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I can already imagine the semiliterate 20 something raised on a diet of YA novels reading that first page and going "God I identify with this so much"
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Mar 19, 2024 18:40
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Thank you Heath for saving me. I read a lot of garbage but I gotta set some barriers. Kudos to them for getting their poo poo published tho
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Mar 19, 2024 18:41
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Tell Me I'm Worthless was pretty good but the political didacticism was pretty wearing. it's not really a meaningful comparison to mishima though? you don't need to do this political hygeine thing about a dead gay bodybuilder. in fact if political education is your objective the author most obviously consumed by the psychosexual drama common in fascism is probably a good bet as writers of fiction goMel Mudkiper posted:I can already imagine the semiliterate 20 something raised on a diet of YA novels reading that first page and going "God I identify with this so much" this would be a very funny turn of events (the kid is a minor character who becomes a terrorist)
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Mar 19, 2024 20:21
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Peel posted:Tell Me I'm Worthless was pretty good but the political didacticism was pretty wearing. it's not really a meaningful comparison to mishima though? you don't need to do this political hygeine thing about a dead gay bodybuilder. in fact if political education is your objective the author most obviously consumed by the psychosexual drama common in fascism is probably a good bet as writers of fiction go Spot on, yeah. The comparison to Mishima only goes insofar as someone brought up TMIW in the context of op posted:I like to interact with writing and difficult ideas but in ways that I find more interesting than just engaging with fascist art. Allison Rumfitt's Tell Me I'm Worthless or Charlotte Wood's The Natural Way of Things both hosed me up but in an engaging and not dehumanizing way that is being used to kill people these days. And then you go read the actual work they're referencing and it's not clear what "difficult ideas" are present in it or what quality the writing has that makes it a superior choice to spend your time interacting with
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Mar 19, 2024 21:05
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reading the quote again, are they outright saying "right-wing" writings shouldn't be read at all versus having leftists present them? why? what is it that's making it more interesting to engage with an author's work in every way but reading? my god schoolchildren are less afraid of books
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Mar 19, 2024 21:09
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With Mishima it's important to note that he was fully aware that his own ideas were essentially juvenile, self defeating, and doomed to failure. You cannot walk away from Runaway Horses or Decay of the Angel thinking the man wasn't far more aware of the criticism against his ideas then most of the people criticizing him, at least the kind of people who've read the wiki page but zero lines of his work. You also get a lot of that towards the end of The Cantos as Pounds hero worship falls away and the work becomes more vociferously anti capital while also acknowledging how failed his melding of the political and the aesthetic was. While we're still on fascist authors, I found Céline very inspiring. For all his ranting and raving about society it's clear the dudes problems were ninety percent self made.
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Mar 19, 2024 21:16
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Especially in the Sea of Fertility the entire theme of Honda's life lies in his inability to square the circle of a fundamentally spiritual, aesthetic, artistic gnawing in his soul that he sees reflected in the world in the form of Kioyaki and his various incarnations, and his rationalist, pragmatic worldview. The one aspect of his personality was bred into him by his education and fostered by his profession and his success, but Kioyaki represents something more primal, something that Honda can see every moment of his life but is always just out of his reach and something that he can never articulate but has such an arresting grasp on him that even catching a glimpse of it sends him into an obsessive spiral for decades. But by the time you get to Decay, that aesthetic yearning has become its own inverse, and the very inexpressible thing seems to reject Honda himself outright. Honda was never Beautiful in the Mishima conception, never could be, and as he decays physically and spiritually he is reduced to a crippled old man whose sole pleasure is spying on couples going at it in the public park and jacking off. And at the end of it all he comes as close as he ever has to truly connecting with Kioyaki by embarking on his own mirror image trek, climbing the steps of the temple, crippled by age as Kioyaki was by fever, makes it to the top, sits down before Satoko and asks her about Kioyaki, and she has no loving idea who or what he's talking about. Claims she never knew anyone by that name. It's not clear if she forgot him entirely in the intervening 60odd years, as though perhaps he was just a footnote in her life and merely a teenage boyfriend, or whether his love story may have never really happened, at least not in the way Honda remembers it. That ending slapped the absolute poo poo out of me because it was, number one, not even on my radar as a possible trajectory for this story, and two, in a single page of dialog it managed to cast four loving novels of intensely personal, emotional, intimate, perverse stories into chaos and doubt. What if this burning, irrational impulse that defines your entire wretched life simply didn't mean that much to anyone but you? What if it was not only unobtainable, but this thing that you have known with a deeper certainty than anything you've ever been taught or anything you've ever seen, has been merely invisible to the rest of the world? What if the thing consuming your soul, this decayed angel that abused you at every turn but which you couldn't help but love with the entirety of your being, were to just fly away from you as meaninglessly as an autumn leaf in the gutter?
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Mar 19, 2024 22:04
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I dunno, go ride a bike or something Maybe he just needed some more outdoor activities in his life
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Mar 19, 2024 22:07
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Heath posted:Especially in the Sea of Fertility the entire theme of Honda's life lies in his inability to square the circle of a fundamentally spiritual, aesthetic, artistic gnawing in his soul that he sees reflected in the world in the form of Kioyaki and his various incarnations, and his rationalist, pragmatic worldview. The one aspect of his personality was bred into him by his education and fostered by his profession and his success, but Kioyaki represents something more primal, something that Honda can see every moment of his life but is always just out of his reach and something that he can never articulate but has such an arresting grasp on him that even catching a glimpse of it sends him into an obsessive spiral for decades. But by the time you get to Decay, that aesthetic yearning has become its own inverse, and the very inexpressible thing seems to reject Honda himself outright. Honda was never Beautiful in the Mishima conception, never could be, and as he decays physically and spiritually he is reduced to a crippled old man whose sole pleasure is spying on couples going at it in the public park and jacking off. And at the end of it all he comes as close as he ever has to truly connecting with Kioyaki by embarking on his own mirror image trek, climbing the steps of the temple, crippled by age as Kioyaki was by fever, makes it to the top, sits down before Satoko and asks her about Kioyaki, and she has no loving idea who or what he's talking about. Claims she never knew anyone by that name. It's not clear if she forgot him entirely in the intervening 60odd years, as though perhaps he was just a footnote in her life and merely a teenage boyfriend, or whether his love story may have never really happened, at least not in the way Honda remembers it. man now i really want to reread this
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Mar 19, 2024 22:24
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Gaius Marius posted:While we're still on fascist authors, I found Céline very inspiring. For all his ranting and raving about society it's clear the dudes problems were ninety percent self made. céline i think is a great example of how self-defeating the moral argument against reading him is because his life and work is arguably a better argument against fascism than anything put out by somebody less overtly terrible. his self-imposed misery and deep unpleasantness as a person seeps through every line, much like my posts on the something awful forums.
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Mar 19, 2024 22:40
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yeah as much as I loathe the idea that there needs to be praxis to reading fascists, the greatest takeaway is that its a political mentality of the broken and miserable and doomed to its own self destruction as no amount of control will ever overpower their own inner weakness
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Mar 20, 2024 01:23
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Guess I’ll sneak in here since yall are talking about him, but this thread finally got me to read Mishima. I read Life For Sale last week which felt like a solid entry point. Sort of reminded me of one of those aimless LA mystery novels/movies like The Long Goodbye or Big Lebowski where the protagonist is just wildly over his head and doesn’t even realize it, and there’s these weird factions working against him in the background that he’s barely aware of, Started Forbidden Colors last night and the language and writing are immediately much more challenging. In a good way! I like challenge. I’m about a fifth of the way in and probably my favorite part so far was Yuchan in the park in the early morning with all the other gay dudes. I also have the Schrader movie to watch, just wanted to read a couple of his actual books before I watched it.
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Mar 20, 2024 01:40
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Life For Sale is fun but you can tell it's a book made for the paycheck not as a statement. Made me want a vampire mommy gf though.
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Mar 20, 2024 01:43
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It strikes me that writing a book titled Life For Sale for a paycheck is itself a statement.
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Mar 20, 2024 15:03
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Tree Goat posted:céline i think is a great example of how self-defeating the moral argument against reading him is because his life and work is arguably a better argument against fascism than anything put out by somebody less overtly terrible. his self-imposed misery and deep unpleasantness as a person seeps through every line, much like my posts on the something awful forums. Tbh I'd say he got off extraordinarily easy compared to contemporary figures like Brasillach and Drieu la Rochelle, mostly because he was too deranged and misanthropic to usefully collaborate with the Nazis. It is pretty inarguable that he was thoroughly miserable his whole life through though
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Mar 20, 2024 16:48
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PeterWeller posted:It strikes me that writing a book titled Life For Sale for a paycheck is itself a statement. lol absolutely
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Mar 20, 2024 18:00
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currently reading the new novel by this danish guy. I also saw him perform at a poetry festival last october-ish, and was p good
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Mar 20, 2024 18:08
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I don't want to reopen it all after that thrashing, but I just wanted to say that I wasn't trying to tell others what to read, just that when I've read authors like Mishima or Celine I found the themes and their history more wearying than the prose makes up for. And that I can understand why people would be wary of engaging with them given the political currents and the lack of free time to enjoy art. Sure they're sadboys that created interesting aesthetic works that can provide windows on their psyches and the interplay of violence, but you can see how some people would just be like, eh, not for me. Rumfitt's book is a weird and effective tackling of trans violence in workmanlike prose. As unsubtle as it is, I found it interesting art. But sure, maybe Eco would have been a better example. I'm not saying don't engage or read right wing authors just that it can be a tiring exercise and maybe people appreciate engaging with those ideas through less of an unfiltered perspective or one that confronts it. Aesthetics and art are subjective and I was just saying that subjectively I found the aesthetics were moot to me at a certain point. Keep reading and enjoying them! I'll read them on occasion too, I'm not cancelling or censoring, just saying I can understand people not wanting to. e: I think I'm still just mad that Houellebecq somehow has a platform. gently caress that guy. Segue fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 18:29
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Is the Sea of Fertility tetralogy the best place to jump into Mishima? I don't plan to read his entire oeuvre
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Mar 20, 2024 18:45
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blue squares posted:Is the Sea of Fertility tetralogy the best place to jump into Mishima? I don't plan to read his entire oeuvre If you are willing to invest in four books. If you want a one off either Temple of the Golden Pavilion or Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea
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Mar 20, 2024 18:48
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Mel Mudkiper posted:If you are willing to invest in four books. agree with this, but will say that Spring Snow is extremely good even if you only read that one
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Mar 20, 2024 18:49
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I don't know how interested I am in reading Mishima given I've read some Soseki. I know it's weird to say an author can capture an entire "thing" for a country, or ideology, but Soseki seems like a full stop on Japan, at least with Kokoro. I have some ideas, but I'm not certain, I just feel people look at Mishima as some historical thing. When I don't buy that given what I've read about him. The conversation around him seems off and isn't encouraging me to read him.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:55
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Okay but this comes up all the drat time, especially on this forum where people think that their consumer choices amount to praxis and will proudly and annoyingly claim that they will not read a fascist author. It is a completely different thing to say "I don't jive with this author's prose." Like, Hemingway is an author who I think I could enjoy thematically but his prose is just not engaging to me. That has no bearing on any ideological reasoning, I just realize that when I've read him that basically none of it sticks. People behave as though engaging with a fascist author or letting their ideas into your head in any kind of empathetic way (as by reading their words, even and especially if the words themselves have no explicitly political content) is endorsing or validating them as a fascist irrespective of validating them as an author or artist. The argument is always "I will not waste my time reading a fascist author" with the subtext that this is a political action and never "nah their prose is dry and uninteresting or too purple or not purple enough etc etc" which is a totally different thing that never comes up in the context of Mishima or Céline or whoever, at least not until people get pressed about it. As an aside I would love to sit you down and have you explain exactly what about TMIW's prose is at all redemptive, because everything I read from it just slaps you in the face as though you're stupid and its ideas seem limited to the same Millennial-literature soup of themes consisting of "I'm sad / I'm alienated / I'm horny / I'm anxious" that form the entire spectrum of things our generation has any will or ability to write about
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Mar 20, 2024 18:57
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mishima is in my top 5, maybe top 3 authors, and i dont give a poo poo about japan
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Mar 20, 2024 18:58
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derp posted:agree with this, but will say that Spring Snow is extremely good even if you only read that one Having just read Spring Snow not that long ago I fully agree
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Mar 20, 2024 19:02
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That's not what I'm arguing on prose though. Mishima is a good stylist, so is Céline, it's not that I don't vibe with their prose it's specifically because I don't vibe with their politics and themes. Prose is only one part of my enjoyment of a work, and it isn't enough for me at a certain point. Yes TMIW is in your face and Twitterfied and unsubtle and that's what I found interesting as it tackled its themes of gendered violence and white supremacy. The author is processing their issues in this contemporary over explicated and messy way. It's not particularly well-written but as a piece of literature it's interesting. I think we're just evaluating on different criteria, yours is more a prose lens and mine is more of a thematic lens, and I understand why some people may not like it. But I'll stop stirring things up I just thought I'd give my reasoning for engaging less with some of those authors. e: to your point about refusing to engage even if their works are not political, to me Mishima's aestheticized violence and longing for masculinity and order are specifically political, as is Céline's misanthropy. If they were purely aesthetic works I would probably like them but to me the works have politics too. Segue fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 19:04
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nah dont stop stirring, its the most posts this thread has had in a while
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Mar 20, 2024 19:09
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Mrenda posted:I don't know how interested I am in reading Mishima given I've read some Soseki. I know it's weird to say an author can capture an entire "thing" for a country, or ideology, but Soseki seems like a full stop on Japan, at least with Kokoro. I mean, I think Mishima is a fundamental voice in the discourse of modern Japan. Like, I find Mishima essential in discourse of Kenzaburo Oe, who speak to a lot of the same issues in a very different perspective. Its like Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie presenting very different ideas of the Nigerian diaspora.
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Mar 20, 2024 19:13
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Mishima, Oe, Tanizaki and Soseki are my picks for necessary Japanese authors to read (though not in that order)
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Mar 20, 2024 19:25
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Ive come around real hard in recent years on Edogawa Rampo.
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Mar 20, 2024 19:28
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Ive come around real hard in recent years on Edogawa Rampo. Good or bad? I've been meaning to read a collection of his works for a while.
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Mar 20, 2024 19:32
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Segue posted:e: to your point about refusing to engage even if their works are not political, to me Mishima's aestheticized violence and longing for masculinity and order are specifically political, as is Céline's misanthropy. If they were purely aesthetic works I would probably like them but to me the works have politics too. but you can acknowledge that the aestheticised violence and masculinity is incredibly dumb at the same time as you acknowledge how wonderfully the temple of the golden pavillion or his other works are written. it's not an impossible feat Segue posted:But I'll stop stirring things up I just thought I'd give my reasoning for engaging less with some of those authors. nah, 
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Mar 20, 2024 19:33
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I mean, I think Mishima is a fundamental voice in the discourse of modern Japan. Like, I find Mishima essential in discourse of Kenzaburo Oe, who speak to a lot of the same issues in a very different perspective. Its like Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie presenting very different ideas of the Nigerian diaspora. No-one's given me an interest in Mishima though. Yeah, he kills himself and is gay. So what? Segue hits on it with not being interested in Mishima's themes. I think we're long past the bit that the only thing that matters is prose considering it's been revealed that people in this thread are reading Black Library stuff. I've never had a succint invitation into Mishima. Fascism and homosexuality? So what? Very applicable to modern ideas but not things I'm interested in. I read Beckett because his ideas of modernism and post-modernism appealed to me as ideas of the self did. Delueze and Guatarri appealled to me about ideas of thinking, and post-structuralism, something this thread was very strong on for a while. I read Heidegger because ideas of phemonenology appealed to me. I read Fosse because thoughts on Catholicism, isolation and alcoholism appealled to me. I read books to satisfy a need, not as some indulgent thing. I have no reason to indulge in Mishima. I definitely have no "need." Is that a problem with me, that I don't read out of curiousity? If that's the case why aren't you on Royal Road reading pure shite to put together insight on shite being pumped out?
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Mar 20, 2024 19:35
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ulvir posted:but you can acknowledge that the aestheticised violence and masculinity is incredibly dumb at the same time as you acknowledge how wonderfully the temple of the golden pavillion or his other works are written. it's not an impossible feat Yes I can, absolutely! I just don't find that dumbness interesting enough for me to want to continue engaging with it. On a more recent note, Michel Houellebecq's Submission was a well-received satire on French academia's capitulation to an imagined Islamic revolution. It is in parts very funny and poking fun at elite mores. It's also an incredibly racist and vile work and I think Houellebecq should be condemned and driven out of society. But France has a very weird relationship with its horrifying white male writers so.
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Mar 20, 2024 19:49
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when a lot of people say a name over and over, or even when a few people in this thread or discord say a name a few times, I look up the name and read a few pages of one of their books and see if I like it, and if I do I read it. that's how ive 'discovered' most of the books i love: checking out things i hear about. kinda wild to me that there is this elaborate internal process for you to decide whether to read a book or not
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Mar 20, 2024 19:51
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lol "elaborate internal process" Do I care? y/n. Has anyone said anything interesting other than "lol dude! he gay and stabbed heself!"
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Mar 20, 2024 19:53
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Mrenda posted:lol "elaborate internal process" Do I care? y/n. the fact that you need to be convinced this much to read the first page of an amazon sample and see if you like it, is what seems elaborate to me
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Mar 20, 2024 19:54
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Mrenda posted:lol "elaborate internal process" Do I care? y/n. Yes. See, for example: Heath posted:Especially in the Sea of Fertility the entire theme of Honda's life lies in his inability to square the circle of a fundamentally spiritual, aesthetic, artistic gnawing in his soul that he sees reflected in the world in the form of Kioyaki and his various incarnations, and his rationalist, pragmatic worldview. The one aspect of his personality was bred into him by his education and fostered by his profession and his success, but Kioyaki represents something more primal, something that Honda can see every moment of his life but is always just out of his reach and something that he can never articulate but has such an arresting grasp on him that even catching a glimpse of it sends him into an obsessive spiral for decades. But by the time you get to Decay, that aesthetic yearning has become its own inverse, and the very inexpressible thing seems to reject Honda himself outright. Honda was never Beautiful in the Mishima conception, never could be, and as he decays physically and spiritually he is reduced to a crippled old man whose sole pleasure is spying on couples going at it in the public park and jacking off. And at the end of it all he comes as close as he ever has to truly connecting with Kioyaki by embarking on his own mirror image trek, climbing the steps of the temple, crippled by age as Kioyaki was by fever, makes it to the top, sits down before Satoko and asks her about Kioyaki, and she has no loving idea who or what he's talking about. Claims she never knew anyone by that name. It's not clear if she forgot him entirely in the intervening 60odd years, as though perhaps he was just a footnote in her life and merely a teenage boyfriend, or whether his love story may have never really happened, at least not in the way Honda remembers it. or Gaius Marius posted:With Mishima it's important to note that he was fully aware that his own ideas were essentially juvenile, self defeating, and doomed to failure. You cannot walk away from Runaway Horses or Decay of the Angel thinking the man wasn't far more aware of the criticism against his ideas then most of the people criticizing him, at least the kind of people who've read the wiki page but zero lines of his work. And that's just from the last page.
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Mar 20, 2024 20:03
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maybe im the weird one here but i approach all of books and poetry like i would an art museum, i dont research the artists or the artworks beforehand and decide which ones im going to look at, I just walk in and look at things, and if I really like something then I find the artist and see what else they've done. obviously reading a book is a much bigger time investment than looking at a painting or sculpture, but reading the first 4 or 5 pages of something isn't....
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Mar 20, 2024 20:08
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To counterpoint myself, I can see interest in Mishima if you are interested in that very aesthetic depiction of a yearning for tradition, a fetishized masculinity, a really idolizing/hatred of women, and a man very publicly laying out his own issues through at times pathetic protagonists. It could be psychologically fascinating. All of which echo a lot in Japan which still has incredible conservative and gender issues. That being said, recognizing that that sort of depiction is inextricably tied to and has been repeatedly used for horrific political and sexual violence including the dangerously revanchist politics today, means hey it's up to you. (Yes this sort of reading can be used to criticize leftist works linked to violence, which I would argue could potentially be more interesting than Mishima, though probably less aesthetically beautiful. He is a great writer.)
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Mar 20, 2024 20:10
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