Personally I’ve been finally back making some progress on my pile after not reading much for a few months.

First I finished Kathy Acker’s “Blood and Guts in High School” - it would be hard and dishonest to try to describe it, it seems to elude any easy definition that wouldn’t reduce what it is. In a way it’s a mad world, an ethereal descent and ascent into a broken mind, or the ur-broken mind, an epic of the object of society. In less pretentious terms: it’s for the neurotic girls out there. Heavy TWs for basically everything though:

spoiler

pedophilia, incest, sexual assault, sexual slavery, whatever you get the point at this point.

I just finished “Amérique” by Baudrillard - I guess it is easy to describe it as just an application of his concept of hypperreality to the most hyperreal place - America, taking the loose form of a travel diary. And it is! But it is really as thought-provoking as “Simulacres et Simulation” was - his vision of space and the desert itself as a signifier and “precursor” to the self-proclaimed city on a hill being really the strong-point of this short essay.

And I am finally starting “The Dangers of Smoking in Bed”! I’ll try and talk about it here when I finish it.

  • UniversalMonk@vegantheoryclub.org
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    2 days ago

    I’m currently reading “Muddled Mind. The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr.” It’s about his little known writing career. When he wasn’t writing bad movies, he was writing really really bad paperback stories.

    Fascinating book, and as I’m a writer myself, inspiring!

  • trent@vegantheoryclub.org
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    2 months ago

    Given recent events, I plan to read Cory Doctorow’s somewhat prophetic short story “Radicalized”, which he made available for free: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/09/radicalized/

    Other than that I have been reading along with my daughter’s high school English class reading (three years). Just finished The Scarlet Letter and now working on Into the Wild and I think The Great Gatsby is next. Nothing terribly exciting.