A Riff on Thomas Bernhard’s Novel The Loser
1. I finished Thomas Bernhard’s 1983 novel The Loser (English transl. Jack Dawson ’91) a few weeks ago and then picked over some of it again this week. I’m not going to try to unpack all of The Loser...
View ArticleAnother paradox (David Foster Wallace)
This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally...
View Article“A Sea of Troubles”— P.G. Wodehouse
“A Sea of Troubles” by P.G. Wodehouse Mr Meggs’s mind was made up. He was going to commit suicide. There had been moments, in the interval which had elapsed between the first inception of the idea and...
View ArticleGood Old “Good Old Neon” Essay (Not Actually Old But Actually Very New)
Today, the Los Angeles Review of Books published an insightful essay by Tim Peters about David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon.” “Good Old Neon” is (in my estimation) Wallace’s finest...
View ArticleMore Plant-like: Riffing on Han Kang’s The Vegetarian
We tend to pathologize the ultimate no—suicide—as a shameful failure, the worst kind of failure. The shame of not having assimilated into normative culture, of not bootstrapping the self into a legible...
View Article“Montparnasse”— Ernest Hemingway
Tagged: Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway, Microfiction, Montparnasse, shorties, Suicide
View Article“The Right to Take Oneself Off,” an essay by Ambrose Bierce
“The Right to Take Oneself Off” by Ambrose Bierce A person who loses heart and hope through a personal bereavement is like a grain of sand on the seashore complaining that the tide has washed a...
View ArticleSunday Comics
A morbid Sergio Aragones strip from the back cover of the 1987 Xmas Super Special of Mad Magazine (Australian edition). Here’s the front cover, also by Aragones: Tagged: Art, Cartoons, Comics, Comix,...
View ArticleSatire of the Romantic Suicide — Leonardo Alenza
Tagged: Art, despair, Leonardo Alenza, Satire, Suicide
View ArticleMore Plant-Like: A review of Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian
We tend to pathologize the ultimate no—suicide—as a shameful failure, the worst kind of failure. The shame of not having assimilated into normative culture, of not bootstrapping the self into a...
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