A pretty enjoyable read.... I meant this to be my follow-up to reading _Raw and the Cooked_ earlier in the summer, thinking reading them both would help me to understand structuralism better. I think it's doubtful it will work out quite that way:)

This reads like most Barthes books (and here I guess I mostly mean _Mythologies_, but you know what I mean)-- short essays on subjects delivered in a witty and self-consciously odd style. All the essays here are demonstrations of the same thing, the arbitrary nature of the connection between signifier and signified, which I think is really interesting and also developed in kind of awesome ways. But if there was a larger tendency or argument in this book then I missed it?

The writing itself is kind of awesome-- criticism from the french can, I know, be a chore for some people, but I kind of love it, and this is no exception. It's like a funnier Adorno, the way is verges on the epigrammatic, at once spontaneous and, I don't know, labored over. And part of me thinks that's an effect, at least in part, of Howard's translation, which chooses "seism" over "earthquake," and commits a lot of other weirdly characteristic turns of phrase. Good stuff, great bedside table reading to cleanse the brain before going to sleep.