Monday, August 17, 2020

Monday internet gold-rush

There are days when the internet is self-evidently the second-worst thing our species has cooked up for itself. Then there are days like today.
  • Surprise! H.P. Lovecraft’s racist contempt included the Irish! Yet another piece that remarks (perhaps, as with Matt Ruff’s adapted-for-TV novel, a touch too lightly?) on the irony of Lovecraft’s still-rising star at this particular cultural moment, given that the single most self-evident feature of the man and his fiction is his racism.
  • “Extremity of transgression, in these cases, may actually be interpreted as a sign of conformity.” Over at LARB John Tottenham surveys Heroin Heroism: The Rock 'n' Roll Survivor Narrative.
  • Also at LARB another hit of RenĂ© Girard. Hm: “A generation devoid of Freuds or Nietzsches or Marxes of its own might turn out to be something we will one day regret.” I dunno. GenX was always going to have some trouble with that.
  • “Among the literature of China under Mao and since, one of the most perceptive and disturbing accounts I have read is Kang Zhengguo’s Confessions: An Innocent Life In Communist ChinaStephen Jones is blown away. And now so am I.

2 comments:

Joel Swagman said...

As always, thank you for the reading recommendations. i enjoyed the John Tottenham article.
I had no idea that John Philips' autobiography was a classic until reading that article. I googled it just now, and it does look interesting.

Whisky Prajer said...

Yeah, I'd be curious to give that a closer look too. But talk about sticker shock! Yipes.