whoischels's Reviews (116)

I would rate this higher but I didn't really understand it a lot of the time. I always feel when I read books that reference people like Kant and Heidegger that I'm at a disadvantage because I haven't read Kant and Heidegger. I also don't really want to, I want to read easier people who tell me what it is those guys think, but then when I do, I feel like I ought to have read Kant and Heidegger to understand what their whole deal is.

Anyway, all this is to say that Byung Chul-Han is interested in the difference between entertainment (generally viewed as lower in Western culture) and passion-driven art (generally viewed as higher). He sort of starts this in a historical understanding that discusses certain 1700s-1800s music as being "not religious enough or glorifying God enough" and thus viewed as lesser. Then he talks about some major philosophers and their ideas about what sort of art had passion in it and what sort of art didn't. Then also whether some arts were considered "morally good" or "healthy" and such. 

I read this with Ben. I was surprised that Ben wanted to read it because it does sort of avante-garde things with sentence and paragraph structure that sort of resembles Joyce, who Ben has no desire to read. 

I liked this a lot. I liked the meanderingness of it, and how it sort of leapfrogged its way forward in time. It wasn't quite nonlinear, but it wasn't quite linear. The sensation that Urrutia, the speaker, is disappointed with himself and how he's lived his life, but can't quite integrate that disappointment into himself was really complex and well done. It was very interesting living in the mind of this narrator for a few days. 

This was an enjoyable read, lots of humor coming from the shock value of certain scenes, humorous at the level of grammar as well. I know I've read Lullaby, but I don't quite remember it, so I only really have Fight Club to compare to this. Which makes me worry Palahniuk is a one-trick pony. I was a bit disappointed that the

ending sort of relied on the main character being psychologically deluded. Although in the case of this story, he sort of buys into someone else's psychological delusion.

Finally read this, this time in tandem with Ben so I actually finished. Camus' vibesy philosophy is a bit more interesting than other philosophy I've read, in that...it's vibesy. 

In summary, to prove that I sort of understood what the fuck I was reading: 
Humans expect and desire meaning in the world, but the world is total chaos, and the tension between these two things is "the absurd." You can either put your faith in God at this point, commit suicide (which Camus posits as actually kind of a reasonable response to the absurd), or try to live in the absurd as a sort of absurd man, doing stuff even though there's no "point." Camus is interested in a) why people commit suicide b) and how to do that last bit about living in the absurd. 

I am interested in the way he sort of re-situates creative work like writing as actually having no meaning, and thus perhaps accessing a bit of it. That makes creative work seem way more approachable. 

Random note:
If you read the copy with random essays attached, it makes sense why the essays are attached. They are from earlier in Camus' life and have hints of him grappling with what he would later define as the absurd. I wish I'd read these before actually reading the Myth of Sisyphus. It would have been a nice gentle introduction to the idea.

This was so good, I love the way Saunders thinks about stories, both the criticism of them and the writing of them. 

I am obsessed with Gogol's "The Nose," I didn't realize people were writing stories so absurd in 1836. It was crazy how modern it felt in terms of the way it spoke so casually about what is absurdly un-visualizable.

So many good nuggets in this book that really changed the way I think about writing:

This was pretty good. I don't think it's quite as good as everyone says it, but that's due to the fact that the stuff he is saying in the book isn't really surprising 30 years later. Sagan's attitudes about improving scientific knowledge are sort of the de facto opinion for educated people now (or at least were when I was I was a kid, things have sort of slipped since then), and seeped into public opinion while I was growing up. It was sort of neat to realize that my middle school science teacher's whole vibe and philosophy was, in fact, clearly influenced by this book specifically. There was a lot I recognized. 

It's depressing how prescient this book is. Sagan makes the case that we're sort of on the knife's edge of having scientifically-based public opinion, but could fall off into the sort of anti-science attitudes that have been so common over history. I think that has happened to some extent since he died. He talks about the alien abduction craze of the 80s, now we seem to have a corrollary in the types of demonic influences/manifestation videos you see on TikTok. 

Checked this out because I listened to Kara Swisher on the Ezra Klein podcast. I was like "wow, this lady's a real hater! I gotta go read her book." I was disappointed that there wasn't as much hatred in this book as in her interviews she's been doing about it. Swisher's hatred of the big tech CEOs seems to be rooted in a feeling disappointment that they're leaning into fascism the way they are given that she has drank the Kool Aid on them being "geniuses." It's interesting to see a democrat turn on these guys after about two decades of doing journalism that helped their cause. I don't necessarily agree with her opinion about them, which again, seems to be the idea that these dudes are actually geniuses who've been tainted somehow by fascism. It's not surprising to me that a bunch of tech CEOs fully bought into capitalism would stick with it and rebrand when capitalism is going the direction its going. Swisher seems to have "surprised pikachu face" about that. 

A lot of pages of saying the same set of principles over and over again, but in different environments (e.g. work, relationships, social). Helpful concrete recommendations on how to make your phone dumber, which has already helped me a lot. 

Wow! Two years ago, I tried to read this, thought it was average and ended up not finishing. For some reason, these stories really hit now.

I've been thinking a lot about whether characters have a change happen to them at the end of a story (what makes a good end, etc etc). Really struck by Saunders' stories where the characters don't change in their outlook, specifically Al Roosten, the Semplica Girl Diaries, and Home. I remember I got stuck on these in my first read. There is something very raw about how the narrators in these stories have these running dialogues in their heads about how much they want to change (Home not so much, but it seems to be implied), which then contributes to the inertia that causes them not to, and then they don't. You'd think this wouldn't make for a very good story, but Saunders exposes this process in such a complete way. It hits even harder when you hit the title story at the end, about two characters similarly bogged down with baggage and expecting not to change, and then...they do!

Also so impressed by how the absurdity of bureaucracy features in these, which I suppose hits harder now that I've been in the workforce longer. 

Provides a tight thesis on how the capitalist soup we live in leads to bureaucracy, affective disorders, and general cultural weirdness. Oddly prescient. Some of his citations predict things like the glut of movie remakes and sequels right now, as well as just...the existence of something like Buzzfeed. This functions as a good primer on ideas from Zizek, Badiou, and Deleuze and Guattari, and I have some good ideas about what I want to read next in this category. I suspect that this was also a good vocabulary dump intro to some of the ideas in anti-capitalist philosophy (e.g. Big Other). 

Cons: 
- Gets really ranty in the affective disorders section. This man hates his students. 
- There are some ideas I don't really buy into, like the section on paternalism, and it being needed to have a thriving culture. Idk about that, though I do think Fischer expanded the definition of paternalism significantly while making this argument. 
- Made me realize that a lot of my ideas about freedom of choice and work-flexibility are Post-Fordist neolib ideas. Sad.