Recently finished Nightfall by David Goodis. The good guys were a little more good than usual for Goodis, writing as good as ever. Just started More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon.

kokorodoko wrote: Fri Oct 01, 2021 12:21 amThe law is supposed to be impartial, but all we have are partial perspectives and judgements.

I was thinking all the while about law like coming to agreements and satisfying conclusions and such, but significantly it's about protecting the body of the individual. Or what is the same, preserving its life. And the sovereign has power over life and death, to do justice and grant mercy.

That makes me feel great.


(and at the same time as it is protecting the body, it is controlling its movement (blocking it from treading on certain areas) and behavior (with prohibitions), and therefore its psyche (in that its sense of right is made to be seen through the eyes of the law, especially through its conditioning to do what is according to the law, blending this notion with the superego.))

Been reading some of Cornelius Castoriadis' The Imaginary Institution of Society (1974) and I'm really into it. It's a merciless assault on the foundational categories of marxism, from a marxist point of view (sort of). Mainly it challenges and in my view convincingly punctures the idea that there are any grounds for positing any singular truth of historical progess which some one particular subject could be uniquely capable of carrying out and by implication be in possession of the necessary knowledge in order to do so.

Castoriadis was a prominent member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, who were a big influence on Situationism, so it figures that this should be up my alley.

This text provides some insight on where post-'68 revolutionary theory and postmodernism runs into conflict with classical marxism. I recommend it to those curious about this.

Less good are the parts where the author falls for the pressure to immediately offer his own alternative. "All right then, so what would be a real revolutionary programme?". If done at all, I would consider that a subject for a separate work, taking an analysis of this one as its starting point. Here it feels rather cobbled together and noticeably lacking in rigour compared to the other parts.

Henry James’ ‘The Turn of the Screw’ may be a great book and I may, eventually, like it, but the greatest disquiet it has inflicted on me over the first thirty pages is the fear of losing my English reading comprehension.
I still don’t know what to do with that sentence. I’m lost by the second negation. I marvel at how he can lose me in so few words.

A: as he expands in the next sentence, "his charming work" makes nothing else much signify, i.e. is the most important thing.
B: the "good thing" in the preceding paragraph is not actually good enough to erase A.

i remember liking The Turn of The Screw, so much that I bought it for my mom. She never finished it, it's probably too convoluted for her English, should've got a translation.

finally done with Proust after more than a year, good lord. Next is probably East of Eden.

Thank you - I’d guessed “the nothing much else signify” part’s meaning, but the overall sense of it is still bizarre to me. The first paragraph talks about a bad thing (the stranger), then mentions a good thing (that they will never see him again). The second paragraph talks about her “charming work” with her charges - the kids she’s teaching. So *I think* she’s saying that regardless of her conviction that they’ll never see the stranger again, her focus was on teaching the children. If I’ve understood correctly, these convolutions are a way of avoiding a simple “regardless” at the start of the second sentence. Dear God.

I’m reading the novella for ten minutes a night and finding it a slog. Any scares so far are deadened by having to trawl back and forth over the text to work out what exactly the narrator’s trying to describe. This is certainly a deliberate style, but so far it is sabotaging the story for me.

Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. It's fine, but I'm not riveted to the story. I find myself drifting away occasionally from the prose.

so close with a and b and regardless but it's more stylish.. she's unruffling her feathers about the intrusion and says oh that intrusion if his staring was impolite its because he was too much of a theif to know better stealing in on the moment in the room and then stealing away as fast, and the good news is that now he's gone and i can focus..
except the news is not so good once she can focus and see reality back, emergency gone and all she is surrounded with is her charges little kids she watches or whatever the book is..

so it's "yay he's gone now, i can return to my position in a civilized human society but oops," look at the downstate of the moment-stealer shamed by the narratits turn of phrase and when she tries to up-pride herself she signifies it's not much to be said of her own work, she says it in a lame book way that made it awkward and should've turned you into a critic questioning the authors style choice here and not your own reading comprehension skills.

it was good when he left.. but it wasn't good once he left, she admits, because she's left to judge (her own work, her work that doesn't leave much to *signify because it is *charming) she's saying good, survived the intruder thanks god, now i can get back to being a professional small time nanny (implying the character is incapable of making a difference in the world because she is a mere guardian of children, so ancient books you gotta be careful because they're wrong and outdated although they tells stylish stories

*signify = impressive esp of rank or in a society way
*charming = small (i.e. charming studio apartment)

I missed that connotation of “charming”. That does change the effect of the section quite a bit. Thanks.

zircona1 wrote: Wed Oct 20, 2021 8:47 am Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. It's fine, but I'm not riveted to the story. I find myself drifting away occasionally from the prose.

Definitely stick with this one.