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Anyway I read seamus heaney's poems. All i can say is his early stuff is the good stuff!
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Nov 30, 2021 17:02
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Heath posted:
gently caress ya. It's real good
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Nov 30, 2021 20:11
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CestMoi posted:by 16 i got really obsessed with the concept of most major historical events and tried to channel them constantly developing prodromal schizophrenia from exposure to the American education system
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Dec 1, 2021 02:37
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deleuze and guattari would predict the opposite
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Dec 1, 2021 05:11
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CestMoi posted:by 16 i got really obsessed with the concept of most major historical events and tried to channel them constantly lol
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Dec 1, 2021 06:10
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Finally got round to reading Steppenwolf, and was pleasantly surprised - I has been soured on Hesse from reading some of his essays beforehand. It was like Catcher in the Rye, except good.
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Dec 1, 2021 11:43
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CestMoi posted:by 16 i got really obsessed with the concept of most major historical events and tried to channel them constantly I know you're joking but when I was growing up I was spending a lot of time being very upset and soul-searching over historical atrocities.
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Dec 1, 2021 15:59
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Oliver Cromwell,.never heard of him..was he in anything good recently?
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Dec 1, 2021 20:08
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:Oliver Cromwell,.never heard of him..was he in anything good recently? yeah the loving ground
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Dec 1, 2021 20:24
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I received a state education in England without the Civil War ever being mentioned, I'm pretty sure! I still read and enjoyed Paradise Lost as a teenager. Anyway, has anyone ITT read Nightwood by Djuna Barnes? I picked it up because I heard it described as a forgotten modernist classic by a female author, and a trailblazing work of lesbian literature to boot. Sounds pretty good, right? It's not a long book (151 pages), but my foray into it has stalled on about page 50. It doesn't help that it contains bursts of anti-semitism (my edition has a foreword by T.S. Eliot that I'm side-eying pretty hard right now), but in general I'm finding the prose overwrought and incomprehensible. Barnes seems to be writing from within a set of cultural assumptions that I just can't get my head around. Beyond the basic events of the plot, I'm finding it really hard to figure out what she's going on about a lot of the time, or how one sentence relates to the next. Here's a sample paragraph in which a character named Felix meets a woman for the first time. Can anyone made heads or tails of this? Is it just me?? quote:The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a 'picture' forever arranged, is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey. Some of it has a hammy kind of charm and sonority, like "the converging halves of a broken fate" but for the most part I'm stumped. I guess I just wondered if anyone else had read this book, and had any tips?
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Dec 1, 2021 20:32
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Chatting with people in the discord and here that seems to be the consensus which makes me realize I might be myopic given a uniquely excellent set of history teachers. Apparently not everyone listened to Monty Python in class as a way to remember the parliamentry period  https://youtu.be/dBPf6P332uM
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Dec 1, 2021 20:43
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I haven't read that Djuna Barnes but I do have a copy of Ryder that I've tried to crack into a couple of times and gotten nowhere.
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Dec 1, 2021 22:26
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I finished The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard and would like to recommend it as I've mentioned before I hadn't read any of his prior works but I imagine if you read all of My Struggle you'd struggle to get through The Morning Star. Knausgaard explicitly said in an interview that "it's me writing and why should I pretend it's not?" when people said all of the characters sound like him which is kind of a cool response. Basically a bunch of weird poo poo happens and some Norwegian death metal teens may or may not have summoned the actual Devil which leads to many people confronting their own mortality one way or another and none of the weird poo poo ever gets explained or solved which is as it should be. I wonder now about reviewers complaining about things not getting resolved. Generally, not just about The Morning Star. When did that become the expectation? That there'll be a nice plot and all the mysteries will be explained? In every book? But sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes it's not. Anyways I think Knausgaard is cool and having your first novel in a while just be a long and aimless look at death and dying that ends with a shrug is neat.
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Dec 2, 2021 03:44
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Nightwood was one of the few books assigned during english lit classes in my undergrad that I didn't read. could not stand it
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Dec 2, 2021 03:57
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Djuna Barnes strikes me as being in that class of early 20th century artists who are more notable for their personalities than the actual lasting quality of their work
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Dec 2, 2021 04:06
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Lobster Henry posted:I received a state education in England without the Civil War ever being mentioned, I'm pretty sure! I still read and enjoyed Paradise Lost as a teenager. i haven't read this book yet but that passage seems to be talking about how a spectator becomes obsessed with a particular sort of woman because of the image she puts forward resonating in memory and triggering all sort of various associations. anyway it reads as cool to me
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Dec 2, 2021 06:09
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Lobster Henry posted:Anyway, has anyone ITT read Nightwood by Djuna Barnes? I read it like 8 years ago and liked it, OP. Think of it like a long poem Heath posted:Djuna Barnes strikes me as being in that class of early 20th century artists who are more notable for their personalities than the actual lasting quality of their work 
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Dec 3, 2021 05:57
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A human heart posted:i haven't read this book yet but that passage seems to be talking about how a spectator becomes obsessed with a particular sort of woman because of the image she puts forward resonating in memory and triggering all sort of various associations. anyway it reads as cool to me Yeah, I agree; I think it's definitely about the tendency to perceive women not as individuals but as callbacks to personal mythology and nostalgia, which the author regards as a dangerous and bestial tendency. It's not a breezy read or anything, and I can understand bouncing off of it, but it's a little interesting.
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Dec 3, 2021 07:08
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the style in that nightwood prose reminds me a little bit of the miklos szentkuthy book i read recently
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Dec 3, 2021 09:54
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Djuna barnes good ... she was producing poetry well after WW2, look it up
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Dec 3, 2021 12:10
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Nitevision posted:I read it like 8 years ago and liked it, OP. Think of it like a long poem Fair. I mean, I like a lot of strange and obscure poetry that I often don't understand. But... not this. I guess you either intuitively latch onto something and are intrigued by it, or, you bounce off it. Oh well. Knowing me, I'll probably pick it up again in 10 years and love it. apophenium posted:I finished The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard and would like to recommend it I read a review of this that sounded like my kind of thing. I might have to check it out. Coincidentally I'm about halfway through my first Knausgaard right now, A Time for Everything, after I picked it up in a bookshop and was totally swept up by the opening pages. It starts out as a kind of treatise about angels and their changing relationship with humanity, treating them as if they were unambiguously real creatures, and examining Biblical anecdotes and Renaissance artworks as if they were historical sources. Then it segues into long retellings of stories from Genesis - first Cain and Abel, and now I'm midway through Noah's Ark - but sort of superimposed into a rural Northern European setting in what feels like the nineteenth century. It keeps going down strange by-roads (I'm currently in the middle of a long flashback about Noah's sister's boyfriend) and I have no idea what it's all leading to, but I'm enjoying it quite a lot. Lots of fun with form, and the prose kinda reminds me of Ishiguro in the way it maintains an evenness, a blandness, even a deliberate dullness, although the things it describes might violent, dramatic or bizarre. It works for me. It's sort of hypnotic.
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Dec 3, 2021 17:22
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Lobster Henry posted:Coincidentally I'm about halfway through my first Knausgaard right now, A Time for Everything, after I picked it up in a bookshop and was totally swept up by the opening pages. That sounds cool as hell I love oblique takes on the Bible/Christianity/angels Also if any of you are writerly types George Saunders has started a Substack (groan) building from his recent look at some short stories by the Russian masters. So it'll be more deep dives on stories and writing exercises and poo poo if that's your bag. I loved it and I like Saunders a lot so I'm kinda stoked.
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Dec 3, 2021 21:36
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Shibawanko posted:american history is presented as a straight line from columbus to washington to lincoln and the end of slavery, and the first major thing after that is wilson and the versailles treaty the lesson here is when people talk about how bad historical education is in the us, it's garbage everywhere else too Antivehicular posted:which the author regards as a dangerous and bestial tendency. how are you getting that from this passage? it doesn't ascribe bestiality to felix's thoughts, but to the woman herself. it seems also to be very misleading to call appeals to "racial memory" and capability "nostalgia"
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Dec 17, 2021 19:19
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Each paragraph of that passage explicitly names a dynamic of atavistic lust within the observer/would-be consumer, not the woman who is being observed. Like it literally says "we feel that we could eat her". No offense but I don't think you are reading it carefully enough if you are missing that
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Dec 18, 2021 00:32
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Lobster Henry posted:Fair. I mean, I like a lot of strange and obscure poetry that I often don't understand. But... not this. I guess you either intuitively latch onto something and are intrigued by it, or, you bounce off it. Oh well. Knowing me, I'll probably pick it up again in 10 years and love it. I have had A time for everything recommended to me by other people who can't really stand the autofiction trend (like me) before, it sounds like I really should give this one a go some time love when the bible gets directly intertwined with fiction this way
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Dec 21, 2021 19:09
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I'm trying to make an honest attempt at going through Cien años de soledad in the original – I've never read it in English, and Spanish is my second language, which I don't typically use for literature. So it's pretty grueling, but rewarding, and doable if I go slowly. It makes pretty exhaustive use of the temporal resources of Spanish, and there are very few utilitarian passages that include only a single tense / aspect / mood over an extended period of time to relate a linear sequence of events. Not being wholly comfortable with the language forces you to pay attention to this, which is pretty nice.
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Dec 27, 2021 01:00
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Yeah, it really does. Also her brother’s new life, how about that for a plot twist. I should read more Herrera. I read Kingdom Cons and The Transmigration of Bodies, and they were as surreal and excellent as Signs Preceding the End of the World had led me to expect. Cons follows a folk singer who becomes the court musician for a drug lord and writes corridos in his honor. Transmigration follows a lawyer in the aftermath of a sort of Romeo and Juliet affair while navigating a pandemic lockdown. In both, Herrera avoids using many given names, and instead most people are just known by their titles, like "the Heir", or their defining characteristic, like "the Unruly". It adds this sort of mythic quality to what are otherwise sort of low-key stories about peripheral characters in criminal organizations.
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Dec 27, 2021 19:30
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:It makes pretty exhaustive use of the temporal resources of Spanish, and there are very few utilitarian passages that include only a single tense / aspect / mood over an extended period of time to relate a linear sequence of events. Not being wholly comfortable with the language forces you to pay attention to this, which is pretty nice. This is really neat. Could you elaborate on it? I don't speak any Spanish, but it seems like a stronger temporal vocabulary would be massive for that novel.
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Dec 28, 2021 06:28
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Anyone else read Paul Scott's Raj Quartet? I'm reminded a lot of Faulkner with the revisiting of events from different perspectives and the racism bound up in repressed sexuality.
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Dec 28, 2021 08:51
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Antivehicular posted:This is really neat. Could you elaborate on it? I don't speak any Spanish, but it seems like a stronger temporal vocabulary would be massive for that novel. Sure. It's not necessarily that Spanish has more temporal constructions, but it does have some that English doesn't. The main two are the imperfect / preterite distinction in the past, where English has only a simple past, and the subjunctive, which has a past / non-past distinction in Spanish (English uses mostly infinitives for subjunctive functions, which don't have a time distinction). English has some other time tricks that Spanish doesn't, but of course a hispanophone book will reflect those available in its language. Some things I'm noticing a lot is that there are a lot of sentences that alternate between the imperfect and preterite between clauses, like this: quote:Había hecho la mitad del camino en una hamaca colgada de un palo que dos hombres llevaban en hombros, porque la hinchazón le desfiguró las piernas, y las varices se le reventaban como burbujas. This is something like, 'She'd made half the trip in a hammock hung on a stick that two men carried on their shoulders, because the swelling disfigured her legs, and the varicose veins burst like bubbles.' In English the most natural way to translate it is all with the simple past (you could do some other things, but it might seem try-hard), but the Spanish moves back and forth between the imperfect and preterite – 'carry' is imperfect, 'disfigure' is preterite, and then 'burst' is imperfect again. So it gives the sense of the events being ongoing in the past, then a single concrete occurrence, then back to being ongoing. I think this is deliberate, because you could pretty naturally stick to just one to narrate the events here, and it's so often that this happens that it can't be anything other than a stylistic choice (I literally just opened to a random page and picked one of the first sentences I saw, and the following sentence does this too). And there are a couple other things García Marquez seems to like to do, like use the imperfect haber de, which he uses in the sense of 'was to,' like in the famous first sentence of the novel. It's always, 'So and so was[imperfect] to do this many years later...' It's a cool construction, because it has a lot of the looking-forward-to-look-back structure of the novel. I understand why people are so fascinated by that opening sentence – it captures the way a lot of the novel's sentences are structured, and it looks like the plot is structured that way, too. 'Many years later, he was to recall...' etc. There's a lot of temporal layering there, both in the choice of words and the grammatical structures. Here's another example of it, beyond the first sentence: quote:José Arcadio, su hermano mayor, había de transmitir aquella imagen maravillosa como un recuerdo hereditario, a toda su descendencia. 'José Arcadio, his older brother, was to pass on that wondrous image as a hereditary memory, to all of his descendants.'
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Dec 29, 2021 06:43
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Hi thread, I have decided to stop reading genre-fiction in an attempt to enrich myself with proper literature. I'm going to start with the Illiad, and move to: "The Odyssey ". If there are books I cannot miss, feel free to quote me. Other wise I will post back after completion. It's time to take a break from 40k, Star-Wars, Witcher, etc. New year new me, or some other such bullshit.
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Jan 1, 2022 18:08
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just remember that you're reading texts that are over 2000 years old, so if you should hit a wall or something, don't let that discourage you from all of literature they are fun though, especially if you read a good translation
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Jan 1, 2022 18:40
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my only advice is to not treat it as a homework assignment. You aren't some warrior monk punishing themselves to be a tougher um, reader. If you aren't finding them fun, drop them and I'm sure this thread will have some really fun, really beautiful, prose novels to share. There's a lot of really rewarding stuff out there, so I hope you enjoy your journey! If you are coming from the Witcher, you might love some original Brothers Grimm collections. I really enjoyed dipping in and out of The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
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Jan 1, 2022 19:26
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Read Blinding
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Jan 1, 2022 19:50
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Read Faust
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Jan 1, 2022 19:55
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Modulo16 posted:Hi thread, There are a ton of don't-miss books but if you could give us some details about what you're into that could help steer you in a good direction What made you decide to start with Homer rather than something more contemporary? Not that Homer's a bad choice, I'm just curious
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Jan 1, 2022 19:58
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Gaius Marius posted:Read Faust poo poo good idea, it'll be next up
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Jan 1, 2022 20:39
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Read the Bible
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Jan 1, 2022 20:39
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Modulo16 posted:Hi thread, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court would do great as part of your transition from baby books to grown up books.
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Jan 1, 2022 21:18
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Heath posted:There are a ton of don't-miss books but if you could give us some details about what you're into that could help steer you in a good direction I read Oedipus, Illiad, and Odyssey in Highschool for an english class, and I couldn't appreciate it at the time. I wanted to go back and read the works and learn to appreciate them better. As far as what I am into: I like Micheal Connelly and Elmore Leonard as far as crime novels, but I'd like to branch more into stories that really bring out emotion. The Kite Runner was a pretty god book from what I remember, same with "The Bean Trees". City of Thieves by David Benioff was also a great book from recent memory. Does that help? Bilirubin posted:Read the Bible I plan to read the Old Testament. Gaius Marius posted:Read Faust Anything specific to start?
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Jan 1, 2022 21:26
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