All in the Name of Spite is a sprawling (idk how sprawling) essay about suicide notes. Paticularly with a focus on literary suicide notes. Currently, it's covering Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Mark Fischer's Ghosts of my Life, David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, and a number of assorted suicide notes, including Bill Zeller's. This piece is a particular reckoning with my own history of suicidality, as well as the concept of suicide notes as a sort of emotional pornography. The actual depth I intend to speak on each piece with varies wildly. I also want to talk about the whole 'It'll be back someday' mentality. I also have some more direct pieces of media I want to mess with in making a video essay.
You may have noticed the reading list for this one is kinda huge, and I'm fucking feeling that right now. I consider Infinite Jest to be a sort of necessary piece of background on The Pale King, so I have a SHIT TON of reading to do before I can work on the Wallace and Plath parts. I would also really like to be able to split a cow carcass with a fire axe as a part of my piece about The Pale King, which means I'll need an in with butchers, and probably a proper recording space. I could definitely scale the ambition on this one back if I wanted, but I like the idea of having it feel really complete and important, even if it means an extra couple months. I will have a much better idea of the timeline once I've finished. I could talk for a million years about the intricacies of the whole cow thing, but other than that it should be pretty straightforward essay writing.
Progress: reading phase... idk... □□□□□□□□□□