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Book: The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of
May. 6th, 2009 08:04 amI'm halfway through Thomas Disch's "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" and I'm not sure I can go on. I'm getting too depressed.
The phrase that keeps going through my mind is "irascible distance from fun" and I keep getting visions of an inverse Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson kept writing all those beautiful images while death was in the carriage or in the next room but we would focus on the fleeting joy (or at least, that's my impression of her, I haven't re-read her poems a whole lot since my middle school binge on them). Whereas in "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" I keep getting told that the author had fun reading the things or hanging out with the people but the analysis is all about the bits that aren't fun, or that aren't fun in retrospect.
It had to be depressing to write; it's also depressing to read.
The phrase that keeps going through my mind is "irascible distance from fun" and I keep getting visions of an inverse Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson kept writing all those beautiful images while death was in the carriage or in the next room but we would focus on the fleeting joy (or at least, that's my impression of her, I haven't re-read her poems a whole lot since my middle school binge on them). Whereas in "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" I keep getting told that the author had fun reading the things or hanging out with the people but the analysis is all about the bits that aren't fun, or that aren't fun in retrospect.
It had to be depressing to write; it's also depressing to read.
