Books of Daniel

Three-ish or so chapters into my own B.A. thesis, I decided it would be interesting to see how threatened I should feel by David Foster Wallace’s.  This was one of two projects he submitted—this for a philosophy degree, and what became The Broom of the System for a creative-writing degree.

I just bought all five books of all four volumes.  I’m sticking the last one on here because it contains extensive writings on remembrance and history, which is sort of my intellectual fetish.

Essays on Walter Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece The Arcades Project, probably the greatest and most compelling failure of 20th-century thinking.  Surprisingly—or perhaps not, since Benjamin’s uncategorizability has made him easy prey for “cultural studies” “scholars”—they’re not very good.

My first Kafka!  At two bucks on Kindle, you can’t afford not to read it.

A longer Freud essay, available on Kindle, that’s about pretty much just what it says on the can.  Note that this is not the Standard Edition translation, but a later translation by Graham Frankland.

Entirely rewarding to re-read.  Her description of her analysis by Otto Rank alone would make the book valuable, and on top of that it’s probably one of the most quotable in my collection.

Before such people…, I begin to imagine that I am also a fake—that maybe all my journals, books, and personality are fakes. When I’m admired I think I am duping the world. I begin to add my lies and to tremble. I have to say to myself: “Either I am just a cleverer liar and actress…, or I’m real.” So many people believe in me instinctively, suspicious and intuitive people. Simple people who hate artificiality above all, severe, moral people.