#litterachoor

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The Judgment Of Magneto | Defector

Somewhere beyond death, in a realm of judgment and pain, a concrete labyrinth filled by countless names, a man walks. He is Jewish, and has

This is admittedly pretty in my wheelhouse, but it is excellent. Whether you're interested in comics or not, if you're interested in current events it's absolutely worth a read.

(Also if you do care about comics I think it's absolutely correct on how good Al Ewing is.)

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A “Chinese Borges” wrote millions of words of fake Russian history on Wikipedia for a decade.

For over a decade, a Chinese woman known as “Zhemao” created a massive, fantastical, and largely fictional alternate history of late Medieval Russia on Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words …

Not only do I love this, but maybe the most Borgesian thing about it is that I strongly suspect me thinking about those thousands of words of fictions does a lot more for me than actually reading them would have.

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A Japanese Novelist’s Tale of Bullying and Nietzsche

In Mieko Kawakami’s “Heaven,” everyday dilemmas provide a forum for examining fundamental questions of power and morality.

This is both the best piece of criticism and, in spots, the best thing on Nietzsche I’ve read in a little while. I absolutely would like to read Kawakami’s novel now. And when I looked up the author of the piece (Merve Emre), it turns out the previous two pieces I’d read from her, eviscerating the uses of “emotional intelligence” under capitalism and discussing the life and work of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, were both great enough I’d specifically noted them when reading.

No doubt Kawakami knows that the risk of ruining someone’s day increases when a novel not only imagines other people’s lives but has those people voice other people’s ideas. Perhaps the cleverest feature of “Heaven” is that one could read it—indeed, one could learn from it—without knowing the first thing about Nietzsche’s philosophy. Its ideas are as concrete and as wounding as the blows the narrator cannot deflect. Through his eyes, as Nietzsche writes of learning new ideas, we learn “to see—accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides.”

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What I Learned After Watching Eyes Wide Shut 100 Times

If Stanley Kubrick’s film felt dated back in 1999, maybe that’s because we weren’t quite as savvy as we thought.

Here was a man so oblivious to his own wife’s sexual desires that he couldn’t abide the thought of her merely fantasizing about someone else. He’s totally clueless about what it’s like to be a woman, and when his wife tries to school him, he runs away in fear. Dr. Harford’s ignorance of his wife’s desires and the guys I knew who couldn’t seem to wrap their minds around the avalanche of stories of abuse struck me as two sides of the same coin. Both attitudes stemmed from an inability to understand the interior life of women and a refusal to acknowledge that we might be experiencing sexual thoughts and feelings so foreign to their own. And so when guys told me that they couldn’t believe the stories that were coming out about the powerful men who were being named, I heard them saying that they had chosen to be clueless, too.

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A Perfectly Normal Interview with Carmen Maria Machado Where Everything Is Fine - Electric Literature

The author discusses her very personal connection to a new edition of the 19th-century vampire novel "Carmilla"

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Ian Mathers's review of OK Computer

1/5: The second of three 33 1/3 books I've borrowed from a friend and am taking entirely too long to read. The previous one, on Donuts, I just might buy myself at some point. This one I am glad I did not. Here are a collection of more or less specific things that I honestly believe to be true about criticism/aesthetics/critical writing/what have you: - You don't have to love, or in fact feel any particular way, about the art you are tackling in order for the result to be good - You can freely admit to the reader in your introduction that you picked your subject to some degree because you thoug...

In which I got so mad at a book I read the whole, admittedly short, thing (against my better judgment) just because I wanted to make sure I was mad at it for accurate reasons.

Here’s a point I think stands fairly alone:

Basically you're left with a volume that says things like "why on earth would a piece of music without words repeat a verse section?" This is bad, not because the implicit position isn't potentially interesting or arguably true (I'd argue it, but I'm not already convinced I'm right), but because it both leaves the question unanswered from its own perspective (i.e. here's why you shouldn't do that) and genuinely can't seem to imagine what someone else's answer might be (i.e. here's why you might want to do that). It's enough to have you muttering "we hope your rules and wisdom choke you" under your breath.

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“I don’t want to be human.”

“That’s not an attitude a lot of humans are going to understand. We tend to think that because a bot or a construct looks human, its ultimate goal would be to become human.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

So I’ve finally read all four novellas in the initial run of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, and all four are as great as I’d hoped when I gave the first one a rave review on RT (RIP) back when it came out. Really glad to hear there’s a forthcoming full length novel; the series started in an interesting place and has only gotten more so with time, and at this point I’m invested enough in the characters I caught myself holding my breath during the hairier combat scenes.

(some good, semi-spoilery writing on the series can be found here and here, if you’re interested)

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LRB · Patricia Lockwood · It was gold: Joan Didion’s Pointillism

The first thoughts about Joan Didion are not reasonable. The present literature about her is a hagiography that does not entirely trust itself; there is a vacancy at the centre of it that I call the ‘but surely’. But surely if these essays were published now, the hagiography says to . . .

Regardless of your feelings on Joan Didion, Patricia Lockwood is a great writer and this essay is incredible and full of language I am flat out jealous of.