Kathleen Stewart (1)Critiques

If I'd stayed in academia, I'd hope to have been able to write in the vein of Stewart.

This was a compelling book in that I couldn't put it down. However much the main protagonist was a complete train wreck who most of the time I wanted to strangle, the author had the skill to make the reader want to go on for the ride. And to be honest, there were moments of self recognition in the obsession and self delusion of the main character. We've all been there, I'm just not sure I want to go back there.

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/ordinary affects/

A couple of pages in, I decided that even though this is a scholarly work, probably belonging to the discipline of postmodern anthropology, I lack the background to be able to read it in a scholarly manner. Instead, I let it kind of break over me. I read it as if it was poetry. And I enjoyed it. I can't tell you what it's about, mind you. It abounds in anecdotes, ranging from a pleasant but odd encounter in a check-out queue to horrific violence, from bizarre plane travel incidents to odd things seen from the car. It offers fascinating reflections on public responses to big events – the OJ trials, the Columbine shootings, child care sex abuse scandals, nuclear waste disposal, 11 September 2001. It positively bristles with gnomic utterances that would make great epigraphs for poems ('The ordinary can turn on you,' or 'Dream meets nightmare in the flick of an eye') or citations in other scholarly works ('Like a live wire, the subject [which I think here means a person] channels what's going on around it in a the process of its own self-composition. Formed by the coagulation of intensities, surfaces, sensations, perceptions and expressions, it's a thing composed of encounters and the spaces and events it traverses or inhabits').

Ordinary Affects deals in something that precedes thought: 'The ordinary can happen before the mind can think.' 'Something' is a word that Stewart uses often and interestingly, usually in the phrase 'or something', as if to insist on the provisional nature of her thinking. At least part of what Stewart means by 'ordinary affect' is what happens when we pay attention, how we integrate, or not, the many influences on our perception, our emotional responses, our unreflective thoughts.

I found myself remembering the only lines I know from the US poet Muriel Rukeyser:

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET

(The capitals are hers.)

If I get a chance I'll re-read this book, though I expect it will be a matter of letting it break over my head again.

a beautifully crafted and compelling memoir

I honestly loved this book. Couldn't put it down originally, and have read it twice since. The story of a boy growing up in suburban Australia (which truly is a nightmare), and his struggles, with suicide attempts, his parents receeding relationship, and many other typical teenage issues. Yet the author manages to tell this story in a truly magnificent fashion, without it ever seeming childish or con-descending. I found it truly charming in parts, and Louis, the main character, is sure to leave an imprint on you for a long time after putting this book down.

I try to make a point never to give up on a book, but this on was just too painful and frustrating. It has a really cool picture of Lilian Gish on the cover, and sounded interesting from the blurb but, well, it wasn't for me. Full of stories about whiny, obsessive, neurotic, vacuous, smug or pathetic women, it made me want to bash my head against a wall. Maybe I'm placing myself too highly by stating this given the previous sentence, but I really couldn't relate at all.½