I'm Fitia. This is my nerd zone.

This was actually my second attempt at getting through this book: happy to announce that I was more successful this time around! I first found the title while I was browsing recommendations for erotic novels – I wanted to actually give published erotica a try, being someone who’s really only encountered erotic writing through fanfiction – and picked it up through my surprise at seeing John Berger’s name. I was only familiar with his documentary work, especially his four-episode program Ways of Seeing, which I really enjoyed and was formative to my current method of approaching art! Given that I had already had that confidence in him as thinker, and was further drawn by the book’s synopsis as a work of historical fiction – with the Boer War and WWI as backdrop! I loved the potential implications of war as backdrop – I decided to give it a shot.

In late 19^th century Livorno, a rich merchant takes a younger, adventurous American woman for a mistress, and through their union is born the titular character we call G. (whose “real” name the author purposely leaves a mystery). The book is a chronicle of his life, beginning with those events explaining his birth and ending with his death in the city of Trieste, the very moment Italy enters the First World War. The focus is on his sexual life: in a linear though heavily tangential narrative, we get a look at the most memorable of the women G. has taken as lovers, all in a heavily schematic style that attempts its best to dissect and isolate how each character experiences the relationship, from the initial attraction up to the act of sex itself.

It’s that very style that stood out to me: if I didn’t recognize Berger in the genre, I certainly did in the writing, which was full of the same granular reflection concerned with the subjectivity of observation I appreciated when I’d watched Ways of Seeing. And that, honestly, is what put me off from the novel the first time around.

My first impression of the novel was that I would’ve rather heard it as a podcast, or watched it in another great documentary; the prose felt discordant with what I’d expect in a character study. While evocative and insightful, it also felt very distant from the characters themselves. Kind of a bird’s eye view, or maybe a third person of the third person? It’s this passage, one of many author interventions into the narrative, that helped to clarify the experiment being made:

“Some say of my writing that it is too overburdened with metaphor and simile: that nothing is ever what it is but is always like something else. This is true, but why is it so? Whatever I perceive or imagine amazes me by its particularity. The qualities it has in common with other things – leaves, a trunk, branches, if it is a tree: limbs, eyes, hair, if it is a person – appear to me to be superficial. I am deeply struck by the uniqueness of each event. From this arises my difficulty as a writer – perhaps the magnificent impossibility of my being a writer. How am I to convey such uniqueness? The obvious way is to establish uniqueness through development.”

Obviously, I am (trying my very hardest to be) a writer, so I do appreciate the difficult task of trying to approximate; it’s evidently at its most difficult when, as Berger is, trying to communicate all the ways your characters are contingent in a way that challenges the reader to inhabit that contingency. Although, I think this passage towards the end of the novel pithily summarizes why I feel the experiment fails, and why I believe its undertaking was unnecessary:

“The degree to which we can postulate or see beyond this is the degree to which we cannot be him.”

When I read a novel, I hope for all the obvious things: that the prose will be, at the very least, competent, and that the story will give me something to chew on; but above all, I’m looking to be affected. I expect some resonance and some sensation. The greatest dissonance I experienced when reading G. was that it was recommended as an erotic novel, and yet I found the writing to be near entirely devoid of sensuality. I think the immediacy and uniqueness Berger talks about can already be found in all the ways that writing, with its various tools, can manage to move, shock, or titillate. The reader is the other half of the equation in writing, so why not poke at their ability to feel? It’s already impossible to ask someone to become someone else, especially at such a great remove as reading about a person who doesn’t exist. As it stands, the reader is stimulated to reflect, and there’s certainly an intellectual pleasure to it; it just isn’t the main pleasure I’m looking for when reading about the erotic.

Though I’m not exactly complaining that I wouldn’t be able to get off to any of it. I’m just wondering: well, why not? Why shouldn’t it be in part written that way? I don’t think it’d remove from the insight, and in fact, I think it would add to it if contingency is Berger’s concern. What’s more contingent, unique, immediate than what the reader feels?

All that aside, I did manage to enjoy reading and finishing this book, once I’d found myself in the mindset to cooperate with its style. True to his word, Berger develops his characters’ subjectivities by attempting to look at them through every angle that would give their experiences their withheld particularity, with his own particular emphasis on time. Nothing in the narrative is simple backdrop: a historical riot is juxtaposed with a dead relationship, which is put in parallel with every individual relationship an unanchored son, a distant mother and a castrated father each have with one another; with proper respect given to what every difference in age, social position, and position regarding the tumultuous events happening around them does to their understanding of themselves as people moving through time. It’s compelling enough for me to almost forgive any quibbles I have with the prose.

G. as a character, I only really warmed up to around the end: that’s when everything actually “clicked” for me, so to speak, when I managed to understand him as someone trying to avoid the very fact of having a past, and which shed a more interesting light on everything I’d read about him up until then. He settled the novel for me as something I would definitely love to revisit in the future, with a much more open mind.

Very thought-provoking experience! I think I did rush a bit in trying to finish it near the end (there were other books I really, really wanted to get to...), but I’m glad I even made the effort. Here’s to gradually becoming a person who actually sees the things they begin all the way to the end!

A friend in high school introduced me to this song that’s just about the weebiest thing you could imagine: an all English tune about this boy trying to get the attention of a “tsundere”, along with a catchy melody and an honestly cute animatic. I really do like it primarily for the melody, despite how... cringe, for lack of a better word, it is. It’s just about the sort of thing people would talk about shoving you into a locker for liking, you know?

The lyrics are pretty trite and often a bit lazy, the theme of the song hurts my feminist sensibilities, but any catchy melody is enough to sell me, which says a lot about my taste in music.

• I am incredibly tired due to administrative errands, but I still took the time this evening to try this because I am ready to be done with this challenge now!
• I forgot to mention the name of the song (it's called It's not like I like you; just about tells you what it's about, really, no further explanation needed) and while I didn't reach the word count, I think I just about said what I needed to say.
• I need to sleep.

You know, it might make answering this prompt easier to just copy paste a select amount of lyrics from ABBA’s Money, Money, Money, because that really is the only explanation for this. Not much of a mystery behind this one!

Besides, in situations where I do have the money, I always prefer to spend it on more immediate indulgences – food, mostly – or books, household appliances, that sort of stuff. I don’t care that much about my appearance, except when the stars align to suddenly make me want to make an impression.

Anyways. My ideal outfit is this

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

Time: Well, as you can see... ran out :(

Notes:

• Should I take pride in the fact that this is my very first timing failure? Though there really was no way to win this: I'm terrible with describing clothing because I'm terrible with details in general, and really, I couldn't think of an ideal outfit if I tried. I have no idea why I set this prompt for myself.
• That said, I probably should've wasted less time on explaining why I couldn't answer it and just tried my best to answer it. The point of this exercise was precision and concision, after all! A mistake I frequently make that I should watch out for.

• I watched Mārama (2025) a few days ago, a gothic horror period piece centred on a Māori protagonist, directed by Taratoa Stappard. Many thoughts on how thematically rich and compelling it is on the level of its characters: the protagonist and antagonist both, at their core, looking for the connection and companionship that come with family, but this on the latter being warped by his own patriarchal, racist, settler colonial fantasies. It's appropriately disturbing, and there's so much I'd like to dissect!

Though for what's meant to be a horror movie, I did find it underwhelming: I'm usually a little baby about horror, but I wasn't scared at all. In fact, I strongly felt that this was a story I would've preferred to experience as a novel, save for some stand-out scenes that manage to justify its medium: the haka scene during the party, for one! That was incredible.

• Speaking of horror, I also watched The Conjuring with my best friend before that, and while as a movie it was definitely scarier, we also had a terrible time with it because we were distracted by how misogynistic and unapologetically Christian it was. I'm not exaggerating that it might as well just be propaganda for the Catholic Church; the movie ends by quoting this, in big bold letters that fit into the entire screen, unironically:

• Okay, one life update allowed, actually: I'm participating in my first fandom zine! It's one centred more on essays/non-fiction, which is really underrepresented in fanzines in my opinion, and I'm so excited to be a part of it. It's giving me an excuse to write about stuff regarding the series I've wanted to write in meta for a while now!

 

• Participating in the above is actually helping with a major insecurity I've been having for a while, which is that I'm way too pretentious over things that don't require that much of my energy, and the things that do get left in the dust. I've been nursing a lot of intellectual insecurity because of what my brain inevitably gets interested vs what I should be learning instead; not to mention my currently... not spectacular academic path. I have all the understandable excuses for it, of course (mental health, life upheavals and difficulty adapting, etc), but it doesn't lessen the shame.

It's nice to have something where I can go all out in taking something not so "serious" as seriously as I want, and for it to be understood as something fun and worthwhile; especially since it's a group project!

 

• Talk about an ambition you used to have as a child, and why you think it appealed to you at the time.
• Talk about an old interest, why it appealed to you, and whether it still does.

I had a morbid fascination for all things deadly and powerful as a child, which is funny considering that I was also easily startled and a bit of a crybaby. One phase that comes to mind is my old obsession with venomous animals.

I was both terrified and fascinated with death that tore you apart from the inside. I loved learning about animals with fast-acting venom that made you burn underneath the skin, that paralyzed your lungs, that made you bleed from within and stopped your heart: there was always a bit of a thrill to it, scary as it was.

My favourite of these animals was the box jellyfish. Unsure if this remains true, but I’d learned it was the most venomous of all venomous animals, and so I was biased towards a winner. I watched countless YouTube videos on it, and I think discovered Wikipedia through the interest!

• Hilarious thing happened here in which I mixed up two prompts and thought I was meant to write about an old interest I used to have as a child! However, I didn't want to just redo the whole thing, so fuck it: it's a prompt fusion today. I'll allow myself this since I missed 4 days already and need to get the thing over with.
  
• I think the style I tried to write this in (a lot more elaborate, prose-wise) would work better with a wider word range. It feels a bit incomplete.
• I also took too long to write this, given that the further down the prompt list I go, the faster I'm meant to write. Woops!

My hair’s recently reached an awkward stage in growth, so I’ve been buying myself a bunch of accessories to help manage it-- hairbands and scarves, mostly! I keep going for the black or darker ones because I’m unfortunately not known for any ability to coordinate an outfit, and the only common fashion sense I’ve retained is “black goes with everything”.

Though it turns out that some of my scarf purchases were useless, because after doing a bit of cleaning back during the weekend, I found some of my old scarves that I thought I’d forgotten back home! I continue to be incredibly airheaded...

Anyways: my favourite out of the hairbands I bought is one that’s very sparkly, given that it’s the most distinct a hairband like that could be, considering its colour. My second favourite is a dark brown, patterned one, flecked with gold, which is very aesthetically nice!

There was this kids’ book series that I don’t remember the name of, in the style of those “diary” series (Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dork Diaries, etc) that I kept borrowing at the library, because I had a phase where I couldn’t get enough of the genre.

This series starred two girls who were best friends and collaborated on the same diary, which led to really entertaining passages in which they had conversations within the pages, where they shared stories from their own perspective, etc. I thought it was pretty cool because the book highlighted their different styles of handwriting (one wrote entirely in cursive with a blue pen, while the other wrote print-style with a pencil), as well as their different art styles (because these books always have the diary owner’s doodles in them), which gave it more of a “real” feeling than other diary-style books I’d read.

• I'm going to have to hunt down this book series later... not sure I'll be able to find them in this country, though...
• I think I did an alright job describing what it's about! Though I wish I'd specified that one of the girls was Asian (Chinese, I think?), while the other was white, so there was also some fun stuff about their different cultural upbringings.
  
• Other thing I had neither the time nor the space to add: one of the girls was definitely the better artist, but as I recall this was never a point of conflict between them. The whole diary-writing process was very collaborative, and I remember yearning for a friendship like that one, haha.