Why do I give people chances?
I can’t believe I spent the whole day reading Joyce and Woolf just to try to understand what people like about them — why do I always do that? Give people chances when I clearly don’t like them?
(Well I liked Joyce in high school; or at least one story from the Dubliners. And Woolf has said some nice paragraphs which have been on my mind ever since but still! I have better things to do! Like reading Nabokov!)
Now that I’m back to my sweet sweet Nabokov I just wonder why I even bother reading anything I don’t like. Or does that just make Nabokov all the sweeter?
It was very nice to read that Didion interview on the Paris Review because I can dismiss her for good now. What a rotten soul she has.
No chances shall be given any more.
Tbh perhaps no more chances will be given to Woolf on account of her being a snob. How she looks down on people for being of working class (her comments on Joyce) or disabled (some little thing she whimsically threw out in A Room of One’s Own, about how men are so endlessly fascinated by women and how she finds that flattering — chill out home girl, they’re not writing about you, don’t take it so personally — except when it comes from invalids and disabled people and such)
Why then, you may ask, don’t I dismiss Plath on account of her rampant racism?
Because her writing is actually enjoyable that’s why.
Only two writings exist:
• that which you enjoy
• that which you peruse for the sake of understanding the tastes of your fellow man