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girlpdf's reviews
61 reviews
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
2.75
I find it difficult to articulate my thoughts about this book. It has a distant beauty, and moments which threatened to make the whole text feel worthwhile and rich. This did not rescue it for me, though. Too fragmented? Too brief? I can't be sure. Maybe I had my brain turned off.
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
4.75
Just shy of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion for me, but still completely ridiculous and nearly overwhelming in its scale, deilcacy, violence, and beauty. I actually think there were moments of this work that I liked perhaps the most of anything he's ever written, but as an overall novel it lost its cohesion and lagged a little at times. Did I care? No. That reviewer said it best when they described the treatment of love in this novel as feverish, but I can't stress enough how steady and careful the pacing is in this work. Every aspect of the fever is controlled. The prose is delirious, the story is utterly sane even in its most unlikely moments. MICHAEL ONDAATJE WHO ARE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History by Jaclyn Pryor
Digestible, broad-ranging, and, refreshingly enough, really, truly queer. I like that Pryor establishes several modes of queer time, including decolonial queer time. It was also deeply painful to read about so many performances that I would kill to watch and will never be able to :(
What hooked me was the analysis of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq as a temporal crisis, where grief is a stagnancy that straight (profit-based) time cannot afford. Initially, to pair this with the development of homophobia as a repsonse to stagnant boy/childhood seemed a little far-fetched to me, but Pryor made it work seamlessly . The moments in the third chapter where this analysis was linked in with Pryor's own performance, floodlines, (enraged that this was a) many years ago and b) in Texas) an odyssey of grief, transformation, and temporal renegotiation where "what is left reveals what is missing" was a very fulfilling moment in a beautifully-written work.
(Also didn't hurt that Pryor gave trans and lesbian histories the intimate, shared relationship they deserve!)
What hooked me was the analysis of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq as a temporal crisis, where grief is a stagnancy that straight (profit-based) time cannot afford. Initially, to pair this with the development of homophobia as a repsonse to stagnant boy/childhood seemed a little far-fetched to me, but Pryor made it work seamlessly . The moments in the third chapter where this analysis was linked in with Pryor's own performance, floodlines, (enraged that this was a) many years ago and b) in Texas) an odyssey of grief, transformation, and temporal renegotiation where "what is left reveals what is missing" was a very fulfilling moment in a beautifully-written work.
(Also didn't hurt that Pryor gave trans and lesbian histories the intimate, shared relationship they deserve!)
The Empty Space by Peter Brook
5.0
Contains perhaps my favourite summary of Artaud's philosophy ever: "A theatre working like the plague, by intoxication, by infection, by analogy, by magic…"
Still startling, even now, decades past what really should be its use-by-date. Brook writes for the director, the playwright, the actor, the critic, and the audience. He balances Marxist realism with hedonistic idealism; luxurious adoration of the past with urgent celebration of the present and future of theatre. Despite the many ways Brook's own practice failed us, there is so much to celebrate here: unwavering belief in the magic of theatre; great ammunition for a fierce defence of Beckett; meditations on architecture (a highlight—why are we building venues for rituals before the rituals exists?)
His work on the importance of an unreconcilable, internal opposition of Rough and Holy Theatre within a play is particularly fascinating, and is probably the first piece of writing championing the "uniqueness'" of Shakespeare that I've actually believed. Really, in and of itself, that's a feat to be celebrated.
Still startling, even now, decades past what really should be its use-by-date. Brook writes for the director, the playwright, the actor, the critic, and the audience. He balances Marxist realism with hedonistic idealism; luxurious adoration of the past with urgent celebration of the present and future of theatre. Despite the many ways Brook's own practice failed us, there is so much to celebrate here: unwavering belief in the magic of theatre; great ammunition for a fierce defence of Beckett; meditations on architecture (a highlight—why are we building venues for rituals before the rituals exists?)
His work on the importance of an unreconcilable, internal opposition of Rough and Holy Theatre within a play is particularly fascinating, and is probably the first piece of writing championing the "uniqueness'" of Shakespeare that I've actually believed. Really, in and of itself, that's a feat to be celebrated.