More on this

A Goodreader's comment on the letters of Vincent Van Gogh:

"he was definitely not crazy, just someone who, sadly, was incredibly talented but got hit with an extremely severe mental illness:"

Heh. Not crazy; just had a mental illness.

It's like, one is medicalised, and the other means 'out of control'. But who exactly is crazy if not the mentally ill?

Anyway, whatever.

Procrastinatin'

I was cataloguing books on Goodreads, a task I allowed myself as a reward for finishing Dreams From My Father. A chance encounter with Spike Milligan on said site reminded me of how much I loved his war memoirs when I discovered them as a young 'un (teen). I mean to read them again, now. Soon praps. (Or not - I have to read according to the rules first). Anyway. I added a new category to account for his description of shellshock in the fourth of the trilogy (and his bi-polarness in general), which I called mental illness. Then I needed to go through all my 'read' books (I know, I know) and mark up the other books with that tag. This proved a problem; is (for example) The Virgin Suicides about mental illness? They all killed themselves - something must have been going wrong in their brains, right? Or what about American Psycho? Does he have an illness? Is sublimation an illness? Or nihilism? What constitutes a mental illness anyway? How about Louis Riel? Is going a bit nuts not a rational response to oppression? And maybe his vision was true, truly from god - who am I to say?

Anyway, the anti-climax here is that I changed the label to the more inclusive and unreconstructed 'madness_mental illness', which allowed me to tag tales involving things like depression and OCD.

This labelling thing is a lark, innit. In the words of Sandra Bernhard, "don't label me: I'm a people person".

More of the same, really

What kind of review do you call this, Goodreads reader?

"I know I read this, but I really don't remember anything about it, so I don't think it would be fair for me to give it a rating. "

Come to think of it, I feel that way about some books. Read 'em today, gone from your memory tomorrow.

I've used up all my BookMooch points so now I'm wasting time on Goodreads. Some people who claim to like books so much might spend their spare time reading, but noooo, I have to get all meta on books' asses.