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moonpix's reviews
337 reviews
Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville
3.0
Honestly mostly just made me want to reread the power of the dog lol
The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier
4.0
I thought both Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel were stronger than this collection as a whole but there was still a lot to love, especially the titular story and The Little Photographer. I’ve been in a short story phase lately, there’s just something uniquely fun about reading a full collection and finding the thematic through-lines between each piece. This work is also an important part of the Isak Dinesen/Shirley Jackson/Angela Carter legacy of gothic short stories by women and so it was interesting to think about the through-lines across all of their works as well.
The comparison to Dinesen’s Winter Tales is especially resonant here, for despite many of the stories historical settings both collections are clearly reactions to the recent world war. This work in particular gives insight into the psychology of post-war Britian— characters struggle with forces beyond their control, and are consumed by repressed guilt. There are many crimes that take place in these stories, as well as some burials and attempted burials. The Birds and The Old Man, the stories that book-end this collection, along with burials also involve seagulls and swans. The role of animals and the ancient ritual of burial lends the whole book a sacrificial, fabulistic quality. In the context of the war, these fables do not have a traditional moral lesson, but rather seem to ask if it is possible to move on knowing that you have done wrong.
Interestingly, this work is also deeply concerned with the power of the landscape, in what after the technological destruction of the war could be seen as a romantic, backward facing turn. But these natural disasters are often directly compared to the effects of the fighting— “It was, Nat thought, like air raids in the war. No one down this end of the country knew what the Plymouth folk had seen and suffered. You had to endure something yourself before it touched you”. In the aftermath of the technology of war the landscape gains more power, and in its uneven distribution of punishment it further alienates people from each other. In fact it seems as if the deeply repressed guilt over the war has been manifested in this new landscape.
For the characters it then follows that the only hope of escaping guilt and regret is if the consequences of violence are returned into the land through burial. After one such burial two characters feel a sense of relief: “It was both a requiem and a benediction. An atonement, and a giving of praise. In their strange way they knew they had done evil, but now it was over … they were free to be together again”. But du Maurier questions this resolution, for another story ends with a character leaving the site where she murdered her lover, writing in a delicious echo of Rebecca that “they turned out of the hotel grounds into the road. Behind her lay the headland, the hot sands, and the sea. Before her lay the long straight road to home and safety. Safety…?”. Even if you have acknowledged wrongdoing, even if you have buried the evidence out of sight, and even if you have left this landscape behind, guilt can still follow you.
“When he reached the beach below the headland he could scarcely stand, the force of the east wind was so strong. It hurt to draw breath, and his bare hands were blue. Never had he known such cold, not in all the bad winters he could remember. It was low tide. He crunched his way over the shingle to the softer sand and then, his back to the wind, ground a pit in the sand with his heel. He meant to drop the birds into it, but as he opened up the sack the force of the wind carried them, lifted them, as though in flight again, and they were blown away from him along the beach, tossed like feathers, spread and scattered, the bodies of the fifty frozen birds. There was something ugly in the sight. He did not like it. The dead birds were swept away from him by the wind.”
Crush by Richard Siken
5.0
Well what can I say that wasn't already said in the excellent introduction by Louise Glück. Despite its dissemination as short excerpts and its reinterpretations onto popular media in Tumblr’s heyday, this collection is of course best in its original, whole form. In fact I think it is one of the most successful collections of poetry I've ever read because of its sense of completeness, its ever enclosing references towards itself. Poetry by nature is abstract, fragmentary— that Siken preserves this while creating such a rich, interlocking narrative is nothing short of masterful.
He is also deceptively skilled in pacing: these poem’s repetitious hysteria makes it difficult to stop reading once you have started, makes it difficult to reflect on the work instead of just feeling it. But unlike many contemporary poets, especially ones that try on similar formal modes to Siken, this fast pace is not meant to hide a lack of beauty or meaning. On the contrary— this is poetry that supports both emotional and intellectual modes of reading, perhaps just in an unconventional way, for it is only though the emotion of panic that analysis can take place. All reflections on the part of the narrator here are prompted by the crisis of trauma, experiences that force a deep reevaluation of the self and the other. For the reader then too, forced to closely inhabit these emotions with him, all intellectual understanding of the work must first come through a more visceral experience of it.
In doing this I also found myself better appreciating the way he undercuts or complicates the suffusion of panic in these poems with humor— there are many wry asides, moments of self awareness and cynicism, the narrator seeing himself from the outside. In the hands of most other writers this would not work for me, but the humor is never dead here, it is always just as lurid as the rest of the work. And yes, perhaps lurid is the word to end on, the best way to describe Crush. The terror of being in a body, the melodrama of the mind, life and death and love and sex… this is what poetry should be about!!!
“His shoulder blots out the stars but the minutes don't stop. He covers my body
with his body but the minutes
don't stop. The smell of him mixed with creosote, exhaust --
There, on the ground, slipping through the minutes,
trying to notch them. Like taking the same picture over and over, the spaces in between sealed up --
Knocked hard enough to make the record skip
and change its music, setting the melody on its
forward course again, circling and circling the center hole in the flat black disk.
And words, little words,
words too small for any hope or promise, not really soothing
but soothing nonetheless.”
Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape by Oliver Fairclough, Tim Barringer
4.0
Each section could have benefited from a short interpretive essay because some of the individual descriptions themselves were kind of rote but overall wow what a great collection of work
Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
3.0
Not to be controversial but I feel like everything everyone else seems to get out of Austen (INCLUDING the romance) I already get out of Jeeves & Wooster
Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama
5.0
The poet John Haines once wrote that “the eternal task of the artist and the poet, the historian and the scholar … is to find the means to reconcile what are two separate and yet inseparable histories, Nature and Culture. To the extent that we can do this, the ‘world’ makes sense to us and can be lived in.” This very long book by Simon Schama is held together by the same central motivation to illuminate how nature and culture are fused together. To this end, Schama argues that these connections are “built from a rich deposit of myths, memories, and obsessions” that endure through time, powerfully shaping our institutions and cultures to this very day. Many of the specific histories Schama chooses to focus on in the book are examples of the influence of cultural ideas of nature, most obviously and consequentially in the role of the landscape in shaping national identity.
An important aspect of his argument is how in the long history of humankind there have been many conflicting myths about the same landscapes, myths that often manifest simultaneously in time. One of the many examples given on the different ways landscapes shape national identity is the cultural memory of mountains, where “the Romantics who saw in the mountains the refutation of imperial ambition coexisted with hearty patriots for whom the peak represented an occasion to demonstrate imperial strength”. As is often the case with the illogic of ideology, drawing out these contradictions, while important work, does little to dispel their power.
Perhaps this is part of why he argues, most effectively in the masterful section on German postwar painter Anselm Kiefer, that “democracy … averts its face from these myths at its peril. To exercise their spell means, to some extent, understanding their potency at close quarters, even, perhaps, within contamination range”. The book attempts this difficult task of taking myth seriously while still maintaining a “critical distance” from it, understanding it as a “historical phenomenon” rather than as intrinsic truth.
For Schama, this critical distance means being open about personal influences and biases rather than pretending that they do not exist. While this is first and foremost a general history, Schama often inserts personal stories and impressions of landscapes he has visited or has a special connection to. His analysis is clearly informed by his own Jewish Lithuanian family history, his experiences growing up in Britain, and his relationship to Israel. But even without these biographical insights, it is clear that his understanding of how conflicting myths about national identity can exist simultaneously in the same location is deeply informed by the relationship between Israel and Palestine. In fact, Israeli landscape traditions set the scene for the entire book: they are described in the introduction, where Schama recounts the practice of tree planting in Israel.
He writes of how he participated in this tradition from a distance as a child in Britain, and of its wider religious and cultural roots. But no space is given to the history of the Palestinian people, and the dark side of the practice of tree planting is never fully addressed. In the ethnographer Irus Braverman’s article interviewing those who have participated in and been affected by the tradition, she describes how “nature not only provides Zionist narratives with a temporal bridge between antiquity and modernity but also remakes the landscape in a particular way that excludes the other”. The first aspect of this, the bridge between past and present, is laid out in Schama’s descriptions, where tree planting symbolizes how “the irresistible cycle of vegetation, where death merely composted the process of rebirth, seemed to promise true national immortality”. But the second aspect of this, the exclusionary remaking of the landscape, is elided. What is not discussed in the book and what I learned on my own is that, as Braverman writes, these pine forests “have provided a green cover to hide the presence of demolished Palestinian villages, thereby preventing Palestinians from returning to their lands after the wars of 1948 and 1967 … eras[ing] any other landscape but itself”. Schama is well aware of the legitimizing power of history and narrative, as well as landscape, and while I largely admire how his descriptive ‘show-don’t-tell’ style demands an active reader willing to make their own connections, to omit this particular context here is a telling misstep.
Edward Said drew on Landscape and Memory in his essay Invention, Memory, and Place, where he wrote that “the unending cultural struggle over territory … necessarily involves overlapping memories, narratives, and physical structures”. This is something Schama is intimately aware of, and it is a theme he returns to again and again, in many different locations and periods. This only makes it more glaring that when it comes to Israel and Palestine, this same struggle is only ever alluded to, never directly addressed. It is hard to criticize a 600+ page book for leaving something out, but this is where I found its largely Western focus most troubling. For while Schama has the lofty goal of treating myth seriously without ever fully giving into its power, one could argue that he has already fallen prey to at least some very potent myths.
In the same essay, Said also wrote that “the interplay among memory, place, and invention can do if it is not to be used for the purposes of exclusion, that is, if it is to be used for liberation and coexistence between societies whose adjacency requires a tolerable form of sustained reconciliation”. If nature and culture are as interconnected as Schama argues they are (and I am inclined to agree in that regard), then these complexities also require the acceptance of the accompanying pluralities of myth and tradition. And if every landscape is pluricultural, then we all must find ways to identify with the landscape without attempting to take ownership over its narratives and its history, as well as its literal geographies.
“It seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack of myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrarch’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resentfully. For within its bag are fruitful gifts— not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though it may sometimes seem that our impatient appetite for produce has ground the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil of its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalist supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum of our pasts, generation laid over generation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.“
An important aspect of his argument is how in the long history of humankind there have been many conflicting myths about the same landscapes, myths that often manifest simultaneously in time. One of the many examples given on the different ways landscapes shape national identity is the cultural memory of mountains, where “the Romantics who saw in the mountains the refutation of imperial ambition coexisted with hearty patriots for whom the peak represented an occasion to demonstrate imperial strength”. As is often the case with the illogic of ideology, drawing out these contradictions, while important work, does little to dispel their power.
Perhaps this is part of why he argues, most effectively in the masterful section on German postwar painter Anselm Kiefer, that “democracy … averts its face from these myths at its peril. To exercise their spell means, to some extent, understanding their potency at close quarters, even, perhaps, within contamination range”. The book attempts this difficult task of taking myth seriously while still maintaining a “critical distance” from it, understanding it as a “historical phenomenon” rather than as intrinsic truth.
For Schama, this critical distance means being open about personal influences and biases rather than pretending that they do not exist. While this is first and foremost a general history, Schama often inserts personal stories and impressions of landscapes he has visited or has a special connection to. His analysis is clearly informed by his own Jewish Lithuanian family history, his experiences growing up in Britain, and his relationship to Israel. But even without these biographical insights, it is clear that his understanding of how conflicting myths about national identity can exist simultaneously in the same location is deeply informed by the relationship between Israel and Palestine. In fact, Israeli landscape traditions set the scene for the entire book: they are described in the introduction, where Schama recounts the practice of tree planting in Israel.
He writes of how he participated in this tradition from a distance as a child in Britain, and of its wider religious and cultural roots. But no space is given to the history of the Palestinian people, and the dark side of the practice of tree planting is never fully addressed. In the ethnographer Irus Braverman’s article interviewing those who have participated in and been affected by the tradition, she describes how “nature not only provides Zionist narratives with a temporal bridge between antiquity and modernity but also remakes the landscape in a particular way that excludes the other”. The first aspect of this, the bridge between past and present, is laid out in Schama’s descriptions, where tree planting symbolizes how “the irresistible cycle of vegetation, where death merely composted the process of rebirth, seemed to promise true national immortality”. But the second aspect of this, the exclusionary remaking of the landscape, is elided. What is not discussed in the book and what I learned on my own is that, as Braverman writes, these pine forests “have provided a green cover to hide the presence of demolished Palestinian villages, thereby preventing Palestinians from returning to their lands after the wars of 1948 and 1967 … eras[ing] any other landscape but itself”. Schama is well aware of the legitimizing power of history and narrative, as well as landscape, and while I largely admire how his descriptive ‘show-don’t-tell’ style demands an active reader willing to make their own connections, to omit this particular context here is a telling misstep.
Edward Said drew on Landscape and Memory in his essay Invention, Memory, and Place, where he wrote that “the unending cultural struggle over territory … necessarily involves overlapping memories, narratives, and physical structures”. This is something Schama is intimately aware of, and it is a theme he returns to again and again, in many different locations and periods. This only makes it more glaring that when it comes to Israel and Palestine, this same struggle is only ever alluded to, never directly addressed. It is hard to criticize a 600+ page book for leaving something out, but this is where I found its largely Western focus most troubling. For while Schama has the lofty goal of treating myth seriously without ever fully giving into its power, one could argue that he has already fallen prey to at least some very potent myths.
In the same essay, Said also wrote that “the interplay among memory, place, and invention can do if it is not to be used for the purposes of exclusion, that is, if it is to be used for liberation and coexistence between societies whose adjacency requires a tolerable form of sustained reconciliation”. If nature and culture are as interconnected as Schama argues they are (and I am inclined to agree in that regard), then these complexities also require the acceptance of the accompanying pluralities of myth and tradition. And if every landscape is pluricultural, then we all must find ways to identify with the landscape without attempting to take ownership over its narratives and its history, as well as its literal geographies.
“It seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack of myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrarch’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resentfully. For within its bag are fruitful gifts— not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though it may sometimes seem that our impatient appetite for produce has ground the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil of its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalist supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum of our pasts, generation laid over generation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.“
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter
5.0
Easily the craziest book I have ever read
A Wave by John Ashbery
3.0
Most of the longer poems and prose poems here did not work for me. My impression from this collection is that Ashbery is someone who plays around with form without having all that specific a point of view to ground the experiments in. But maybe that's my bias for less airy (and generally more depressing) poetry showing through lol. And there are still some poems here worth reading and rereading, my personal favorites being At North Farm, When the Sun Went Down, Just Walking Around, and More Pleasant Adventures. The final, titular poem reminded me of André Breton’s Nadja, and so I was not surprised to learn that surrealist art was one of his early influences. Well, maybe his art criticism is better.
“So a reflected image of oneself
Manages to stay alive through the darkest times, a period
Of unprecedented frost, during which we get up each morning
And go about our business as usual.”
“So a reflected image of oneself
Manages to stay alive through the darkest times, a period
Of unprecedented frost, during which we get up each morning
And go about our business as usual.”
Erasure by Percival Everett
5.0
Usually I find satires kind of tiresome, but to market this novel under any one genre label would be to sell it short. And of course the desire of the publishing industry (and wider society) to simplify everything down to easily understood categories is also part of the critique here: this book is not just a parody of racist, sensationalist, commercialized fiction, it is also a family drama and a psychological portrait of an artist deeply alienated by what mainstream culture deems authentic. The structure of the novel is similarly layered, along with its primary narrative there are imaginary asides from artists and historical figures, passages detailing woodworking and fishing practices, and a long unbroken section of the parody novel the main character Monk writes relayed in full. Its intertextuality is both destabilizing and engaging, and it never looses its deep seated cynicism for both the “ghetto novels” that are directly parodied and the “high art” Monk dedicates his life to.
The complexity of this novel stands in stark contrast to the proliferation of simplistic art that coninues to be framed as positive representation. I’m already looking forward to doing a reread someday, both to deepen my understanding of it as a work of fiction and to help me continue to think through the fraught contemporary relationship between art, society, and capitalism.
“I considered my woodworking and why I did it. In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend. But the wood, the feel of it, the smell of it, the weight of it. It was so much more real than words. The wood was so simple. Dammit, a table was a table was a table.”
The complexity of this novel stands in stark contrast to the proliferation of simplistic art that coninues to be framed as positive representation. I’m already looking forward to doing a reread someday, both to deepen my understanding of it as a work of fiction and to help me continue to think through the fraught contemporary relationship between art, society, and capitalism.
“I considered my woodworking and why I did it. In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend. But the wood, the feel of it, the smell of it, the weight of it. It was so much more real than words. The wood was so simple. Dammit, a table was a table was a table.”