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mdemone posted:I am tired of having to explain why Moby Dick is the Great Gay American Novel. Homosexual subtext being laced throughout Moby Dick is not unclear, what is unclear is how Manliness and Gayness are mutually exclusive. That is to say, there's a reason I did not call out your first post.
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Jan 4, 2023 01:14
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mdemone posted:I am tired of having to explain why Moby Dick is the Great Gay American Novel. Your interpretation is totally valid. My objection is that calling Moby Dick a gay book is kinda like calling the Old Testament a Christian book or calling the Aeneid an Italian book. None of which are technically wrong. The seeds of the gay movement, christianity, and Italian culture are all unquestionably there, respectively, but you run the risk of obfuscating what the works were in their time by labelling them based on what was only potential in them.
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Jan 4, 2023 01:38
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Gaius Marius posted:Homosexual subtext being laced throughout Moby Dick is not unclear, what is unclear is how Manliness and Gayness are mutually exclusive. Hell it always seemed to me that gay men were and are "manlier", just by definition. But then nobody ever accused me of being a traditionalist 
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Jan 4, 2023 01:39
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Gaius Marius posted:This is the literature thread, please try to elevate your thinking beyond that of a middle school aged child who labels anything with two men in it "gay" No, it's the literal century of queer literary criticism and identification with the novella that makes Billy Budd 'gay'
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Jan 4, 2023 01:57
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Carly Gay Dead Son posted:Your interpretation is totally valid. My objection is that calling Moby Dick a gay book is kinda like calling the Old Testament a Christian book or calling the Aeneid an Italian book. None of which are technically wrong. The seeds of the gay movement, christianity, and Italian culture are all unquestionably there, respectively, but you run the risk of obfuscating what the works were in their time by labelling them based on what was only potential in them. I mean that's fair enough. I would only call MD a "gay novel" among confederates who take that kind of reductive stuff with a wink and a nod, honestly. It's much more than that, it's a seed for many things, as you note.
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Jan 4, 2023 02:00
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mdemone posted:It's apparently not enough that Melville openly pined for Nathaniel Hawthorne until the latter's death. In Moby Dick?
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Jan 4, 2023 10:40
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Danger posted:a few rando thoughts on catching up on this thread: while much of the stuff that comes out of writing workshops is bad, flannery o connor attended the iowa writers workshop
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Jan 4, 2023 12:26
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How the gently caress would one know if any given writer attended a writer's workshop? Does someone god drat google writers or something lmao?
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Jan 4, 2023 12:37
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3D Megadoodoo posted:How the gently caress would one know if any given writer attended a writer's workshop? Does someone god drat google writers or something lmao? did you hit your head?
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Jan 4, 2023 12:49
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Speaking of O'Connor, I'm reading Wise Blood now. Hazel is a freak.
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Jan 4, 2023 14:17
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Gaius Marius posted:Homosexual subtext being laced throughout Moby Dick is not unclear, what is unclear is how Manliness and Gayness are mutually exclusive. Manliness and Gayness are in no way mutually exclusive if you live in reality, but the person who made that tweet almost certainly believes in a strictly heterosexual form of masculinity. Of course, that type of fetishization -- buff manly men who fought and hunted and conquered and hosed -- is in itself immensely queer and it's why poo poo like Tom of Finland, leather culture, etc. were so prominent for so long; they were an appropriation of heterosexual conceptions of masculinity into an openly queer form. All these Reject Modernity online misogynists love the Greeks (gay as hell) and poo poo like Moby Dick because of the violence, individualism or cultural signifiers of manliness they read into them (out on the seas trying to kill an animal for revenge) and they almost certainly are subconsciously responding to the queer subtext but refuse to recognize it. This is not to say that all these guys are secretly gay or whatever -- that's a bad assumption to make -- but I think it's a good example of what happens when someone is deeply insecure in their own sexuality and gender identity, often because of cultural pressure from their fathers or childhood peers or just the general culture that enforces a certain concept of the jacked, meat-eating, gun-toting, hyperviolent Man.
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Jan 4, 2023 18:37
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3D Megadoodoo posted:How the gently caress would one know if any given writer attended a writer's workshop? Does someone god drat google writers or something lmao? Yeah, and who wastes time readin a drat book any more when there’s Twitter !
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Jan 4, 2023 19:54
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TrixRabbi posted:Manliness and Gayness are in no way mutually exclusive if you live in reality, but the person who made that tweet almost certainly believes in a strictly heterosexual form of masculinity. Of course, that type of fetishization -- buff manly men who fought and hunted and conquered and hosed -- is in itself immensely queer and it's why poo poo like Tom of Finland, leather culture, etc. were so prominent for so long; they were an appropriation of heterosexual conceptions of masculinity into an openly queer form. All these Reject Modernity online misogynists love the Greeks (gay as hell) and poo poo like Moby Dick because of the violence, individualism or cultural signifiers of manliness they read into them (out on the seas trying to kill an animal for revenge) and they almost certainly are subconsciously responding to the queer subtext but refuse to recognize it. This is not to say that all these guys are secretly gay or whatever -- that's a bad assumption to make -- but I think it's a good example of what happens when someone is deeply insecure in their own sexuality and gender identity, often because of cultural pressure from their fathers or childhood peers or just the general culture that enforces a certain concept of the jacked, meat-eating, gun-toting, hyperviolent Man. Early gay culture did not “appropriate” masculinity from heterosexual culture, it was masculinity incarnate. It was freedom from women, or put more charitably, freedom from the social strictures which traditionally surrounded men’s dealing with women. It was a wild rebellion against God and his laws, just like the Pequod. A marvelous, audacious, doomed act of hypermasculine hubris and god dammit I change my mind, Moby Dick is the great gay American novel.
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Jan 4, 2023 19:54
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Carly Gay Dead Son posted:Early gay culture did not “appropriate” masculinity from heterosexual culture, it was masculinity incarnate. It was freedom from women, or put more charitably, freedom from the social strictures which traditionally surrounded men’s dealing with women. It was a wild rebellion against God and his laws, just like the Pequod. A marvelous, audacious, doomed act of hypermasculine hubris and god dammit I change my mind, Moby Dick is the great gay American novel. lol
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Jan 4, 2023 20:22
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Gaius Marius posted:This is the literature thread, please try to elevate your thinking beyond that of a middle school aged child who labels anything with two men in it "gay" I love moby dick to death. It’s also gay as all get out. That’s not a slight at all. It revels in it. It’s wonderful. Edit: also, lol Danger fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 20:28
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Gaius Marius posted:Homosexual subtext being laced throughout Moby Dick is not unclear, what is unclear is how Manliness and Gayness are mutually exclusive. Oh sure it’s super manly or whatever too. Who cares.
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Jan 4, 2023 20:29
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Does "Appropriation" definitionally have to be a bad thing? Reclaimed, reframed, celebrated -- however you wanna phrase it.
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Jan 4, 2023 20:29
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TrixRabbi posted:Does "Appropriation" definitionally have to be a bad thing? Reclaimed, reframed, celebrated -- however you wanna phrase it. The word does have a stink around it. Honestly, I misread your post as saying gay dudes took the masculine ideal from their straight contemporaries. I see now you didn’t mean that.
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Jan 4, 2023 20:40
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Maybe Moby Dock is just bi
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Jan 4, 2023 21:31
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Honestly I think Moby Dick is just going through a phase.
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Jan 4, 2023 21:45
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We got foot and a half of snow the other day and I had to abandon my car on the road and walk back to my house. I figured it was the perfect time to read Snow Country. Biased because the nationality or not the obvious comparison is Mishima, with the main character of Snow Country reminding me most of a blend of Kiyoaki and Honda. He's got the desire for pure aesthetic regardless of the consequences that Kiyoaki has, but without youthful inexperience and apprehension Kiyoaki has he feels more like a gross voyeur like Honda is in the Post Runaway Horses works. The actual novel that it reminded me most of is JR, it has the same way of dragging you helplessly through the narrative as that work, although Snow Country is a lazy river ride compared to the dragged by the back of a truck experience of the Gaddis novel. Journey to the end of Night was giving me the same vibe, but I've only just started it.
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Jan 5, 2023 01:19
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The Rings of Saturn is marvellous. Is there anything else like it?
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Jan 5, 2023 10:56
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FPyat posted:The Rings of Saturn is marvellous. Is there anything else like it? Yeah, Wikipedia
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Jan 5, 2023 11:34
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FPyat posted:The Rings of Saturn is marvellous. Is there anything else like it? all his other books
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Jan 5, 2023 17:29
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TrixRabbi posted:Manliness and Gayness are in no way mutually exclusive if you live in reality, but the person who made that tweet almost certainly believes in a strictly heterosexual form of masculinity. Of course, that type of fetishization -- buff manly men who fought and hunted and conquered and hosed -- is in itself immensely queer and it's why poo poo like Tom of Finland, leather culture, etc. were so prominent for so long; they were an appropriation of heterosexual conceptions of masculinity into an openly queer form. All these Reject Modernity online misogynists love the Greeks (gay as hell) and poo poo like Moby Dick because of the violence, individualism or cultural signifiers of manliness they read into them (out on the seas trying to kill an animal for revenge) and they almost certainly are subconsciously responding to the queer subtext but refuse to recognize it. This is not to say that all these guys are secretly gay or whatever -- that's a bad assumption to make -- but I think it's a good example of what happens when someone is deeply insecure in their own sexuality and gender identity, often because of cultural pressure from their fathers or childhood peers or just the general culture that enforces a certain concept of the jacked, meat-eating, gun-toting, hyperviolent Man. at least some classical and hellenistic greeks, like plato, considered gay dudes the essence of masculinity because they were untainted by femininity or desire for it plato with bracketed commentary by crompton posted:Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called androgynous [made up of a man and a woman] are lovers of women, adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men. The women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments: the female companions [that is, lesbians] are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they have affection for men and embrace them [the Greek verb implies a sexual sense], and these are the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.
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Jan 6, 2023 06:34
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Ras Het posted:Yeah, Wikipedia 
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Jan 6, 2023 11:13
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good poo poo is about to drop. Melancholia is really good https://twitter.com/FitzcarraldoEds/status/1611708930152960001
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Jan 7, 2023 17:22
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Finished Against the Day, great novel although not my favorite of Pynchon's. I felt the middle sections dragged, but at the same time the palpable sense of unease and apprehension that built as the various Balkan crises resolved themselves was a high point for me. It's the feeling that I liked everything happening around those chapters except the actual plot goings ons. Some of the Venice and Alps chapters especially dragged for me. To the point that It took me a day to even consider that the tunnel itself might have been one of those unseen gates, and the Tanzelworms invaders. Frank in Mexico also just felt like it went on forever, not helped at all by how much less I liked his side characters compared to the European/American side characters. The little adventure where he sees Aztlan in a parallel world was great, and then it's right back to him making coffee. There was two points that were interesting to me from sections though. The first being the two villages at war, which always seemed to end in stalemate. It's a situation of instability that always ends in stability. Or perhaps the illusion of instability, that when you pull out your view is actually a system with nothing going in or out. Same as the view the Chums would have from the sky, or Wefner/Renfew from his maps on a larger scale. It goes into whats happening at the end of the novel with the Chums seeming to fully transcend earthly politics. There's a section I forgot to highlight, that talked of Wefner being the worst of the TWIT Tarot because being the devil he had the ability to transcend but instead chose to become enmeshed in worldly events. If we think about how the Chums would see the world from the sky, with no borders or political distinctions just people in larger or smaller amounts and the earthly features they live on and then compare it to the map that Lew sees. The map is a parody of that, all the same landmasses and features but with arbitrary boundaries inscribed into it, and the Interdikt line is the most heinous of all being someone taking an arbitrary political boundary and inscribing it upon the actual earth itself. The same could be said of the railroads. Connecting the centers of capital together to allow them to further reap their profits physically, we can also look at it metaphorically the way Pynchon does with the Double Slit experiment and the Feldspar, if the future you could be in one of two places, bilocated. A train track serves to reduce that to one possibility by bounding you to a track. The exact opposite being the type of Airship the boys have that when first we meet them under the leadership of the guild is free to go where it pleases, but still bound to follow the wind. In effect they can go anywhere within reason, when they set out on their own and gain their light engine they can now go anywhere without reason. The second Frank section worth looking over is his near suicidal train ride, the parallels with Kit's near fascist turn at the end is obvious. There's an undercurrent that I have a bit of trouble feeling out, but I think is the sort of corruption of purpose that comes from larger organizational structures, even ones that exist on the "outside" can become corrupt either subverted by or turned to serve the interest of Plutocrats and the Elites. TWIT seems to be semi on the up and up at the start but it quickly turns out to be more interested in starting the war than preventing it. The Chums super organizations becomes more and more shifty until it seemingly vanishes.Privett's Detective agency has gone full corpo cocksucker by the end. The Russian equivalent is coopted by the Okhrana, even Webb's union abandons him after he's killed because helping his sons would not further the interests of the Union. There's this belief that any and all structures beyond Family and Friends should be looked on with extreme caution if not hostility. The culmination of that is the family groups we find populating the end of the novel, Yashmeen and Reef. Stray and Frank. And perhaps Lew and Lake if I read that section right and he'd gotten her pregnant. Bringing a new life into the world is this culmination of a life drive that everyone has embedded within them. Even the Chums eventually have to get with the Aeronautress's before transcending the next plane of existence. Probably worth noting that the idea of Family is not the same as an atomic family, Cyprians secret order and the Hotel Lew Stays at can also be seen as the same extended family unit, and it's only in those that people can be truly happy. If we wrap up the family and life together, than rejecting family and death are also entwined. And the only two characters we see that reject family in that way are Scarsdale and Webb. Both are in direct opposition and one is obviously worse than the other, but both become so lost in their cause that it drives them recklessly forward into their deaths, to the point that Scarsdale is begging to become one a revenant. Yashmeen's father manages to come back from that absence where he was so lost as a slave to the English and his thoughts so perverted that he seems to have substituted the father daughter relationship with Yashmeen with a imagined erotic one. That death drive follows all the characters I believe, but the two most clearly identified are Frank on the Explosive train and Kit in the Torpedo bomber. Both are this absolute rejection of other possibilities or thoughts, just pure violence heading at incredible speeds. They've in effect become the essence of a futurist painting in those moments. Hell Kit's become the screaming coming from the sky on the first page of Gravity's Rainbow. In Kit's case it's even more a debasement, because it not only degrades his own humanity but also the freedom of the skies. He took a plane that can go anywhere, briefly touched the heavens, and then tilted it straight down ready to embrace hell. The ending seems to show two paths for him, either leaving Dally and fully embracing Fascism with the Italians, or going to her to try and work things out and finding his own version of Shambala like Reef and Frank did. It's a lot of words and technical jargon, but sometimes it does just boil down to two choices. Do the the right thing, or choose the path of mindless violence and servitude. I'm gonna give it a night and think it over some more.
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Jan 10, 2023 02:10
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is there a good booktuber or podcast for literature out there? I mostly read Real Literature even though its loving hard. I would probably read more often if I read more dumb books.
discount cathouse fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jan 10, 2023 |
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Jan 10, 2023 17:27
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discount cathouse posted:I mostly read Real Literature even though its loving hard. I would probably read more often if I read more dumb books. anyone here read a normal book now and then? i find that i just can't. i can't go back. i just got no time or energy for anything that isn't Great anymore. every time i think i'll just read something simple to relax, it only ends up annoying me
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Jan 10, 2023 19:05
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derp posted:anyone here read a normal book now and then? i find that i just can't. i can't go back. i just got no time or energy for anything that isn't Great anymore. every time i think i'll just read something simple to relax, it only ends up annoying me I loved fantasy and sci fi during my teens and early 20s, but I have had an increasingly difficult time over the years getting through the bad writing and characters that plague the genres
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Jan 10, 2023 20:16
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derp posted:anyone here read a normal book now and then? i find that i just can't. i can't go back. i just got no time or energy for anything that isn't Great anymore. every time i think i'll just read something simple to relax, it only ends up annoying me Yeah I can’t manage to read any kind of more…casually written, so to speak, novels anymore.
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Jan 10, 2023 20:40
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derp posted:anyone here read a normal book now and then? i find that i just can't. i can't go back. i just got no time or energy for anything that isn't Great anymore. every time i think i'll just read something simple to relax, it only ends up annoying me I read non-fiction to relax after reading capital L lit. Something nice like Frazer’s The Golden Bough usually works for me.
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Jan 10, 2023 21:01
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discount cathouse posted:is there a good booktuber or podcast for literature out there? I mostly read Real Literature even though its loving hard. I would probably read more often if I read more dumb books. I like leaf by leaf on YouTube
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Jan 10, 2023 21:16
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discount cathouse posted:is there a good booktuber or podcast for literature out there? I mostly read Real Literature even though its loving hard. I would probably read more often if I read more dumb books. I listen to Sacred and Profane Love. The host is a philosophy professor (with a catholic slant), and brings on a new guest each episode to talk about a different book or author. I’m not Catholic, but I love hearing someone with a university background talk about art and morals, without the usual irony and cynicism I see a lot.
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Jan 10, 2023 22:13
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discount cathouse posted:is there a good booktuber or podcast for literature out there? I mostly read Real Literature even though its loving hard. I would probably read more often if I read more dumb books. It’s worth looking up lectures on archive or YouTube etc. Berkeley used to save all theirs and I think r mirrored on archive.org and plenty of similar stuff is about. All credit 2 a friend who mentioned something interesting he’d heard about Henry James from finding some recording of a class about modernism which made me think…oh…good idea
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Jan 10, 2023 22:20
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There are zero good 'tubes or podcasts (whatever they are). HTH, OP. Also real literature is normal literature.
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Jan 11, 2023 13:47
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literary sci fi exists if you must read sci fi: stanislaw lem
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Jan 11, 2023 20:28
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i read agamemnon's daughter by ismail kadare and i found it... OK? it's not clear to me why this is Man Booker prize, in-the-conversation-for-nobel quality stuff, it's just a liberal intellectual who's sad that hoxhaism made his hot gf dump him
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Jan 12, 2023 01:03
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maybe you should give it 1 star on goodreads and write a review about it which attempts to imitate the authors style in an ironic way
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Jan 12, 2023 01:05
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