Recording my Internet Archive Bookmarks before they disappear.

1. The End of the line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat by Charles Clover
2. Willie and Joe: Back Home by Bill Mauldin
3. Last Vanities by Fleur Jaeggy
4. Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones
5. The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
6. The Joker by Lars Saabye Christensen
7. Damballah by John Edgar Wideman
8. Hiding Place by John Edgar Wideman
9. Sent for You Yesterday by John Edgar Wideman
10. The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories by Angela Carter
11. Where is Here?: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates
12. Where are you going, where have you been? by Joyce Carol Oates
13. The Best American Essays (1988) by Annie Dillard
14. The Fate of Mary Rose by Caroline Blackwood
15. Diomedes by Lourenco Mutarelli
16. Morpho Fat and Skin Folds by Michel Lauricella
17. Supposes and Jocasta by Geoge Gascoigne
18. Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise by Steve Jones
19. Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson
20. Mona Minim and the Smell of Sun by Janet Frame
21. The Pocket Mirror: Poems by Janet Frame
22. Owls do Cry by Janet Frame
23. Scented Gardens for the Blind by Janet Frame
24. Snowman, Snowman: Fables and Fantasies by Janet Frame
25. Daughter Buffalo by Janet Frame
26. A State of Siege by Janet Frame
27. An Angel at my Table by Janet Frame
28. Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room by Janet Frame
29. The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame
30. The Adaptable Man by Janet Frame
31. The Carpathians by Janet Frame
32. Intensive Care by Janet Frame
33. Reservoir: Stories and Sketches by Janet Frame
34. Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
35. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and the English Culture
36. The Norton Book of Women’s Lives by Rose Phyllis
37. Magill’s Survey of World Literature
38. Thomas the Obscure by Maurice Blanchot
39. The Penguin Complete Novels of George Orwell
40. Angel in the Forest by Marguerite Young
41. Garments against Women by Anne Boyer
42. My Neighbour Seki by Takuma Morishige
43. Everything by Kay Boyle
44. Everything by Shirley Hazzard
    

I think I’ll attempt reading these books in this particular order and see if I have the discipline to do that.

I open my blog and immediately close it. I reveal too much here. And there is a severe lack of literary and whimsy to what I write these days. But I believe that one day I would be grateful for recording these thoughts.

August has been a month of bitter revelations. Someone I am not talking to underwent a surgery. And someone else, in conversation over phone, threatened to kill themself. And it caused a brief moment of ideological cessation in my life. I have been mulling over suicide one way or the other for a very long time. Like hearing an old friend’s name, my ears perk up every time suicide is brought up. I freeze like an imposter when someone says how could they (the suicidee) be so selfish? What about their parents and those they leave behind in grief? I never fully confront it head on. But I really don’t think it’s selfishness.

Killing oneself is such an ugly thing. I wouldn’t do it. But I also cannot forgo the fact I’ve used suicidal ideation as a coping mechanism my whole life – an emotional release in times of distress. Not unlike masturbation, I have fantasized death in many ways. Images of violence and catharsis fill my mind when things go out of control. The idea that there’s an option that life with all the things that hurt could immediately stop is too tantalizing sometimes. Talking about it has only lead to miscommunication and exhaustion. But repressing it is not going to end well for me. In the past year I’ve been committed to mapping notions of suicide, in literature and in the world around me – trying to form my own philosophy on suicide, intellectualize it – that I was surprised at feeling unpleasant when suicide was brought up so brashly, outside the framework of literature. I hated being blackmailed and even more I hated what I thought to be a higher intellectual indulgence shown in context of the real world. And I kept saying the same old script people say to a suicidal person. All the nuance, I thought I had, didn’t come through.

Do I think that my suicidal thoughts are different (and better) than others? That’s not good. It’s narcissism, clearly. But I am so desperate to become wise and put things in perspective. I know it’s going to take time for me to achieve that. But why can’t it happen now? I want to feel good now, immediately if possible. It’s not a very wise thing to say. But the lesser-me persists.

Anyway…

Here’s my suicide reading/watching list: