nat's dinosaur exhibit

flame out

i hope this isn't a tired topic, but i don't finish a lot of books; in all honesty i don't watch nearly as many movies or tv shows as i'd like to either, but the distinct pit of emptiness in trying and then slowly failing to read a book is a unique feeling to put it softly.

since i've started this, in late august of '23, i've 'paused' or otherwise given up on eleven books:

i don't even think they're distinctly difficult reads (except, by a chasm of a margin, Anti-Oedipus; the differences in these books is a lot of my reasoning for wanting to write something about it all), but i don't even think that necessarily matters. to an extent i agree with a lot of reader-circle forum posts online, where if you're not enjoying it or making it through well enough, why bother? but i also feel to a certain extent, given that i've been taking id:3 so seriously as a media curation project that these 'failures' are more than just unimportant blips. they feel closer to admissions of a lack of something like stamina or drive, in an annoyingly similar way to other projects i've fallen out of time with.

in a way i'd like to carve out the space to discuss why those books are the ones which i never fully explored—particularly 'formally' on id:3—but the fact that i already read so little, and that i finish so few, that list comes off closer to my being unable to sit content with one thing for a while and riding it out, rather than that particular book being a dead end.

Middlemarch is one i really want to finish (in a few years), as much as it feels like a dull drama circle even hours past; Perfume was simply one i couldn't sit down and handle at the time, but maybe that was just the mood i was in then (i certainly wasn't reading much in october at all); same goes for The Metamorphosis, The Yellow Wall-Paper, and To Make Their Own Way in the World, even if for Gilman it was read nearly to completion anyways. that's a fault to acknowledge, i guess.

the rest were either too much in an overtly negative way (The Iliad, The Nineties), or my library hold expiring before i gave myself space and time (The Wretched of the Earth, House of Leaves). which is another distinct fault, but i care to reiterate simply because the conception in my head of that struggle is one i find impossibly difficult to articulate here. it's always a little different in my head, and i can't ever get the right words out. but hopefully that means something and is enough contextually.

Dune felt like a beast i didn't want to handle back in december, and Anti-Oedipus was so abhorrently insane and simultaneously fascinating that i don't think i'll ever be able to read it from start to finish altogether. i've read countless reviews, forum posts, and discussions about what those two were trying to say, and i think i understand it and agree with some of it, until i start to read what they wrote and i feel my body crumbling in on itself and my eyes start to bleed backwards into my skull. it is a book all its own, which is maybe the best praise it could receive.

but more importantly (i guess), the paths i've been willing to take creatively have been more narrow too; i've certainly organized my thoughts much better than i ever have before, yet at the cost of their quantity (which isn't all bad, a lot of those old ideas were genuinely going nowhere) and a need to have everything figured out before i do anything at all. that's why i'm still upset about what has become of my (current) youtube page, because it's both so barren and what's there feels pointlessly irrelevant, at least to where i want it to be. i guess don't be surprised if one day you don't see those videos anymore. i hope the ideas that i've come up with can be enough to re-satiate it a little bit, but my standoffishness about even saying that, let alone enacting the process of that creation, is also an admission, painfully so.

my only clear success to me has been the written reviews to an extent, in reformatting the old ones that very quickly fell out of my own favor, and the new ones where i feel more like describing what it feels like instead of what it sounds like. there's already enough of the latter, and the former is where i think anything near personality can come through in writing for something else as critic. that's, coincidentally, near to what i want to do with any video content related; there's people with great formulae already on youtube, be it fantano, brad, path, smags, etc., where their styles can't be well-replicated—or at least without another admission that your idea is one that's been recycled haphazardly from another.

that might be closer to the answer for a lack of much. i have to find the faint flicker first, for what feels new, what feels like me. and without that light yet, i can't yet navigate very well.

oh also i need to work on vocal processing in ableton. i'm getting close on that avenue, it's just always a motivation thing. and to be fair, a deeply personal outing. even just the 'poem' i put with the picture portfolio i have now was a lot, and that's just writing a few words about feelings, not the feelings themselves.

we'll see where i go :>

ilysm