deathbedxcv's reviews
52 reviews

“We want to confess, and you’re going to be our confessional. We want to write our testament, and you’re going to be our notaries. We want to say goodbye, and you’re going to be our next of kin.”

Olga Ravn’s ‘The Employees’ has lines like the one above that are so beautiful and bleak and sad, but then there are other lines like Statement 18’s, “What are cookies?” And you start to laugh uncontrollably on the train, cause like wtf, but then you’re brought back into the story. Because they aren’t really asking, “what are cookies?” They are asking a question, which we as humans have never had to ask, something a humanoid can only ask. ‘The Employees’ is a collection of statements from the human and humanoid crew of the Six Thousand Ship. They talk about what they do all day. Some do laundry, other’s cook, some are funeral directors, etc. But then there comes a day when the crew picks up these weird objects from the planet New Discovery. They never explicitly tell us what these objects are. They just describe them. Some hate them, some love them. Some have sexual feelings towards them. Some don’t care about them. And some see them as their children, which the expedition to New Discovery has separated them from.

I would highly recommend this book. It’s funny as fuck sometimes and sad as fuck sometimes. It’s interesting because there are moments that feel so human from the humanoids. For example, this one also from statement 18, “All I want is to be assimilated into a collective, human community where someone braids my hair with flowers and white curtains sway in a warm breeze.” Statement 18 has to be one of my favorites.

Seriously couldn’t put this book down, but I was forced to because of society!

Now I have to ask myself, What are cookies?

“Well, doesn’t really matter what you think, I mean, I care, I do, I want you to listen to this, here me out, but it’s not really important how you feel about it all in the end…it’s happened now.”

‘iphigenia in orem’ is the first play in Neil Labute’s three one-act collection, ‘Bash: Latter-Day Plays’. It is a modern retelling of the story of Iphigenia, who in Ancient Greek mythology is the daughter of King Agamemnon and is sacrificed by him so that his troops can reach Troy. In Labute’s play, a young man retells his own story of family sacrifice to an unknown listener (us, the audience?). He’s an Utah business man, early 30s, who committed something so horrid to keep his job. And he tries to rationalize his actions to us, or maybe to himself because as he states, “it’s not really important how [we] feel about it.”

The language in this play is very normal, like a friend talking to you. I mean I wouldn’t be this guy’s friend because he just sounds like some white business man that likes sports and movies, and was probably in a Frat in college, etc. But I guess this means that the characterization is on point.

But going back to the plot, I think it’s very interesting to connect losing a job to fighting a war. Because, and especially in capitalistic US, if you lose your job you might as well lose everything. And I’m not saying that what the young man did in the play is right but I can totally see how someone might have a moment of desperation stemming from the potential loss of income.

“O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”

Another gothic banger to check off of the necessary for life reading list! ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ by Robert Louis Stevenson is a Novella which tells the story of distinguished saintly-wouldnthurtafly Dr. Henry Jekyll and evil Purefuxkingrage666 Mr. Edward Hyde through multiple narrators, with the main narrator being lawyer and friend to Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Gabriel John Utterson. Dr. Jekyll is the complete opposite of Mr. Hyde, or so we think. I feel like this book is so much a part of our literature lexicon that it seems kinda foolish to hide how it ends, but I think it’s still nice to keep the mystery alive. So shh from me.

This gothic mystery drops subtle hints throughout, which to some readers might leave themselves shaking their heads, but I think that’s what makes it good. Imagine when this Novella first came out? I feel like a lot of people must’ve lost their minds at the twist.

Also, it’s not possible for me not to connect this to Frankenstein—after having read it and fallen in love with Mary Shelley’s novel. But I see Dr. Jekyll as a sort of Victor Frankenstein-Prometheus esque character, who faces the consequences of their actions. For example, these ‘monsters’ didn’t ask to be born, and now that they live and breathe of course they’re gonna wanna be individuals and do everything to live comfortably.

“Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds but was unable. Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.”

Is it possible to fall in love with a novel? I ask that seriously. Is it possible? For this is what I feel with Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’. This text written by an 18yearold for a horror story competition has made me feel so young. More than gothic horror, this is gothic romance between the reader and the writer!

With every line, every space, every indentation, that my eyes ran across, I fell more and more in love. The language that Shelley uses is incomparable to any other piece of literature that I have read. She puts this immense sense of despair and romance in both Victor Frankenstein and his Monster, making us choose which one is the most evil. Who is the actual monster in this tragedy? Is it God who abandoned his creation? Or is it the child who curses the world and their parent for abandoning them.

Man as God. God as a college student way in over his head. God as the hubris that afflicted Icarus and Frankenstein alike.

I urge you to read this and fall in love with it that I have. Read it and rethink everything you’ve read before and everything that you will read next!

“For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.”

Maggie Nelson’s lyrical essay/prose poetry/poetry collection ‘Bluets’ was recommended by someone very close to me. It’s made up of 240 sections, or propositions, based on the speaker’s affinity for the color and all things blue. The speaker talks about blue in regards to philosophy, time, history, sexuality, depression, loyalty, friendship, and more. The speaker discusses blue in terms of Joni Mitchell, Goethe, Leonard Cohen, the crack epidemic, and other famous people/events.

Two key plot lines, for lack of a better word at the moment, is the speaker taking care of her friend and the speaker recovering from a heavy break up. But there is no plot.

There are so many wonderful lines, if there wasn’t a character limit I would put them all down, but here are a few I like:

“If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.”

“The ink and the blood in the turquoise water: these are the colors inside the fxcking.”

“According to Dionysius, the Divine Darkness appears dark only because it is so dazzlingly bright—a paradox I have attempted to understand by looking directly at the sun and noticing the dark spot that flirts at its center.”

This collection is really hxrny and poetic sometimes—such is a plus for me.

Sarah Kane’s ‘Complete Plays’ include ‘Blasted’, ‘Phaedra’s Love’, ‘Cleansed’, ‘Crave’, ‘4.48 Psychosis’, and ‘Skin’. Kane is well known as a prominent female voice in the in-yer-face movement of 1990s British drama.

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“Gun was born here and won’t die. Can’t get tragic about your arse. Don’t think your welsh arse is different to any other arse [Redacted]. Sure you haven’t got any more food, I’m fucking starving.”

Sarah Kane’s ‘Blasted’ premiered on January 12, 1995 at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London. The Daily Mail called it “a disgusting feast of filth” and it was initial dismissed by many other critics as a shock play. I learned about Kane’s ‘Blasted’ from a disturbing books Iceberg, which placed many of her plays at Level 4.

Although I do agree with it being called a “disgusting feast of filth,” because at the end of the day the play wasn’t produced by Disney and it has multiple instances of war and SA, I believe that to call it just filth is extremely short sighted. Akin to Martha Rosler’s ‘House Beautiful’ which used collage to bring the atrocities of the Vietnam War into 1960s American home life, Kane’s ‘Blasted’ does the same—extremely graphically—in “a very expensive hotel room in Leeds—the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world.” The play follows Ian, 45yrold tabloid journalist, and Cate, 21yrold. Ian is extremely extremely extremely racist and patriotic—go figure—and he has bought Cate to the hotel room. Cate stutters and speaks in a way that Wikipedia consider emotionally fragile and intellectually simple. The entire play takes place in the hotel room. Later a Soldier enters the room.

There’s a stage direction; “Cate (Smiles a big smile, friendly and non-sexual.)” which I find to be extremely telling of the plays main idea and focus.

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“I know what I am. And always will be. But you. You sin knowing you’ll confess. Then you’re forgiven. And then you start all over again. How do you dare mock a God so powerful? Unless you don’t really believe.”

Kane’s next play—which premiered on May 15, 1996 at the Gate Theatre in London—‘Phaedra’s Love’ is described by David Greig as, “brittle and full of bleak insight, [the play] contains some of Kane’s wittiest dialogue.” I do agree with this. And as soon by the quote I’ve chosen, Kane’s brittle and bleak and witty insight/dialogue really makes one rethink everything. ‘Phaedra’s Love’ is a perverted and brutal retelling of the Ancient Greek tragedy, ‘Hippolytus’, by Euripides. Kane’s version focuses more on Hippolytus, while Euripides’ version focuses more on Phaedra. It tells the story of Phaedra, who has fallen in love with her fat, overly sexual, stepson Hippolytus. Like in Euripides’ original, Hippolytus rejects his stepmother’s advances. There’s a lot of SA in this play.

Greig adds, “in Phaedra and Hippolytus, Kane marked out the two poles that are the extremes of the human response to love. She also exposed the bitter irony, which is that those of one pole are driven to seek out those of the other.” This play has extreme forms of love. From the obsessed to the unwanted. From the passive to the aggressive. But truly, if we disregard certain plot points, the only thing that differentiates Kane’s and Euripides’ is that Kane was willing to show the extreme violence on stage while Euripides wasn’t. I guess this is what they meant by in-yer-face theatre.

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“I’m a dealer not a doctor.”

‘Cleansed’ had its first showing on April 30, 1998 at the Royal Court Theatre. If you thought ‘Blasted’ was fuxked up, then oof will you be really surprised by this one. It’s made up of 18 scenes, each more fuxked up than the one before. The character that holds them all together is Tinker, a drug dealer/doctor/not a doctor, who is sadistic and nightmarish.

It was really hard to make sense of this play at first because there’s so much happening and Kane gives us no context—having each reader create their own interpretation. I read up on one interpretation by Dan Rebellato (from Wikipedia of course what do you think this is a school???) and he states, “there's certainly a way of seeing ‘Cleansed’ as enfolding entirely in the dying mind of Graham as he takes the lethal dose of crack at the end of scene 1.” And so if we consider this interpretation then it becomes sort of a more unified story.

I think this has to be Kane’s most violent play. She uses violence in a way that makes you think about the human psyche; that of your peers and of yours. Kane apparently wrote this play when she was really in love.

What’s also interesting about this play is the absolutely poetic and almost completely impossible stage directions. For example there are flowers that magically grow out of the stage, rats that carry body parts, and a blinding sun. If I ever have the pleasure of seeing this play live I would love to see how directors interpret these stage directions.

Another thing that is interesting is that Kane stated that she was inspired to write this play after reading Roland Barthes’ ‘A Lover’s Discourse’, who connected rejected love to the being a prisoner in Dachau—the first Nazi concentration camp.

All I have to end this with is wtf, that was a really crazy ending!! Also I think Tinker is a fuxked up Tinker Bell.

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“If you died It would be like my bones had been removed. No one would know why, but I would collapse.”

‘Crave’, first performed on August 13, 1998 at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, is a departure from Kane’s classic hyperviolence. Although this play has themes of sexual assault, eating disorders, drug addiction, and more—it does not have stage directions which call on the actors to perform violently. Supposedly Kane first presented this play under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon so that it would not be associated with her earlier work and their graphic violence. Like nobody gets their eyes sucked out of their head in this one lol.

There are no character descriptions. The characters are simply named C, M, B, and A. But I feel that it’s easy to see what kind of person would play them by paying attention to the way that the character speaks and what they speak about. For example, I believe M is a mature woman, maybe about 40, who is worried about growing older. A is an abusive person, who tries to gaslight and say sweet things to get you back. B is a young man—I feel this just by the way the character talks, I don’t really see an older person or a woman talking like that. And C is either a child that has been abused, or a young woman that has been abused. It’s really hard to tell if the characters are addressing each other or if they are all having some sort of monologue which presents itself as a dialogue. Sometimes it feels like M is talking with B, or A is speaking to C, but I can’t be too sure.

‘Crave’ is weird to say the least. There’s no plot, but there is a plot. It’s seems time linear, but then it doesn’t. The characters speak to each other, but then they don’t. But I think this is what is interesting about it because you’re forced to create your own interpretations. Unlike Kane’s previous work, which literally presented violence to the audience, the audience is now forced to interpret it. It’s like what one of the characters states, ““And if this makes no sense then you understand perfectly.”

Although I find all of Kane’s play to have some sort of poetic language in them, this is the one that I find more poetic.

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“I dreamt I went to the doctor’s and she gave me eight minutes to live. I’d been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour.”

“My mind is torn by lightning as it flies from the thunder behind”

‘4.48 Psychosis’ is Sarah Kane’s last play, and is considered by many to be her suicide note as she ending up taking her own life, after many attempts, on February 20, 1999. ‘4.48 Psychosis’ was performed by the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs on June 23, 2000.

This play is unlike any other play I’ve read both on the page and performance. It has no stage directions. It has no characters. It has no acts. So why does everyone call it a play, and not a poem or something like that? Although the play is extremely poetic, it’s important to note that Kane had always been a playwright and not a poet. And as indicated in all her other plays before, “stage directions in brackets ( ) function as lines.” I believe there are actually multiple instances of stage direction, they just don’t have the brackets.

Is the play one huge rant, one exploding and imploding monologue? Is the play a discussion between multiple people, or is one person talking at multiple people? Is the play Kane’s resignation letter from life? “Yes” to it all. “No” to it all. ‘4.48 psychosis’ is Kane’s attempt at trying to make sense of how she’s feeling. It’s extremely poetic and depressingly creative babbling. It’s a long sentence not destined to explain anything, only to state what she was feeling at that moment at 4:48am.

I compare ‘4.48 Psychosis’ to Henri Roorda’s ‘My suicide’ which is a piece of literature also written prior to the author taking their own life. I will say the same thing about Kane’s play as I said about Roorda’s essay; “to be able to critique anything as dark as this would leave anybody feeling taciturn.”

This play cannot be given a proper summary—you’ll just have to read it or watch it.

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“Over and over, as hard as he can, hatred and revulsion all over his face, blood pouring from his head.”

In ‘Skin’, a short film which Kane wrote the screenplay for and premiered on Channel 4 on June 17, 1997, Billy is a skinhead. A racist. He wears cherry red Doc Marten’s with red laces. He rarely eats and is painfully thin.

This short film follows Billy’s day as he wakes up in the morning, hangs out with his fellow racists, and hangs out with Marcia, a black woman that feeds him dog food.

It’s an interesting commentary about race in England. Billy acts one way with the skinheads, and another way with Marcia. He Beats a black man to a pulp, and it is a black man that saves Billy’s life.

A quick look-up of the 10 minute film presents us with some interesting facts about it, one of them being that it had an original airtime of 9:40pm but was pushed to 11:35pm because television executives were worried about the depictions of violence and racism. Which doesn’t surprise me because the screenplay is very violent and deals with racism. But like Kane said about her plays before, it’s like people are more angry about the representation of violence than the actual violence.

“God preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already”

So many times have I tried to read Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ but failed to do so because of distracting youth and distracting life. But finally I made it my duty, after finding this copy in my local outdoor library, to read this book. And now I am very glad that I did. This gothic novel—this gothic masterpiece—is so amazing. The way it’s structured through epistolary and with no main character, but with a main enemy, is wonderful and honestly refreshing even for a novel that’s centuries old. So much happens in this novel—like there’s ships and cemeteries and superstitious people and wolves and this zoöphagous person.

I can’t say anything more than to read this. I highly recommend it. I could not put it down, and I had to keep reading it.

I hope I give off Quincy P. Morris vibes.

“I swiped otjize from my forehead with my index finger and knelt down. Then I touched the finger to the sand, grounding the sweet smelling red clay into it. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered”

‘Binti’ by Nnedi Okorafor has got to be one of the greatest books I have ever read in my entire life. I’m joking I think this book might be in my top 5 now. I’ve never read a book that mixes the long traditions of a people and space travel, and aliens. Okorafor does an incredible job of making her story feel like it’s from the past, present, and future.

‘Binti’ tells the story of the titular character and her journey to Oomza University, one of the most prestigious schools in the entire galaxy. It’s a long journey that her family warns her not to take. As a Himba woman, her traditions are strong. She has never left her home and is anti war. Binti faces tragedy, gets involved in a war between the Meduse and Khoush, and sacrifices one of the most important things to her and her people.

Binti also faces prejudices from Khoush and other people who are ignorant to her traditions. They ridicule her otjize, which is a red clay made up the water and the sands of her home. But little do they know of the power that these substance holds.

I highly recommend reading this, and I can’t wait to read the next two books in Okorafor’s trilogy.

“In a cold dawn, in a cold house, Bond Rogers sat, watching through her own tears her son grieve the loss, in less than two years, of two fathers”

I came to read Glendon Swarthout’s 1975 western classic ‘The Shootist’ after it was recommend by TikTok user Jeninsight. In her video she described Swarthout’s novel as Red Dead Redemption II’s biggest influence. Having had fallen in love with RDR2, wow, almost 4 years ago, i just had to get my hands on ‘The Shootist’.

John Bernard Books is The Shootist, not the assassin, and not the killer. Books only shoots if he’s threatened. But he’s not the only shootist in the world—this one comes in the form of Prostate Cancer. And this is a shootist that Books can’t kill even with his Remingtons. Or can he?

This book really does make you feel like you’re in an Wild West movie. The gunfights in the saloons, the carriages, the horse rides. And I appreciated the relationship with Books and the Rodgers’ family (Mother Bond and Son Gillom).

To read a book about a man essentially dying from page 1 to 213, and to see him try so hard to die of his own accord, the only way he knows how, was insane.

“So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.”

I’ve always wanted to read H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” cause it’s a really fucking cool book akin to what Doctor Who does. Now that I’ve read it, it’s way more than a really fucking cool book about time travel—it’s covert Marxist literature about the future of Capitalism and its affect on the human race. Such a divide does our dear capitalism create that the nevernamed Time Traveller gets first hand experience of two different worlds in the year 802,701. I would like to speak more on this, but then I feel this would give away most of the story—and I fear that I’ve already have.
The structure of Wells’ 1895 seemingly communist utopia novel is also interesting, because it’s really just the Time Traveller retelling what he saw in the future to friends/whatever they are to him. From chapter 3 to 11 the Time Traveller recounts everything to us. It’s literally one big quotation mark until page 109. And I think that’s pretty cool because there’s no way for us to verify if the Time Traveller is being honest or is talking out of his ass.