the dream must be vivid and continuous
May. 27th, 2024 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neonanimasaw furiosa on saturday with margot and snek. we invited the wider friend circle in the signal group chat, but one couple is dealing with the latest in ongoing brain tumor treatments, one is in canada, chris and fantasia were getting married at the courthouse. chris sent us a picture of their hands layered over each other wearing their wedding rings and said "sorry we couldn't make it, we were a little busy." i was surprised at how aged his hands looked. they were so red, cracked, and wrinkled. i think i never really looked at them. margot said she liked that their wedding rings didn't match, and reflected their individual tastes instead. i want the bitterness to fully dissolve and to be happy for them. it doesn't really even have to do with him, but the pathological belief that anyone who desired me did so through a veil of dishonesty. like only fundamentally untruthful people, who saw something other than who i am, have ever wanted me.
today i went to kinokinuya to buy pens. there was a specific powder-pink uniball jetstream i bought there when they opened that i lost and haven't been able to find on the internet. weirdly, the online uniball store wouldn't let me add anything to my cart. i rebought the pink jetstream along with a few others sized 0.5mm or smaller, as i have a grand lust for this pen precision that's new to me.
after, i went to a park i'd never visited before. there was a pokemon raid with the lollipop clown space-pokemon that just debuted. there were also several wooden bridges. i can never get enough views of wooden bridges curving into the woods. there was a little marshy area with tall, bright green water grass and mallard ducks idling in the muddy creek. one of them had a cinnamon colored head instead of jeweled green; i wondered if it was another species because it looked a big bigger than the others i know female mallards are brown-speckled all over without a solid-colored head.
i finished ling ling huang's natural beauty and i'll tell you what i told goodreads:
My library loan for the audibook expired and I was going to let this fish go, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. A book intertwining beauty industry capitalism and child-of-immigrants assimilation is almost too insufferably on-trend with contemporary literature, but I enjoyed this a lot and didn't find the take too forced or the main character too morally pure, as is usually the case with today's books about marginalization.
Things I loved: Huang's vivid and engrossing details, such as the narrator's special pianist technique she learned from her parents and the various, horrifyingly plausible organic beauty treatments (eels that suck toxins out of the skin, papaya seeds in the vagina, pores encrusted with tiny diamonds, a cult-diet called Dianaism mandating one emulates the fashion and dietary examples of the famously bulimic Princess Diana, mink pubic hair transplants), the intersection of beauty standards and cultural assimilation as body horror.
Things I didn't like: The whole "I don't do the thing I'm a virtuoso at anymore because my family died in a car crash on their way to see me perform!" is a hard-to-forgive cliche. However, the narrator's relationship with her parents is the heartbeat of this book and I can't say Huang doesn't give new life to the trope. The climax is very rushed and by-the-numbers, designed purely to hurl us toward an ending that, while beautifully conceived, doesn't feel earned.
i say the main character wasn't too morally pure, but she was also far too passive to really say she chose any of the morally gray things she gets involved in. i remain sick to death of this trend in female main characters.
i'm also reading balzac's old goriot, or père goriot as my edition calls it and it's a riot. an absolute parade of moral tennis whiplash, savage superficiality, and idiot passion conquering entrepreneural reason. crimes of the heart galore. wealth and fortune given and gutted in dramatic fashion. balzac did almost nothing in his life but feverishly write, according to the introduction, and that mania definitely comes across in the narrative movement. i've been writing a lot in the margins to try and pay better attention to how in the hell a story actually works. taking the time to write out things like "character learns information from a conversation he wasn't supposed to hear" and "this character's dilemma is a parallel of this other character's dilemma."
they say that to achieve lucid dreaming, you start by getting into the habit of asking yourself "is this a dream?" i'm hoping that learning to storytell is the same, that if you begin actively noting things you've learned not to think about, you will start to gain control of the dream.
today i went to kinokinuya to buy pens. there was a specific powder-pink uniball jetstream i bought there when they opened that i lost and haven't been able to find on the internet. weirdly, the online uniball store wouldn't let me add anything to my cart. i rebought the pink jetstream along with a few others sized 0.5mm or smaller, as i have a grand lust for this pen precision that's new to me.
after, i went to a park i'd never visited before. there was a pokemon raid with the lollipop clown space-pokemon that just debuted. there were also several wooden bridges. i can never get enough views of wooden bridges curving into the woods. there was a little marshy area with tall, bright green water grass and mallard ducks idling in the muddy creek. one of them had a cinnamon colored head instead of jeweled green; i wondered if it was another species because it looked a big bigger than the others i know female mallards are brown-speckled all over without a solid-colored head.
i finished ling ling huang's natural beauty and i'll tell you what i told goodreads:
My library loan for the audibook expired and I was going to let this fish go, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. A book intertwining beauty industry capitalism and child-of-immigrants assimilation is almost too insufferably on-trend with contemporary literature, but I enjoyed this a lot and didn't find the take too forced or the main character too morally pure, as is usually the case with today's books about marginalization.
Things I loved: Huang's vivid and engrossing details, such as the narrator's special pianist technique she learned from her parents and the various, horrifyingly plausible organic beauty treatments (eels that suck toxins out of the skin, papaya seeds in the vagina, pores encrusted with tiny diamonds, a cult-diet called Dianaism mandating one emulates the fashion and dietary examples of the famously bulimic Princess Diana, mink pubic hair transplants), the intersection of beauty standards and cultural assimilation as body horror.
Things I didn't like: The whole "I don't do the thing I'm a virtuoso at anymore because my family died in a car crash on their way to see me perform!" is a hard-to-forgive cliche. However, the narrator's relationship with her parents is the heartbeat of this book and I can't say Huang doesn't give new life to the trope. The climax is very rushed and by-the-numbers, designed purely to hurl us toward an ending that, while beautifully conceived, doesn't feel earned.
i say the main character wasn't too morally pure, but she was also far too passive to really say she chose any of the morally gray things she gets involved in. i remain sick to death of this trend in female main characters.
i'm also reading balzac's old goriot, or père goriot as my edition calls it and it's a riot. an absolute parade of moral tennis whiplash, savage superficiality, and idiot passion conquering entrepreneural reason. crimes of the heart galore. wealth and fortune given and gutted in dramatic fashion. balzac did almost nothing in his life but feverishly write, according to the introduction, and that mania definitely comes across in the narrative movement. i've been writing a lot in the margins to try and pay better attention to how in the hell a story actually works. taking the time to write out things like "character learns information from a conversation he wasn't supposed to hear" and "this character's dilemma is a parallel of this other character's dilemma."
they say that to achieve lucid dreaming, you start by getting into the habit of asking yourself "is this a dream?" i'm hoping that learning to storytell is the same, that if you begin actively noting things you've learned not to think about, you will start to gain control of the dream.