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Finished Pynchon's V. after two weeks of reading. I don't have anything particularly intelligent to say about its ideas or themes, but it's a titanic book. Something about the mad nightmare of modern civilization. It did surprise me with how serious it managed to get, when Lot 49 and the first 270 pages of this trained me to think of Pynchon as a very silly writer. I can scarcely imagine what Gravity's Rainbow will be like, if it's considered to be an even greater achievement. One thing to note is that there are two sieges in the novel, which put me in the mind of Victorian siege fiction. I occasionally see vague references to such a genre's existence, but have been unable to find any hard substantiation or evidence, with the most famous clear cut example of such a story, The Siege of Khrishnapur, having been written long after V. itself. I wonder if such books were written about the international settlement in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion? FPyat fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 08:28
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Gaius Marius posted:The occasional flashes into numismatic events sorry the what now is there just a subplot about coin collecting or am i misunderstanding what you mean DeimosRising fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 16:45
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lacrimal events
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Oct 30, 2023 16:48
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Lex Neville posted:lacrimal events lol
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Oct 30, 2023 16:59
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Numinous, gently caress me or gently caress spell check not sure which got me there.
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Oct 30, 2023 17:28
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Lex Neville posted:lacrimal events Enough about my attempted sexy times.
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Oct 30, 2023 19:23
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Gaius Marius posted:Numinous, gently caress me or gently caress spell check not sure which got me there. hubris
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Oct 30, 2023 20:33
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Well, I slogged through Infinite Jest in two and a half weeks. I liked it more than I thought it would but gently caress me was it exhausting.
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Oct 30, 2023 21:19
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Gertrude Perkins posted:Well, I slogged through Infinite Jest in two and a half weeks. I liked it more than I thought it would but gently caress me was it exhausting. It works a lot better on a reread because you can just hit the highlights or just leaf through it at random. And I say that with the disclaimer that it's one of my favorite novels.
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Oct 30, 2023 21:24
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mdemone posted:It works a lot better on a reread because you can just hit the highlights or just leaf through it at random. I spent much of the afternoon going through analyses and other discussion pages about it and flipping back through relevant passages and going "Oh okay this major plot point actually got resolved here but I didn't notice".
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Oct 30, 2023 22:36
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Reading lots of poems lately. Mahmoud Darwish is great and so are John Ashbery and Rita Dove
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Oct 31, 2023 01:57
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thehoodie posted:Reading lots of poems lately. Mahmoud Darwish is great and so are John Ashbery and Rita Dove if you like darwish the collection of palestinian writing named in his honor that archipelago put out (a map of absence) is a good primer with a nice mix of prose and poetry if you like ashbery but you're the person who made it impossible to find a copy of self-portrait in a convex mirror at any point in the past like five years then congratulations on the success of your plot against me
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Oct 31, 2023 02:04
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I started War and Peace in June and finished it this past weekend. I read the Garnett translation, but I just bought the Mandelker revision of the Maude translation for whenever I reread it (I'm guessing I'll want to do so at least once in my life). When I got a Kindle for Christmas seven or eight years ago, I downloaded it on a whim along with a few other classics I hadn't read because they were free on the Amazon store. I set a goal a few years ago of not having any books on my Kindle that I hadn't read, and this was one of the last few I had left to get to. Some thoughts: - It's absurd how many aspects of life this book touches on - The story/world is very absorbing even in the present day; I cannot imagine how obsessive people would've been about this book if they were its contemporary, like a Lord of the Rings on steroids - Peace chapters > Philosophy chapters > War chapters, but the last two are close - Tolstoy sure loving hated the great-man theory of history, and kudos to him for getting there early - Also a lot of great comedy-of-manners here for Russia's nobility - Given where he ended up in his personal beliefs, I was surprised that religion didn't play a larger role in the book - I've seen a lot of commentary along the lines of "everyone loves Pierre" but he was by far my least favorite of the major characters to follow; he wasn't the worst on a moral level or whatever but he's just such a dithering dope - I loved Natasha in most of her iterations (the highlight being manic nightmare Natasha melting down at home while Prince Andrei was on his year-long recovery trip), but her characterization in the first epilogue really fell flat for me. I think it's Denisov who's like "who's this boring broad" until Pierre gets home and she momentarily gets some of her old verve back. - My second favorite was Princess Marya, who's one of the best depictions of a strongly religious character I've ever seen - I enjoyed Nikolai in the war chapters and That's About It for him, that dude sucks - I kind of wanted more Vera and Berg's middle-class busybody adventures if I'm being honest with you - Conversely, I wish Petya had died much faster, what a twerp - I think the only character in the whole book who didn't feel real to me at any point was Platon Karataev, the idealized peasant - Poor loving Sonya, goddamn. Would've been a little nicer at least if she ended up in Pierre and Natasha's home, but given that Natasha's takeaway was "well Sonya is just a little loser and she likes it that way," maybe that wouldn't have been better - Shout-out to Prince Andrei, the most Byronic hero who offhandedly accomplished all of the serf freeing that Pierre was too much of a doofus to do and who never found a half-full glass in his life Favorite scenes: - Anna Drubetskaya's maneuvering during the death of Pierre's father, and Pierre's discomfort through that whole process - Prince Andrei's first near-death experience, his visions of the sky, and his meeting with Napoleon - Natasha and Denisov during Nikolai's first leave - Nikolai's bold dancing - Nikolai's gambling with Dolokhov - Pierre's awkward visit to Bald Hills until he and Prince Andrei are able to talk philosophy and effectively rekindle their friendship - The death of Lise - Pierre's entry into freemasonry, and his annoyance with the person inducting him being some underwhelming dude he knows in regular life - Natasha and Co. getting ready for her first grand ball - Natasha and Marya's failed first meeting, and the old count's boorish intrusion - The failed elopement - Tsar Alexander browbeating the nobles and merchants into supporting the war, and their disbelief afterward at how they had been whipped up into a delirium - Pierre attempting to make his case to the other nobles at that meeting and getting totally disregarded - Prince Vasili vacillating between positions on Kutuzov - Kutuzov during the Battle of Borodino - The Rostovs preparing to leave Moscow - Helene of loose-bosom fame dying on her way to her home planet offscreen - The dissolution of the French army in and after Moscow, along with Napoleon's unraveling - Pierre witnessing the execution of the other prisoners - Petya's last battle - Prince Andrei's actual death experience and the move from tenderness with Natasha to distance as they can no longer understand one another; his comparing and contrasting of human love with divine love - The implication that Pierre and Prince Andrei's son are both on their way to dying as Decembrists These are all extraordinarily shallow thoughts for one of the most impressive books I ever read, but I'm still overwhelmed a couple of days later. I'm looking forward to watching the 1956 and 1967 films, and maybe even the 2016 miniseries. surf rock fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 04:47
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History is written by the winners is a truth that is anything but, however it does hold true in regards to Tsar Alexander's case. The man was absolutely unhinged. The 2016 miniseries seems like a skip to me, the 56 is alright but really needed someone who read a history book on staff, it's one of Hepburn's worst films of her major roles and Fonda is miscast terribly. The Bondarchuk movie and Waterloo are both incredible just for the scale of the battles. Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 05:34
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Good War and Peace thoughts. I wish I had enjoyed it as much as you but to my shame I really struggle with those gigantic Russian novels. The short stories are more my speed. I remember being frustrated with W&P and reading someone who said that the book works because everyone who reads it falls in love with Natasha. But I found her pretty irritating and, more to the point, not a persuasive representation of a person. It felt like Tolstoy had pioneered in inventing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl 150 years too early. Some of the battlefield stuff has really stuck with me, though, particularly how Tolstoy captures these proud young soldiers happily charging into battle for the glory of the fatherland, and then their minds basically breaking in two because they can’t deal with the sudden, surreal reality of chaos everywhere and people - strangers! - actually trying to kill them. Very powerful and memorable.
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Oct 31, 2023 11:53
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Gaius Marius posted:History is written by the winners is a truth that is anything but, however it does hold true in regards to Tsar Alexander's case. The man was absolutely unhinged. the 2016 miniseries is actually okay, if you like W&P enough to also see/hear adaptions of it, it’s worth a watch imo
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Oct 31, 2023 13:48
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Lobster Henry posted:Good War and Peace thoughts. I wish I had enjoyed it as much as you but to my shame I really struggle with those gigantic Russian novels. The short stories are more my speed. Regarding Natasha, I see what you mean about the manic pixie dream girl thing, but I do disagree about her seeming like a real person. Here's how I see her progression: - When you first meet her, I think she's 13 or so and her manic energy is pretty fitting for that age from what I see in family around that age. She's just a big kid who has had a great childhood, and she's as happy/spoiled as you'd imagine. - As she enters her teenage years, Tolstoy is clear that she's pretty, musically talented, and well-liked. However, she's also impetuous, indecisive, and worried about the impressions of others. Again, seems pretty spot-on for a popular teen. - As she reaches the cusp of adulthood (or whatever was considered adulthood at the time), these traits all remain but she start hitting major walls. Her headstrong approach to love whirls her around between Prince Andrei and Kuragin, leading to a cascading series of eventually disastrous decisions that destroy her sense of self (and not without some justification). She also meets someone in Princess Marya with very different values who isn't immediately bowled over by her charm (which she's now so convinced of herself that before the meeting, she literally thinks something like "it has to go well! everyone likes me!!!"), which shakes her too. - As time passes, she eventually rallies (thanks to the resilience of youth, as Tolstoy puts it), but she's changed. She's still naive and impetuous, but she becomes more self-aware, decisive, and empathetic. She also starts to take on some of Marya's traits such as her religiousness (to a degree) and her ability to be serious. The childishness that defined her earlier in the book is gone, and she does seem like a realistic young adult to me. - Her reunion with Prince Andrei initially reopens the wound, but she handles it much differently than her previous heartbreak. They get closure on their relationship and Natasha takes another step toward a calmer, more serious personality to mirror her new friend Princess Marya. - The start of her relationship with Pierre largely takes place from his perspective and offscreen, but the next time we see her after a big time jump she's full-on Mom Mode and couldn't care less about anything other than her family. Like I said above, I think she's a little too far removed from where she was in the early/middle chapters at this point, but I've certainly had friends whose previous personalities have seemed to disappear entirely under the all-encompassing assault of motherhood.
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Oct 31, 2023 14:29
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Reading Knausgaard's latest in English and loving it, though the translator has stripped a lot of Norwegian identity from it with a bunch of Britishisms, for lack of better term. Characters greet each other by saying 'all right,' lunchtime is teatime, there are lorries, etc. You'd be forgiven for forgetting that it takes place in Norway sometimes. I guess it's not necessarily a wrong way to translate it and I might not give it a second thought if I were from the UK. No doubt I've read translated books that flattened the prose into something more palatable to English speaking readers without recognizing it
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Oct 31, 2023 16:04
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Lobster Henry posted:Good War and Peace thoughts. I wish I had enjoyed it as much as you but to my shame I really struggle with those gigantic Russian novels. The short stories are more my speed. Another work that captures the chaos of Napoleonic warfare is the opening section of The Charterhouse of Parma. Fabrizio the main character is a dumbass and overly romantic, when he hears of the restoration of Napoleon he sneaks across the border into France to go and fight for him only to end up finally reaching the French during the chaos of the final few hours of Waterloo. Stendhal served in the Grand Armée during the Russian campaign and understood a thing or two about war even if he escaped seeing the full fiasco the retreat would become. Also an interesting book to see a flip side to the Napoleonic world with many of the Italians freed from the shackles of the Austrians and the Church for a precious few years only to be re-shackled. For both the more liberals and conservative characters it is a turning point, they now know that a unification and renunciation of foreign dominance is possible, but they don't know or can't will it into existence leading to a general depression and malaise among the population that drives the strange psychological situation you find the principal characters engaged in throughout the novel.
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Oct 31, 2023 18:04
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Question for the thread. I'm a pretty young guy forums wise but recently I've started to see more and more people appealing to a sort of mediocrity. Disliking anything using five dollar words, having harder than average prose, being challenging to their base worldview in any way. I must ask. Do you guys also feel this? And if so, do you believe it's becoming more present in society, or at least forum society? I just can't get into the headspace to castigate a work by Faulkner or Nabokov for being difficult and I can't think of a reason for it beyond resentment or a bizarre sense of psuedo socialism that thinks rewriting the nature of what is great to what is simple will level the playing field of thought.
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Nov 1, 2023 04:26
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The dumber conversations I see on this site are still rather elevated compared to what I find in the wider world of social media and in-person literary dialogue.
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Nov 1, 2023 04:34
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I don't have social media so that isn't a factor to me. Although I'd say in person I have nobody whom to talk literature with, even my cousin whom I consider a very smart woman reads nothing but YA garbage and whatever genre John Grisham is.
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Nov 1, 2023 04:37
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Gaius Marius posted:Question for the thread. I'm a pretty young guy forums wise but recently I've started to see more and more people appealing to a sort of mediocrity. Disliking anything using five dollar words, having harder than average prose, being challenging to their base worldview in any way. I must ask. Do you guys also feel this? And if so, do you believe it's becoming more present in society, or at least forum society? No. This is anathema to me and contrary to everything I enjoy about art and prose specifically. But yes I do believe it's become pretty common at least in America, this place is utterly flooded with anti intellectualism.
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Nov 1, 2023 04:44
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My mother's a teacher of English translation, so I grew up with all kinds of classics and 20th century American lit on the shelves. She's a bit clueless when it comes to any intellectual subject that isn't literature, poetry, or language, which I guess created a gap in my ability to talk about what I read with her. I do hope I get to share my thoughts on Middlemarch with her, though.
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Nov 1, 2023 04:50
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Good luck man, that novel was frustrating as hell to me. There are a lot of interesting scenarios and choices going around in it, but it gets so backbitey and gossipy I was practically skimming into the end. It's a shame Dorthea and her situation and Lydgate and his show such promise drowned out with endless English scenes of the most tedious stripe. Your mom might actually love it though. I think mine would given how much she likes those Downtown Abbey shows. Ladislaw is also a huge problem for me. He shows up as a better match for Dorthea but he does and accomplishes just as little as Casubon does. He's such a poorly sketched character, if the novel had had the balls to be more controversial making Lydgate and Dorthea an adulterous pair would have served the narrative better I feel. Also hard to take a work with a character named Raffles seriously. Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 04:54
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I just associate Raffles with the founder of Singapore, so it wouldn't stand out as a name for me.
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Nov 1, 2023 05:02
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Gaius Marius posted:Question for the thread. I'm a pretty young guy forums wise but recently I've started to see more and more people appealing to a sort of mediocrity. Disliking anything using five dollar words, having harder than average prose, being challenging to their base worldview in any way. I must ask. Do you guys also feel this? And if so, do you believe it's becoming more present in society, or at least forum society? The forums are quite a big place so your experience could differ wildly depending on where you go but as someone who typically posts in the Games Forum I feel there is very positive view toward looking at art critically and intellectually. I know you post in games too so maybe you disagree with me but I feel its a pretty intellectual-friendly place despite the subject matter not being particularly intellectually challenging. That being said I know quite a few games posters who are well read and I'm currently reading Under the Volcano when a poster mentioned it as one of their favourite novels and I have to say its quite good and I'm enjoying it
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Nov 1, 2023 11:27
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Gaius Marius posted:Question for the thread. I'm a pretty young guy forums wise but recently I've started to see more and more people appealing to a sort of mediocrity. Disliking anything using five dollar words, having harder than average prose, being challenging to their base worldview in any way. I must ask. Do you guys also feel this? And if so, do you believe it's becoming more present in society, or at least forum society? Are you talking about the weird argument you had in CineD or something else? I haven’t noticed any kind of general trend toward anti intellectualism but it’s a big forum
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Nov 1, 2023 17:33
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DeimosRising posted:I haven’t noticed any kind of general trend toward anti intellectualism but it’s a big forum
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Nov 1, 2023 17:47
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If it’s CineD, there’s some topics goons can’t handle. Mainly sex. That’s most of the forums actually.
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Nov 1, 2023 17:53
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lol, cineD banned posters who actually tried to evaluate and discuss art, including “art” like superhero movies, critically
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Nov 1, 2023 18:24
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This is a cross-post from the What Did You Just Finish thread, I figured I might get some better answers in here, if it's not ok to double post feel free to delete this:McSpankWich posted:Just finished Doctor Zhivago and I have to say it was rough. I had a hard time at the beginning because going in I didn't realize that Russian naming conventions attached relationship/status to the names like Japenese does. So I was extremely confused by that, along with why everyone was always being referred to by full name. Once I figured that out though it was much less confusing, but there so very long sections of story that were diatribes on various philosophical, religious, and political subjects, some of which ended up impacting the course of the whole story and others that were seemingly irrelevant in the scope of the book as a whole.
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Nov 1, 2023 18:38
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ulvir posted:lol, cineD banned posters who actually tried to evaluate and discuss art, including “art” like superhero movies, critically I would be curious when this was (like are we just talking about BotL?) because I have gotten the opposite impression of cD especially under the past 2 mods. even going back to like the Transformers threads, a bunch of that was ironic/tongue-in-cheek but there were some great posts and observations made, and that seemed to be encouraged instead of stifled
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Nov 1, 2023 19:22
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lEt pEoPlE eNjOy tHiNgS
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Nov 1, 2023 19:59
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in my reply to gaius i was talking about american society specifically, not these forums. actually these forums in my experience consistently have the smartest posters ive encountered anywhere online. though i do look at a very limited slice of the forums.
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Nov 1, 2023 20:02
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Thanks for the responses. That conversation in CineD got me tilted that's for sure. derp posted:lEt pEoPlE eNjOy tHiNgS This is the kind of thing I'm talking about, both in Forums and Life where someone mistakes a dislike or criticism of the work they consume with a personal attack on them. It's strange to me the act of identifying yourself with a work so heavily that you subsume it into your own identity. That and the aspiration to universal understanding of art which if one is thinking clearly at all is nothing but a reduction in the quality that one can produce and for no legitimate reason. I blame "video essays", tik tok, and twitter
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Nov 1, 2023 22:52
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I had someone get insanely tilted at me for saying the Da Vinci Code was bad in 2006, so it's always been around
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Nov 1, 2023 23:01
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There is definitely a strain of internetish neuroticism surrounding anything that could be perceived as pretentious. I don't know if it's specifically something on the internet-left but it does seem to pop up most frequently with outspoken socialists. Very much the "let people enjoy things" because they've bought into the idea that reading (or watching, etc.) anything challenging is in the vein of self-imposed austerity, similar to how working out or eating healthy can slide into the concept of "body-fascism," and that "popcorn" media, for lack of a better word, has value on account of being affirming or presents openly anti-colonialist or anti-capitalist values and that works that are framed that way should have a degree of primacy in any consideration. That is, cartoons and movies and comics and such with the right sort of values on display. This isn't everybody by any means, but it's loving wearying trying to have a discussion about any kind of literature with "problematic" themes or authors with anybody whose tastes you don't know well. I'm at least as much a democratic socialist as the average goon, but if, say, I mention that I read and enjoy an openly fascist author like Mishima's work, the discussion terminates and the interrogation begins probing into my sympathies for any hint of cryptofascism, someone trots out the same threadbare "scratch a liberal, etc." and everybody leaves annoyed and stupider than they went into it. Nobody will ever ask you why you enjoy these things, at least not in a way that isn't clearly aiming for something to poo poo on you for. No mention of anything in the work itself that might have resonated with you, because that would imply some work on the part of the person who is interrogating your beliefs, who might have to actually read the thing to have a discussion. I'm guilty of this too, of course. I will never in my life watch a loving Marvel movie. I know they're not for me, and I dislike them for their omnipresent shoveling of these stupid loving superhero characters into every possible facet of life, wherever they'll fit, from diaper boxes to every third YouTube ad (If I have to hear "That shield's legacy is ... complicated" one more loving time where you can just hear the loving dot dot dot you hack pieces of sh) and I have a really hard time taking people who find anything of value in them seriously. But I'd have to watch the drat things to "get it" and I know I'm not going to get it. We're on different wavelengths. I'd sure like it if more people were willing to put the work into more challenging things, but it's not going to happen except among the people who self-select into it.
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Nov 1, 2023 23:28
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I think there's also something about the nature discussion on a web forum such as this. It takes a long time posting with ppl to actually get to know them in any meaningful sense and so it's a lot easier to be dismissive of ppls arguments when a lot of us are mostly strangers to each other. People will be a lot more receptive to ideas and criticism when it comes from a trusted source.
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Nov 1, 2023 23:40
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Heath posted:.... We're on different wavelengths. I'd sure like it if more people were willing to put the work into more challenging things, but it's not going to happen except among the people who self-select into it. does anyone here read because it's challenging, or hard? i feel like people do it because, its fun, we love it, its beautiful, inspiring, whatever. maybe sound like the crazy gym rat who works out because they love it... maybe it's hard at first? i dont know. If I don't like a book i put it down and move on, I don't find myself 'working' at something 'challenging'. I agree very much with the sentiment of your post but these kinds of phrasings just seem to work against the idea of reading good books. Like, i'm not sitting here sweating and getting a headache, im having a great time
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Nov 1, 2023 23:58
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