For one reason or another, the most likely one being I can't quite put my finger on what it is I'm getting from it, this book draws a number of other titles and times to my mind. The introduction mentioned Carson McCullers, I had suspicions of Flannery O'Connor, and then there's the famous husband and and the quoted (more?) famous playwright on the cover. I'm sure this has as high a chance of amounting to an indication of personal interest as it does the obsessions of today's academia, what with the word Modernism being thrown around at times, but that doesn't lessen the instance of when I thought of [b:Under the Volcano|31072|Under the Volcano|Malcolm Lowry|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1390014193s/31072.jpg|1321805] and everything clicked. I read that one long enough ago to not have had an awareness of exotification in literature and all that colonialist jazz (the irony), but the messy scrabbling at the corners of civilization for a barest scrap of ethics is familiar. Putting UtV's lushfest of a military industrial complex next to TSL's quagmire of white female performance of sexuality and class in the late 30's and early 40's, you can't really say one's more obvious than the other.

A number of people describe this book as crazy, or the author as crazy, or use the word crazy somewhere in the vicinity of their review; all I can think is that if I were looking into this book today, I wouldn't have added it like I did two years ago. As someone whose history of "crazy" could get her fired or institutionalized if the wrong individuals catch wind of it, the carelessness with which people throw this word around is both threatening and lazy cause seriously, what crazy we talking about? Major depressive disorder? Bipolar disorder? Borderline personality disorder? A mix of all three and then some? Cause things get really fun when the diagnoses cross borders and doctor's don't want to know what the hell is going on.

Crazy's got a hierarchy like any other grouping of human beings, from the marvels of creative folks to the recent adaptation of Deadpool having his schizophrenia erased cause producers don't want him to be "too" crazy. Look up the way schizophrenia literally eats at your brain, compare how often schizophrenic individuals are killed compared to the rest of the not "too" crazy, and you can see the mess these adapters are trying to avoid. In light of that, next time you call someone/something/somehow "crazy", are you doing it cause they're weird? Cause they're different? Cause they shot up a school and that correlation between mental illness and violence must be upheld as absolute? I can't tell if one person did it and the others are just following or the ideological connectivity of the concept's really that universally convincing and it's flat out unnerving.

Trust me, I liked the picking at presentations of femininity, socioeconomic brutalization, the ethical heaven of one being the moralizing hell of another, the rich being rich and the poor being poor and a modern day saint of a woman instantly regaled to the line of sex work cause that's how females on the lam always function in this society of ours, but seriously, where the fuck is this lazy "crazy" business coming from. Do you actually know what you're talking about in the wider spectrum of what many have to take into account every day of their lives? Or are you just being cute. The slurs didn't help either, but someone's going to throw a tantrum about chronological universality if I go down that pathway, so I'll just leave that there.

Look, if you're some sort of crazy like I am in the literal, biological, governmental sense of the word, you can do whatever with the crazy cause that's your life. The rest of you, I'll be over somewhere else for the sake of my well being while you figure out what exactly you mean by this "crazy", and what you intend to accomplish.