#Am I surprised that overall the advisors would be better it's Dad's that the Kings? not really

[r0-boat]

who out of the whb nobles do you think would be the best dads if they have kids w the mc?

Doing all the nobles would take a lot of work so I'm just going to bubble it down to the advisors.

So like the second in command

from best to worst!

This was a hard list to make God

Foras

The best dad!!! It would be his first child so he would make mistakes like all first time parents do. But he would learn from those mistakes and get better.

He's had always wanted a child So he would be the most loving most supportive parent you've ever seen.

Honestly his only shortcomings being that he can be protective of his baby. But that's probably because he is a demon from Hades and I feel like all demons from Hades have a little bit of a possessiveness going on

Beleth(daddy)

I didn't want to leave him hanging but I don't know much about him so this is small 😭

Good Lord This man juggles the entire country the king and his child and he's doing well.

Dependable demon dependable father, But doesn't lose his boyish charm and his fun-loving side.

Child: *literally does anything* Beleth: 'm so fucking proud of them

Sitri

Great Dad! Supportive dad though can be a little stern. Unlike Satan he prefers a more strict approach.

He is stern because he cares He wants His child to be a good demon and a very accomplished devil. He puts a lot of expectation on his child.

For a while he gets a little bit of a "my child must be like me" mindset which goes away with time. "NO CHILD OF MINE WILL LIKE COFFEE INSTEAD OF TEA!!"

Bael

Constantly tired, probably a starting to grow 5:00 shadow now. Because of a certain man who is now that child's uncle.

He is a good father when he is there. Lord have mercy please He's already running an entire country please give him a break.

Very heartwarming to see Beelzebub actually step up to give Bael A month or two off. Bael we'll make sure you have plenty of sleep He will practically take over taking care of the child. Because he feels bad that he's almost never here because of work

Gamigin

(I have no idea who Lucifer's advisor is)

He's going to make a lot of mistakes. He has a new parent and he is not as diligent as foras. But please don't underestimate him. He's a hard worker and he really is trying.

He will be up for nights trying to figure out and look at books. This is his baby His hatchling, His dragon baby. He will protect it with his life. He promises you and the baby that he will be the best father.

Dragon hatchlings are not like demon hatchlings and he learned that the hard way. He's still learning... And he's got a lot to learn. He just needs more time

Bimet

Do I really have to explain myself?

He is like mammon but worse and the only thing sharing Mammon and him is money Your poor child will be spoiled rotten.

MF Would faint changing a diaper.

Does this motherfucker even want kids???

[shelfcompletionist-blog]

#004: Minima Moralia, by Theodor Adorno

We were somewhere in the heart of the right lung of the country, an anonymous linear plane stretching over languid plains. It was, in fact, the last family vacation we embarked upon as a whole group: I was in the exact middle of my college years (and I would be dropped off at my new house, in my newish town far from home before the trip was over) and my sister was about to finish her time in high school. That vacation had the tinge of nostalgia from the outset, and it started timidly, as if it knew its duty was to recreate some of the more earnest trips of adolescence. This type of vacation would be replaced by something more adult: the visit, in which I go home or parents come to me for a shorter period of time. A visit is crucially different from the seasonal breaks of earlier college years in that, when returning home on break, the business of the world continues largely as usual, whereas on a visit as many resources as possible go towards maximizing time spent and entertainment manufactured together.

I sat in the middle left seat of our minivan, surrounded by stacks of books. Any road trip necessitated a plethora of reading material, more than I consciously knew I could read; I needed the options. On a trip to Boston the year before eighth grade I packed an entire suitcase full of Stephen King novels I hadn’t read yet, and if I remember right I only finished Salem’s Lot and The Regulators. My future self has read more books than my present self ever will.

The first morning of the trip, that first span of hours in which everyone in the car carries an unspoken determination. It is not leisure time, not yet. We must first fling ourselves away from familiar terrain. That is why dad seeks to “put some miles on the odometer.” Everyone is expected to be well nourished and fully evacuated so that the vessel makes no stops before state borders. The determination strikes us non-drivers differently. Sister is determined to win back the hours of sleep she lost, being forced to wake at 5 AM. I, on the other hand, push myself deep into whichever book I have decided must take precedence. I imagine that I will finish it before the end of today’s drive, that I will read at least a book a day the entire trip, that I in fact will burn through the twenty or so volumes I’ve wedged into the overstuffed Chrysler Town & Country, and will demand that we stop at the nearest bookstore (probably back in Omaha) so that I can add a few more books to the pile.

This is, of course, unrealizable.

I didn’t realize how unrealizable until I opened the second book of this journey (because despite my best intentions, I am a flitting reader, engrossing myself in a few chapters of one book and then turning to another and then still another, rotating between four or five books until one eventually wrests my attention away so that it can finish out its whole story.

This second book, though, wrested my attention away by not telling a narrative, but instead spurting out a single thought at a time, often unconnected but for the most tenuous (and, in the end, vital) of threads. I moved slowly through this book, reading each fragment individually, taking time to stare out the window or go back over the page to highlight any especially pertinent selections. Oh yes, the highlighter. The intense need to mark and notate my texts, replacing an earlier impulse to keep my personal volumes as pristine as possible. Highlighting was necessary. This is an Intellectual Book. This is Philosophy. It demands to be treated as an object of study.

Returning to it now, to pick upon the remaining fragments left unhighlighted, I understand it differently. This is a lark, meant to be enjoyed as a meandering stroll as well as a rigorous hike.

(It is, of course, never an either/or proposition.)

Read in the Interim:

Letter to the Amazon, by Marina Tsvetaeva - A fascinating piece of emigre literature and lesbian literature that (perhaps unknowingly) describes the ur-narrative of all conceited lesbian stories. A worthy read, in turns insightful and retrograde.

Phoebe Light and Incidentals in the Day World, by Alice Notley - More Notley! Nothing new to add here, I haven’t yet gotten to something from her that I feel is totally transcendent, but I feel it coming.

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, by Lindy West - I find that in most trendy collections of feminist essays that have been springing up in the past couple years, there is usually one to a  couple dull notes being hit (especially if the said collection is coming from a celebrity). Lindy West’s collection does not do that. Sure, some of the humor is corny, but it’s corny in a way that works. Also, she doesn’t commit any racist, transphobic, or fatphobic errors (perhaps obviously on the last one, since fatphobia is one of her big topics). I was pleased all the way through this book.

Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, by Horacio Castellanos Moya - Here’s a link to a longer piece I wrote about this!

Cannibal, by Safiya Sinclair - A really well done poetic update of the Caliban figure to reflect Sinclair’s own life narrative as a Jamaican-American woman.   

Brawl & Jag: Poems, by April Bernard - Some definite standouts in this collection, but perhaps not completely consistent.

News of the World, by Paulette Jiles - In my opinion, the worst of this year’s batch of National Book Award nominees for fiction. This novel, which tells of an older man who travels the countryside reading the news to the illiterate and is tasked with bringing a child abducted by Native Americans back to her family, rests on a patchwork of other western narratives (most specifically True Grit) without bringing a whole lot to the table. The depiction of Native Americans is downright embarrassing, something the book should have tried harder to update. The only really interesting part was the main character’s job, which could be an interesting commentary on the way we relate to the news now (a pressing matter since this past election), but Jiles could have leaned harder into that aspect of the text as well.

Odes, by Sharon Olds - Of all the horny older white women poets (as I’ve said, a favorite type of poet for me) Olds reigns supreme. I got to see Olds read a number of the best poems in this collection out loud this summer at the Tin House Writer’s Workshop, and they blew everything else out of the water. She got a standing ovation, and it was well deserved.

Erasure, by Percival Everett - Perhaps my own personal experience with Everett tainted my reading of this book (I had lunch with him and some other students at my college last year, and he was consistently condescending to us) but I found this book dangerous in its overall attitude. Erasure simultaneously aspires to be a postmodern look at the way the publishing industry treats black voices as well as an earnest family drama about the protagonist’s declining mother. The parts with the mother are pretty good; her growing dementia contains sorrow, angst, humor, and love. The half of the novel about the publishing industry, however, does not come off as well. I get that Everett’s overall project is to tear down stereotypes of African Americans (which I think he did much better in I Am Not Sidney Poitier, but it has also been a while since I’ve read that), but often in this novel what is meant to declare “I am not this stereotype” comes much closer to being “I am not like these other black people,” with the problematic biases that come with that. I was happy to talk with my former advisor about this book (he’s teaching it in a Contemporary African American Literature course, which is why I caught up with it) and he feels similarly about this novel.

The Unfollowing, by Lyn Hejinian - Strange, superbly intelligent ‘sonnets’ (note the scare quotes) that sometimes flew about ten miles over my head.

Dothead: Poems, by Amit Majmudar - This collection begins with the titular poem, which is a bit of a red herring for the rest of the collection. That first poem makes motions to examine Indian-American identity, talking about the speaker’s mother and the way his supposed friend mock her ‘dothead.’ This primed me for a whole collection of poems following in this same vein, meditating on the lives and status of Indians and other people of color in America. What the collection actually focuses on, though, is hinted at not by the speaker’s Indian mother but his group of male friends: masculinity. This actually brought about some fascinating poems, like “Abecedarian,” which ties the speaker’s first blowjob back to the mythic first blowjob of Adam and Eve. What results is an honest look at consent from an imperfect, masculine perspective. Yeah, you could label several of these poems rather puerile, but the same could be said of the new Sharon Olds collection, and it doesn’t seem worth it for either. Majmudar tunes his humor well throughout this book, and only a select few poems (such as “Logomachia,” which was far too long) don’t live up to the collection as a whole. Overall, a pleasant surprise.

Garments Against Women, by Anne Boyer - A critique of capitalistic imaginations of women’s labor, rendered as prose poems. This book is quite interesting and something I plan to return to, to fully examine the depths of Boyer’s intellect.

Poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax - Poems as relaxational mantras as pop. Lax’s poetry isn’t meant to be read so much as whispered into your ear as you float in still water. Some find his repetitious, minimalist style infuriating, but to me he seems to be reminding us of the core tempos of both poetry and thought itself.

Staying Alive by Laura Sims - Post-apocalyptic survivalist sci-fi poetry done right. Sims doesn’t rely on cloying tactics, and as a result, these poems feel natural, like they are being transmitted from this alternate universe instead of just describing it. I didn’t know this is what the book was about going in, which made Sims impressionistic evocations of the world even more impressive. The afterword, that lays out her thinking in the creation of the series, helps elucidate but does not didactically decimate the wonder of the poems either.

Excavation: A Memoir, by Wendy C. Ortiz - A sensitive and well-wrought memoir of growing up as the victim of pedophilia. Ortiz is perfectly tuned; she manages to capture a full range of emotions, be it sickly desire, teenage infatuation, pure disgust, or profound soul detente. I don’t have much to add to that!

Ignatz, by Monica Youn - A perfectly good collection of poems that show impressive range; Youn handles different tones and forms of verse with aplomb. Using Ignatz Mouse as a central figure I found a bit perplexing, though. Perhaps this is personal, in that I have very little connection with Krazy Kat and his ilk so the signifier of Ignatz meant little to me, but it also felt a bit unnecessary. When will we reach critical mass of substituting a lover figure with something obviously fictional or false? Yeah, it works the first couple times you run into it, but its effects dull quickly over time. I’m excited to read Youn’s new collection, Blackacre.

An Elemental Thing, by Eliot Weinberger - Weinberger has pioneered the invention, or reinvention, of this sort of essay, in which he builds a collage of fragmentary pieces culled from history and folklore into one long work, spanning years and volumes, all working towards an answer to… I’m not sure. Humanity’s place in the world? It is impossible to know. It seems like a project like this should be coming from sometime in the enlightenment, but we are blessed to have Weinberger at work on this in our lifetimes. An Elemental Thing is the first volume in this larger project, which I picked up in honor of the release of the newest installment, The Ghost of Birds, which I was able to see Weinberger read from a couple weeks ago. He seems like an average, approachable, New Yorker intellectual dude!

Calamities, by Renee Gladman - I was maybe more excited for this book than what it actually delivered, but it still delivered quite a bit. A black female avant-garde writer I had never heard of before pulling together short essays/prose poems obtusely dealing with the daily life and struggles of being a black female academic? Sign me up! I was excited to see that Gladman has published a trilogy of novels about a fictional group of people known as the Ravickians through Dorothy, a Publishing Project (one of the best publishing projects in the game, in fact) so I’m excited to go back and take a look at those.

Hollywood Notebooks, by Wendy C. Ortiz - Ortiz’s second memoir takes a hard left turn from the realistic approach of Excavations. This one takes on the form of Ortiz’s notebooks, meaning it is fragmentary, diaristic, and at times impressionistic. Some entries tell entire stories, while others take the form of a listicle. While I appreciate the formal inventiveness of this approach, I didn’t find it as touching as her first memoir, and it didn’t always captivate on its own. That said, Ortiz is building up the great start to a formidable body of work, and I look forward to reading her ‘dreamoir’ Brujas, which just came out.

The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, by Kristin Dombek - My problems with this book are actually the opposite of many other book-length essays that have been coming out lately (see Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry). Whereas those other essays have an excellent writing style and purview, they don’t really argue for anything that insightful. Dombek has that insightful viewpoint, arguing that people who obsess over the so-called narcissism of other people (often their romantic partners) are often channelling their own narcissism in a way that is seemingly beyond criticism. That’s an interesting point, one that I think speaks to a lot of issues in our current trends in how we express the self in a semi-public sphere, but Dombek conveys it in a really uninteresting, clinical way.

Hell Figures, by E. Tracy Grinnell - ~~I don’t have a ton to say about this collection of poems~~

The Mothers, by Brit Bennett - This was much better than I expected an over-hyped debut novel to be. Bennett’s delicate touch at crafting characters and their interactions, in this case a two African American women growing up in a coastal California town and the former football player that comes between them, is masterful. Bennett uses the conceit of a quasi-Greek chorus of old church ladies, the Mothers of the title, that watch over the three main characters well, not overdetermining their meaning or importance to the narrative but letting them exist in traces. Overall, an exceedingly impressive debut and one that I’m excited to see Bennett build upon.