I’m glad I stumbled across this response to a sexist essay on Edith Wharton by Jonathan Franzen. It helps to justify my dislike of his books (and of what I’ve gathered about him.)
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Love the non-objective stance of this reviewer, which made me want to read the book after all (but first I’ve got to find it):
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Thanks, promising indeed!
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A good and brief review of Claire Dederer’s great book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
A central metaphor Dederer uses is a stain. The bad things perpetrated by monsters have the quality of a stain. They are indelible. They seep through in every direction – past, present, future. We may be moved by an evening of Wagner’s Siegfried, but we cannot un-see the stain of his proto-Nazism and anti-Semitism. In discussing the latter, Dederer makes a point similar to one I posited about Audubon: Wagner (and Audubon) had choices. They were not merely vessels blown by the prevailing winds of their times. Wagner was well aware of anti-anti-Semitism writings, Dederer shows, just as Audubon must have been aware of abolition.
Monsters is, without doubt, a feminist work, an indictment of the privilege of patriarchy, which has given and continues to give men a free pass to behave as badly as they please – for the sake of “art,” or “genius,” or whatever. “Genius” as an adjective is rarely paired with anyone but white men. When she gets to women, it is to show that the dilemma for women is endemic and intractable: career versus motherhood. The abandonment of children almost invariably defines women “monsters.” There is no hall pass for what Dederer calls “the pram in the hall.”
What makes “Monsters” truly engrossing, ultimately, is how it gradually morphs into the author’s inner journey. She processes not only the “monsterhood” of famous people but also her own. She wrestles with her sometime choice of writing (her art) over motherhood. She wrestles with fandom, with the ineluctable beauty of art and creativity that brings love into the world, and forces us not to look away. She ends up close to redemption: with the knowledge that no one in this world is perfect, and if we love enough, we may love the monsters, too – even and especially the ones in our own lives.
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Oooooh, looks really good! 
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Yeah I’ll be buying that one, but the following is next up once it arrives.
Geoff Rickly’s debut novel Someone Who Isn’t Me is a feverish journey through the psyche of someone who no longer recognizes himself. When Geoff hears that a drug called ibogaine might be able to save him from his heroin addiction, he goes to a clinic in Mexico to confront the darkest and most destructive versions of himself. In this modern reimagining of the Divine Comedy, survival lurks in the darkest corners of Geoff’s brain, asking, will he make it? Can anyone?
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I didn’t know this exists!
Stephen Fry, Neil Tennant, Fiona Shaw, Will Self, Benedict Cumberbatch, China Miéville, Tony Kushner, John Waters, Simon Callow, Sir David Attenborough, even Prime Minister David Cameron. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver finishes off the whole project, reading the Epilogue.
All 135 chapters are available to be listened to in your browser, downloaded on iTunes, streamed on SoundCloud, or even heard as a podcast. However, do check them out online, as each chapter comes with a work of art each created by 135 contemporary artists such as Matthew Barney, Oliver Clegg, and Matthew Benedict. (See David Austen’s work above.) The project is a mammoth undertaking befitting such a monumental book, and if you’ve never read it this just might be the way to go.
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Hah! See? Even people being paid to narrate the audiobook can’t finish the whole thing!
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I for one have finished reading it, but iirc, it was more an act of will than enthusiasm.
I did enjoy most of it though. Pretty trippy stuff!
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So has my gf, she just informed me, so that makes 2 people I have ever spoken to who have (I’ve tried, but…).
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I read it! I was young and didn’t know you don’t have to.
Lots of very long details about whaling and whales.
And sailors hands touching and fleeting glances below deck whilst they rubbed sperm.
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Yes, the man-love is pretty intense at times (and surprising to me when I read it way back when). The scene where someone dons a whale’s foreskin is pretty wild. Or did I just dream that?
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I had managed to entirely forget it anyway. Well done brain, thank you.
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FTR:
But Tim Cassedy, an English professor at SMU, thinks it’s OK to laugh at Moby-Dick. In fact, he thinks that’s the intent of the name.
“I genuinely believe that on some level there is a dick joke in the title of the book – hidden in plain sight,” Cassedy told me via e-mail. “I think the book frequently plays around with that meaning of ‘dick.’ Sperm whales really are named that because they have a white, waxy substance in their head that early mariners mistook for semen. They called that substance ‘spermaceti’ (which means whale sperm) or just ‘sperm.’ (It turns out to make excellent candles.) The book is full of moments where the whale meaning of sperm starts to blur over into the reproductive meaning – sometimes just to play with words, sometimes for comic effect, and sometimes as part of straining to articulate ideas that are difficult to put into words. Relevant chapters include 81, 94, and 95. The entirety of chapter 95 is about making a smock out of the foreskin removed from a sperm whale’s 6-foot-long penis. So.”
Meet the SMU professor and students behind the irreverent ‘Moby-Dick’ inspired card game ‘Dick’
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There was a scholarship available back in high school for reading The Fountainhead and writing an essay about it. I noped out maybe two chapters in. This was hard because only until recently I was the person who would force himself to read every single word because you don’t start what you can’t finish. But I couldn’t pick that book up again. Not even for the content. Her writing is uninviting. It’s such a struggle.
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I read Junji Ito’s Uzumaki last week. Grotesque in the best ways with (literal) twists you just couldn’t predict at the end of each story. My only criticism is that everything slows significantly and becomes less interesting in the last third to half of the three volume collection. It shifts from being an episodic anthology about an epidemic of spirals supernaturally impacting a town to a survival story. It’s still delightfully horrific, just not my preference.
I’m looking forward to the perpetually delayed anime. Hopefully the bulk of the budget goes toward the most important parts: the gross ones.
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