Tag: nonfiction
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 13: The Beloveds
MILES DAVIS Now our author asks a last time, what do we do about monstrous men? Dederer provides us with a very relevant narrative of Miles Davis, his monstrousness, and Pearl Cleage’s essay “Mad at Miles.” But I’d rather concentrate on the conversation around beauty. I love this quote from a 1995 interview with the…
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 12: Drunks
RAYMOND CARVER Claire Dederer is a big fan–a lifelong fan–of the author Raymond Carver, who becomes the next subject of our examination. I’m unfamiliar with his work myself, so I have no opinion on his writing style and I knew nothing of his biography until reading Monsters. He sounds like an interesting person in a…
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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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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 9: Am I a Monster?
“There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist…But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness.” p. 559 Selfishness = time Selfishness = privacy Selfishness = no interruptions Like our author, I haven’t done any of the things these men are accused of. Unlike the author,…
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 8: The Silencers and the Silenced
CARL ANDRE, ANA MENDIETA Before #metoo, how much of the work of women was lost, stolen, or co-opted by monsters? What about by plain ol’ average men? “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” – Virginia Woolf I really appreciate that Claire Dederer…
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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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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…
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Monsters on Mondays | Chapter 1: Roll Call
WOODY ALLEN Monsters gets really personal for me right away. If you look at my all-time film stats on Letterboxd, you will see that I have viewed more Woody Allen films than those of any other director. I discovered Allen in my late teens upon watching Annie Hall. Movie rental was becoming a thing then…