books i read/listen to. years of original publication. dates when i enter them here. thoughts are brief ideas on the text.
31/10/2026
naked lunch – william s burroughs (1959)
hypnotic addiction and gay sex obsession picking the scab of effects of a drug and sexual repression as a social, economic, national, racial factor, and the power of words to upset and push your face into the dirt, blend with snippets of burroughs anthropology degree, collage world becoming evident. fucking. his 60s afterword is unconvincing, this isn’t satire, it’s living it from the inside out nightmare easy to recognise if u know any of it even from today.
rabelais and his world – mikhail bakhtin (1965)
gorgeous history of books i never read but knew of and the missing factor in history generally that is THE AMBIVALENT NATURE OF FOLK HUMOUR. pulls on a lot of threads of what i find infuriating about cultural discourse i.e the inability to grasp throughout history a working/oppressed people’s utter disregard NOT for Intelligence or Criticality or Beauty but for the OFFICIAL and its SERIOUSNESS. really awesome book.
m: the man who became caravaggio – peter robb (1998)
interesting and propulsive account of caravaggio’s life, very day to day, criminal in the streets type stuff, and the beauty of his paintings and newness of his style to the people at the time from the scant patchwork of details available, which rambles on possibilities to draw the author’s preferred history. honest in its detailing of gay sexuality at the time and place as prevailing, yet likely to get you killed somewhere or someway, though not what to make of works coming out of a tradition of pederasty, aside from a sentence worth of ‘this was bad’.
