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Clancy Martin

Autor(a) de How to Sell

21+ Works 427 Membros 27 Reviews

About the Author

Includes the name: Professor Clancy Martin

Obras de Clancy Martin

Associated Works

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) — Tradutor, algumas edições13,304 cópias
The Best of McSweeney's {complete} (1800) — Contribuinte — 143 cópias
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (2011) — Contribuinte — 64 cópias
McSweeney's Issue 42 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern): Multiples (2013) — Translator/Contributor — 62 cópias

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome de batismo
Martin, Clancy W.
Data de nascimento
1967
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
Canada

Membros

Resenhas

I’d hoped for more philosophy, Martin being a philosophy professor and translator of Kierkegaard. But as the subtitle suggests, its more memoir and related anecdotes, organized in a not exactly rigid way. Good in parts.
 
Marcado
lelandleslie | outras 4 resenhas | Feb 24, 2024 |
Mr. Martin is a man trying to save himself from his self. He shares how until very recently he has been chasing death but also trying to outrun it. The reader hears how he took steps to help himself throughout the years and you can feel in the urgency of the text that the writing of the book (and I think our reading it) is a large part of the outrunning he's doing. The level of honesty also speaks to urgency of his quest for a normal life (normal as in not spending time in psych wards/jails). Not necessarily a easy read but very much worth reading for just about anybody who's been touched by suicide, depression or addiction and that seems to be just about everybody.… (mais)
½
 
Marcado
jemmatcf | outras 4 resenhas | Feb 3, 2024 |
Thank you to #NetGalley and publisher for an advance copy of this book to review. I found it to be one of the most raw and honest memoirs I’ve ever read. I also learned a great deal about the suicidal mindset, including the breadth of material about the subject. I recognize that Martin isn’t generalizing from n=1 or encouraging readers to do so. Nevertheless, I agree with his central argument that suicide is rarely, if ever, spontaneous. I can’t say everyone should read it, but if you’re interested in the subject and not at risk, I do recommend.

I may add to this review in the next few days, as I continue to think about it; I’m trying to review #NetGalley books promptly so that I don’t forget to review.

As much as I appreciated reading this, I agree with GoodReads reviewer Kristi Lamont that this book would benefit from more careful editing and a shorter length.
… (mais)
 
Marcado
LizzK | outras 4 resenhas | Dec 8, 2023 |
On tortured material and the (ironic) posthumous work.

The naïve writer/reader often starts from the perspective that "it is possible to write anything," only to subsequently realize that only certain specific things can be written, and only in certain specific ways. (problems of writing.) Those of us who have at least gotten that far have done so following the recognition of a resistance in the material itself which retaliates against the kind of presentation or conclusion which we would have for it. When, nonetheless, we would have the material confess our conclusions, we do so by prodding (editing) in a way which produces a "tortured" work. There is something uncomfortable going on here, a kind of lack of fit. The Memoir (not just in this case) often reaches back against its authors' intentions.

To understand how a succinct 20 page essay can metastasize into a 400 page tome (which could have been even longer) we would do well to consider the idea of a "novel in retreat." A novel constructed in the form of an ego defense, where each compulsive addition to the series appears to subtract further from the argument, "Well so what if I'm not a great philosopher at least I'm a great artist and so what if I'm not a great artist at least I'm a good person and so what if I'm not a good person at least I'm trying to tell the truth and so what if I'm not telling the whole truth at least I'm making an attempt." So an essay becomes an essay/memoir becomes an essay/memoir/philosophical-investigation becomes an essay/memoir/philosophical-investigation/resource-for-crisis, but gets progressively further away from its stated goal.

On Memoir
Martin's "memoir" practices a kind of slight-of-hand. The author is endlessly apologizing for unforgiveable past transgressions, yet every questionable act is excluded from description. (Supposedly to "spare the children" the horror of repeating the experience in lexicographic form, but we know the real reason.) Occasionally we are presented with a striking image (e.g the gun in mouth), but these have the uncanny quality of still-images, as if the author is watching himself watching himself (which is, not uncoincidentally, the author's description of his meditative process).

One wonders to what extent the well-marketed book with glossy cover is functioning as a bulwark against the author's own suicidal ideation. Yet we also sense that in his continuous insistence that he is "not currently suicidal," the author is working himself up toward a future tragedy (which would lend the work the pathos it currently lacks). There is a sense that the author is out-of-place in that he continues to live. (A similar feeling arises when watching highly-acclaimed film Dear Zachary (crypto-reactionary cinematography) which, ostensibly the letter-on-film to a child, is couched in a kind of persistent vitriol such that one intuits that the child must be martyred for the sake of justifying the hatred pervading that product of cinematographic revenge.)

On Suicide
To what extent is the suicidal person subjected to intolerable feelings as a consequence of a "vegetal reflex" versus a "conclusion of objective analysis." Martin's own struggle appears to be more of the former, though he appears to be convinced it's about an even split. To what extent is the author's sympathy for himself, which is the enlightened self-actualized perspective of, "I would not have it any other way," reconciled with the notion that certain horrible and life-scarring experiences/compulsions actually make you a worse person. In the interstices between Martin's vocal rejection of suicidality, we witness the paradoxical notion that having compulsive feelings of desire for suicide makes you a deeper, more mature person, belied in the episode of the precocious undergraduate who is able to read the author's soul with a glance.

How does it come to pass that the esteemed PhD, who was once motivated by a deep sensitivity to the material, and who has pursued a strenuous course of graduate studies in confirmation of that fact, comes to lose the earnest joy of the text which once motivated him to pursue this accreditation. (Many such cases.) One must assume it has something to do with graduate-school tedium which is the major constituting power behind the monomaniacal training for dissertation-writing. Martin's scholarship lacks the levity/irony which may have once lead him to pursue a dissertation on the concept of irony in Kierkegaard. It is scholarship as flat survey, exemplifying the aseptic academic approach to the original texts which is already a kind of black dread (author does not appear to be aware of this). To forget that the texts are, even now, lying in abeyance for a new interpretation is already the death of scholarship. (Though Martin makes explicit reference to Fear and Trembling he appears to have moved beyond Kierkegaard, not bothering to consider the real possibility of an existence for which, "The ethical is the temptation.") Our author's eschatological argument is the half-serious half-Buddhist insistence that existence continues after death, but that you end up somewhere even worse. If this were an effective panacea, or even an axiom he himself believed, "It would have been enough."
… (mais)
 
Marcado
Joe.Olipo | outras 4 resenhas | Jun 4, 2023 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
21
Also by
5
Membros
427
Popularidade
#57,179
Avaliação
3.8
Resenhas
27
ISBNs
49
Idiomas
4

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