Category: Observations
Protected posts contain spoilers. Password is SPOILERS.
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On Public Executions
I remember the first time I saw a public execution. It was on video at a time when I worked in a television newsroom. It was my job as a producer to watch incoming video from a number of live and delayed feeds, then decide whether clips were too explicit, too vulgar, too violent, too…
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On Time
What is time? I have no doubt that every person to have ever walked the earth has had this exact question; I’m not special in that way. I do feel preoccupied with time though, and I don’t know how unique or not that is among humans. I took a moment to look up an official…
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Artificial Intelligence, Part 1
I’d like to say I don’t do AI. I can’t do that because AI is forced upon me and has been forced upon me for some time now. It used to be that AI was hidden, baked into some online services I use and probably in a fair number of IRL places, too. I know…
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 11: Lady Lazarus
VALERIE SOLANAS, SYLVIA PLATH Thanks to Claire Dederer, I now see how similar Valerie Solanas and Sylvia Plath are, even if they don’t appear to be at all the same at first glance. These two women raged against the patriarchy in their own ways and their work is indelibly stained by their own violence. I…
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 10: Abandoning Mothers
DORIS LESSING, JONI MITCHELL In chapter 9, Claire Dederer makes a good and reasonable argument that female “monstrousness” = real or perceived abandonment of kids. “If the male crime is rape, the female crime is the failure to nurture.” p. 609 Exhibit A: Doris Lessing left two children with her husband in Africa and took…
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History Repeats Itself
I hate that I’m writing this, but I think it’s important for myself to get these words and ideas of myself so that I can observe them on paper and on a screen. This helps me be as objective as possible. I am disappointed in my country’s current leaders and those who voted for them.…
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 7: The Anti-Monster
VLADIMIR NABOKOV And so we arrive at Lolita. I read Lolita as a 20something and not since. I have no intention of reading it again, but Claire Dederer’s words ring true: to choose to read Lolita is to choose to engage with something monstrous. For the rest of your life, every time you see the…
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 6: The Anti-Semite, The Racist, and The Problem of Time
RICHARD WAGNER, VIRGINIA WOOLF, WILLA CATHER Two questions: Dederer brings Richard Wagner and his apologists into the conversation. I had no idea before reading this book that Wagner was anti-Semitic. I didn’t know anything about him at all, except that he wrote a lot of operas, including Der Ring des Nibelungen. (I’ve never taken the…
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Clothing, Fashion, and Aesthetics (Part 2)
The things that resulted from nearly 18 years of clothing conflict and angst. It’s funny, though. Thirty years later I know quite a bit about fashion. I’ve worked at a fashion school for a while and I’ve really learned to appreciate fashion as art and the work that goes into each individual garment. I’m fascinated…
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 5: The Genius
PABLO PICASSO, ERNEST HEMINGWAY Dederer points out that a certain kind of person is immune to the stain: the genius. “Genius is the name we give our love when we don’t want to argue about it.” p. 217 Men who are geniuses can do what they want; they can not only carry on with bad…
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 4: The Critic
In which the author describes how she came to be a critic and her life as a critic: “…I somehow never was able to transcend the sense that I was an audience member, rather than a professional.” p. 198 I struggle with imposter syndrome. Our author, Dederer, was a professional critic when she was very…
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 2: The Stain
MICHAEL JACKSON “Stain” refers to a situation in which you find out something terrible about someone you admire and then the knowledge seeps down and back into the prior work of the artist. If you stack up napkins or towels and pour a measure of liquid onto the top layer, the liquid will penetrate down…