Port over some additional files from old site

Author: devalog

_posts/2020-06-13-normalpeople.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "*Normal People* is about shifting power dynamics, not love"
+date: 2020-06-13
+---
+
+*Normal People* is about the power dynamics that are present inside and outside of a romantic relationship and how they shift over time (over years and also over moments) because of the relationship itself, external factors, and individual factors like insecurity and mental health.
+
+What it isn't is a "love story for the millenial generation." When people say "love story," they usually use it to describe a story about love that's positive or idealistic (*Normal People* isn't either one of these) – or if they don't, they qualify the phrase more (like "tragic love story" or "dark love story"). Or like "millennial love story." That's such a generic phrase. What do people mean when they use that phrase? That it's supposed to characterize a generation? *Normal People* doesn't characterize a generation – or if it does, it doesn't characterize a generation as much as I think it characterizes like college relationships and relationships in general.
+
+When people describe *Normal People* as a "millennial love story," they don't get the core of the actual book. Connell and Marianne's relationship isn't a very healthy, romantic, or ideal relationship most of the time. But that's the point, and that's what the book is about. More specifically, I think the book is actually about:
+
+* How two individually messed up people (Connell and Marianne, and also Connell and Helen to some extent) overcome and don't overcome their personal struggles to relate to, be with, and show up for each other.
+
+* How people (like everyone in the book) fail to communicate over and over again, even though they both desperately want to communicate with each other. How people (Connell and Marianne) won't let themselves be loved even when it's right in front of them because of their own personal neuroses and insecurities
+
+* How two flawed people (Connell and Marianne) who aren't quite healthy themselves can find themselves in an unhealthy and healthy relationship with each other, at different times and different moments.
+
+* How timing and mental health and security often determine who you end up with.
+
+* How obsession and idealization of someone (Connell and Marianne's idealizations of each other) can lead you away from good relationships (Connell's relationship with Helen) and into bad ones (Marianne's relationships with Lukas and Jamie) and back into good ones.
+
+* How friends (Peggy, namely) can really mess with your romantic relationships, or be models for good ones, or be there for you, or be there for you only sometimes.
+
+* How societal expectations and norms, both real and perceived, can positively and negatively affect romantic relationships and friendships.
+
+Not all relationships are as on and off and up and down and painstakingly uncommunicative as Marianne and Connell's relationship. But I think all people and all relationships struggle with some of the same things that Marianne and Connell struggle with, at least at some point in time.
+
+I've heard some people say that the writing in Normal People is either not good or just mediocre. I mean, it's not like lush prose or anything, but I think Normal People is really well-written. More specifically, I think Rooney's writing style emphasizes and adds to the story she is telling. I think sometimes her writing can seem disjointed or vanilla or incomplete, but I think that just illustrates the bad communication between Marianne and Connell and other characters, the way they don't quite click in the moment or how they say what they think the other person wants to hear instead of what they actually mean. Rooney's writing also reflects how Marianne and Connell are both unreliable narrators – the writing isn't inconsistent, it's just that often, Marianne's and Connell's perspectives about the world around them and how other people perceive them are fundamentally unreliable.
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_posts/2021-02-04-wharton.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "*The House of Mirth* and *The Awakening* have so many similarities"
+date: 2021-02-04
+---
+
+I read *The House of Mirth* and *The Awakening* almost back to back (one book in between – Susan Choi's *Person of Interest*) unintentionally, but I was totally struck by how similar the two books are. *The Awakening* was published in 1899, while *The House of Mirth* was published just six years later in 1905. The protagonists, Lily Bart and Edna Pontellier, are also incredibly similar (and, interestingly, almost exactly the same age – Edna turns 28 during the course of The Awakening; Lily is 29 when *The House of Mirth* begins) – both are in rather precarious positions because of both their own actions and their own yearnings for something more than conventional social life, and both end their own lives because they are unable to find fulfillment through men and society and unwilling to conceive of a life outside of those constraints.
+
+Lily Bart, the protagonist of *The House of Mirth*, has the clarity to both see her precarious position and realize that she's really not suited for a life without wealth. Because of these two things, she knows she must marry for wealth. She knows what she wants and has the social skills to get what she wants (a proposal from a rich man), and beyond that, she has so many opportunities to get exactly what she wants. The issue is, she always gets cold feet at the last moment. Every time she's about to get someone to propose to is on the verge of accepting a proposal, she gets a conscience and starts to feel bad that she'll just be marrying for wealth, or she'll think she can do better, or she thinks oh wait, maybe she doesn't need wealth, and backs out. And then after she gets cold feet, she has the same realizations (that she really does want luxury and society) all over again and starts the whole useless cycle again, progressively with less and less leverage. She becomes doomed to a "dingy" life and unlike her foil, Gerty Farish, she's unable to make peace with her circumstances. Then, she dies.
+
+Unlike Lily, Edna Pontellier in *The Awakening* is already married and has two kids. She slowly awakens to the dissatisfaction of her life – her husband is nice enough, but expects total submissiveness; she's expected to live solely for children in a way that seems impossible to her. Her "awakening" is the result of a passionate lust for Robert Lebrun, who returns her affection but is first hesitant and ultimately unwilling to act on that passion. Like Lily, Edna has a foil – Madame Reisz, a rather disagreeable musician who lives (it seems happily) alone in a small apartment (the descriptions of this apartment match closely with the descriptions of Gerty Farish's apartment!)
+
+Both Lily and Edna find solace at Gertie Farish's and Madame Reisz's apartments, respectively, but neither are able to fully give up their claims to conventionality and society in the way their foils do. Neither women are satisfied by the standard option that society provided to women: marry and be part of society. Both women can comprehend an existence that is entirely separate to their lives (Gertie Farish and Madame Reisz), but both cannot fully give up their previous, conventional lives – Lily cannot stop wanting wealth (which would come only through marriage) and Edna cannot stop wanting a marriage-like relationship (Robert).
+
+A lot of people have written articles about both *The House of Mirth* and *The Awakening* that are a lot more eloquent and nuanced than this one. In particular, I liked [this article](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/the-house-of-mirth-jennifer-egan-on-edith-whartons-masterpiece) about *The House of Mirth* and [this article](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/books/review/kate-chopin-the-awakening.html) about *The Awakening*.
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_posts/2021-10-29-booksoct.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "The books I read in October 2021"
+date: 2021-10-29
+---
+
+...in chronological order.
+
+# #1: *Wuthering Heights* by Emily Bronte 
+
+I first read Wuthering Heights when I was 15 and hated it. I read it again this month and loved it. The narrative structure of the book is interesting and pretty convoluted, and probably the main reason I hated the book when I was younger. (Though, it's a major reason I liked the book so much this time around!) Lockwood (a neighbor) is the narrator, but the bulk of the book is Lockwood recording a story that Nelly (the housekeeper) tells him, and within that story, Nelly sometimes narrates the contents of letters other people wrote her or things other people said – it's a first person narration that almost becomes more like an omniscient third person narration. It gives me some distance from the characters and emphasizes how self-contained and alien their world is. They seem separate from the rest of the world, which is sort of how I imagine the Bronte family was, actually.
+
+Over the course of the novel, Catherine Earnshaw becomes Catherine Linton and gives birth to her daughter, Catherine Linton, who becomes Catherine Heathcliff, who becomes, finally, Catherine Earnshaw. The whole book is about how the two Catherines are without Heathcliff, become intertwined with Heathcliff, and finally free themselves from Healthcliff. I found this circularity profoundly poetic and meaningful. Everything felt like fate, like predestination – every decision solely a point in the circle that brings Catherine Earnshaw back around to Catherine Earnshaw. This sense of Gothic, Romantic predestination book only made it more compelling to me.
+
+Lastly, I read some [very salty contemporary reviews](https://wuthering-heights.co.uk/reviews) of the book. In 1847, for example, a reviewer wrote the following in the *North British Review*: "Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read."
+
+# #2: *Eugene Onegin* by Alexander Pushkin
+
+After reading *Wuthering Heights*, I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole on [Byronic heroes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero). That brought me to some references to *Eugene Onegin*. *Eugene Onegin* is a novel in verse, which I found intriguing. Then, I just happened upon a copy in my local used bookstore a few days later. Fate! The book was great and surprisingly funny, though a little tedious to read in places mainly because I'm so unused to reading stuff in verse. One of my favorite funny stanzas was this one:
+
+"We all meandered through our schooling  
+haphazard; so to God be thanks,  
+It's easy, without too much fooling,  
+to pass for cultured in our ranks."
+
+I also found [Sir Charles Johnston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Johnston_(diplomat))'s "translator's note," which precedes the actual text, fascinating. The note describes how hard the translation problem of a Russian vernacular novel in verse: The original Russian text "depends on a lavish use not only of French and other words, but also of slang and of audacious Byronic-type rhymes. If the translator produces nothing comparable, he is emasculating his original. If he attempts to follow suit, he must do all he can to avoid the pitfalls of the embarrassing, the facetious and the arch." The note also discusses how Johnston tried to retain the "feel" of the book, which necessitated something compromising the literal meaning: "It can attempt to produce some substitute for the 'bloom' of the original, without which the work is completely dead."
+
+# #3: *This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind* by Ivan Doig
+
+After reading *Eugene Onegin*, I thought I could use a break from Byronic heroes. I'd picked up *This House of Sky* at my local used bookstore a few months ago. I loved *The Whistling Season*, also by Ivan Doig, which I read when I was probably 13 or 14. Feeling nostalgic, I read *Dancing at the Rascal Fair* earlier this year. It was rather a letdown, but I decided to give Ivan Doig another try and read *This House of Sky*. I'm so glad I did, because I enjoyed the book a lot. *This House of Sky* is an autobiography of Ivan Doig's childhood growing up in a remote ranching community in Montana, his relationship with his father and grandmother, and his choice to leave Montana, go to Northwestern, and become a journalist. I thought the book was less successful when it went deep into analyzing the characteristics of memory and nostalgia, but great when it stuck to the journalistic retelling of Ivan Doig's very interesting life. This is the first book Doig published – it seems like this book acted as a bridge from journalism to the fiction he almost exclusively wrote after This House of Sky.
+
+# #4: *Mary Olivier* by May Sinclair
+
+I bought a pristine hardcover first edition of *Mary Olivier* off of eBay for $32.00 (damn, Sinclair is so underrated!) after reading and loving *The Life and Death of Harriet Frean* and *Arnold Waterlow: A Life* a few months ago. The eBay seller messaged me and thoughtfully swindled me into buying another May Sinclair book, *The Tree of Life*! *Mary Olivier* was another "life of" book, as in, it chronicled the life of Mary Olivier from her infancy to her old age. Fun fact, *Mary Olivier* was published in 1919, in the same issue of Little Review as Ulysses! I got some major Virginia Woolf vibes from this book, but I liked this book better than any Woolf book I've read. ([Woolf apparently didn't like May Sinclair very much.](https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=asbookchapters)) Though published in 1919, the book takes place in the mid/late 1800s. Mary, the only girl in a family of four children, is completely torn between her devotion to her (pretty tiresome) mother and her love of philosophy. I found Mary's conflicting senses of duty really compelling, though I got a little bogged down in all of the Kant and [Spinoza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza) references. The book alternates between second person ("you") and third person ("she"). This was confusing to me at first, but then I realized that the "you" was happening in Mary's head (I think!), which was super cool – it's sort of her inner monologue, and it blends closely with the third person narration.
+
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