina long enough and fast enough to produce an orgasm," at which point that "relationship" is over and it's time to go find another "relationship." This invariably then leads (like it always does in incel books) to the defining of the entire female gender not as individual humans each with their own individual personalities, quirks, likes and dislikes, but rather just an endless sea of interchangeable vaginas with legs, which you apply the same ol' shtick to over and over without ever bothering to get to know them as actual human beings, since things like personalities and interests aren't required for the incel definition of a "happy relationship." Especially infuriating in these books is the way they do these incredibly strict and niche definitions of terms, then pretend that this is the global standard that applies in every situation with every person. Here, for example, Monsieur Pook very specifically defines a "very attractive woman" (the woman you're ultimately working up to under an incel dating system, because by the point that they finally take an interest in you, you will have truly earned that vagina with legs) exclusively as someone with long hair and big boobs, who wears a lot of makeup and regularly squeezes herself into tight, trashy dresses. For a bunch of guys complaining about how they can never have sex, they sure are voluntarily eliminating a lot of women who exist from consideration! I can state all this with some authority, because as a teen in the '80s, I suffered from a lot of the problems incels do too (inconsolably horny, awkward around women, finding myself in the "friend zone" a lot), but it was only decades later with a lot of hindsight that I realized that I could've been fucking hot teen girls left and right when I'd been in high school, that all the signs of their interest were clearly there, but that I eliminated the very idea of dating them from my head because they were too much this or not enough that. Once I got into my twenties and actually did start dating these women, they turned out to be super-interesting and way more sexually confident than some bleached-out Kardashian who's poured herself into some Spanx while hanging out at a club on the Jersey Shore, and it's maddening to hear these dudes complain about how they never have sex when the only women they'll even consider are airbrushed AI bots in lad magazines. What's perhaps most infuriating of all, though, is the way these books get just a little bit of a situation right, just enough that the writing sounds serious and worth paying attention to, which is why these books keep selling and people just keep making more of them; but then they'll completely draw the wrong conclusion from this limited amount of true information, or take situations that's happened to them in particular as an aggressively obnoxious alt-right incel and state that this is the reaction that all creatures with a penis will forever always get from all creatures with vaginas. Like, Pook talks here about a common piece of wisdom in these incel books, that women generally dislike men who come across as weak, spineless, indecisive and easy to persuade; and that's a true statement about the world, in my opinion. But that has nothing to do with women's "mating rituals" or whatever these incel authors are attributing it to, but rather something that's simply true of the entire human race whenever they're hanging out with any other member of the human race, that all of us generally prefer to spend time with someone confident, courageous, with specific opinions and who can equally participate in a conversation about "where should we have dinner tonight?" Instead, Pook and these other incel writers state that this is proof that women want forceful, dominant, trick-playing "alpha males" to rule over them in a relationship with an iron fist like the animals they are, not bothering to acknowledge that you don't have to automatically go from being a doormat to being an asshole, that there are other shades of behavior in between those extremes. Or for another example, note here when Pook claims that "women simply aren't interested in your opinions," using this to claim that the proper response is to simply buy them pretty things and make sure to fuck them regularly, and just force your Star Wars and anime on them if they're not naturally interested. But Pook, bro, I gotta tell you, I've had dozens of female romantic partners over the decades who were interested in my opinions, just that my opinions weren't the crazy fucking woman-hating rantings of a fedora-wearing meninist, so no goddamn wonder you're finding that the women around you in your life aren't interested in your fucking opinions. This is the tragedy of the alt-right movement, that they're getting something like 25 percent of it right, which is just enough to feel righteous and motivated, but then just so utterly fucking up the other 75 percent that everything they touch turns into cartoonishly terrible shit just a moment later. However, I can certainly state that a book like this will absolutely help get you into the mindset of someone who believes this stuff, if you're interested in writing a novel where they're the villain-heroes in a world gone mad. Read it for this reason and this reason only. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Dec 04, 2023
not set
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Dec 04, 2023
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ebook
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0374211728
| 9780374211721
| 0374211728
| 4.30
| 207
| 2021
| Mar 09, 2021
|
really liked it
|
2023 reads, #80. Earlier this year I heard from an acquaintance of mine, transgressive author Joshua Mohr, who was writing to nicely send me a gift co
2023 reads, #80. Earlier this year I heard from an acquaintance of mine, transgressive author Joshua Mohr, who was writing to nicely send me a gift copy of his newest book, the absurdist fairytale Farsickness that he co-wrote with his small daughter during the pandemic. That made me remember that I had lost touch with Mohr's career ever since my small press closed in the late 2010s, after being so impressed with his first couple of books on the exquisite small publisher Two Dollar Radio; and after scanning through his bibliography, I realized that what I really wanted to read next of his was a memoir he published just recently in 2021 called Model Citizen, concerning his time as a drug and alcohol addict and general lover of chaos back during his youth in the gentrifying '90s Mission district of San Francisco. I just got done with it this week, and it's as powerful as you would expect from someone who's made an entire career now out of stories about the world's druggies, petty criminals, and other lumpen proletarians; for it turns out that Mohr's real life is very similar to the sometimes desperate lives of his characters, with the hipster scene of the '90s Bay Area being not particularly helpful to this son of an alcoholic who had already started drinking himself by the age of ten, and who by his thirties was now regularly injecting fentanyl and ketamine, and who purposely cultivated chaos-embracing friends who would encourage him to do things like mug drunk guys just for kicks, or have contests over who could shoot more staples into their skin without flinching after getting good and fucked up. This is easily the best part of the book, the unflinching and unsentimental way he approaches his years of darkness, neither condemning the behavior nor Tarantino-glorifying it, but simply acknowledging that this is what his life used to be, and that in some ways it was like this precisely because this is the way the entire Bay Area artistic community was back in those years, a sort of "late-stage Byronism" of doomed romantic artists that Generation X perfected in a way no other generation had, until the next young generation entirely rejected it (like they have with most Generation X things) and now treasure their artistic lives of health, wellness, earnestness and financial security. Of course, this being Mohr, the book is also incredibly insightful as well, which in good MFA style is centered around a compelling framing device that just naturally makes you want to learn more; namely, after being sober for years, now married and with a toddler child, he discovers that the occasional moments of physical numbness he sometimes experienced while an addict were actually a series of strokes he didn't realize he was having, and that doctors have now determined that he has a hole in his heart (talk about MFA symbolism!) that will require surgery to correct, and that they plan on knocking him out using the exact same fentanyl he used to be addicted to. Will this "freelapse" eventually knock him off the wagon again? Will his love for his infant daughter be enough to keep him on the straight and narrow? Mohr uses the event as basically an excuse to do a "plain-language Proust" digression-filled look back at his entire life, examine the crippling self-esteem issues from his damaging childhood that led to the breakup of his first marriage and the constant doubts he has about his second, and pontificate in a clever, knowing way about how actual sobriety stories often don't fit the neat, tidy three-act structure that Hollywood wants them to when making inspirational Oscarbait films about the subject. And indeed, although this book made me laugh out loud sometimes, unnervingly see myself at other points (I was part of Chicago's arts community in these same years, which shared a lot of the same dysfunctions as San Francisco's), and just plain ol' openly weep in the middle of public cafes at yet other moments (prompting all the people around me to check out what book exactly I was reading that had moved me to such an extent -- you're welcome, Josh), what I liked and appreciated the most about this book is that Mohr has the courage to make it a messy story, one that doesn't hit the usual three-act beats and that he refuses to force into that pattern, which I bet he was under an immense pressure to do, since this was his first of his then five books to actually come out on a mainstream press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), after having the usual indie career before this of prestigious but tiny destinations like Two Dollar Radio and Soft Skull. That makes the book much more interesting than usual, which makes it much better than usual, and I was really glad to see Mohr make such a strong commitment to telling the story he knew he needed to tell, even at the expense of the feel-good wrap-up most people are looking for when they read clean-and-sober books like these. As he demonstrates by the end of the book, even the term "clean and sober story" is a misnomer in the first place, one that leads to manipulative memoirs instead of intellectually honest ones, after his freelapse makes him realize with a lot of terror just how close all addicts are all the time to their head sinking below the water's surface yet again; and that makes for a much more interesting and enjoyable read than simply another Lifetime movie told the same exact way for the ten thousandth time again. Unfortunately, the end kind of falters a bit, which is why it's getting 4 stars instead of 5 from me; it becomes pretty clear in the last third that Mohr simply ran out of things to say, so he starts glomming on more and more to the typical infuriating MFA tricks at that point, especially his habit of writing very artsy run-on sentences when he doesn't have much of a point to make. Or sometimes single paragraphs that last for two or three pages, which like all three-page single paragraphs you can entirely skip over without missing even the tiniest important thing to the story. (Also, Mohr very badly and very often makes both of the general mistakes about storytelling that almost all humans know, whether or not they're writers themselves -- that no one wants to hear about the dream you had last night, and no one besides you is interested in the randomly adorable thing your kid did yesterday, stories of which start taking up more and more and more and more and more of the book's final third.) That said, these problems weren't enough to stop me from loving the book, just like I've loved everything of Mohr's I've now read (think of my 4 stars here at Goodreads as actually more like 4 and a half stars, if I could award half-stars here); and that's made me realize that I have some backlog reading to do now, in that Mohr has actually put out another three books between my early years as a reviewer and now, and I want to read them all. Next up will be his 2011 Damascus, the novel that first started getting him mainstream notice and that began lifting him out of the indie-lit ghetto, so I hope you'll join me here again in early 2024 for that. For now, though, I can confidently state that this will be making my "2023 best reads of the year" report I'll be sharing on the social network Mastodon at the end of December. If you can stand queasy stories, pick it up with no delay. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Oct 24, 2023
not set
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Oct 24, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 9798414608431
| B09T61FBDD
| 5.00
| 1
| unknown
| Feb 16, 2022
|
it was amazing
|
2023 reads, #64. Many men get to their late-middle-aged years like I currently am (I'm 54 this year) and still obsessively think about the natural int
2023 reads, #64. Many men get to their late-middle-aged years like I currently am (I'm 54 this year) and still obsessively think about the natural interest and curiosity they had when younger regarding kinky sex, which has still stayed with them all this time because they had actually been quiet suburban husbands in those years and never actually had a chance to have kinky sex. Would they have enjoyed it? Would they have been any good at it? Would it have changed their entire life trajectory? And thus does this lead many middle-aged men to actually try it in their forties and older, for better or for worse. I, on the other hand, as a professional artist for most of my youth (and a paid sex columnist for a few years of that), got to sow all my wild oats back in those salad days, and thus no longer have a curiosity for it; so I instead have an obsessive fascination with the stock market, and ask myself all the same "what if" questions about it that most fiftysomething men ask about the idea of being in an orgy. I just thought about it again this week, in fact, when a character in a novel I'm editing right now turned out to be a day trader himself; so on impulse, I jumped over to Amazon right that moment and bought the Kindle version of the number-one absolutely highest rated book out of their entire system on the subject of day trading. That turned out to be the unwieldy titled Trading Experts Presents Getting Started: A Beginner's Guide to the Stock Market, Step 1, by Bennett Robert Zamani and Matthew Pryzby (although to be clear, it's Zamani who actually wrote this, which you can tell because he wrote it in first person; his co-founder of the educational group "Trading Experts" I think is just included because both of them likely came up with the lessons). And folks, let me tell you, it was one of the more fascinating books I've read in some time, although in many cases not for the reasons Zamani and Pryzby want it to be. Just to be clear about the logistics, it's actually one massive book they're offering here, for a total price of $36; but they've split it up into 12 small books that are $3 apiece, I think because their main purpose is as giveaways at the educational program they run through their website, and I imagine are also used as a "lead magnet" for their popular newsletter. This first one doesn't actually go that much into the nuts and bolts of trading itself, but instead talks a lot about the fundamentals of being a trader when it comes to personality, focus, the habits you need to develop, the things you need to unlearn from watching stock market shows on cable television, etc. For example, an early basic thing I learned is that "day trading" is not actually a general term for anyone who trades stocks from home during the day, like I thought it was; it actually means specifically a trader who will buy a stock in the morning and then sell it that same day before the markets close. Trading Experts, on the other hand, teaches "swing trading," which is where you learn through math and statistics when to determine that a stock's value is about to "swing up" to a new level (at which point you buy it), and when it's about to "swing down" back to a low level (at which point you sell it), a process that can sometimes take weeks or even months. It's full of very useful, very practical advice, and it's easy to see why it still has the astonishing average score of 5 out of 5 at Amazon, despite there now being thousands of reviews posted. But what's funny and fascinating is that it still can't help but be such a naked glimpse of the "Finance Bro" world that constitutes Trading Experts' core customer base, all those incels and meninists and Boiler Room dudes who gather at places like r/WallStreetBets and follow Jim "Mad Money" Cramer like a god, guys who use the word "beast" as a verb, who always refer to stocks as women and then always say things about those women that are borderline criminal ("I fucked AMZN in the ass like the bitch she is!!!!"), who do shit like buy million-dollar sports cars and then get the interior all gunked up with Cheetos dust from their pudgy little no-class fingers. Zamani very admirably trashes Finance Bro culture himself in his book, saying among other things that you will never be a success if you're buying what everyone else is buying, that arrogance about being "the smartest one in the room" pretty much 100% guarantees a giant loss, and that there's no way you can compound your profits if you keep pulling out cash to bling-bling up your life; yet he also tells us with pride about the Aston-Martin he bought at 22 as a college graduation present just because he felt like it, and makes it clear that he primarily sees the world in terms of "winners" (people like him and his friends) and "losers" (anyone who doesn't follow his advice). It's such this riveting glimpse into Finance Bro culture, one Zamani I think doesn't realize he's giving us, where like the poker world pretty much every term for every single thing you can do has a slang term that has nothing to do with the actual activity, so that people like Zamani and his friends can rattle off these monologues that sound like gobbletygook to everyone else and thus exclude all of us from their little elite circle (and I mean a literal elite circle, one they run through their website and that costs people hundreds of dollars a month to join, and that they literally named "The Alpha Chat," sheeeeeeeesssshhhh, bro, c'mon). It's also telling that the book has so many grammatical errors that it feels like a ten-year-old wrote it, because that's part of the Finance Bro mystique too; because this bro is making too much money to worry about fucking commas, bro, which is why you should trust all the advice this particular bro is giving you. That's brilliant and evil in equal measures simultaneously, and a better historical record of our times than a thousand Trump indictment documents added together. I want to be very clear about this, that the book itself actually has incredibly smart and insightful things to say about the subject of unlicensed home stock trading (which turns out is the general term for it, "unlicensed trading," because if you want to trade stocks on behalf of someone else for a fee, you have to get a literal license from the SEC to do so, a rule not coincidentally invented three years into the Great Depression), and I absolutely plan on using this 12-book series as my initial rabbit hole into actually trying out stock trading for the first time later this winter. (Currently I'm busy training to get a formal certification in traditional academic editing, so that I can start taking on things like doctoral dissertations and medical books that pay five times as much as what I'm currently making as a freelancer, but one infuriatingly tedious thing at a time, I suppose.) But even if you have no interest in stock trading at all, this first book that only touches on the technical topics of trading is such an amazing read anyway, a chance to crawl up inside the head of one of these Jordan Peterson-loving, Stoicism-reading, Joe Rogan-listening, Tim Ferriss-quoting BROOOOS and see all the fucked-up shit going on up there. It comes recommended in that spirit if nothing else, and as an added bonus will actually teach you how to become quite a successful swing trader too. AND THEN YOU CAN MAKE AAPL YOUR BITCH, BRO!!!!!!!1!! ...more |
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| 0593420314
| 9780593420317
| 0593420314
| 3.83
| 119,379
| May 03, 2022
| May 03, 2022
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2023 reads, #50. DID NOT FINISH. I knew I was in trouble with Hernan Diaz's new Pulitzer winner Trust literally around page 5 or 10, when the narrator
2023 reads, #50. DID NOT FINISH. I knew I was in trouble with Hernan Diaz's new Pulitzer winner Trust literally around page 5 or 10, when the narrator mentioned that the reason our book's protagonist (Gilded Age tycoon Benjamin Rask) enjoys investing because it allows him to have fun and accomplish his goals without having to worry about how his actions affect the "little people" he can't stand being around. That sent up a big signal flare that this was going to be an RPB novel, by which of course I mean a "RICH PEOPLE BAD!!!" novel, which I have to admit right away I can't stand. I mean, don't get me wrong, I agree that rich people are bad; but that's an insight any random five-year-old child can give me, and not something I would expect from a book that's just won the US's most prestigious literary award (or, well, in this case co-won it with Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, which I'll be reading next). Unfortunately, though, that's the level of discourse we have in our country anymore, where the radical wings of both political parties have completely taken over our national culture by now, and so we literally now hear such cartoonish things in public as one side declaring, "Slavery is bad!," mostly because the other side is so reactionary, they immediately respond with, "No it's not! Slavery is good! Fuck you, snowflake! SLAVERY NOW, CUCK!!!" I acknowledge (even if I don't like it) that such troglodytes and mouth-breathers have completely hijacked the tattered remnants of what used to be called "intellectual discourse" in this country; but that's why I turn to literary fiction in these times, because that's supposed to be one of the few places left in the US where we can actually have nuanced, complex, sophisticated conversations about the issues affecting society in any given year. But man, if they're now giving out Pulitzers to "RICH PEOPLE BAD!!!" novels, we're all fucked, and surely a violent and protracted Civil War II ("This Time It's Personal") is just around the corner. To be as fair as I can, at least Diaz attempts a clever structure to his RPB story, which I suspect is the main reason it won the Pulitzer; it's only the first quarter of the book that's written in the style of an Edith Wharton novel, supposedly published during the Great Depression, while part two is a section of an autobiography by the supposed real person behind this supposed fictional novel (the fictional-to-us but real-to-this-universe Andrew Bevel), talking about what a great guy he is and how the novel totally gets things wrong, while part three is a memoir by the woman hired to write that autobiography, revealing that Bevel's actually much more of a monster than either book makes it seem, while the concluding part four is an excerpt from the private journals of Bevel's wife, revealing that no, seriously, Bevel's a serious monster, I'm not kidding, because did I mention that RICH PEOPLE BAD???!!!!!1! That's clever, I admit, which is why I stuck in there with this book for as long as I did; but ultimately none of these four sections do anything but continue to make the RPB case over and over, with less and less subtlety with each passing page, until by the end we're watching Bevel cooking and eating puppies in front of their child owners while giving an evil cackle and asking for his special ketchup made out of human tears and blood (or at least presumably -- I didn't actually make it that far). That's simply not for me, and in an ideal world it wouldn't be for you either; but in a world that condemns billionaires in one breath and then in the very next breath makes Succession literally the most watched television show in the country, I'm not holding out hope that things will change anytime soon. ...more |
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May 17, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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| 0192838652
| 9780192838650
| 0192838652
| 3.37
| 6,002
| 1826
| Sep 10, 1998
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #53. It's firmly autumn here in Chicago, so it was time recently to put away my beach-and-airport Lee Child and Elin Hilderbrand and whatn
2022 reads, #53. It's firmly autumn here in Chicago, so it was time recently to put away my beach-and-airport Lee Child and Elin Hilderbrand and whatnot, and instead turn to a series of very large and intellectually interesting tomes I'll be slowly getting through all the way until next spring and the return of warm weather. Coming later this winter will be my first-ever read of Gone With the Wind, a re-read of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, a binge-read of the entire seven-book "Narnia" series in a row, and my first attempt at Gene Wolfe's 950-page The Book of the New Sun; but first for these cold-weather long-form reads, it's the 150,000-word (i.e. Harry Potter-sized) 1826 forgotten "post-apocalyptic" "classic" The Last Man, by Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley, long overshadowed by her more famous book but now getting more and more of a serious 21st-century look again, when we take both genre literature and novels by women much more seriously. I purposely put air-quotes around both the terms above, because part of what makes it famous is precisely that it's not considered a classic by any way you measure it; in fact, it was sort of angrily rejected by contemporary audiences in the 1820s when she first published it, a little less than a decade after Frankenstein, as she hit middle-age and her work first started to fall out of favor, along with the other Early Romantics who were dying like flies all around her. And now that I've read it, I'm not sure even if you can properly call it a post-apocalyptic novel, at least not in the genre-thriller way we largely mean it now when we use the term ourselves, which is why that's getting air-quotes too. It's still super-fascinating, though, for what it is instead is Shelley talking about all these Early Romantics she spent so much of her youth around, and who had all recently died in a very short period, leaving Shelley essentially alone in the world -- not only her husband Percy, but her sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, her child William, and the charming asshole George Byron who held their whole circle together, otherwise known as Lord Byron. So in other words, the "last man" of her so-called speculative proto-sci-fi novel is not the lone survivor of the futuristic plague seen in her book; it's Mary herself, and this book is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about what it was actually like to live within such a group of people, with just a few showy genre details stitched on to nominally make it a sci-fi story. So in this, it's really important to keep two things in mind about the world as it existed in the 1820s when Shelley wrote this: first, her father-in-law, the politically powerful father of Percy Shelley, had forbidden her from ever writing a memoir about her time with his son; and second, the entire post-apocalyptic "last man" trope of proto-sci-fi had already been around for over 20 years at that point, ever since the unexpected explosive bestseller The Last Man by French author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville in 1805, which had suffered so many cheap ripoffs in the decades after that the "last man" trope was actually kind of a joke by the 1820s, even to the point that there were now popular parodies of the genre. That's why contemporary audiences angrily rejected the book when it first came out, because they took it all at face value and rightly concluded that this didn't hold a candle to the other, much more thrilling "last man" post-apocalyptic melodramas that had been published over the last 20 years. But we now 200 years later can clearly see it as yet another proto-example from the literary world, this time the prototype of the modern autobiographical novel, where Shelley is actually trying to record what her time among the tragic, often infuriating Early Romantics was like, and as such uses the "last man" trope only metaphorically to declare her the last among her artistic peers to still live and write new work, one of the only people who actually got to live long enough to approach it through the wiser filter of middle-age, and therefore has more complex and nuanced things to say about it than any of them did when they were in their passionate twenties. It makes sense, after all, once you learn that she had been forbidden by her father-in-law from publishing a "true story" about her time with Percy, Byron and the rest; but this was the early 1800s, after all, not long after even the novel as an art form had even been invented, and when it was still largely considered silly rubbish only good for women and children by the exact sober, older white men like Shelley's father-in-law. Of course Shelley could get away with couching her memoir of these times within a so-called science-fiction melodrama, especially a trope that had already been around and trendily popular for the last 20 years, because readers literally weren't sophisticated enough yet to read something like The Last Man and say, "...Oh, wait, she's actually talking about Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, isn't she?" But sheesh, what else can you say about a character named "Lord Raymond," who is described as looking exactly like Byron, who in our late 21st-century setting of future England is a charming rogue asshole who wants to see England return to a state of monarchy, after the country fully converts into a secular democracy like the US in Shelley's "past future" timeline. Or what about his complicated, almost sexual relationship with who is supposed to be the current king of England if he hadn't abdicated, one Adrian Windsor who just happens to look exactly like Shelley's real-life husband Percy, who is 100% on the side of the rational Republicanists and has an antagonistic yet almost sensual relationship with Lord Raymond, who's trying to achieve the exact opposite thing and bring back "rule by the righteously ordained?" So if we use all this as proof that what Shelley was truly trying to do here was actually write an autobiographical novel about the Early Romantic inner circle she was a part of, that actually makes this quite the interesting book, and especially in the ultra-complex, ultra-nuanced way she portrays her version of Lord Byron here, very easily the true protagonist of the book even though it's supposed to be a sweeping ensemble drama where the abdicated king is just as important, as is his Shakespearean mother who schemes with Lord Raymond to bring back the monarchy, as is another dozen characters based here and there on actual figures from her real-life circle in those years. Shelley's the only one left alive at this point in real history, after all, so she can say whatever she wants to about these people; and it's clear that, just as we think about him today 200 years later, Shelley clearly found Lord Byron to be the most complex and mesmerizing person of their entire circle, and largely devotes her ensemble drama here to examining the detailed ins and outs of his character in particular. And like we've often been discovering just now in our #MeToo years, one of the things making this book worth revisiting here in the 21st century is that Shelley's post-death brutally honest assessment of Lord Byron is of a real MeTooer type -- charming and seductive in a way you can't tear yourself away from, but that you can easily see right away is damaging and too intense for your well-being, the kind of person to both build up a fervent circle of true believers and eventually resign with disgrace from that circle (if they live long enough, that is, which in the case of both the real Byron and the fictional Raymond was not the case), much more honest and sophisticated an examination of this type of "intelligentsia bro" than the traditional "Byronic Hero" that grew together during the Victorian Age. Unfortunately, though, I find myself once again paraphrasing Homer Simpson talking to Ricky Gervais when it comes to me discussing a novel from the Early Romantic period: "Lady, you take forever to say nothing!!!" And that's another reason you can see why contemporary audiences might've angrily rejected this book when it first came out, because for a post-apocalyptic thriller, it's slow as freakin' molasses, and I have to confess that I didn't make it all the way to the end of this thousand-page book before I had decided that I at least had read enough to write a measured and informed review. That review, as you can see, is that it's well worth your time to take on, at least the slow and extra-long first act which is where most of the character-building of these thinly veiled Early Romantics take place, before a second and third act that crank up the genre tropes considerably. (Also, be aware that Shelley didn't even bother trying to think of cool sci-fi what-ifs; the most cutting-edge thing anyone does in her book is travel long distances by hot air balloon.) In it, you'll get a more refreshingly honest and complicated look at these "world's first whiny hipsters" of Shelley's generation than perhaps you've ever seen an actual member of that generation talk about themselves before; and understand that if any of them had managed to live beyond their mid-thirties, like Shelley turned out to be the only one to do, all of them might have had a quite different attitude about this "age of the tortured romantic artist" that still very much exists to this day, even while seemingly getting snuffed out more and more by our rapid transition into our current Woke times. You may not last the entire book, but even the first couple hundred pages are well worth the time to read, even if you Wikipedia the rest of the plot; and Shelley in general deserves to be remembered as a towering pioneer of her age, and not just a one-hit wonder for Frankenstein in the style of, "Isn't it nice that Percy's wife got to do something too?" These books and others show exactly why, so ahead of their times that we're only catching up to some of them now. ...more |
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| 1984879359
| 9781984879356
| 1984879359
| 3.24
| 44,687
| Jun 23, 2020
| Jun 23, 2020
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did not like it
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2022 reads, #37. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! As friends remember, this is the summer I'm finally reading for the first time all four of the
2022 reads, #37. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! As friends remember, this is the summer I'm finally reading for the first time all four of the novels by hipster-lit It Girl Ottessa Moshfegh, right in a row until I'm done, because of recently noticing a growing amount of my friends at Goodreads starting to now describe other surreal novels by young female authors as "Moshfeghian" in nature, and me having a desire to know exactly what they mean when they use a term like this. I've been through two of her books now, 2015's Eileen which I hated, and then 2018's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I loved; but unfortunately her third novel, 2020's Death in her Hands, is much more like the former than the latter, which means I'm back to hating it again. The problem here, just like Eileen, is that Moshfegh is utterly uninterested in turning in a three-act story, giving us instead a 300-page plotless character study about The Second Most Unpleasant Woman In Human History (the aforementioned Eileen of course being the most unpleasant woman in human history), essentially what it would look like if you took Saturday Night Live's "Debbie Downer" and played her for drama instead of laughs, and then slowly revealed through one odd sentence every 10,000 words that she's in fact insane and that you can't trust even a single word coming out of her mouth. That's interesting as a concept, but fucking unbearable as an actual reading experience, just pages and pages and pages and PAGES of tedious minutiae from our put-upon unreliable narrator's daily life (she walks in the woods, she makes some dinner, she pets her dog, she goes to bed, she gets back up, she takes a shower, she walks in the woods...), just for Moshfegh to randomly insert exactly one weird sentence every 30 pages that makes you stop and say, "...Wait, I'm sorry, what was that?" She's definitely on-brand here with what I've come this summer to think of as the typical Moshfeghian Hero (namely, that dishwater-dull mousy doormat who works the receptionist desk at an insurance office and who no one on the planet ever gives a second thought to, just to reveal that she's actually much crazier than anyone ever suspected, and that today is the day she's decided she's had just about enough of your fucking bullshit, thank you very much); but while such an anti-villain is irresistible when paired with a bizarre, hilarious, JG Ballard-like pitch-black surreal storyline like in the case of Relaxation, our Moshfeghian Heroes are just barely tolerable when put in a go-nowhere MFA hipster circle-jerk character study like here or in Eileen, and I have to confess that after absolutely loving the former (Relaxation will definitely be showing up on my "best reads of the year" list in December), I detested the latter, and gave a huge sigh of relief when I finally made it to the end of this endlessly droning disaster of a book. That finally brings us to Moshfegh's fourth and latest novel, Lapvona which was just released a couple of months ago; and I've been told that that's actually a historical novel, taking a typical Moshfeghian Hero and plunking her into a Medieval village where strange and possibly evil events are afoot (think The VVitch), so please keep your eye out my review of that in just another week or two. ...more |
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| 0316704261
| 9780316704267
| 0316704261
| 3.28
| 9,989
| Jul 13, 2021
| Jul 13, 2021
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #18. Wow, I went through quite an emotional journey with this book, starting with the fact that I initially gave up on it only 25 pages in
2022 reads, #18. Wow, I went through quite an emotional journey with this book, starting with the fact that I initially gave up on it only 25 pages in, because it originally looked like it was going to be just another stupid Brooklyn hipster MFA novel by another stupid Brooklyn hipster MFA author about a bunch of stupid Brooklyn hipsters who no one can stand yet everyone keeps seeming to write books about; and I've already had enough of that kind of nonsense in my life in the last year, so I put it down quickly and added it to the pile of books to take back to the library on my next trip. But like all of these kinds of DNF novels, before I turned it back in I skipped ahead and read the last chapter, just so I'll know how it ends; and that's where I discovered a scene with our stupid Brooklyn hipsters still whining and griping at each other, but now with apparently some kind of supernatural monster tearing down the hallway of the Brooklyn loft they're all in, wreaking havoc and trying to destroy them all. So at that point I was like, Well, fuck, I guess I gotta go back and read this entire thing, because that was simply too intriguing a detail to let pass by. While doing that, then, I also took some time to read everyone else's reviews of the book here at Goodreads, something I don't do until afterwards with books I like, but that I do in advance for books I'm on the fence about; and it was there that I saw that nearly every review now posted of this novel says something along the lines of "OMG THE LAST CHAPTER OF THIS BOOK BLEW MY FREAKING MIIIIIIND;" and that's when I started suspecting that this is one of those stories in the tradition of The Sixth Sense, where the story itself is actually only mediocre once you stop and really examine it, but has such an explosively unique and surprising ending that it literally changes how people feel about the 300 pages or two hours of film time that came before it. And so that's how I approached this book when I finally sat down and read the entire thing -- wary and on the alert for evidence that it was only going to be so-so, forgiving of the second act even while trying to make my way through it as quickly as possible, so that I too can see what everyone else has been raving about once you finally make it to the climax. And indeed, be forewarned that you're going to have to pretty much read the entire first half of this book before anything interesting actually happens, but that you can't skip it because it sets up everything that pays off later; and that you need to go into it understanding that the characters are not just being needlessly cruel to each other in this first half randomly, but that there's a logical and clever purpose behind every snotty barb and half-lidded shrug we see. That's a good example of what makes this book so frustrating yet so memorable, especially for people like me who are heavy readers; for despite being a Brooklyn MFA hipster herself, author Beth Morgan has not even the tiniest interest in turning in a traditional MFA three-act structure here, which results in things like the first and second halves being essentially two entirely different books (the latter very similar to Donnie Darko, the former reminiscent of that horrid go-nowhere character study in Kenyon Review you once choked down when you were 19 because you were trying to sleep with the author), or the fact that one of the major characters just dies out of the blue with no notice at a certain point, far from a place of climax or resolution that such a death would normally occur in an MFA novel, and in fact looks at first like it doesn't even have anything to do with the bigger plot going on, until you finally get to that infamous last chapter and say with a big smile, "Ah, okay, I see now where this was going." That's courageous of Morgan to do, and I can imagine her horrified professors during the first draft of this marking out giant sections with a red pen and scribbling "NO NO NO!!!"; and it also goes a long way towards explaining why the marketing staff of Little, Brown seems to have become completely befuddled by how to actually sell this book to the public, so made the unfortunate decision to present it as a goofy Millennial comedy about an trainwrecky Instagram influencer whose antics destroy the lives of a bland couple who develop a mutual obsession with her, when in fact this book doesn't resemble that description in even the slightest way. (Like these other idiosyncrasies mentioned, although Morgan does make our titular Jen an Instagram influencer, as an excuse for why our narrating couple know of her in the first place, we learn by the end of the book that that has not even the tiniest bit to do with the actual story being told here.) And of course this doesn't even touch on what turned out to be my personally favorite aspect of it all, that while the man in the protagonist couple looks at first to be just another cardboard-cutout whiny hipster bro, his actions become more and more repulsive and unforgivable the longer the pages continue, until we finally realize by the end that he's not actually the protagonist but the antagonist. This, then, makes for an extremely clever and interesting "anti-villain" tale, in the spirit of Breaking Bad or A Confederacy of Dunces, my absolute favorite genre of storytelling; and anti-villain tales are tough to pull off, because you basically have to hide the fact at first that the main character is actually the villain and not the hero, and then deal with the reader fallout when they've realized that you've tricked them. I know it sounds like I'm revealing a lot of spoilers here, but let me assure you that I haven't even gotten to the actual surprises in this book, and that there isn't anything I've said here that should ruin your enjoyment of this fascinatingly unique story, but in fact should hopefully guide you into not giving up on it on page 25 like I originally did. A beautifully flawed, unforgettable debut novel, I can say with a bit of certainty even now that this will most likely be showing up on my "best reads of the year" list come December, and I'm now looking strongly forward to whatever darkly surreal nightmares Morgan has for us next. ...more |
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| 0374605084
| 9780374605087
| 0374605084
| 3.14
| 2,744
| Mar 01, 2022
| Mar 01, 2022
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really liked it
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2022 reads, #17. I admit, author Missouri Williams first came to my attention, while reading the "newest acquisitions" newsletter of the Chicago Publi
2022 reads, #17. I admit, author Missouri Williams first came to my attention, while reading the "newest acquisitions" newsletter of the Chicago Public Library, because her first name is the same name of the American state where I grew up, and you simply don't hear of many people in the world named "Missouri," especially one who lives in England. But then I read on and saw that her debut novel is actually right up my alley, a nightmarishly perverted horror show of a post-apocalyptic novel, so I went ahead that day and became the first person in the city to put it on reserve, and just got done with it last week. The answer to the question, "Is anyone in Generation Z even allowed to make artistic projects that are dark, gross, offensive, and often truly transgressive, or will they be stoned to death for doing so by their earnest, shiny, happy, neon-clothes-wearing, cheerleader-dancing TikTok mouth-breather peers?" (spoiler alert: yes), the novel basically asks what the world might look like after an apocalyptic event if the only people who survived were the worst dregs of society -- the Springer trash, the Trump rioters, the rapists and the con artists and the unmedicated mentally ill? And what if their only option for trying to continue the human race was serial incest not only between the patriarch and matriarch but also any of the children once they reach childbearing years, creating a piglike brood of a next generation who all have physical deformities and barely measurable intelligence? And what if the only way to keep these slobbering, claw-handed animals from going wild and killing everything in sight was to build a harsh Calvinist-style religion around the batshit mother's supposed prophet-like status, ala The Island of Dr. Moreau? Well, it doesn't look too freaking great, I can tell you that without spoiling any of the plot; although I don't really need to give spoiler alerts anyway today, because this is one of those MFA kind of books that's much more about setting a mood than about relaying any substantial storyline. Unfortunately, though, this was one of those books that I wanted to like a lot more than I actually did end up liking; for not only does Williams assault us with her outre storyline and repulsive characters, she literally writes the story in the most aggressively reader-hostile way possible, using these unending paragraphs that last for four or five pages and sometimes results in page spreads that are nothing but two giant impenetrable black rectangles of ink (no, seriously). It's like she's punishing us for daring to take an interest in her writing, and I have to say, I kinda like that; but a little of that kind of stuff goes a long way, and it didn't surprise me to learn that after an early career so far of short work in impressive places like The Baffler and The Believer, this is her first full-length book, because this very much feels like a short story that Williams tried and mostly failed to squeeze out into a compelling full novel (and just barely at that, clocking in at a shade over 200 pages in a 5 x 7" paperback). Williams is just starting her career, and I'm really fascinated to see where she goes next, which I'm willing to bet will be in even weirder directions, but in the future with more and more of a mature control over her writing and less reliance on gimmicks; but here, while she admirably swings for the fences, the ball drops just short enough that you can't legitimately call the book great, but only on the intriguing side of okay. That would usually get a score of 3 1/2 stars from me, rounded up to 4 here at the no-half-star Goodreads. If you're intrigued at the mental image of a severely autistic, morbidly obese, legless teenage girl dragging her torso across a parking lot of debris using her claw-tipped arms, by all means give this a try; but if you're horrified by that image, then sister, you really don't want to read page two. ...more |
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Apr 06, 2022
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Apr 06, 2022
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| 0451499069
| 9780451499066
| 0451499069
| 3.75
| 505,682
| May 25, 2017
| Aug 07, 2018
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it was amazing
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2021 reads, #91-93. As I progress more and more into my fifties, one of the curious things that's happening to me is that I'm almost entirely losing m
2021 reads, #91-93. As I progress more and more into my fifties, one of the curious things that's happening to me is that I'm almost entirely losing my ability to enjoy indie-lit character-heavy human-interest dramas from academic writers, which is curious because I recently got done spending a decade of my life actually publishing such books for a living. Is it because such books are mostly about people in their twenties and thirties, and that I'm losing more and more interest in the topics associated with such people the older I get? Is it because MFA-style authors have simply run out of things to talk about, making each new book feel more and more like every other book that already exists? Is it because I've simply read so many of them now, and that this genre can only be enjoyed when the story tropes are relatively new to you? Is it because they all tend to be masturbatory circle-jerk tales about creative classers who are gently miserable, because of self-made crises they could've easily avoided if they had wanted to? Six of one, half dozen of another, I suspect, but the net result is that I find myself reading general commercial contemporary fiction less and less, and getting into things I could've never imagined when young getting into, such as my recent rabbit hole plunge into the decidedly less celebrated world of Star Trek non-canon novels. But even I could not avoid the gravity pull in 2021 of Sally Rooney, current NPR hipster-lit It Girl (or as I recently explained it while meaning to be sincere, but that made my friend Carrie laugh uproariously, "She's the female Irish Millennial Jonathan Franzen"), whose newest novel went into publicity-hype overdrive this autumn after becoming a huge, huge star among the Brooklyn McSweeney's crowd, helped immensely by a recent television adaptation of her second novel that became an unlikely hit on BBC (available on Hulu for us Americans). I didn't really want to read Rooney, but I felt like I had to, because she's going to be a topic of conversation at every goddamn dinner party I attend for the next six months, so I decided to do a deep dive and go ahead and read all three of the novels she's so far published in her young career, wrapped together into one review today and posted in duplicate at all three book pages. And sure enough, her later two novels, 2018's Normal People and this year's Beautiful World, Where Are You, were exactly the kind of milquetoast NPR MFA miserable-creative-classer nonsense I was precisely expecting when deciding to read these, and I didn't even make it 50 pages into these snoozers before quickly deciding to quit, because I found myself with such a sense of dread every time I thought about picking them back up and trying to get through a little more of them. So that makes it all the more surprising, then, that her full-length debut, 2017's Conversations with Friends, turned out to be just incredibly delightful in my opinion, one of my favorite reads of the last year and one of the rare contemporary human-interest dramas to really capture my attention and love fully. I've been spending some time this week thinking about why that is, when her two follow-ups left me just as flat as any of the other whiny Brooklyn hipster stuff that crosses my path these days, which is why I thought it'd be worth posting this at all three book pages, because it explains not only what went right with that book but what went wrong with the other two. A huge part of it is because of the character at the center of the story, 21-year-old college student Frances, who may or may not be autobiographical (I honestly don't know enough about Rooney to know) but certainly shares a lot of public traits with the author, such as physical appearance, political beliefs, etc. Rooney doesn't have the slightest hesitation about presenting Frances in an often unflattering light, and this is one of the big things the book has going for it when compared to so much other MFA indie lit; Frances in fact is not entirely a protagonist, but often does things that Rooney very deliberately means for us to see as horrible, and sometimes is the least sympathetic person in the entire room. That makes her much more complex and interesting than your average MFA hero, the story much more realistic, the plot that much more unpredictable. Frances felt very much like some of the over-analyzing, super-intense, always zigging and zagging art-school ex-girlfriends from my own past twenties, who I have both positive and negative memories of, ironically with both types caused by the same behavior; and that made her feel like a very vital, fascinating person, in a way that the female protagonists of Normal People and Beautiful World simply do not. But this is balanced by a strong sense of wanting to root for Frances, and feeling forgiving of her many behavioral sins, in that same kind of way you felt about Saoirse Ronan's character in Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird, where you understood what was going on in her life that was making her behave in sometimes infuriating ways. And in this, I suppose it's fair to say that my enthusiasm is influenced by the fact that I'm in my fifties now, and so far removed from the exploits of people in their early twenties as to make a lot of that seem nostalgically cute in my eyes now. I found it easy to believe that Frances would eventually learn from all this and be a much better person by her thirties, that this soap-opera drama she was going through would be that "lesson learned the hard way" so many of us have in our own early twenties that we keep really quiet about now, that made us become better people afterwards precisely because we saw the full fallout of being a worser person. College students deserve to be cut a break by those of us who are old enough and removed enough that we're not really affected by their sometimes crazy behavior; so whenever Frances did something stupid here (which she does a lot, part of that Irish dark droll humor that really drives this minimalist storyline), I actually found myself gently laughing a lot and saying, "Aww, poor stupid little 21-year-old Frances!" Oh yeah, that's right, those are the kinds of mistakes you 21-year-olds make, aren't they? Wow, glad you're the one going through it, and not me...um, anymore. This is the same reaction, after all, that I had to Lena Dunham's debut indie film, 2010's Tiny Furniture, as compared to the high-profile television show Girls she got to make because of its indie success; that although the characters in her movie behave just like the characters on the TV show, it's a lot more forgivable in the film because the characters are all 21, and have so far lived almost entirely sheltered bubble lives on a college campus. What's forgivable among them, knowing (or at least allowing for the possibility) that eventually they'll get older and learn how to be better people, is a lot more problematic among the late-twenties characters of Girls, who have actually been out in the real world exactly long enough that they should know by now that they can't behave like that any more. I guess you could make a direct comparison here too between the characters of Conversations and those of Beautiful World; 27 and unpleasant is a long way from 21 and unpleasant, and the slightly older characters of Beautiful World just come off as a little more irredeemably mean-spirited and harder to invest in. (Normal People, on the other hand, has the opposite problem -- the two protagonists are both still in high school when the book opens, and I was like, "NO, NO MORE DONNA TARTT GOLDFINCH-STYLE ADULT-BUT-REALLY-YOUNG-ADULT BAIT-AND-SWITCH BULLSHIT AGAIN IN MY LIFE, NEVER EVER AGAIN.") There are other reasons I liked the book that are a little more spoiler-heavy, so I won't go into them -- except to say that I really liked the dynamic between the two college students and the married older couple who serve as the main quartet in the book, in that all four had overlapping character traits so that they were like others in one specific way, and yet others in a very different specific way. That makes the book conceptually and intellectually interesting, because as the soap opera shenanigans are going on, we're thinking, "Oh, right, that would explain why person A relates to person B in this way, but why person B slept with person C anyway," and gives a lot of food for thought as far as the complex ways the various parts of our personalities either fence or dance with others. I guess that would be the final reason I feel that Conversations works so well when the other two don't; Rooney really feels like she's inhabiting these people in her debut, like she understands them inside and out, while by the third book they feel much more like the same cardboard cutouts you see in so many MFA hipster books, to be pushed around and lined up in certain ways so that you can make the flowery literary point you wanted to make. (Hint: if your characters find themselves suddenly writing multi-page academic intellectual essays through emails, you've officially lost touch with the vitality of those characters.) Maybe Rooney will get her groove back with the next one, or maybe she'll be destined to be one of those authors whose lightning-in-a-bottle debut ended up outshining the entire rest of their career (Lord knows there's enough of those people out there); but for now, I recommend only Conversations with Friends out of the current three, although certainly ending my mini-marathon this month with an enthusiasm for checking out the next one whenever it's out too. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Oct 13, 2021
not set
|
Oct 13, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0313200572
| 9780313200571
| 0313200572
| 4.11
| 18
| 1978
| 1978
|
really liked it
|
2021 reads, #76. Most people no longer remember this, but for the entire first half of the 20th century, ex-patriate Ezra Pound was largely considered
2021 reads, #76. Most people no longer remember this, but for the entire first half of the 20th century, ex-patriate Ezra Pound was largely considered one of the greatest writers in the entirety of American history, one of the high-profile gatekeepers at the beginning of Modernism who was the first and loudest champion of such now household names as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, and who by all signs should here in the 21st century be known in the same rarified air in which we breathlessly utter such names as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. And the reason most people don't remember this is because when the 1930s rolled around, and most liberal American artists became disgusted with the unregulated free-market capitalism that had led to the Great Depression, while most of his peers pivoted to the radically left precepts of Communism, Pound instead decided that these fascists in Europe certainly had some interesting things to say, and ended up moving to Italy and becoming a gleeful Nazi speechwriter for years and years, eventually penning and performing over 300 monologues on the radio about how all our modern problems were being caused by the Jews, and life would return to a happy normal just as soon as his pals Hitler and Mussolini eliminate all the Jews from the face of the Earth. Pound was eventually captured by Allied forces during the liberation of Italy, was found guilty of war crimes, and was incarcerated in a prison hospital for the criminally insane for a little over a decade; but this is where his story gets extra-fascinating, in that the same liberal intellectuals who denounced fascism during the war suddenly came to the passionate defense of Pound, including the US Library of Congress awarding him the prestigious Bollingen Prize a mere three years after he publicly declared Hitler a "saint" and a "holy martyr on the level of Joan of Arc," and with there eventually being a concerted effort among Hemingway and such mainstream publications as The Nation and Esquire to successfully get Pound released from the mental institution, whereby he promptly moved back to Italy, gave a Nazi salute to the awaiting press, then spent the last 14 years of his life in depressed isolation, reportedly suffering from dementia and spending his last days dazedly wandering the hallways of a friend's crumbling Medieval castle, obsessively complaining about how the government had injected evil microbes in him for the purpose of murdering him. American liberals' love affair with such a vile, detestable human being simply flummoxes me, to tell you the truth, not just among his contemporary friends which at least is understandable, but modern liberals' championing of him to this day -- the entire reason this all even came to my attention, in fact, is that I'm currently reading the 90th anniversary anthology put together by Poetry magazine in 2002, in which editors Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young claim that the book represents the "finest artists" the magazine has ever published, which makes it a quite pointed comment when a full five out of the first fifteen pieces in the book are by Pound, leading me to wonder what exactly the magazine's Jewish readers and supporters thought of this development when the book first came out. So to try to make better sense of it all, I went straight to the source, and recently read the published transcripts of Pound's Nazi radio addresses, or at least the hundred-odd ones the American government thought to actually record during the 1940s in preparation for his eventual war-crimes trial, first published in 1978 and currently out of print, but that can be downloaded for free at the Internet Archive. It's there that I discovered the main justification that his defenders use for his deplorable actions during the war, and was forced to admit that they kind of have a point; that Pound had simply gone insane at this point in his life, in that same kind of "the echo chamber became too much and broke his brain" way that we've seen millions of otherwise rational Americans become during the Tr*mp years, and that his anti-Semitism and passionate embrace of Hitler had a lot less to do with actively supporting either of these concepts, and a lot more to do with what at the time was an extremely common disgust for free-market capitalism. Let's never forget, after all, that in these same exact years, John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel that also passionately argues that the US government needs to be violently overthrown by a people's revolution, only in that case arguing for a much more liberal-friendly socialist revolution and with no mention of Jews at all. It turns out that Pound was a huge fan of an economic philosophy in these years called "Social Credit," which in very general terms sounds a lot like modern Libertarianism (lending yet more credence to the modern complaint that Libertarianism and Fascism are much more closely related than Libertarians want to admit, but that's an angry rant for another day), and which blamed most of society's ills on the fact that our economic system is centrally controlled by banks and other financial institutions. The vast majority of Pound's rambling, almost nonsensical speeches actually have to do with this, and what he considered the cardinal sin of usury that banks commit every time they give a person a loan, which he claimed wouldn't exist if people had the opportunity to lend to each other without the banks being involved at all. (Maybe you're starting to see already why this economic theory, especially when coming from someone who was already in the process of losing his sanity, quickly devolves into unreadable nonsense just a few pieces into Pound's Nazi-era writings.) But since Jews have been spending several thousand years now storing their assets in the portable form of money in banks, instead of the Gentile tradition of real estate (which is impossible to do when you keep getting chased out of every country you try living in), by the 1930s the entire global banking system was primarily associated in many people's minds with Judaism in general, which is how it is that Pound's speeches became more and more peppered with (paraphrased) statements like, "And this is why all our current problems have been caused by the Jews, and why everything would be great again if we simply killed all the Jews and burned down all the banks, like my buddies Hitler and Mussolini are in the process of doing." It's this part where I keep getting hung up when it comes to the post-war embrace of Pound by intellectual liberals; for as hard as these people worked in the 1950s and '60s to essentially sanctify Jews as an angelic people who can do no wrong, as a way of justifying America's involvement in the war after the fact (which is another thing we've generally forgotten, that most Americans generally disliked Jews in the decades leading up to the war, and reacted to the news of concentration camps with a shrug and a mutter of, "Yeah, that sounds about right," a viewpoint that was only slowly changed over decades through such acts as the beatification of Anne Frank, and the ascendancy of such Jewish writers as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth), it seems incomprehensible to me that when it came to Pound's own fiery pronouncements about the Final Solution, these same intellectual liberals sort of waved their hands in the air and said, "Eh, yeah, but he's okay, because he used to be one of us, so let's just spend the rest of our lives pretending that Pound never spent a decade of his life telling millions of people on the radio that they should go out and kill all the Jews now." And judging by his veneration still going on as lately as this 2002 Poetry magazine anthology, it seems to be an attitude that modern intellectual liberals still have to this day, a full half-century-plus after the Holocaust, which I find even more incomprehensible, especially now in our "cancel culture" days when other artists' careers have been entirely and permanently destroyed for what I consider a lot less. Have whatever opinion about Philip Roth that you want, for one good example, but at least he didn't spend years of his life screaming in public to anyone who would listen, "LET'S KILL ALL THE JEWS!!!!!!!" Pound, however, did exactly this -- and I don't mean metaphorically, but I mean he literally screamed this, on the radio every single week for an entire decade of his life -- yet here we are in the 21st century, with Pound still dominating poetry anthologies and still being declared one of the greatest geniuses America ever produced. Isn't it time we put a stop to this? Isn't it time we put Pound's work into the locked underground biohazard container where we currently keep Disney's Song of the South and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, to only be occasionally pulled out with lead tongs and full shielding whenever some nerd wants to write another academic paper about the "bad old days?" I don't understand why we're continuing to give Ezra Pound a free pass to this day, why he continues to show up in contemporary anthologies as someone to be admired and read for pleasure here in the 21st century. I think it's time for this to stop, for Pound to be put in that radioactive "Box of Forbidden Mystery" where Mitchell and Uncle Remus and all the rest of them now live; and all it will take for you to agree with me is one read through these clearly insane, clearly fascist radio addresses he spent a decade of his life happily writing and performing, something I encourage all of you to do the next time you think it's a good idea to include Pound in a list of the greatest thinkers the 20th century produced. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Sep 05, 2021
not set
|
Sep 05, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 160690373X
| 9781606903735
| 160690373X
| 4.17
| 3,134
| Dec 01, 2012
| Dec 25, 2012
|
it was amazing
|
2021 reads, #61-72. In preparation for finally watching the Amazon Prime Video adaptation currently being made out of it, I recently had the opportuni
2021 reads, #61-72. In preparation for finally watching the Amazon Prime Video adaptation currently being made out of it, I recently had the opportunity to acquire the entire six-year, 72-issue run of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's The Boys (broken down at Goodreads into 12 larger graphic novels; this review covers them all, which I'm copying and pasting into each book page), the anti-superhero tale from the creator of legendary '90s Vertigo Generation-X hit Preacher that is now popularly known as "The Darkest Comic Book In History And We're Not Just Buying Into The Hype When We Say That, You Should Do Yourself A Favor And Seriously Take That Warning Legitimately;" and while the original plan had been to read only a few issues of what I was fully expecting to be a mediocre title, whose reputation I assumed had been artificially inflated by a bunch of uncultured nerds who wouldn't know true transgressive literature if it reached up and bit them on the dick, I ended up doing a feverish binge of all 72 issues in a mere 72-hour period this weekend, because the hype turned out to be fully believable in this case, and I kept greedily drinking it all in as fast as I could, partly because I couldn't believe something this relentlessly dark could even exist within the comics industry in any form at all, and kept half-expecting it to disappear in front of my eyes as I was reading it, like some kind of evil magical spell that had finally reached its end. And indeed, the first thing you'll wonder as you start making your way through it is how this possibly could've started life at "mainstream indie" Wildstorm in the first place, which was just about to go through an acquisition by DC when The Boys was first brought on, which is why Wildstorm unceremoniously dumped The Boys six issues in, although to their credit with the enthusiastic help of the pre-DC staff to get it to a more unknown publisher that would do it right before the acquisition happened, and even giving Robertson a special allowance to his otherwise DC-exclusive contract in order to continue working on it. And this is not just because the title is a particularly sickening example of the Dark Age "superheroes are actually barely disguised Nazi monsters" trope that's been around since literally the early '80s (imagine taking Alan Moore's infamously apocalyptic ending to his early underground hit Miracleman and making that page 1 of issue 1 of The Boys), but it's just as much an indictment if not more so of the corporate psychopaths who own the intellectual property rights to such superheroes, intimating here that if we lived in a world where Time Warner owned not only the story, movie and merchandising rights to caped heroes but the actual real-time life rights of the human beings committing these acts of derring-do, the employees of Time Warner would essentially spend a billion dollars a year attempting to hide the psychopathic crimes such "heroes" would of course start immediately committing, the moment they realize that they have powers that can only be stopped by only a handful of other creatures on the planet, and a fully oiled corporate machine going around cleaning up whatever messes they choose to cause with such powers. That leads to a world where the violent gangrape initiation ceremony of a new member of the Justice League of America, by this universe's version of Superman, Batman, Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter, is merely chapter one of a sprawling, always worsening look at the depths of the human race's capacity for depravity, as we quickly learn that the "super" powers of this universe are not caused by superior alien DNA or bites from radioactive spiders but rather a single "supersoldier" serum developed by a Nazi scientist in the 1930s, which makes it just a bunch of normal, everyday random people who end up becoming said superheroes in the universe of The Boys (around 200,000 of them now, by most people's estimates, although with the vast majority of them never making their powers publicly known, and the only "famous" superheroes being the ones who have managed to achieve corporate sponsorship); and it turns out that when you give superpowers to a bunch of normal, everyday random people, and not the "paragons of virtue" that DC and Marvel have made sure all their own superheroes over the years have been, those normal, everyday random people almost immediately become corrupt, perverted serial killers upon realizing that no one can stop them besides their equally corrupt, equally perverted superfriends. And this is not to mention creating the very real threat of a future government coup by the main multinational superhero conglomerate, Vought-American (a clear stand-in for real-life baddies Marvel-Disney), if their whims aren't catered to by an increasingly nervous Congress and White House (whose current VP, by the way, is a literally mentally challenged Vought stoolie). That's led the CIA to quietly putting our titular Boys on the payroll, four equally violent psychopaths (plus our hapless Simon Pegg everyman reader-stand-in character) as a dirty-tricks squad being desperately used by the government as a secret behind-the-scenes check and balance against the growing dictatorial control of Vought-American, while a billion dollars are being spent by V-A at TMZ and TikTok to keep up the public appearance of these caped rapists' Dudley Do-Rite reputations, then eventually (in what many comics fans will consider the most cynical turn of the entire storyline) creating their own version of "Dark Age" comics when the Boys' shenanigans make it too impossible to keep their corporate mouthpieces' various horrific vices out of the public spotlight anymore, deciding to turn the vices into virtues so to not cause even the slightest interruption to the hamburger-selling that's been going on the whole time. So in this, then, the 72-issue uber-plot going on here is an angry condemnation of the entire superhero comics industry, not just the intellectual premise of turning such Nazi ubermen into toothless rah-rah heroes, but the psychopathic mindset needed among the emotionally stunted man-child comics creators to pull off this premise, the glib incel glee among the industry's Comic Book Guy fans who made such material so popular in the '80s and '90s to begin with, the corporate middlemen who know exactly what kind of Nazi rape-porn twaddle they're peddling but simply don't care, and even you for thinking that a mean-spirited but ultimately toothless satire of the subject somehow counts as an effective antidote. It doesn't, as this series' infamously pessimistic climax proves, and now I'm more curious than ever to see how this ceaselessly piss-fueled indictment of the entire industry ended up getting adapted at the corporate-friendly Amazon, whose own employees are guilty of many of this story's most damning behavior. Certainly you shouldn't take this on unless you're ready for one of the most relentlessly bleak stories you've ever read in your life; but absolutely you should do so if you're ready for such, and big kudos to creators Ennis and Robertson for actually managing to finish it without slitting their own wrists somewhere around issue #54 or so. Do yourself a big favor and go into it with this attitude in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1606903411
| 9781606903414
| 1606903411
| 4.27
| 3,301
| Jan 01, 2012
| Jul 03, 2012
|
it was amazing
|
2021 reads, #61-72. In preparation for finally watching the Amazon Prime Video adaptation currently being made out of it, I recently had the opportuni
2021 reads, #61-72. In preparation for finally watching the Amazon Prime Video adaptation currently being made out of it, I recently had the opportunity to acquire the entire six-year, 72-issue run of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's The Boys (broken down at Goodreads into 12 larger graphic novels; this review covers them all, which I'm copying and pasting into each book page), the anti-superhero tale from the creator of legendary '90s Vertigo Generation-X hit Preacher that is now popularly known as "The Darkest Comic Book In History And We're Not Just Buying Into The Hype When We Say That, You Should Do Yourself A Favor And Seriously Take That Warning Legitimately;" and while the original plan had been to read only a few issues of what I was fully expecting to be a mediocre title, whose reputation I assumed had been artificially inflated by a bunch of uncultured nerds who wouldn't know true transgressive literature if it reached up and bit them on the dick, I ended up doing a feverish binge of all 72 issues in a mere 72-hour period this weekend, because the hype turned out to be fully believable in this case, and I kept greedily drinking it all in as fast as I could, partly because I couldn't believe something this relentlessly dark could even exist within the comics industry in any form at all, and kept half-expecting it to disappear in front of my eyes as I was reading it, like some kind of evil magical spell that had finally reached its end. And indeed, the first thing you'll wonder as you start making your way through it is how this possibly could've started life at "mainstream indie" Wildstorm in the first place, which was just about to go through an acquisition by DC when The Boys was first brought on, which is why Wildstorm unceremoniously dumped The Boys six issues in, although to their credit with the enthusiastic help of the pre-DC staff to get it to a more unknown publisher that would do it right before the acquisition happened, and even giving Robertson a special allowance to his otherwise DC-exclusive contract in order to continue working on it. And this is not just because the title is a particularly sickening example of the Dark Age "superheroes are actually barely disguised Nazi monsters" trope that's been around since literally the early '80s (imagine taking Alan Moore's infamously apocalyptic ending to his early underground hit Miracleman and making that page 1 of issue 1 of The Boys), but it's just as much an indictment if not more so of the corporate psychopaths who own the intellectual property rights to such superheroes, intimating here that if we lived in a world where Time Warner owned not only the story, movie and merchandising rights to caped heroes but the actual real-time life rights of the human beings committing these acts of derring-do, the employees of Time Warner would essentially spend a billion dollars a year attempting to hide the psychopathic crimes such "heroes" would of course start immediately committing, the moment they realize that they have powers that can only be stopped by only a handful of other creatures on the planet, and a fully oiled corporate machine going around cleaning up whatever messes they choose to cause with such powers. That leads to a world where the violent gangrape initiation ceremony of a new member of the Justice League of America, by this universe's version of Superman, Batman, Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter, is merely chapter one of a sprawling, always worsening look at the depths of the human race's capacity for depravity, as we quickly learn that the "super" powers of this universe are not caused by superior alien DNA or bites from radioactive spiders but rather a single "supersoldier" serum developed by a Nazi scientist in the 1930s, which makes it just a bunch of normal, everyday random people who end up becoming said superheroes in the universe of The Boys (around 200,000 of them now, by most people's estimates, although with the vast majority of them never making their powers publicly known, and the only "famous" superheroes being the ones who have managed to achieve corporate sponsorship); and it turns out that when you give superpowers to a bunch of normal, everyday random people, and not the "paragons of virtue" that DC and Marvel have made sure all their own superheroes over the years have been, those normal, everyday random people almost immediately become corrupt, perverted serial killers upon realizing that no one can stop them besides their equally corrupt, equally perverted superfriends. And this is not to mention creating the very real threat of a future government coup by the main multinational superhero conglomerate, Vought-American (a clear stand-in for real-life baddies Marvel-Disney), if their whims aren't catered to by an increasingly nervous Congress and White House (whose current VP, by the way, is a literally mentally challenged Vought stoolie). That's led the CIA to quietly putting our titular Boys on the payroll, four equally violent psychopaths (plus our hapless Simon Pegg everyman reader-stand-in character) as a dirty-tricks squad being desperately used by the government as a secret behind-the-scenes check and balance against the growing dictatorial control of Vought-American, while a billion dollars are being spent by V-A at TMZ and TikTok to keep up the public appearance of these caped rapists' Dudley Do-Rite reputations, then eventually (in what many comics fans will consider the most cynical turn of the entire storyline) creating their own version of "Dark Age" comics when the Boys' shenanigans make it too impossible to keep their corporate mouthpieces' various horrific vices out of the public spotlight anymore, deciding to turn the vices into virtues so to not cause even the slightest interruption to the hamburger-selling that's been going on the whole time. So in this, then, the 72-issue uber-plot going on here is an angry condemnation of the entire superhero comics industry, not just the intellectual premise of turning such Nazi ubermen into toothless rah-rah heroes, but the psychopathic mindset needed among the emotionally stunted man-child comics creators to pull off this premise, the glib incel glee among the industry's Comic Book Guy fans who made such material so popular in the '80s and '90s to begin with, the corporate middlemen who know exactly what kind of Nazi rape-porn twaddle they're peddling but simply don't care, and even you for thinking that a mean-spirited but ultimately toothless satire of the subject somehow counts as an effective antidote. It doesn't, as this series' infamously pessimistic climax proves, and now I'm more curious than ever to see how this ceaselessly piss-fueled indictment of the entire industry ended up getting adapted at the corporate-friendly Amazon, whose own employees are guilty of many of this story's most damning behavior. Certainly you shouldn't take this on unless you're ready for one of the most relentlessly bleak stories you've ever read in your life; but absolutely you should do so if you're ready for such, and big kudos to creators Ennis and Robertson for actually managing to finish it without slitting their own wrists somewhere around issue #54 or so. Do yourself a big favor and go into it with this attitude in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1606902644
| 9781606902646
| 1606902644
| 4.12
| 3,451
| Mar 01, 2012
| Mar 20, 2012
|
it was amazing
|
2021 reads, #61-72. In preparation for finally watching the Amazon Prime Video adaptation currently being made out of it, I recently had the opportuni
2021 reads, #61-72. In preparation for finally watching the Amazon Prime Video adaptation currently being made out of it, I recently had the opportunity to acquire the entire six-year, 72-issue run of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's The Boys (broken down at Goodreads into 12 larger graphic novels; this review covers them all, which I'm copying and pasting into each book page), the anti-superhero tale from the creator of legendary '90s Vertigo Generation-X hit Preacher that is now popularly known as "The Darkest Comic Book In History And We're Not Just Buying Into The Hype When We Say That, You Should Do Yourself A Favor And Seriously Take That Warning Legitimately;" and while the original plan had been to read only a few issues of what I was fully expecting to be a mediocre title, whose reputation I assumed had been artificially inflated by a bunch of uncultured nerds who wouldn't know true transgressive literature if it reached up and bit them on the dick, I ended up doing a feverish binge of all 72 issues in a mere 72-hour period this weekend, because the hype turned out to be fully believable in this case, and I kept greedily drinking it all in as fast as I could, partly because I couldn't believe something this relentlessly dark could even exist within the comics industry in any form at all, and kept half-expecting it to disappear in front of my eyes as I was reading it, like some kind of evil magical spell that had finally reached its end. And indeed, the first thing you'll wonder as you start making your way through it is how this possibly could've started life at "mainstream indie" Wildstorm in the first place, which was just about to go through an acquisition by DC when The Boys was first brought on, which is why Wildstorm unceremoniously dumped The Boys six issues in, although to their credit with the enthusiastic help of the pre-DC staff to get it to a more unknown publisher that would do it right before the acquisition happened, and even giving Robertson a special allowance to his otherwise DC-exclusive contract in order to continue working on it. And this is not just because the title is a particularly sickening example of the Dark Age "superheroes are actually barely disguised Nazi monsters" trope that's been around since literally the early '80s (imagine taking Alan Moore's infamously apocalyptic ending to his early underground hit Miracleman and making that page 1 of issue 1 of The Boys), but it's just as much an indictment if not more so of the corporate psychopaths who own the intellectual property rights to such superheroes, intimating here that if we lived in a world where Time Warner owned not only the story, movie and merchandising rights to caped heroes but the actual real-time life rights of the human beings committing these acts of derring-do, the employees of Time Warner would essentially spend a billion dollars a year attempting to hide the psychopathic crimes such "heroes" would of course start immediately committing, the moment they realize that they have powers that can only be stopped by only a handful of other creatures on the planet, and a fully oiled corporate machine going around cleaning up whatever messes they choose to cause with such powers. That leads to a world where the violent gangrape initiation ceremony of a new member of the Justice League of America, by this universe's version of Superman, Batman, Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter, is merely chapter one of a sprawling, always worsening look at the depths of the human race's capacity for depravity, as we quickly learn that the "super" powers of this universe are not caused by superior alien DNA or bites from radioactive spiders but rather a single "supersoldier" serum developed by a Nazi scientist in the 1930s, which makes it just a bunch of normal, everyday random people who end up becoming said superheroes in the universe of The Boys (around 200,000 of them now, by most people's estimates, although with the vast majority of them never making their powers publicly known, and the only "famous" superheroes being the ones who have managed to achieve corporate sponsorship); and it turns out that when you give superpowers to a bunch of normal, everyday random people, and not the "paragons of virtue" that DC and Marvel have made sure all their own superheroes over the years have been, those normal, everyday random people almost immediately become corrupt, perverted serial killers upon realizing that no one can stop them besides their equally corrupt, equally perverted superfriends. And this is not to mention creating the very real threat of a future government coup by the main multinational superhero conglomerate, Vought-American (a clear stand-in for real-life baddies Marvel-Disney), if their whims aren't catered to by an increasingly nervous Congress and White House (whose current VP, by the way, is a literally mentally challenged Vought stoolie). That's led the CIA to quietly putting our titular Boys on the payroll, four equally violent psychopaths (plus our hapless Simon Pegg everyman reader-stand-in character) as a dirty-tricks squad being desperately used by the government as a secret behind-the-scenes check and balance against the growing dictatorial control of Vought-American, while a billion dollars are being spent by V-A at TMZ and TikTok to keep up the public appearance of these caped rapists' Dudley Do-Rite reputations, then eventually (in what many comics fans will consider the most cynical turn of the entire storyline) creating their own version of "Dark Age" comics when the Boys' shenanigans make it too impossible to keep their corporate mouthpieces' various horrific vices out of the public spotlight anymore, deciding to turn the vices into virtues so to not cause even the slightest interruption to the hamburger-selling that's been going on the whole time. So in this, then, the 72-issue uber-plot going on here is an angry condemnation of the entire superhero comics industry, not just the intellectual premise of turning such Nazi ubermen into toothless rah-rah heroes, but the psychopathic mindset needed among the emotionally stunted man-child comics creators to pull off this premise, the glib incel glee among the industry's Comic Book Guy fans who made such material so popular in the '80s and '90s to begin with, the corporate middlemen who know exactly what kind of Nazi rape-porn twaddle they're peddling but simply don't care, and even you for thinking that a mean-spirited but ultimately toothless satire of the subject somehow counts as an effective antidote. It doesn't, as this series' infamously pessimistic climax proves, and now I'm more curious than ever to see how this ceaselessly piss-fueled indictment of the entire industry ended up getting adapted at the corporate-friendly Amazon, whose own employees are guilty of many of this story's most damning behavior. Certainly you shouldn't take this on unless you're ready for one of the most relentlessly bleak stories you've ever read in your life; but absolutely you should do so if you're ready for such, and big kudos to creators Ennis and Robertson for actually managing to finish it without slitting their own wrists somewhere around issue #54 or so. Do yourself a big favor and go into it with this attitude in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1606902202
| 9781606902202
| 1606902202
| 4.00
| 3,512
| Aug 01, 2011
| Nov 22, 2011
|
it was amazing
|
2021 reads, #61-72. In preparation for finally watching the Amazon Prime Video adaptation currently being made out of it, I recently had the opportuni
2021 reads, #61-72. In preparation for finally watching the Amazon Prime Video adaptation currently being made out of it, I recently had the opportunity to acquire the entire six-year, 72-issue run of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's The Boys (broken down at Goodreads into 12 larger graphic novels; this review covers them all, which I'm copying and pasting into each book page), the anti-superhero tale from the creator of legendary '90s Vertigo Generation-X hit Preacher that is now popularly known as "The Darkest Comic Book In History And We're Not Just Buying Into The Hype When We Say That, You Should Do Yourself A Favor And Seriously Take That Warning Legitimately;" and while the original plan had been to read only a few issues of what I was fully expecting to be a mediocre title, whose reputation I assumed had been artificially inflated by a bunch of uncultured nerds who wouldn't know true transgressive literature if it reached up and bit them on the dick, I ended up doing a feverish binge of all 72 issues in a mere 72-hour period this weekend, because the hype turned out to be fully believable in this case, and I kept greedily drinking it all in as fast as I could, partly because I couldn't believe something this relentlessly dark could even exist within the comics industry in any form at all, and kept half-expecting it to disappear in front of my eyes as I was reading it, like some kind of evil magical spell that had finally reached its end. And indeed, the first thing you'll wonder as you start making your way through it is how this possibly could've started life at "mainstream indie" Wildstorm in the first place, which was just about to go through an acquisition by DC when The Boys was first brought on, which is why Wildstorm unceremoniously dumped The Boys six issues in, although to their credit with the enthusiastic help of the pre-DC staff to get it to a more unknown publisher that would do it right before the acquisition happened, and even giving Robertson a special allowance to his otherwise DC-exclusive contract in order to continue working on it. And this is not just because the title is a particularly sickening example of the Dark Age "superheroes are actually barely disguised Nazi monsters" trope that's been around since literally the early '80s (imagine taking Alan Moore's infamously apocalyptic ending to his early underground hit Miracleman and making that page 1 of issue 1 of The Boys), but it's just as much an indictment if not more so of the corporate psychopaths who own the intellectual property rights to such superheroes, intimating here that if we lived in a world where Time Warner owned not only the story, movie and merchandising rights to caped heroes but the actual real-time life rights of the human beings committing these acts of derring-do, the employees of Time Warner would essentially spend a billion dollars a year attempting to hide the psychopathic crimes such "heroes" would of course start immediately committing, the moment they realize that they have powers that can only be stopped by only a handful of other creatures on the planet, and a fully oiled corporate machine going around cleaning up whatever messes they choose to cause with such powers. That leads to a world where the violent gangrape initiation ceremony of a new member of the Justice League of America, by this universe's version of Superman, Batman, Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter, is merely chapter one of a sprawling, always worsening look at the depths of the human race's capacity for depravity, as we quickly learn that the "super" powers of this universe are not caused by superior alien DNA or bites from radioactive spiders but rather a single "supersoldier" serum developed by a Nazi scientist in the 1930s, which makes it just a bunch of normal, everyday random people who end up becoming said superheroes in the universe of The Boys (around 200,000 of them now, by most people's estimates, although with the vast majority of them never making their powers publicly known, and the only "famous" superheroes being the ones who have managed to achieve corporate sponsorship); and it turns out that when you give superpowers to a bunch of normal, everyday random people, and not the "paragons of virtue" that DC and Marvel have made sure all their own superheroes over the years have been, those normal, everyday random people almost immediately become corrupt, perverted serial killers upon realizing that no one can stop them besides their equally corrupt, equally perverted superfriends. And this is not to mention creating the very real threat of a future government coup by the main multinational superhero conglomerate, Vought-American (a clear stand-in for real-life baddies Marvel-Disney), if their whims aren't catered to by an increasingly nervous Congress and White House (whose current VP, by the way, is a literally mentally challenged Vought stoolie). That's led the CIA to quietly putting our titular Boys on the payroll, four equally violent psychopaths (plus our hapless Simon Pegg everyman reader-stand-in character) as a dirty-tricks squad being desperately used by the government as a secret behind-the-scenes check and balance against the growing dictatorial control of Vought-American, while a billion dollars are being spent by V-A at TMZ and TikTok to keep up the public appearance of these caped rapists' Dudley Do-Rite reputations, then eventually (in what many comics fans will consider the most cynical turn of the entire storyline) creating their own version of "Dark Age" comics when the Boys' shenanigans make it too impossible to keep their corporate mouthpieces' various horrific vices out of the public spotlight anymore, deciding to turn the vices into virtues so to not cause even the slightest interruption to the hamburger-selling that's been going on the whole time. So in this, then, the 72-issue uber-plot going on here is an angry condemnation of the entire superhero comics industry, not just the intellectual premise of turning such Nazi ubermen into toothless rah-rah heroes, but the psychopathic mindset needed among the emotionally stunted man-child comics creators to pull off this premise, the glib incel glee among the industry's Comic Book Guy fans who made such material so popular in the '80s and '90s to begin with, the corporate middlemen who know exactly what kind of Nazi rape-porn twaddle they're peddling but simply don't care, and even you for thinking that a mean-spirited but ultimately toothless satire of the subject somehow counts as an effective antidote. It doesn't, as this series' infamously pessimistic climax proves, and now I'm more curious than ever to see how this ceaselessly piss-fueled indictment of the entire industry ended up getting adapted at the corporate-friendly Amazon, whose own employees are guilty of many of this story's most damning behavior. Certainly you shouldn't take this on unless you're ready for one of the most relentlessly bleak stories you've ever read in your life; but absolutely you should do so if you're ready for such, and big kudos to creators Ennis and Robertson for actually managing to finish it without slitting their own wrists somewhere around issue #54 or so. Do yourself a big favor and go into it with this attitude in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.92
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 20, 2024
not set
|
Apr 20, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.68
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 15, 2024
|
Apr 15, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.90
|
really liked it
|
Mar 02, 2024
not set
|
Mar 02, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.34
|
did not like it
|
Dec 09, 2023
|
Dec 09, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.00
|
it was ok
|
Dec 09, 2023
not set
|
Dec 09, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 2.00
|
it was ok
|
Dec 09, 2023
|
Dec 09, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.31
|
did not like it
|
Dec 04, 2023
not set
|
Dec 04, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.30
|
really liked it
|
Oct 24, 2023
not set
|
Oct 24, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 5.00
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 18, 2023
not set
|
Aug 18, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.83
|
May 17, 2023
|
May 17, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 3.37
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 20, 2022
not set
|
Nov 20, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.24
|
did not like it
|
Jul 09, 2022
not set
|
Jul 09, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.28
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 14, 2022
not set
|
Apr 14, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.14
|
really liked it
|
Apr 06, 2022
|
Apr 06, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.75
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 13, 2021
not set
|
Oct 13, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.11
|
really liked it
|
Sep 05, 2021
not set
|
Sep 05, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.17
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 31, 2021
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.27
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 31, 2021
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.12
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 31, 2021
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.00
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 31, 2021
not set
|
Aug 31, 2021
|
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