some reads

[a_flyleaf]

This was supposed to be a short post (“some reads, some writes”) and then the reading rec section turned into like, four-ish (not-quite-)book reviews in a bigass trenchcoat. Cut cut, motherfuckers.

reads

Random recs from recent, all of which made me Think for some reason or another:

• The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka, translated by Donna Freed
  Found this a few weeks ago whilst perusing the library, and decided I should really get a firsthand taste of what that cockroach story’s about. Spoiler alert, he’s not a cockroach, and in fact Kafka specifically did not want the character visualized and I feel deeply cheated in retrospect. Also, I did not realize the story would be so goddamn depressing, or at least that’s how I read it; ultimately I was reminded of this video essay on the 1986 film The Fly, one of those movies I know entirely through such analyses (this constitutes a majority of my media familiarity, ngl).
  Toils of being a bug aside, I enjoyed the other stories here! I had no idea what to expect, having only vaguely osmosed idea that “kafkaesque” is used to describe surreal shit. “The Judgment” and “A Country Doctor” stood out to me as particularly surreal (the former for the ending; the latter for… everything, really); and “In the Penal Colony” is going to stick with me for a long, long time.
  Freed concludes the anthology with a translator’s note, which my freshly-language-intrigued self found especially enlightening. On which note, one more link for your buck: an archived website-lecture on the craft of translation, with the specific part linked using “Die Verwandlung” as a case study.
• assorted writings by the internet presence called Froge
  POV: You are hopping from Reading Page to Reading Page in a questionable simulacra of the Tumblr Dashboard. You stumble upon a link to (paraphrasing, as the source has since been lost to memory and browser history) a “10kb gallery.” You click a random piece and the entirety of the description has nigh-fuckall to do with the art on display, but something about the writing grips you anyway.
  You spend the rest of your day reading this person’s various writings, and also drop the second-person schtick what is this Homestuck.
  “Froge” is someone whose website I’ve stumbled upon before, ages ago; hell if I remember when, how, or any particular pieces that stood out to me at the time. But I liked it back then enough to get sucked in for a few hours, and boy did history repeat itself this time. The entirety of the 10kB Gallery is an exercise in flipping copyright the bird, in which the artist reappropriates apparently-random images from across the interwebz, remakes them in 10kB or less, and then posts them as the thinnest visual veneer to write about whatever they want for the rest of the page. Fascinating shit. I didn’t read it in its entirety (or the rest of Froge’s archive, for that matter; I’d be glued to the screen for several months without break at minimum, I think), but a personal favorite is 0015 “Smooches”, which dissects cringe and features gay horses.
  The 10kB Gallery seems to have run analogous to Froge’s indie game review site, Kratzen, of which I read relatively little but “Twenty Books Changed my Life” certainly caught my interest. (This will be important later.) And skipping to their most recent work, Frogesay features a goodbye letter from the entire persona. As someone who has a mildly strange relationship with online anonymity (ah, the tradeoff between the ability to compartmentalize to a frankly absurd, granular degree, and how that fares against increasingly eroding privacy defaults; and yet, both concepts vs true authenticity, what it means to be a full person with varied interests and ways of approaching the (digital) world)— Uh, needless to say, the whole idea of announcing and then commencing the death of one’s persona, because it no longer serves the person you’ve become… it Speaks To the [insert author’s name here], alright??
  Gnawing at the end of a tether forcing myself not to end this with some irreverent “anyway here’s a post [with some objectively ridiculous shitpost nonsense].” Mortifying ordeal of being sincere etc. etc. et al.
• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkemann
  Did you want more existentialism? Of course you do. This book I read back in late 2020/early 2021 (a weirdly specific date range which only sticks out because I mentioned it offhand in a blog post around the time. wack), and it has stuck with me since. Froge’s list of Books That Changed Their Life (see? told ya) reminded me of it, so I’m reading it again. Ah, finitude.
  This one speaks for itself, I feel. I like reading things like this every so often, the kind of idea that kicks you in the teeth but then makes you realize life’s been kicking your metaphorical teeth this whole time. Jury’s still out on what to do about that, but the kinder of these reads (including this book) will offer some form of solace. Easier read than done, of course, but they’re ideas worth chewing on.
• “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny” by RS Benedict & “The Death of Sex” by Haley Nahman
  These articles aren’t related (shrek-meme-they-dont-even-link-to-each-other.jpg) but they are related, y’feel? They fuck. These articles fuck, in the Hip New Slang-y way of saying they’re Pretty Damn Cool, and they fuck in the sense that they’re not about sex (direct, physical action) but they are about sex (desire, mess, I don’t want to say “being human” because asexuals are tired of that nonsense but bear with me and be a bit less literal for a second, ok? being an animal who is alive and likes things; ravishes them, even, in one way or another).
  The latter article concerns trends and life through a screen; the former, meanwhile, tears into shifting norms of, well, what’s normal, specifically in Hollywood’s increasingly-idealized eye. I am linking them both in the same section anyway because Nahman’s definition of “sexlessness” stuck with me, and seems very much related (albeit on a smaller scale) to the too-idealized-to-be-human trends discussed in “Everyone Is Beautiful.”
  (This rec is brought to you by: conversation with someone who I’ve been talking to here on Dreamwidth, but am not sure is ok with being linked here. If you’re here: hello, and thanks ^^)

Anyway! I thought that was gonna be like a paragraph per, and it has now been -checks watch- nearly 2 hours since I started writing here, jesus. There’s technically nothing stopping me from merging topics with reckless abandon again, and I am very glad longform posts are the norm here, but it feels like an appropriate time for a break anyway. Split post ahoy~

Comments

[jellyfishlover]

THE 10K GALLERY! I stumbled across that a while ago as well, and man it does tend to suck you in! I was meaning to look at the other works by Degenerates / froge, and promptly forgot to do so. Man, the eulogy for their persona... conceptually it appeals to me a lot, and the execution of it lives out to those appeals. What a graceful + artful way to take an internet persona out! Thanks for reminding me of this site!

RE: "The Death of Sex"'s definition of sex definitely links well between the articles, like you said! It's a really good angle on trying to get at the core of that hard-to-capture-feeling that seems to be absent in modern, mainstream items and venues...

[a_flyleaf]

It is such a cool gallery/project, right?! I think the gallery was Froge’s main foray into visual work, although they wrote a visual novel at one point (which, uh, only seems to be optimized for Linux. Fair play, honestly).

And yeah, having a whole eulogy for a persona is a work in its own right. Usually (afaik) people just quietly drop handles, change names, and no one’s the wiser, or if there is an announcement it’s because some drama went down and they are making a point of saying goodbye. (Not that Froge’s writing doesn’t allude to rocky social waters, but the decision was clearly more premeditated….)

Re:hard-to-capture-feeling, yeah. Something something people want things, and sometimes those things are -gasp- not friendly to modern censors and/or “convenience.” But then we get stuck with what Hollywood and CEOs and whoever think people want, and then it’s normalized >8V Bluh!