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Text of the page (random words):
wasn t too soon for him to be tackling a memoir too fresh the shame still there in a way he didn t want to write about and him still fighting like mad to stay clean again again the steve almond thing slow down where it hurts and while ryan did a great job of that in the early years he rushes over the more recent and more relevant later activities it s too long for a follow up but i hope there is one anyway when he s old a layer of insight about where he was when he wrote this book over what he learned afterward a warning to my sensitive reader friends some bad things happen to animals yet since my appetite was infinite i wasn t nearly powerful enough either i never got what i really wanted and i hated myself for that and hated life and hated myself again for caring about sex more than anything or anybody including the people i loved then i hated myself for loving so badly it was like living inside a spin dryer finally what i cared about was me and not even me but the addict me this no i driving me to be with no one to be no one love junkie by rachel resnick this was the lightest memoir i read last year the one that felt the most like there could have been another draft or another few years of experience before writing however i tore through it in a day and was more emotionally invested than i thought i would be the problems are the same ones that i have with many addiction memoirs not enough space from the behavior yet so the regret doesn t seem quite sincere enough i feel more upset about some things than the writing suggests she is glamorizing some of the worst incidents i don t mind the glamor but it works against the claim of the regret and the sense that the parts of her that are the most upsetting to other people are not to her and she doesn t recognize it resnick was a mess in relationships the sort of crazy girlfriend it s good for others to have so you can hear their stories and feel grateful she d write literally dozens of emails a day clingy whoa all flowery and overwrought be thrown into a tailspin by small relationship dramas and picked horrific men to be with it s one of the accomplishments of the book that despite all that i found myself pulling for her and understanding her hurt and helplessness at the end she s with a woman and not only does it sound a bit too sedate it sounds like resnick isn t attracted to her at all as though that is the flip side of her crazy interactions with men after an incredibly fucked up and tough early life i don t know that there is an accessible calm space for her but i was left hoping she will be able to find a way to embrace her crazy without all the attendant destructiveness the addict by michael stein another fast compelling read stein a doctor lets us follow along as he treats an opiate addict for a year at the same time he reflects on treatment options other addicts he s worked with and what is happening in his head and life while he does this work it raised some interesting questions if someone feels the same depressed desperate anxious etc even if her external circumstances have changed for what others consider the better is the change a success how far into talk therapy methods hour long history intense sessions can a medical doctor who requires the talking to prescribe the addiction breaking drugs successfully go given that the drugs he gives do work for a good number of patients where does that leave the traditional willpower models of sobriety despite being a quick read it was a little long for itself and i had some issues along the way i think the patient he picked to highlight was problematic even if typical frequently i felt irritation about a significant self congratulatory doctor god vibe coming from him even if he does temper it by being self aware non condemnatory and invested in his patients addiction is the disease of wanting more more is always better more becomes necessary the more disease is about impending deprivation it combines a fear of being without with the sense of never having enough reading writing the possessed by elif batuman a gift from ian the chapters covering her travels to conferences and the study abroad in samarkand are fabulous hilarious ridiculous i was a teenager when i had my phase with big russian novels but having forgotten most of the details was not a hindrance to enjoying this book many reviews have noted that it s uneven and i agree but it s not so uneven to be a problem it took me a while to get into the book and a while after that to figure out why in the beginning i didn t trust batuman s writing about herself which meant that i didn t trust her about others and others people and places come in for constant criticism she s very hard on herself early on painting a picture of someone indecisive and unmotivated and possibly not very bright then she settles settles for grad school at stanford and has in the few years since published this book along with many mean and clever essays in all the best places i understand the need to set herself up as not an insider in order to have believable distance to mock the establishment she s firmly ensconced in but it came off like a supermodel complaining about her enormous ass that tone fades over the first few chapters and isn t worth ditching the book over i have no idea why this is the only quote i copied out of the book must have been a rough week in the 1960s girard introduced his widely influential theory of mimetic desire formulated in opposition to the nietzschean notion of autonomy as the key to human self fulfillment according to girard there is in fact no such thing as human autonomy or authenticity all of the desires that direct our actions in life are learned or imitated from some other to whom we mistakenly ascribe the autonomy lacking in ourselves although of course you end up becoming yourself by david lipsky it s so nice to have a few more hours with david foster wallace s voice to really miss the person i never knew even if only in this slightly off book the offness comes from lipsky trying too hard i think but i can t identify what he s trying too hard to do to make himself look worse as a young over eager too pushy interviewer and not then but now in the editing of his question and bracketed asides to make those small added details seem more significant or more full of gravity or to make himself seem both more flawed and more chummy i don t entirely trust his representation of himself which makes for discomfort if i want to trust his picture of dfw all that aside i did appreciate the essays in the front and read the afterword last as though there could be any spoilers at this point particularly the quotes and remembrances from his friends it was good timing to read this so soon before franzen s freedom i had both dfw s voice some of which franzen has absorbed and franzen s commitment to david as a friend and fellow artist still running around in my head the best part of the book is the little details dfw s terrible taste in music bush his strange crushes thatcher morrissette his interactions with his bad dogs jeeves and drone much sadness in how frequently he uses suicide imagery and phrases he lies about the chemical basis of his depression and pushes back after honesty on lipsky s questions about his drug history i was unsure about reading this but ended up liking it enough that i ll buy a copy at some point what writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit to sit clench their fists and make themselves so excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we re mostly aware of only on a certain level and that if the writer does his job right what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader s been aware of all the time and it s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person it s that the writer is willing i think to cut off cut himself off from certain stuff and develop and just and think really hard which not everybody has the luxury to do but i gotta tell you i just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me or that somehow their interior life is less rich and complicated and acutely perceived than mine makes me not as good a writer because that means i m going to be performing for a faceless audience instead of trying to have a conversation with a person out of sheer rage by geoff dyer reread as good as the first time it feels like the perfect thing to read this book in order to procrastinate on writing projects you could make a gift basket out of that idea a copy of this a set of index cards with reminders of mundane distracting things hey shouldn t you clean the kitchen before you start that paragraph a few dvds of the author s favorite series and a sleep mask for that desperately needed power nap right before cracking down on the next round of edits i swear i resign myself to things this is my own warped version of amor fati regretting everything but resigning myself to this regret however things turn out i am bound to wish they had turned out differently i am resigned to that take this book which is intermittently about lawrence right now i profoundly regret ever having started it i wish i hadn t bothered but if i hadn t started it i would have regretted not having done so i knew this and so i got on with it and now that i have got on with it i regret that i got on with it in the way i did i regret that it will not turn out to be the sober academic study of lawrence that i had hoped to write but i accept this because i know that in the future when it is finished i won t want it to be any different i ll be glad that this little book turned out how it did because i will see that what was intended to be a sober academic study of d h lawrence had to become a case history not a history of how i recovered from a breakdown but of how breaking down became a means of continuing anyone can have a breakdown anyone the trick is to have a breakdown and take it in one s stride ideally one would get to the stage where one had a total nervous breakdown and didn t even notice mentor by tom grimes grimes s memoir about his life as a writer and more specifically his life as a writer in the orbit of frank conroy who moved from being an idol to a teacher to a friend to a father figure reading it in a couple of days highlighted the problems unnecessary repetitions forced or too blatant connections echoes a certain thudding rhythm to the language in parts and the end which is a reprint of grimes s eulogy for conroy didn t entirely work for me but all that accounted for i was so into this the inside scoop the tales of back breaking labor 20 hours a week even if only a sentence came out of each hour and self hatred and anxiety at the desk grimes s wound up paranoia the tension and disaster of publishing attempts reading it wasn t a grand love affair everything perfection and awe but more like kicking it with a good flawed friend after a long absence it knew what i needed i am uncomfortable writing and i know a number of writers although i won t mention them who feel the same way the isolation self doubt perfectionism and other idiosyncratic impediments to action some completely irrational almost like superstitions mix in various ways in various people to create something close to dread at the sinister urgency of the blank page for myself once i m up and moving if not running through the lines i zip back and forth between feeling okay and feeling terrified once in a while i am exhilarated but more often it is as if my inner self my sense of myself is at risk something like the tension one might feel watching the ivory ball circumnavigate the roulette wheel after having made a large foolish impulsive bet frank conroy unsorted half a life by darin strauss strauss at 17 accidentally killed a girl he vaguely knew from high school he was in his car she was on her bike and she swerved into traffic immediately in front of him while everyone from the police to the parents of the girl rushed to assure him that it wasn t his fault strauss spent years waiting for someone to see that even if the accident wasn t on him his reactions made him a bad person worthy of blame he tore at himself for his selfish thoughts his lack of approved grief reactions his clumsy attempts to do the right thing with her parents who later sued him throwing his life into an extended waiting nightmare of litigation this is a beautifully designed book with a clever half jacket but it s really an extended essay on grief and chance and the acceptance of self interest and self forgiveness it was great as an essay in that way but a little flat as an entire book a few more threads would have fleshed it out lots of telling but it worked i think we all build superstructures in our heads catwalks and trestles that lead us from the acceptance of our own responsibility to the cool mechanics of the factory where things are an interlocking mess where everybody s pretty much unaccountable to be alive is to find a way to blame someone else final analysis by jeffrey moussaieff masson note masson was one of the coincidence thick threads that ran through my reading last year i started 2010 having no idea who he is and i ve now read books about by and possibly inspired by him he just kept showing up not only in books but in anecdotes a story about berkeley a bunny and a pack of dogs that i m sure i ll share in the next few weeks i m both fascinated and appalled by him man oh man do i wish i had taken notes on this when i finished it not a month and three weeks later masson is at full masson here blazing a light on all the incredibly fucked up things analysts did during his own analysis and training as always he s the innocent wide eyed reporter constantly shocked and confused when his dramatic efforts to upset the apple cart are received as such it s a good read however because there were batshit analysts out there and masson ends up being supervised and surrounded by them they are also constantly dazzled and enamored of him of course the age of the book works against it those type of analysts just aren t around much anymore and some of the things he had major problems with have been addressed i wish he d write a whole life memoir i d read that big conceited song and dance in a sitting with pleasure but it did not really sink in to me when i first read it that freud really meant what he said misery is unbearable misfortune is bearable misery is self created the misfortune comes from without freud is not offering to help a person by altering external circumstances but only be getting that person to reconsider his or her life it is the essence of psychotherapy look inward freud is asking us to shift the direction of our attention from the external to the internal every patient whose memory of abuse was treated as nothing more than wishful thinking will have to be recalled oh hello litt...