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I'm reading Chekhov.
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Jul 12, 2016 16:10
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Ras Het posted:I'm reading Chekhov. keep an eye out for that gun I hear it's important
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Jul 12, 2016 16:11
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Guy A. Person posted:keep an eye out for that gun I hear it's important stfu
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Jul 12, 2016 16:25
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Jul 12, 2016 16:27
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Ras Het posted:I'm reading Chekhov. Died tragically young. Imagine what he could have accomplished if he hadn't been squished by his own car.
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Jul 12, 2016 17:28
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got to hear Alejandro Zambra reading from his new book last night (weird but cool novel/novel length poem written in the form of a standardized test?) but was sad after the reading b/c it's not actually out yet 
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Jul 12, 2016 18:00
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Ras Het posted:I'm reading Chekhov. Don't bother. Just a bunch of Russian women looking out windows.
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Jul 12, 2016 22:03
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I read half of The Plot Against America while I waited for my computer to get fixed, and I'm tempted to finish it. It's interesting to see Philip Roth take a detailed, autobiographical take on how his childhood could have gone.
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Jul 12, 2016 22:16
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Solitair posted:I read half of The Plot Against America while I waited for my computer to get fixed, and I'm tempted to finish it. It's interesting to see Philip Roth take a detailed, autobiographical take on how his childhood could have gone. The first chapter of that book was insanely bad and the rest was pretty good. My fav part was people in this forum being like "it's very pertinent to today's society because Donald Trump is friends with Hitler"
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Jul 13, 2016 12:17
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*person in this forum.
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Jul 13, 2016 13:26
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Apologies to all those affected by my misrepresenting of The Book Barn position on Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.
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Jul 13, 2016 14:09
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CestMoi posted:Apologies to all those affected by my misrepresenting of The Book Barn position on Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. I'll just add it to the list of times you have shamed us
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Jul 13, 2016 14:24
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CestMoi posted:The first chapter of that book was insanely bad and the rest was pretty good. My fav part was people in this forum being like "it's very pertinent to today's society because Donald Trump is friends with Hitler" I'm not entirely sure what you mean. That first chapter is slow going with more setup than emotion, sure, but it's not awful.
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Jul 13, 2016 14:57
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blue squares posted:I'll just add it to the list of times you have shamed us Jokes on you I have no shame
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Jul 13, 2016 15:02
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CestMoi posted:The first chapter of that book was insanely bad and the rest was pretty good. My fav part was people in this forum being like "it's very pertinent to today's society because Donald Trump is friends with Hitler" I'm also friends with Hitler just like all my favourite reactionary authors
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Jul 14, 2016 02:12
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Died tragically young. Imagine what he could have accomplished if he hadn't been squished by his own car. Lol
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Jul 14, 2016 05:38
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Just finished the woman warrior. More about Chinese immigrant culture than Feminism, but it's still really good. I like how it's a big gently caress you to biography as a genre myself
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Jul 14, 2016 05:41
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just started The Vegetarian, and boy, was the scene with yeong-hye's father brutal
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Jul 14, 2016 11:22
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A human heart posted:I'm also friends with Hitler just like all my favourite reactionary authors I've realised there isn't any reason to read anything that wasn't written by Ezra Pound so I'm reading his edit of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.
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Jul 14, 2016 12:49
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I like reading about Ezra Pound a lot more than I like reading Ezra Pound. + they should've executed him
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Jul 14, 2016 15:46
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Since this thread is for punning on the names of authors we've not read: Ezra Pounding off.
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Jul 14, 2016 16:10
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Why do I like the bell jar so much?
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Jul 14, 2016 17:00
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You're very misogynistic and think it's good she's sad.
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Jul 14, 2016 20:20
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Mr. Squishy posted:You're very misogynistic and think it's good she's sad. I more liked the whole uncertainty of the events and how well the books representation of depression I think
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Jul 14, 2016 20:28
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Sylvia Plath's pretty cool. A little gassy, though.
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Jul 14, 2016 20:37
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Franchescanado posted:Sylvia Plath's pretty cool. A little gassy, though. I wish she wrote more fiction
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Jul 14, 2016 21:06
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I haven't read all of The Bell Jar, actually. Got through half before putting it down from depression. I like her poetry quite a bit. "Daddy" and "The Colossus" are very good.
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Jul 14, 2016 21:10
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I finished Gravity's Rainbow a couple weeks, and I loved it. In flipping through it since then, my suspicion from the day I finished it has proven to be correct: you can totally just open to any page of that book and find another perfect encapsulation of one or multiple of its themes. My personal favorite right now is the haiku: "The lover jumps in the volcano! It's ten feet deep, And inactive--" Which, aside from being just a great haiku on its own, also reflects in miniature what I think Gravity's Rainbow as a whole was designed to do: simultaneously subvert and augment literature and literary criticism. I realize that's maybe a dull theme to hit upon, but I just really love that haiku, and discussing any of the other stuff that happens late in that book would involve spoilers. I should also offer the caveat that I've had the common first-time GR reader experience of having a few major plotlines fly mostly over my head, so my picture of what it's even about is incomplete. GR is the second Pynchon book I've read, having enjoyed Inherent Vice last summer. I think I like Inherent Vice more, though they have fundamentally different aims. Inherent Vice seems like a response to people who (rightfully, I think) accuse Gravity's Rainbow's characters of being thin, inconsistent, or unsatisfying. This didn't bother me about GR, personally. I just looked at them as cartoon characters for grown-ups, cardboard cutouts that Pynchon could put in these wacky situations to illustrate profound ideas about war, behavior, and control. Part of it is also that there are just so many recognizable characters and such interesting things happen to them that I don't mind if they themselves aren't the most interesting, realistic, or likeable. Inherent Vice, on the other hand, starts out on a similar track, but its cartoon characters smoothly gain more and more dimension until I realized that I actually cared about all of the main characters, and even about many of the side characters. Anyway, to piggyback on the Kesey discussion from a couple pages back, I'm going to read Sometimes A Great Notion soon. I'll be reading it on the exuberant recommendation of my wife who I essentially shanghaied into reading Gravity's Rainbow (she didn't like it, for the common character complaint I described above). I need to finish The Fireman by Joe Hill first, but that's not really what this thread is for, though all that fantasy discussion sure was confusing. Hell, I can get down with a Malazan Book of the Fallen as hard as (probably much harder than) anybody else, let's roll.
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Jul 14, 2016 22:06
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Roger Mexico is one of my favorite characters, and I loved his arc (heh) in Gravity's Rainbow. My only problem with Gravity's Rainbow was that I couldn't wrap my head around Blicero's motivation. Was it simply evil for evil's sake? Destruction for some form of rebirth? Dude spends the whole book in the background, coming to the foreground to rape people and then blows poo poo up, and I never had a grasp on why.
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Jul 14, 2016 22:21
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I was never really clear on the whys either. I feel like the ending of the book was extremely esoteric and requires a deep understanding of tarot and such to piece together the last 100 pages or so. Can someone smart explain it?
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Jul 14, 2016 22:32
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Franchescanado posted:Roger Mexico is one of my favorite characters, and I loved his arc (heh) in Gravity's Rainbow. Roger Mexico was great in Part 1 but I didn't love his entitled bitterness later on. It might have been easier for me to stay enthused about his arc if Jessica had been more of a character and less of an object. I do recognize the realism of his attitude, and I like that it's reflected also in where Pointsman ends up. The whole end of the book, pretty much everything after that last big proto-cyberpunk Kenosha Kid hallucination sequence, feels like this amazing anti-climax. So much of Part 1 is about how people and organizations try to eke out personal good from the war, whether that comes as continued existence, career development, or love affairs. So when Part 4 came in after the unhinged insanity of Parts 2 and 3 and claimed that no, the only reason war exists or could possibly exist is to perpetuate itself, I felt satisfied. As with so many cases in GR, I felt so enthralled by the towering literary structure of it all that I didn't mind if it wasn't engaging me on a character level. I still always felt like I had something really big to think about while reading Gravity's Rainbow, it just wasn't usually the characters. Also, before anybody mentions the Pokler section, yeah, I agree that that is a devastating work of character-based fiction. It may have even made me more ready to excuse the issues with GR's characters. It was like Pynchon was saying, "Hey, I can do some real deep dark character-type poo poo, but that's not really what I'm going for here. Just trust me on this one. Follow me where I'm going." Pokler's section was great, and Byron the Bulb's section was great, but if I'm sorting the characters in GR into those two buckets, Byron's is much heavier the Franz's. And I just want to reiterate that I definitely didn't mind this--I don't think a Gravity's Rainbow could possibly work if it also tried to juggle emotionally complex and realistic characters. It would crumble under its own weight. But it is a valid complaint that some people have (my wife included, so, y'know, full disclosure, maybe I'm biased toward understanding that POV) On the subject of Blicero: I think Blicero is meant to embody the illusive object of Slothrop's self-dissolving paranoia. Blicero is the ultimate controller. He's the figure that paranoiacs believe exists but can never actually prove, and often don't even acknowledge believing in. Because nobody with that kind of preternatural ability to predict other people's actions actually exists, except in the world of Gravity's Rainbow. He's representative of all the organizations that actually do manage to benefit consistently from the act of war, and he's a sadomasochistic rapist Nazi. If I'm getting really wild and wacky and wooly, I'd summarize the end of Gravity's Rainbow as: Tyrone Slothrop came to contain the knowledge of the 00000 so thoroughly that even though he was never explicitly told about its cargo, he understood it in the part of his brain beyond the zero, the same part of his brain that still responded to Imipolex-G. Weissmann meant for his act to reverberate in the collective unconsciousness of the human race for decades to come. When Slothrop dissolves, he becomes the collective unconsciousness of every person living after World War II. Within the real-world equivalent of Pynchon's bizarre Gravity's Rainbow cosmology, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan at the end of WWII constitutes a new original sin that every person living today bears, and the details of Blicero's character show us exactly what GR thinks of the people involved in making that happen. Not that each and every person involved in dropping the bomb is individually a sadomasochistic rapist Nazi, but that, like a thousand falcons screeching, all their efforts came together to result in an act that could only individually be performed by a sadomasochistic rapist Nazi. Here's that caveat again: I don't know poo poo about tarot and I feel like I missed more allusions than I understood while reading Gravity's Rainbow. I wasn't reading with any kind of formal guide, other than occasional visits to the Pynchon wiki. I love The Malazan Book of the Fallen with all my heart, so I'm obviously not a particularly smart or discerning man. I didn't even understand big chunks of GR. But I do know how I felt about the parts I did understand. On a lighter note: Gravity's Rainbow has entered the short list of books that have actually made me a better reader by wanting to read them so bad. Do you folks have books like this? These are those books that might not even still be among your favorites, but you learned to read more attentively in order to give them the care they so clearly deserved. In my case, they're books that I probably felt were well outside my ability level when I started them, but something about them appealed to me personally and I just had to keep going and trying to understand them. For me, the list is Gravity's Rainbow, The Name of the Rose (by Umberto Eco), and The Ambassadors (by Henry James). I could also go further back to when I was reading my mom's Stephen King collection in the basement at age 10, and then further than that to when my mom's storytime wasn't going fast enough so I just plowed ahead on my own in the R.L. Stine Fear Street book about the boy who ate a whole bunch. I'd be really interested in hearing if you fellow lit-minded types have books like this in your pasts.
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Jul 14, 2016 23:33
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Ras Het posted:I like reading about Ezra Pound a lot more than I like reading Ezra Pound. + they should've executed him His paris review from like 1960 or whenever is pretty cool Heath posted:I was never really clear on the whys either. I feel like the ending of the book was extremely esoteric and requires a deep understanding of tarot and such to piece together the last 100 pages or so. Can someone smart explain it? The 'climax' of the book happens way earlier than that with all the plot elements converging, and then the last part is basically Pynchon commenting on the book itself.
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Jul 15, 2016 01:07
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Schmischmenjamin posted:long Gravity's Rainbow post. I read this book for the first time less than a year ago and it was such a mindfuck that I can barely remember anything you're talking about
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Jul 15, 2016 01:26
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A human heart posted:The 'climax' of the book happens way earlier than that with all the plot elements converging, and then the last part is basically Pynchon commenting on the book itself. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. I actually remember feeling that Part 4 felt like a hazy Return to Oz-style sequel to the first three Parts.
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Jul 15, 2016 01:58
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Franchescanado posted:Roger Mexico is one of my favorite characters, and I loved his arc (heh) in Gravity's Rainbow. Blicero is the most direct avatar of death in the novel. The complete absence of any reason for his existence is absolutely, thoroughly The Whole Point. To all whom GR interests: read Weisenburger, for the love of God. The level of detail put into the construction of the timeline will have almost entirely escaped you on the first read, and it will blow your loving mind.
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Jul 15, 2016 02:19
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I should probably get around to reading Gravity's Rainbow so I can have the slighest loving clue what y'all on about
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Jul 15, 2016 02:36
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I should probably get around to reading Gravity's Rainbow so I can have the slighest loving clue what y'all on about I honestly think you would hate it. I would bet serious money blue squares fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jul 15, 2016 |
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Jul 15, 2016 03:06
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I should probably get around to reading Gravity's Rainbow so I can have the slighest loving clue what y'all on about i think you would like big chunks of it but after reflection would not like the whole. i think v or mason & dixon might be more up your alley tbh. i don't think there's really a pynchon acid test tho (other than that crying of lot 49 is a bad one to start with), so i don't know what would be most diagnostic. also i will have to reread the last chunk but iirc the tarot stuff was pretty straightforward even with pretty surface-level knowledge of the major arcana and a lot of it (the fool is either 0 or 22, death is change not mortality) gets explicitly spelled out by pynchon.
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Jul 15, 2016 04:40
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V. is the best Pynchon of the ones I've read. Gravity's Rainbow is good but intricate to the point that it's harder to connect with. I haven't read Mason & Dixon but I suspect I'd like it.
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Jul 15, 2016 05:51
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blue squares posted:I read this book for the first time less than a year ago and it was such a mindfuck that I can barely remember anything you're talking about Same here. I remember some names but that's basically it.
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Jul 15, 2016 06:22
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