Double Reading

Lynch follows themes found throughout American fiction, especially that with a Puritanical background:

He follows an intrinsically American moralistic obsession with the ideas of innate depravity (13).

Lynch’s villains… are drawn from the same archetypes that populate American fiction (13).

… effigies of anomie, incubi of chaos, are particularly American demons (14).

American national identity: that of the individual [...]

FYI — I finished reading Perfevert in the Pulpit. I’ve concluded that I’m horribly lazy when it comes to this idea of “blogging the book,” as I’ve only managed to do notes on the first chapter of the book. Oh well. I do intend to get notes about the rest, it just may take a [...]

Here is the citation for the edition I am using:
Johnson, Jeff. Pervert in the Pulpit: Morality in the Works of David Lynch. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2004.
I’ll start by noting that I typically only read critical work that enhances or adds to my appreciation of something I already enjoy. Reading Pervert in [...]

… when you’re 21, you’re no fun — “Seventeen” by Ladytron.
Rather than go ahead and type up notes for the entire The Use of Pleasure, I think my time would be better spent just typing notes for the “Erotics” chapter since it was the most interesting and the only one I really took anything away [...]

While I failed my attempt to blog my reading of The Use of Pleasure, I vow to do a better job with the book I am currently reading: Pervert in the Pulpit: Morality in the Works of David Lynch.
So far I am only about 30 pages into the book, but I can say already that [...]

As I’m reading Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure, which is ultimately his analysis of Greek sexuality, I must admit that I’m finding it difficult to really try to visualize (er, not like that, but I mean really try to picture the culture and practices in my head) the society that Foucault presents. The Greeks he [...]

Introduction/Modifications

the term “sexuality” did not appear until the nineteenth century (3)
“experience that caused individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a ’sexuality’” (4)
experience = “the correlations between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture” (4)
“desire and the subject of desire were withdrawn from the historical field, and interdiction [...]

In an attempt to be an academic while not in school, I’m going to make use of my journaling and note taking skills and see if I can’t use this blog as a place to jot down thoughts as I read various books.
To see how this works out, I’ll start with the book I am [...]