User Profile

Alecs Ștefănescu

catileptic@bookwyrm.social

Joined 9 months, 1 week ago

i'm an activist thriving on layers and layers of affinity for shades of nuance. i have a life-long love for the Weird / Uncanny / Unheimlich.

chaos.social/@catileptic

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Alecs Ștefănescu's books

Currently Reading (View all 5)

Han Kang: The Vegetarian (EBook, 2016, Hogarth) 4 stars

Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked …

Silence as violence

5 stars

The first two thirds of the book were a chorus that I am all too familiar with: some men turn everything they touch into burning pain. Han Kang allows us to experience patriarchal violence both through the eyes of the men, and through the thoughts of the women they hurt. The book opens with a first-person view that made me feel the familiar nausea of realising that the women are trapped narcissistic men.

There's only one character whose inner thoughts we never read, except through her dreams. And, honestly, after the last third of the book, I feel like reading her thoughts would have been too much to bear. Perhaps even too much to imagine, as an author.

The silence of the main character feels like a different kind of violence. Just like "Greek Lessons", it feels to me like Han Kang portrays women fighting back at the men that …

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism (EBook, 2009, Zero Books) 4 stars

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? explores Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism," which he takes …

A lightweight must-read

5 stars

I should have read Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" at the very beginning of my incursion into philosophy - it would have made many concepts easier to grasp. It's a solid introduction to concepts such as "reality versus The Real", "the big Other", to the critique of ideology.

The tone is closer to "anecdotes told over beer" than to a formal philosophical essay. To my understanding, the book is, after all, an extension of ideas that Fisher was already writing about on his blog.

Beverley Clack: Freud on the Couch: A Critical Introduction to the Father of Psychoanalysis (Paperback, Oneworld Publications) 3 stars

Almost 75 years since his death, Freud remains as influential and divisive as ever. This …

An easy read, a light introduction

3 stars

After hearing Freud's work referenced so heavily, I read Beverley Clack's book with a hope to understand what Freud actually thought about matters such as transference, the death drive, and so on. In a way, I got what I wanted, but I was also left wanting more.

The first part of the book which describes Freud's life and his relationships with important people in his life is by far the part that I found most useful to my personal effort to envision Freud. The detail that he had an difficult professional relationship to men, but an open and collaborative one with women, was surprising - and maybe a little bit endearing? The tender feelings don't go far, though - not when the details of the ways in which Freud's perspective has often failed to note the abuse and the horrific entrenched practices directed at young women at the hands of …

Martin McDonagh: The Pillowman (2003) 5 stars

The Pillowman is a 2003 play by British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. It received its first …

Serious Weakness brought me here

5 stars

Porpentine recommended [1] The Pillowman in her post about "the aftermath" of writing Serious Weakness. There is a common essence between the two, though it's captured in very different forms / presentations. I loved the pace of the dialogue, and the sparse metalanguage indications were enough to bring the scenes to life clearly in my mind.

I suspect that, had I read this all the way back in high school, I would at least try my hand at staging it in the most amateur and fangirl-y way possible.

B.R. Yeager: Negative Space (2020, Apocalypse Party) 4 stars

"Like smoke off a collision between Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle and Beyond The Black …

Couldn't put it down

5 stars

I read the last couple of hundred pages in the company of dear people. I could have stopped reading and resumed by cozy social evening, but I could not bare to not know how this book ends. What happens all the way to the point where the author decided that enough has happened.

This was an extremely good read. For me, what stood out most was the depth of emotion, turmoil, the nuanced decisions of each character. There was no point where one of them felt "secondary". Some stories contain characters who feel like they are meant to provide context for "the main characters" to develop. This book did nothing of the sort.

I felt waves of powerful, consuming emotions, while reading this. I've had nightmares and vivid dreams every night while I was reading it and I fully expect that fragments will populate my subconscious and bubble to the …

Leigh Cowart: Hurts So Good (Paperback, PublicAffairs) 5 stars

An exploration of why people all over the world love to engage in pain on …

I've abandoned this book before finishing it. There subject of the book is interesting, but I felt like it didn't really address some questions that hung over my head while reading it. Namely, in a patriarchal society, what is the significance of who chooses to receive pain and who wants to inflict it (consensually)? I feel like these aren't the "free choices" that the author would like them to appear. One can not say "I could have chosen either way" when one is brought up entirely to consume or to be consumed, depending on how society judges their gender.

Leigh Cowart: Hurts So Good (Paperback, PublicAffairs) 5 stars

An exploration of why people all over the world love to engage in pain on …

Specifically, capsaicin is a heat mimic. It activates sensory neurons that alert the brain to the presence of actual heat, not the flavor of heat but real, kinetic energy heat. When you eat a very hot pepper, capsaicin binds a specific receptor, the kind that warns your brain when your coffee is too hot.

Hurts So Good by