A ritroso

The hipsters are right: society is trying to destroy you--not your body, or your mind, but you , the part which makes an individual. That's what society is: the aspect of human life that is not the self, but is communal, the part that causes humanity to behave like a colony of ants. As brilliant Nietz Leggi tutto

I don’t know intentionally or not but Against Nature is an absolute opposite of Walden by Henry David Thoreau and it is a complete denial of nature. Nature, he used to say, has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her la Leggi tutto

Did I really read this book forty years ago? Or did I just read the passages about the "perfume organ" and the jewel encrusted turtle and later assumed I had read the rest? If I did read it, I was completely wrong in my evaluation of this as a static, effete precursor to Dorian Gray , a work marooned Leggi tutto

“Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.” ― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against the Grain Against the Grain (alternately translated as Against Nature ) is a slim novel (110 pages) where French a Leggi tutto

I read this as a companion to The Picture of Dorian Gray (this book was hugely influential for Wilde, and the Decadence movement in England more generally. It very much resembles Chapter 11 in Dorian, with its trailing descriptions of things and ideas and art). This book is filled with poetry. Huysm Leggi tutto

It must have been so exciting to be a novelist in the second half of the nineteenth century. You weren't limited to just creating a novel; if you were talented, you could create a whole new kind of novel. Here, Huysmans has written the first example known to me of the novel where nothing happens. Fr Leggi tutto

Tersine, nihayet bitti dediğim kitaplardan biri oldu, bir daha da cebir ve şiddet altında dahi olsam dönüp yüzüne bakmam. Tersine ile aynı günlerde Karatani’nin Transkritik: Kant ve Marx üzerine adlı kallavi bir kitabına başlamıştım. Benim iki kitabı aynı anda okurken rutinim şudur; kuramsal eserden Leggi tutto