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Burning Rain posted:This guy gets it! Did you read the Marxist-enhanced later version? In my version there was an introduction where Ngugi explains that he wrote it as a young man who didn't know enough about marx and the Truth About History, so now he changed stuff around to make the story more Truthful. Still, it was very good, and the Marxist stuff was barely noticeable unless you went hunting for it. He's not a Marxist(sadly..) but Ayi Kwei Armah has some good poo poo about history in Two Thousand Seasons, the book is subtitled 'a novel' but the tone is like some kind of afrocentric religious text only for initiates, and it's anti religion, anti monarchist, anti colonialist and he describes Arabs as 'predators' and Europeans as 'destroyers'. Africans who collaborate with colonialism are called 'zombies'.
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Jul 25, 2016 12:03
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Guns Germs and Steel is a cool book but itd be really loving stupid to be like "oh so this is how everything works". It's a handy narrative about a few things that do matter a lot (agriculture, animal husbandry, or simply put, the nature of a society) but it follows the theory to really weird logical endpoints which probably shouldn't be just accepted as such When you get to Cortés in Tenochtitlan you have to pursue arguments like "the mountain ranges of Western Eurasia made Cortés violent", and accept that humans are psychotic murderbots, totally servile to vague cultural stimuli. It's like handwaving the Holocaust away, "the Roma as a semi-nomadic minority group were....... The Austrians, hardened by two and a half millenia of intense cultural contact between...." I'm into theories of everything (ask me about Julian Jaynes and bicameralism), but a sort of a big thing about Diamond's book was the idea that "look, it's not that Europeans were better in any way, it's not about races, racism is fake"; instead Diamond was saying "Europeans are more highly evolved to succeed in the dog-eat-dog world of my narrative" and "Native Americans are scrawny and fragile, and they couldn't help it, and we couldn't help genociding them because we are big and strong" - which is, in fact, kinda racist and bad
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Jul 25, 2016 12:40
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If you want to talk about Diamond perhaps one of the various history threads would work better than the literature thread
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Jul 25, 2016 13:15
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I don't trust history nerds who aren't also literature nerds (preferably they should also be punk rock nerds)
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Jul 25, 2016 13:19
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What about lit nerds that are also punk rock nerds, but aren't really into history?
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Jul 25, 2016 13:44
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All punk rock nerds are into history cause punk is dead
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Jul 25, 2016 13:47
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Zorodius posted:What didn't you like about it? It's one of the laziest books I've ever read. There's multiple points where it either directly plagiarizes or cribs from Let The Right One In, like Gaiman thought nobody was going to notice. The ending is just twenty pages of Neil giving himself a long, sloppy blowjob. At least when Stephen King wrote himself into Dark Tower he made himself an annoying, drug addict rear end in a top hat - Gaiman uses it to reassure himself that he's a good, important writer, and that even the fairies that secretly rule the world love him. It's garbage. On the plus side, it did finally make me realize that he's a loving hack, so that's a point in it's favor.
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Jul 25, 2016 14:09
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Ive just started a Neil gaiman book 
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Jul 25, 2016 14:31
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Thread full of children
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Jul 25, 2016 14:42
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Jimmithy posted:Ive just started a Neil gaiman book *spooky ghost voice* Turn back, turn baaaaaaack~
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Jul 25, 2016 14:42
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I can't believe people are buying some total nobodys books just because he's Amanda Palmer's husband
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Jul 25, 2016 14:43
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In the interest of getting back to discussing good books, I'm reading Gaddis' A Frolic of His Own and am having a weird issue with it. On a page-to-page level I'm enjoying it a lot: it's very funny, the "pages and pages of unattributed dialogue" structure from JR is much easier to follow here (everyone constantly calls each other by their proper names like Gaddis is afraid he was being too difficult last time), and even if there's an occasional groaner like Oscar's car being called a 'Sosumi', I'm digging it. My problem is the book's central premise: the idea that American society is overly-litigious and that Americans are 'sue-happy'. I just don't agree with it; if anything, that line of thinking in the 1990's was heavily damaging to consumer rights. Stories about the lady who got a million dollars or whatever for spilling coffee in her lap lead to 'common sense' tort reforms and now nearly every product locks you into a forced arbitration clause where if you buy a product and it blows up in your face, you have very little legal recourse. Every review I've read of this book claims that Gaddis is satirizing America's love of the lawsuit, but Gaddis' satire is a right-wing shibboleth that's been thoroughly debunked two decades later. So it's weird reading a book and enjoying the poo poo out of it while disagreeing in your bones with everything the author is trying to say. I guess I'm hoping Gaddis is planning to subvert the poo poo out of this later.
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Jul 25, 2016 15:05
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A.D. Melville's translation of Metamorphoses is really fun. Occasionally you have some odd word-choice (like "yokel"), but it has none of the stuffiness of the first translation (non-English) that I read.
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Jul 25, 2016 15:12
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Metamorphoses kicks rear end
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Jul 25, 2016 15:14
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The Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs is amazing after two tragic love stories (of people turning into birds).
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Jul 25, 2016 15:30
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Guys I'm getting worried about Mel Mudkiper. He hasn't posted in two days! http://forums.somethingawful.com/query.php?action=posthistory&userid=183592
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Jul 25, 2016 15:31
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Your GIF killed him, blue squares. The guilt weighs on your shoulders, loving monster.
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Jul 25, 2016 15:35
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and look at what happened to this thread in my absence shameful
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Jul 25, 2016 15:53
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Does BS have some kind of alarm set up for when people try to actually talk about books in this thread.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:00
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Popular Human posted:In the interest of getting back to discussing good books, I'm reading Gaddis' A Frolic of His Own and am having a weird issue with it. On a page-to-page level I'm enjoying it a lot: it's very funny, the "pages and pages of unattributed dialogue" structure from JR is much easier to follow here (everyone constantly calls each other by their proper names like Gaddis is afraid he was being too difficult last time), and even if there's an occasional groaner like Oscar's car being called a 'Sosumi', I'm digging it. Americans have been stereotyped to be really contentious and sue happy since 1700 or so. It's not right wing or left wing or any wing.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:00
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DisDisDis posted:Hey did you say you were a fan of Raymond Carver at some point or was that a different author named Raymond, or Carver Yes, I am the Raymond carver fan
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Jul 25, 2016 16:03
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Ras Het posted:Metamorphoses kicks rear end Its an incredibly layman's interpretation but one thing I appreciated about Metamorphoses is it makes me realize how "scrubbed" of homosexuality our modern understanding of Greek Myths were. It was also interesting to see homosexuality portrayed as just a physiological and universal behavior rather than as an explicitly social or othered behavior.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:04
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That's not a reading that stuck with me, but it's probably worth noting that Ovid was one of the few Roman poets not into boys: in one of those Art of Love books he's like "I don't like to gently caress boys, they don't enjoy it", but, remarkably, talks about giving women orgasms. (Along with raping them, let's not get carried away.) Which in a sense actually emphasises the sort of pederast-normativeness of early imperial society.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:12
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Popular Human posted:In the interest of getting back to discussing good books, I'm reading Gaddis' A Frolic of His Own and am having a weird issue with it. On a page-to-page level I'm enjoying it a lot: it's very funny, the "pages and pages of unattributed dialogue" structure from JR is much easier to follow here (everyone constantly calls each other by their proper names like Gaddis is afraid he was being too difficult last time), and even if there's an occasional groaner like Oscar's car being called a 'Sosumi', I'm digging it. I read this a year ago and enjoyed it, I don't think it was totally about people being sue happy, although I might be forgetting some dialogue/scenes involving the lawyer brother-in-law. I remember there being 3 lawsuits in particular: two of them concerning the main character (his "car accident" and his play being stolen for a movie) and one of them that the judge father was presiding over involving the sculpture and the trapped dog. Two of those were more concerned with copyright law and artists' rights so don't really fall under the "frivolous lawsuit" topic, and in fact have more to do with how the legal system and Hollywood bureaucracy operate. The car accident seems like a frivolous lawsuit at first, but if I remember correctly the car thing actually does pan out (it turns out there was a defective part in the car) but at that point he has spent so much money consulting his brother-in-law's law firm about the play that the settlement amounts to basically nothing. I can't remember what happened with the dog trapped in the sculpture but again I think this has less to do with sue-happy Americans and is more about the ridiculousness of this living thing being trapped for weeks because the legal system is slowly deciding what to do. I think it's more likely that people were latching onto that subtext because it was the era of the "frivolous McDonald's coffee lawsuit". Then reading the wiki there was the part at the end that I forgot about where the sister is cheated out of her husband's life insurance because the law firm has made themselves the beneficiary. And the fact that the main character is not some average American trying to hit it big on some ridiculous lawsuit but a member of a wealthy family who hasn't really had to do much most of his life. That book was drat funny in retrospect. I always thought the part where the main character hands out his play for a bunch of random people (including his lawyer and sister and some neighbor) to perform in his living room would be really cool in an actual play. Like you see them reading/acting clumsily but then it transitions into an actual play within a play, with occasional asides in the "real" characters voices. Guy A. Person fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Jul 25, 2016 |
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Jul 25, 2016 16:13
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Raymond Chandler is the better raymond 
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Jul 25, 2016 16:15
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Ras Het posted:That's not a reading that stuck with me, but it's probably worth noting that Ovid was one of the few Roman poets not into boys: in one of those Art of Love books he's like "I don't like to gently caress boys, they don't enjoy it", but, remarkably, talks about giving women orgasms. (Along with raping them, let's not get carried away.) Which in a sense actually emphasises the sort of pederast-normativeness of early imperial society. Well, I saw Ovid's role in the Metamorphoses as making the stories pretty without changing the content. These versions are probably the closest to the "original" versions and its interesting to see them in the context closest to how the Greek's told them
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Jul 25, 2016 16:15
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Now there was a certain Olynthian, named Episthenes; he was a great lover of boys, and seeing a handsome lad, just in the bloom of youth, and carrying a light shield, about to be slain, he ran up to Xenophon and supplicated him to rescue the fair youth. Xenophon went to Seuthes and begged him not to put the boy to death. He explained to him the disposition of Episthenes; how he had once enrolled a company, the only qualification required being that of personal beauty; and with these handsome young men at his side there were none so brave as he. Seuthes put the question, "Would you like to die on his behalf, Episthenes?" whereat the other stretched out his neck, and said, "Strike, if the boy bids you, and will thank his preserver." Seuthes, turning to the boy, asked, "Shall I smite him instead of you?" The boy shook his head, imploring him to slay neither the one nor the other, whereupon Episthenes caught the lad in his arms, exclaiming, "It is time you did battle with me, Seuthes, for my boy; never will I yield him up," and Seuthes laughed: "what must be must," and so consented.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:30
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Well, I saw Ovid's role in the Metamorphoses as making the stories pretty without changing the content. These versions are probably the closest to the "original" versions and its interesting to see them in the context closest to how the Greek's told them Eeehhhh, this is a huge debate and I should be working, but I'll note two points: 1) Ovid did reinterpret many myths in many ways, so I absolutely wouldn't speak of "original versions". We generally associate Greek culture, history & literature primarily with Classical Athens, which is hundreds of years before Ovid, and inbetween is the Hellenic era, which is totally unfamiliar to modern Western culture, basically a fuckoff big hole between Aristotle and Plutarch. So you have to be pretty careful when talking about influences and predecessors, and especially about how Ovid's versions would represent Greek mythology 2) there's no "original text" for mythology - you can see that in how for a lot of stories Ovid's version is canonical in Western culture, even if they're notably different from earlier treatments
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Jul 25, 2016 16:30
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Its an incredibly layman's interpretation but one thing I appreciated about Metamorphoses is it makes me realize how "scrubbed" of homosexuality our modern understanding of Greek Myths were. It was also interesting to see homosexuality portrayed as just a physiological and universal behavior rather than as an explicitly social or othered behavior.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:39
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Graeco-Roman sexuality is in itself a really fascinating issue, particularly when you look at how quickly the sexual culture was, ehh, "Judaized" by Christianity in the 300s
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Jul 25, 2016 16:41
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:This is a theme that also runs throughout Chuck Tingle's work, in particular Buttageddon in which the entire populations of Billings, Chicago and New York are revealed to love pounding butts. The only characters in a Chuck Tingle novella that do not love pounding butts are those that love being pounded in the butt.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:41
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Nanomashoes posted:The only characters in a Chuck Tingle novella that do not love pounding butts are those that love being pounded in the butt.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:44
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Ras Het posted:2) there's no "original text" for mythology - you can see that in how for a lot of stories Ovid's version is canonical in Western culture, even if they're notably different from earlier treatments You're right, I guess what I meant is that this is one of the first times I can think of when someone sat down and put them to word rather than as an evolving oral tradition. I might be completely wrong, the classics is not really my area of expertise. Ras Het posted:Graeco-Roman sexuality is in itself a really fascinating issue, particularly when you look at how quickly the sexual culture was, ehh, "Judaized" by Christianity in the 300s Yeah this is what I was trying to get at. Metamorphoses is an interesting peek, even if from an outsiders perspective, of a form of sexual identity completely alien to contemporary understanding.
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Jul 25, 2016 16:52
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Tiresias is another really interesting example of how the Greeks looked at sexual identity
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Jul 25, 2016 16:56
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Mel Mudkiper posted:You're right, I guess what I meant is that this is one of the first times I can think of when someone sat down and put them to word rather than as an evolving oral tradition. I might be completely wrong, the classics is not really my area of expertise. i'm a classics guy, so i've actually thought about classical sexual identity more than modern gently caress CONTEMPORARY PEOPLE YOU CANT EVEN FARM
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Jul 25, 2016 16:58
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Smoking Crow posted:gently caress CONTEMPORARY PEOPLE YOU CANT EVEN FARM Like hell, I am an expert at plowing and hogs. Or in the case of your mother, both.
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Jul 25, 2016 17:00
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Like hell, I am an expert at plowing and hogs. my mom's dead, i see you've been plowing her grave
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Jul 25, 2016 17:01
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:The Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs is amazing after two tragic love stories (of people turning into birds). Ovid's crazy tone-clashing is so cool and it really bugs me that even today people get all prissy about it. I'm always open to suggestions of similar stuff
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Jul 25, 2016 17:15
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Catullus 69 or whatever is the poo poo imo
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Jul 25, 2016 17:29
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Mel Mudkiper posted:You're right, I guess what I meant is that this is one of the first times I can think of when someone sat down and put them to word rather than as an evolving oral tradition. I might be completely wrong, the classics is not really my area of expertise. Well, yes, this is wrong: Ovid comes some 700 years after Homer, there's absolutely no need to talk about oral tradition. He was definitely working in a literary tradition: even the idea of a compilation of mythological metamorphoses was a previously existing genre. It's just that because such a small part of classical literature has been preserved, we have to deal with huge gaps in the record, and some versions of myths take precedence purely because of that. Another point is of course that the mythological tradition was absolutely not in any way unified, and as such didn't just evolve to one direction: it diverged concurrently all over the Eastern Mediterranean, and from the first Greek literature until Christianization we're looking at over a thousand years. So you can't really pin these things down: completely contradictory versions of myths existed at the same time, and people acknowledged both. My favourite example is the common story that Helen was never abducted by Paris, but he took with him a phantasm, while the real Helen escaped to Egypt for the duration of the war. That undercuts the whole dramatic arc of the entire Trojan Cycle - how arbitrary is that?
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Jul 25, 2016 17:50
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