sonofapritch:

ghostorballoon replied to your post: fuck this shit

You didn’t like Lydia Davis?

I appreciate the ways in which definition and domestic spaces are taken up as recurring themes, but in terms of form the stories are either hit or miss. The shorter pieces are more successful; whenever she’s teasing something out over a longer space, I feel like my attention flags, with the one exception (so far) being the one about the thyroid. The Marie Curie thing was like “why does this exist, kill me.” I don’t DISLIKE it, it’s just not grabbing me or doing anything super-interesting.

Also, trigger warning, I’m bad at reading fiction, by which I mean I prefer more explicitly experimental work (all that Surrealist prose, Don Barthelme, Bruce Boone (swoon), etc.—and before I close the brackets for this aside I want to wonder aloud if I should read Ben Lerner’s novel) and maybe that’s just one more reason I’m a terrible literature person but I do generally shy away from novels or stories in favor of things that interrogate those genres or perform them outside of the auspices of their generally recognizable formats. Which Davis does to some extent, I suppose.

And anyway this book of stuff from Benjamin’s archive is fucking cool as shit.

I guess I don’t really get how you can reconcile that stance with liking theory so much. Like, when Benjamin talks about Kafka or Beckett talks about Proust or Lacan talks about Poe or whatever are you just like, ‘yeah yeah, ok’?

(Source: hookedonsemiotics)