(no subject)

I am so, so broke. And I need to buy art. This art, and so much else. I need an apartment with blank walls, a blank canvas to fill with other people's ideas. Living alone, surrounded by someone's art.

On a literary note Youth is disappointing. I don't expect it to improve. Coetzee's too indulgent, some reviewer wrote; there might be something to that. There is such a thing as too much angsty, internal monologue (re Pears' The Portrait, that godawful monologue). A monologue is difficult to write because you must keep the reader's attention with only one character, only one set of tools. And while Youth is not badly written, it does not hold my attention for longer than thirty pages at a time. The aspiring artist, no doubt Coetzee himself, struggling with no longer being the cleverest and finding that cleverness is not all, is not interesting in himself. No progress, no conflict, a complete stand-still.

Come to think of it, it is very much in the tradition of Hamsun's Hunger. Starving, broke artist, writing nothing, doing nothing, ideas of what life should have been like 'if only'. While I hated it with a passion, it was an important book. This, just, meh.

(no subject)

I am so, so broke. And I need to buy art. This art, and so much else. I need an apartment with blank walls, a blank canvas to fill with other people's ideas. Living alone, surrounded by someone's art.

On a literary note Youth is disappointing. I don't expect it to improve. Coetzee's too indulgent, some reviewer wrote; there might be something to that. There is such a thing as too much angsty, internal monologue (re Pears' The Portrait, that godawful monologue). A monologue is difficult to write because you must keep the reader's attention with only one character, only one set of tools. And while Youth is not badly written, it does not hold my attention for longer than thirty pages at a time. The aspiring artist, no doubt Coetzee himself, struggling with no longer being the cleverest and finding that cleverness is not all, is not interesting in himself. No progress, no conflict, a complete stand-still.

Come to think of it, it is very much in the tradition of Hamsun's Hunger. Starving, broke artist, writing nothing, doing nothing, ideas of what life should have been like 'if only'. While I hated it with a passion, it was an important book. This, just, meh.