Nightwood | 
I read Nightwood for my podcast. It‘s considered the first lesbian novel and that is to its credit. However it wasn‘t my cup of tea. Mostly because it felt all over the place and at times the language is difficult to understand. Check out The Brown Girls Booking Podcast discussion, where Christi and I discuss identities, obsessions, and the masks we wear.
“I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”
Remembering Djuna Barnes on her birthday.
panI tried, I really did but I give up. I adore books from this period but this one is just too damn depressing.
""Well," said the doctor, "I have always thought I, myself, the funniest looking creature on the face of the earth; then I laid my eyes on Jenny--a little, hurried, decaying comedy jester, the face of a fool's-stick, and with a smell about her of mouse nests."" ?⚰
"She wanted to be the reason for everything, and so was the cause of nothing." ?
"Only severed could any part of her have been called "right."" ?
panNot the type of book you can just read and get easily lost in. I had to concentrate on every word otherwise I lost the point or thread (sometimes it felt like there wasn‘t much of one) but at the same time it‘s a novel that‘s best read if you just go with it. It‘s more of a ‘mood‘ book than one that focuses on the story. Its a bit of a strange one. I feel like I should have loved it but after the first 20 pages I didn‘t really enjoy reading it.
Drinking while reading this is either gonna be the worst or best idea 😂 I‘m liking it but at the same time I feel like I have no clue what‘s going on (two people that just met were married and had a baby in about 3 pages.)
Jeanette Winterson‘s introduction to this book is on point 👌
“Nightwood, peculiar, eccentric, particular, shaded against the insistence of too much daylight, is a book for introverts, in that we are all introverts in our after-hours secrets and deepest loves”.
Starting this beauty today!
#nightwood #DjunaBarnes #femaleauthors
The yogi teamonger dislikes this passage even as he drinks his latte ?: "In 1685 the Turks brought coffee into Vienna, and from that day Vienna, like a woman, had one impatience, something she liked. You know of course, that Pitt the Younger was refused alliance because he was foolish enough to proffer tea; Austria and tea could never go together. All cities have a particular and special beverage suited to them."
So excited to start this next one. This beautiful edition waited patiently on the shelf of Alias Books East in Atwater Village until I could afford her. Look at that gorgeous cover art! ❤️📖🤓
Thanks to all who‘ve posted their #cult5. It‘s got me thinking! I wanted to do all women authors (but ❤️ Hitchhikers, Infinite Jest & Slaughterhouse 5).
‘Cult‘ so tricky to define. For me, it‘s a book that not everyone has read or liked, so that if you meet someone and they say ‘oh yeah, I loved that too‘ you feel a special affinity. Classic: will stand the test of time. Here are mine (is Station 11 too mainstream? Let‘s discuss!)
panA rather hysterical novel of love and obsession in Europe in the twenties. The evocative language, the long, long sentences made that I didn't enjoy this book at all, while the main theme did interest me. #1001books
Strong, dense, poetical prose/style and demanding story about love (and with the strangest end ever).
#junetunz #Ikissedagirl
I've done and been everything that I didn't want to be or do--Lord, put the light out--so I stand here, beaten up and mauled and weeping, knowing I am not what I thought I was, a good man doing wrong, but the wrong man doing nothing much, and I wouldn't be telling you if I weren't talking to myself.
Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; [...]
Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past; before her the structure of our head and jaws ache -- we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers.
pickSublime but elusive, the story of the doomed love between two women, told in vivid prose. Paris is seedy, the characters flawed & Gothic. Barnes' writing gleams: her poetic wordplay & wit reminded me of Shakespeare; the confessional tone pre-dates Camus' 'The Fall', & the Woolf comparisons are apt too. Strong, dense, it refuses to be matter-of-fact, but feels searingly honest. I'm wiped out now!
"You, who should have had a thousand children and Robin, who should have been all of them; and Jenny the bird, snatching the oats out of love's droppings..."
So many exquisite moments in this book (but it has also wrecked me)!
"There was some derangement in her equilibrium that kept her immune from her own descent."
I fear things are not going to go well for Nora.
"The Catholic [church] is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her ..."
I've had Nightwood on my TBR since reading a biography of Peggy Guggenheim which details her friendship with Djuna Barnes. Now finally starting it!
#feistyfeb #artdeco
On a quiet Sunday- an extraordinary book and very good soup ... spoiling myself, before crazy Monday.
My contribution for #diversathon #ownvoices Suzana Tratnik is a Slovenian writer of short stories, novels, essays... she is also the initiator and activist in the field of LBGT movement in Slovenia. This book is a scientific work, which raises and explores the question - what is the lesbian literature and what defines it as such.
Fresh fruit isn't my favorite snack, but the last few days I crave for it.
#readjanuary #bookandyourfavesnack
so-soI didn't enjoy this at all until I got to the end. She definitely makes you think and maybe I'm off the mark, but she had a lot to say about sacrificing ourselves in the name of love. Of giving up so much that we loose our power and sense of self. The book was strange but the theme was intriguing.
so-soIn his introduction, TS Eliot said that "only sensibilities trained on poetry" could wholly appreciate this book. Well, I don't like poetry.
I can appreciate the book's existence, and I think it would be interesting to have it as a text in a course, but I found it overwrought.
?️?️?️ 3 natural disasters out of 5.
"...how in the end you'll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on and eye-to-eye, until death...."
"Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people..."
And so it begins.
Here's what I've currently got out of the library, not including The Adventures of Augie March, which I'm almost done with.
Happy Birthday, Djuna Barnes (b. June 12, 1892).
bailed
