deathbedxcv's reviews
53 reviews

“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.

“I need—more desperately than my children need me—a way of seeing in the dark. What way is this? … What dark is this? …”

‘Equus’ by Peter Shaffer is a 1975 Tony Award Winning play, which tries to make sense of the question, Why the fuck did 17 year old Alan Strang stab the shit out of six horses with a horsepick? Martin Dysart is the psychiatrist who tries to answer this question, but ends up asking even more questions about Religion, finding solace in a religion of one’s own making, the relationship between mother and son, father and son, socialism, religion versus socialism, sex, purity, sin, and the idea of Place.
And to speak on the idea of Place, Dysart does a great job of subverting the idea of setting, which then subverts the idea of character. The set has a simple introduction, “A square of wood set on a circle of wood,” but it encompasses multiple settings and multiple characters all at once. “All the cast of ‘Equus’ sits on stage the entire evening. They get up to perform their scenes, and return when they are done to their places around the set. They are witnesses, assistants—and especially a Chorus.”
I also love the literal characterization of the horses. “Any literalism which could suggest the cosy familiarity of a domestic animal—or worse, a pantomime horse—should be avoided.”
This was really fuckking good.

“No. My dog and I despise them. We’re hidden in our own secret life, concealed in our innermost wilderness…”

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‘The True Deceiver’ by Finnish-Swedish author and creator of the Moomins, Tove Jansson, begins on an ordinary dark winter morning, with snow still falling. What does it mean to lie? How bad is lying when it’s for something noble, in your heart, and for someone else? And is the oxymoronic title, ‘The True Deceiver,’ or honest deceiver, oxymoronic at all?

Jansson’s 1982 novel, translated to English from the Swedish by Thomas Teal in 2011, follows Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin; two completely different women from completely different walks of life. Katri is described as a yellow-eyed outcast, and Anna as a respected member of the village. The story also follows Mats, Katri’s brother, who I believe acts as a midpoint or common point between the two women.

The three words that I believe summarizes this novel are snow ❄️, deceit

‘Three Plays’ by dramatist and socialist Seán O’Casey includes; ‘Juno and the Paycock,’ ‘The Shadow of a Gunman,” and ‘The Plough and the Stars’. All of these plays feature 1910s Dublin working class. For this reason they are also considered O’Casey’s ‘Dublin Trilogy’.

* “I’m telling you for the last three weeks I haven’t tasted a dhrop of intoxicatin’ liquor. I wasn’t in ayther wan snug or dh’other—I could swear that on a prayer-book—I’m as innocent as the child unborn!” (Juno and the Paycock, pg. 14)

The first play, ‘Juno and the Paycock’, is the classic “What would happen if a poor family was awarded a large sum of money, more than they’ve ever had?” scenario—with the Irish Civil War as the backdrop and silent, but extremely active character. What I love about this play, and there’s a lot, is its language. How the characters talk to each other. How you can hear their accents in every word. I especially love the banter between Captain Jack Boyle and Juno Boyle—the classic married couple. Basically what happens is that a relative of Captain Boyle dies and leaves him with a huge amount of money in a Will, the Boyle family buys so many unnecessary things, and then all hell breaks loose. There’s more to it than that but I don’t want to give too much away. Like I said before, the dialogue is amazing.

* “And what danger can there be in being the shadow of a gunman?”

The second play in O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy, ‘The Shadow of A Gunman’, is a really sad one about a silly rumor—a play that could have ended happily in the first act if only honesty were a thing. But this ain’t no happy ever after; this is the Irish Civil fucking War and everything, even the sun, is a tragedy. I believe that O’Casey perfectly summarizes the relationship between his two mains, Donal Davoren and Seumas Shields, in the following sentence; “The aspect of the place is one of absolute untidiness, engendered on the one hand by the congenital slovenliness of Seumas Shields, and on the other by the temperament of Donal Davoren, making it appear impossible to effect an improvement in such a place.” They argue about religion, sacrifice, poetry, and love. RIP to a real one.

* “Ireland is greater than a mother […] Ireland is greater than a wife.”

The third play, ‘The Plough and the stars’, feels like the more comunal or community based of the three, which I believe makes it the most tragic. This four act play has multiple characters, many of which argue with each other. The Young Covey argues with Peter Flynn about socialism, and urges everyone to read Jenersky’s ‘Thesis on the origin, development, and consolidation of the evolutionary idea of the proletariat’. Bessie Burgess literally argues with fuckking everyone. And this all takes place during the Easter Rising of 1916. Here’s another sentence that I like:

“We’ll have to be brave, an’ let patience clip away th’ heaviness of the slow-movin’ hours, rememberin’ that sorrow may endure for th’ night, but joy cometh in th’ mornin’…Come on in, an’ I’ll sing to you, an’ you’ll rest quietly.”

“Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt”

—‘In the Dream House’ is a memoir written by Carmen Maria Machado which chronicles her struggles in a same sex abusive relationship. In the Afterword, Maria Machado illuminates her intent of writing ‘In the Dream House’ not as a “comprehensive account of contemporary research about same sex domestic abuse or its history” but as a “very rough, working attempt at a canon [that] will be a useful resource, in addition to honoring the work that has gone before.” The memoir is made up of multi-length vignettes each with a title comparing the dream house to something. For example, “dream house as a self help best seller,” or “dream house as lesbian pulp novel,” or “dream house as the queen and the squid.” And I think that by doing this, Maria Machado does two things; 1) she makes it posible for the reader to “understand”—for lack of a better word—her abuse though metaphor and simile, 2) she connects her abuse to common American culture aspects. And I think this does a great job of discussion same sex abuse as not something mystic but as something common as fucking dirt. Pain, abuse, and trauma is something very hard to read about let alone write, but I recommend this memoir to anyone that is willing and ready to read it.

“I am completely bewildered. Yesterday, at the very moment when I thought that everything was already disentangled, that all the X’s were found, new unknown quantities appeared in my equation”

* Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We’ is, as it’s 2012 Harper Voyager edition states, a page-turning SF adventure that predated Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and George Orwell’s ‘1984’. I personally had never heard of ‘We’ until one day I started researching obscure Russian science fiction novels online and strangely came upon ‘Utz’ by Bruce Chatwin—which I don’t believe is science fiction or Russian, I haven’t read it so I can’t say—and Zamyatin’s novel. It’s clear, after reading ‘We’, that Huxley and Orwell were biting Zamyatin’s ass, or jacking his swag, when they wrote and published their own novels. Yet, I ask myself, who—in their right mind—would not take every opportunity to mimic this epic 232 paged book? It follows the journal entries of D-503, the primary builder of the ‘Integral’, which in 120 days will be completed and will take flight to extraterrestrial planets so to “subjugate the unknown beings […] who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason.” But D-503 meets a woman—like they say in Spanish, “al azar”—named I-330, who starts putting thoughts of a different world into his head, and this is when/where things start to change…! This book was incredibly good and I can confirm it is a page turner. I would recommend it to everyone. The adventure is insane, but even just the literal words are as insane. Take this opening paragraph of D-503’s 23rd entry as an example, “It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never knew about them simply because this ‘once in a thousand years’ has come only today?”

“i am terribly bored/sometimes it is like seeing a bad movie/other days, more often, it's like having an acute disease/of the kidney”

* ‘Lunch Poems’ by American poet, musician, and Museum curator Frank O’Hara is a collection of his poetry from 1953-1964. From what I can tell, and from what the internet tells me as well, these poems were usually written by O’Hara during his lunch hour working at the Museum of Modern Art. This is something that the beginning of ‘Personal Poem’ can be used to prove, “Now when I walk around at lunchtime;” as well as it’s ending, “I wonder if one person out of 8,000,000 is thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi [Amiri Baraka] and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go back to work happy at the thought possibly so[.]” And it’s also in this poem that we get, at least I believe, to the heart, or stomach, of O’Hara’s poetic philosophy of Personism, which according to him has the one minimal duty of “address itself to one person (other than the poet himself).” And this is very true in O’Hara’s writing. I found that a lot of it is personal—or person based—even autobiographical. They also felt very conversational, with lines like, “You say that everything is very simple and interesting it makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great Russian novel does[.]” I absolutely love O’Hara’s writing because of this. It honestly feels like, after a while, I become like Frank O’Hara. Another thing that one realizes very quickly from this collection is that O’Hara knew a lot, and I mean a lotttttttt, of artists. He name drops left and right like it’s nothing. Anyway, another thing I will say is that this man knows how to write about love in the mundane sense of it all, and when you can do that, I think that’s incredible.

“Music calms me. I feel that it forgives me. I am sure that all the poets would forgive me. (I do not speak, of course, of those patriots who compose poems for the state.)”

* ‘My Suicide’ by Swiss anarchist and math teacher Henri Roorda, is a depressed man’s retelling of what he believes to be his mistakes which have led him to considering and ultimately taking his own life. Written in 1925 and given along with his actual ‘end note,’ Roorda offers critiques to both capitalistic and socialistic societies. Roorda speaks of the mundaneness and boredom of life, stating “I had an absolutely false idea of life. I attached too much importance to what is exceptional: enthusiasm, excitement, drunkenness. What occupies almost everything in a person’s life is daily monotonous tasks, hours of waiting, hours in which noth- ing happens. The normal man is he who knows how to vegetate.” It was interesting to read over what a man left over before he took his own life—to be able to critique something as dark as this would leave anybody feeling taciturn. I won’t say it’s good or it’s bad, it just is. One thing that stood out to me is Roorda’s disillusionment with the education system oh his time. He states, “The prospect of taking up my lessons again would depress me less if those who pay me said, “You will give these children the best of your thoughts.” I hardly resemble those civil servants who are proud to be “cogs” in the social machine. I need to be moved by the truths that I teach.” This was a short read, and Mr. Roorda lived a short life. One thing I believe is true, is that no matter what life is always worth living.

“[…] an eyebrow which, if ladies wrote sonnets to those of their lovers, might have been made the subject of such a piece of verse - and a light moustache that flourished upwards as if blown that way by the breath of a constant smile”

* ‘The Europeans’ by Henry James, is described as “essentially a comedy contrasting the behaviour and attitudes of two visitors from Europe with those of their relatives living in the 'new' world of New England’ by Wikipedia user Rmackenzie on August 18, 2005, and as “[…] an early example of James’s lifelong project of internationalizing the novel and his prescient anticipation of what now is a familiar world of permeable borders and pluralized identities,” by Andrew Taylor, senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh circa 2008. It follows Baroness Eugenia Münster and Felix Young—the European siblings—as they travel to Boston, Massachusetts to try to bag their cousins. I see this entire story as a competition between Eugenia and Felix to see who can basically fxck ehm *clears throat* marry one of their American cousins first so that they can attain an American fortune. One of them wins, but I won’t tell you who! This is my second time reading something written by Henry James, and it’s like they say 2nd times the charm! I really liked this one. I loved how James describe the different settings of Germany and Boston, and how every character was painted so vividly I could picture them in front of me. Henry James is a pretty good writer and if he ever decides to make a career out of it, I feel like he could do very well for himself.

“Tell your granddaddy what’s playing in your pretty brown head, my little melody. Name like a song. Like you were born and it was cause for the world to sing”
* ‘Red At The Bone’ by Jacqueline Woodson was for a lack of a better phrase or word, really fucking good holy shit. I swear if you haven’t read this already, go to your local library or your local book store and pick it up. Woodson’s words are beyond poetic. The way she forms this story through different perspectives all surrounding a Black Teen pregnancy in the 1990s was, and I’m sorry for using so many cliches, a Tour de France. I couldn’t stop reading it and I was really sad when it ended. Woodson also deals with race, generation gaps, wealth gaps, sexuality, and more! Although, I will say that the shift in perspectives was a bit jarring at first, I really appreciated the ones that were from the POV of the grandparents. It was like when your own grandma or grandpa tells you about their life…which is always something sweet to listen to.