So, another Williamsburg themed post I supposed. I warn you there’s a couple more NYCish ones on the way. I had such a fantastic time.

When I was in Willamsburg I happened upon the most amazers 2nd hand book store called Spoonbill and Sugartown

The service left a little to be desired – the staff were too busy having their own conversation to be helpful and when I asked for a bag I might as well have asked for the woman’s 1st born child by the look on her face. Nevertheless, the cultural & critical theory stock was the best I’ve seen anywhere. There is one shelf in the bookshop in The Tate Modern that occasionally turns up something interesting, but this place was something else.

Whilst there I bought myself a copy of French Thinker and all round cool guy Barthes’ The Lovers Discourse

As the review on the jacket says

‘A Lover’s Discourse maybe the most detailed, painstaking anatomy of desire that we are ever likely to see or need again…The book is an ecstatic celebration of love and language and…’

Barthes is such a brilliant character, a philosopher, a semiotician, a cultural theorist, journalist, teacher; he was interested in so many different aspects of culture and everyday life – what ever captured his imagination. I found out in the foreword by Wayne Koestenbaum that Barthes was a gay man, something I didn’t know and he lived most of his life with his mother Henriette whom he was devoted to.

His Mythologies is a work I know very very well indeed. It has been a source of inspiration for my own work and thinking for over a decade of study and research and it’s a book I know like the back of my hand. The Lover’s Discourse is, I’m finding, quite hard going and I’m certainly glad of the notes at the beginning. As it says, the book is a series of linked miniatures about the different thralls of loves categories. It’s about how love ‘is a translated affair; love, Barthes proves, is not a feeling we take raw, but a condition that passes through the mediating scrim of plots, prejudices, and assumed positions’ ‘(Koestenbaum 2010 pxix)

What I adore about it, is that it’s an academic text, but at the same time it isn’t in the slightest. It’s emotional, it’s painful and there is a mediation of suffering that emerges from the words. As the reader I feel as strong sense that the author has felt something and very deeply too.

As Koestenbaum says, Barthes never wrote a novel, but this comes close. It’s critical prose. I also love the fact that the footnotes and references are so vague. Yabooshucks to the Harvard system. Away with you citation! Barthes flouts academic convention by only slight references to the thinkers, spiritual leaders, poets and philosophers he employs. For instance,the name Freud may casually appear in the left margin, but that is it. It’s up to the reader to follow this up if they care to. Bravo for Barthes! The contemporary academic writing ‘house’ style is a sore point for me. I dislike the conventions of thesis writing and how the author’s creativity and feeling is snuffed out by the academe in pursuit of convention and under the guise of objectivity that’s a nonsense anyway. I do so admire Barthes and even more now I’ve begun to read this.