Reviews and Comments

This book didn't start well for me. The introduction by Douglas E. Winter is the worst intro to a book I have ever encountered. Then the author herself admits it is cringey in the preface. So it took me awhile to warm up to the stories in the collection.

Yup, parts of it are cringey self-conscious 90s subculture stuff. I wouldn't have liked it at all back then but there's good stuff shining through that I recognize reading it here and now.

Peter Straub's afterword is excellent -- it pinpoints what is good about this collection and gives me hope that Kiernan's later writings will align much more with the vision she is trying and nearly failing to get across here.

Reading this it has become clear that the graphic novel/film 300 was about the wrong band of 300. The Sacred Band is much more interesting!

Content from The Great Courses/The Teaching Company is all over the place. The Rick Roderick lectures from the nineties are some of the best shit ever. Some of it is really bad in terms of dumbing down or trying to produce pop academia. Or weird agendas I am too embarrassed to admit that I slogged through.

Elizabeth Vandiver is one of the better presenters in terms of saying which ideas came from where, which ideas are her own, while leaving room for people to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions.

I just came off of a super opinionated book, that I loved, about Greek tragedy by someone who is selling it hard but didn’t provide a lot of the detailed background that these lectures provide. So this is good to fill in the missing bits.

This is a really feisty and enthusiastic take on Greek tragedy.

I don’t want to spoil it but there’s a lot of great stuff about why tragedy is a worthwhile thing to read right now, how heroes and wars fucked up everything, and how Greek tragedy gave voices to the people most affected by this.

Sometimes he gets a little off track but he does a good job of reigning it back in.

It is not all a slog. There is a nice romantic moment leading up to him confessing his love for his second wife. He even fainted when they kissed. The closest I have ever come to romantic fainting is crashing a Bixi when falling in love and falling down in the street when getting dumped over a text message.

I find myself relating to some of the stuff in this novel in a cringey way. These ruminations about a certain set of authors riffing on nihilism, Stockholm, and Borges have all bounced around in my head too at points too, lol.

I opened up the French edition of this in the library today and was completely awestruck by the images on the last pages (proving I am also a vampire from Clan Toreador).

This is the English edition, which I own but have never read.

Osamu Tezuka is my favorite manga writer, hands down, far ahead of any other. I think I will close out my “read 100 books in 2024” with him.

I am deep into the other essays (ie: where she is For and not Against Interpretation).

It is a little exhausting and I don't recommend it was a way to pass time while you are waiting in the cold for the bus. But there are things I am really taking notes on. For example, when she is talking about different Robert Bresson films on their own terms but before she diverges into the big themes of his work in general. Taken side-by-side, the former is the type of thing I am looking to learn from, the latter is what I want to avoid.

I am a few essays in and it is hitting the spot.

It was a strategic decision to read this book right now because I am on the cusp of starting a film watching blog. I had a pretty good idea of what this book was going to say but I wanted to hear the thesis in full.

I am reading it because I want to be able to write some prose for my blog but I don't really want to engage in criticism. It is more of a record to myself of what I appreciated about a given film watching experience. (And the same goes for wyrmsign and the books I read.)

At the end of the first essay, Susan Sontag says that we need "less hermeneutics and more erotics" in our approach to enjoying art. That's the sort of bold statement I am looking for from this book.

Books like this make me smile. The first exercise is to draw a face that is infested with mosquito larvae.

Lots of beautiful prose but it starts to lose its charm when one of the characters starts ranting against dualism moments before revealing he is possessed by a demon.

At points I felt like CS Lewis was stopping the fiction to beat me over the head with his belief system — like with the long rant about gender and how mountains are metaphysically masculine, yada yada.

I haven’t read Paradise Lost so I suspect a lot of stuff from this book is lost on me from a “oh look he is referencing great literature” standpoint.

Gotta say there is some excellent cover art for this book across the different editions. Worth image searching for.