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I just started reading Max Havelaar by Multatuli, a 19th-century Dutch novel. My plans this summer, in terms of literature, include a) reading as many Dutch/Flemish classics as I can get my hands on b) struggling through two Tolstoi novels I got for my birthday c) finally reading Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 so I can use the adjective 'Orwellian' and actually know what I'm talking about
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Jul 4, 2011 15:30
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pkd3001 posted:Yeah, I actually have a master's degree in philosophy, and what Orwell is getting is one of the deepest philosophical subjects out there. He is writing about the nature of evil, actually and how it happens. The famous political and phenomenological philosopher Hannah Arendt, used the often used, phrase, "banality of evil." This means, that evil happens not always, but sometimes, by psychopaths, but by ordinary people just going with the flow. In Nazi Germany how did the evil happen? It wasn't because the nation was a nation full of psychopaths, but because 30 million Germans were just "going with the flow." If you get enough people to start thinking 2 plus 2 equals, and they have actually done experiments where you get people to believe things they known are not true, then you get lots of evil. The ending is really, really, really, deep. I haven't actually read anything by him yet, but I generally respect him for immediately recognizing Stalinism for the criminal monstrosity that it was, which was not self-evident to many explicitly left-leaning intellectuals at the time. It's the same reason I admire Camus but despise Sartre.
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Jul 5, 2011 14:43
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pkd3001 posted:I mentioned this in another post, but Hannah Arendt, was similar to Orwell, where they both seem to recognize both political extremes have major flaws. This might be a tangent, but where are the centrists in America anymore. It's like I have to choose between the "Tea Party," who are sometimes just apologists for corporations, and their greedy ways, and "progressives" who don't seem to recognize that overall a free market works better than a planned economy. Camus and Orwell maybe were more on the left, but they were no Marxists, which is nice. Oh, and by the way, just to let Tea Party members know, President Obama is not a Marxist, I have friends who are Marxists, and he is not a Marxist. Sorry, this is kind of tangent, but it must be said! I hope your not a Tea Party member, also I think everyone who's ever been near a college has 'Marxist friends'. I find this puzzling; the more I read about history and the more knowledge I gain about human nature, the firmer my support for liberal democracy becomes. In the same vein, I've noticed that Something Awful has a disproportionately leftist membership - the Games forum even has a thread that involves nothing but (uncritically) applying Critical Theory to the video games industry. It is an interesting thread from an intellectual point of view, and the people posting there obviously know their stuff like the latter-day Adornos they are, but at the same time it makes for a frustrating read because they look at the world through a very narrow, dogmatic prism. And I think this has been symptomatic of left-wing intellectualism since at least the days of Stalin. That's why I admire someone like Orwell who was very principled about his (socialist) beliefs, but at the same time didn't allow the purely theoretical to become omnipotent at the expense of compassion and the human element. No, I'm not a Tea Party member. I'm actually not American.
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Jul 6, 2011 21:02
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PatMarshall posted:Critical theory is not necessarily narrow and dogmatic; it's less a frame for viewing the world than a tool for peeling back the surface and trying to understand the broader implications of our society and culture. Orwell was very fond of the method himself, as evidenced by his detailed deconstruction of boy's school stories, roughly equivalent to comic books today, in the following essay: http://www.george-orwell.org/Boys'_Weeklies_and_Frank_Richards's_Reply/0.html Thanks for the link. His style is indeed quite Frankfurter Schule-like, but seems to be more accessible, which is always appreciated. I find Adorno to be nigh unreadable at times. Will have to read up on some of Orwell's essays, and I still have to find Animal Farm and 1984.
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Jul 7, 2011 03:02
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pkd3001 posted:Cool, I like that. I don't play video games, so I don't visit that forum. I have friends who are really dogmatic and your right they are well read in there "own" area. The problem is often they are only well read in the areas that they already agree with, so they don't really know the full argument. To really know an argument I think one has to be able to "principle of charity" the other side of the argument, and not straw man the other side. Many people don't even seem interested in what the other side argument is. Most people don't really seem capable of this, for whatever reason, likely it is because I think our beliefs get tied to our egos and we don't want to be wrong. I'm an American also, nice answer. What it ultimately boils down to with all forms of Marxism, whether it is orthodox/economic marxism, cultural marxism or even only tangentially related schools of thought like poststructuralism, is that they think they are the only ones who truly understand the world. If you disagree with their analyses and/or the conclusions they reach, you either simply do not understand the subject (and are therefore part of the unenlightened masses that are burdened with a 'false consciousness') or you are trying to stop the oppressed subjects from being emancipated because you are blinded by ideology. You see, their point of view is simply the objective truth, lucid, cold and hard, while your point of view is merely 'ideology', a necessary façade for the dominant capitalist system. This is exactly what renders these revolutionary ideas so attractive to people in their late teens/early twenties. They are a part of society, but they are also able to look at society from the outside, they understand the true nature of society, and believe they are the only ones blessed with this gift. Note how this premise automatically and invariably invalidates all criticism of Marxist-inspired ideas, which helps to explain their enduring nature despite the complete and utter failure of every attempt to find a superior alternative to the liberal democratic system of free market/representative democracy since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
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Jul 7, 2011 03:35
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WoG posted:I think marxist theory is more structuralist than post-structuralist, but either way, yeah, they sure are mean. Uh, yes, that's why I described poststructuralism as 'an only tangentially related school of thought'. It's literally in the part of my post that you quoted.
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Jul 7, 2011 17:28
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WoG posted:Sorry, didn't realize we meant 'related' in the six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon sense. No problem, not all of us have a vocabulary extensive enough to know what words like 'tangentially' or 'only' mean. And gently caress it, now I've become caught up in the Something Awful cycle of endless snarky remarks triggered by something inconsequential.
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Jul 7, 2011 18:14
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Agreed. This is not really the place for such a discussion, as interesting as it is. I've almost finished Max Havelaar. This book strongly reminds me of a Dutch version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin - there is a slightly paternalistic tinge to it, but in a very benevolent way. Overall a worthwhile read, though it can get a little long-winded at times. However, people who are bothered by this should generally stay away from 19th-century literature.
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Jul 7, 2011 23:20
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Hedrigall posted:This motherfucking tome: I know exactly how you feel. I'm reading Tolstoi's War And Peace. It's pretty much what you would expect from a 19th-century classic: beautifully written but long-winded.
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Jul 17, 2011 05:41
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El Bano posted:I've been trying to work my way through an assortment of Latin American nobel prize winning authors. So far I have read 100 Years of Solitude from Columbia and just finished Feast of the Goat from Peru. Now I'm moving on to Chile. I finished up a trash horror paperback to cleanse my palette between books, so tonight I'll probably start The Savage Detectives. It took me a while to find another Latin American Nobel Prize winner in my library, so I'm not sure where I'll go after this. If you're moving on to Chile, Isabel Allende is an obvious choice as she has the distinct advantage of being perfectly readable. Personally, I quite enjoyed Eva Luna. I gave Mario Vargas Llosa's La Casa Verde a try, but had to give up after a few dozen pages due to being completely disorientated by the Peruvian slang. I'm still not sure whether the problem lies with the quality of my Spanish or with his writing style. I have a Dutch translation of La tía Julia y el escribidor lying around, so I suppose I will find out if I ever get around to reading it.
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Jul 20, 2011 11:56
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Chamberk posted:I really liked Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, it was a nice combination of a semi-autobiography and the craziest goddamn soap operas ever. I really got into Vargas Llosa this year, having read that and The War of the End of the World (which was amazing), and I've got a copy of Death in the Andes waiting around. Was Feast of the Goat good? So you would say he's worthwhile? I will give Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter a chance then, though given my current backlog of unread books I should get around to it somewhere in 2043.
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Jul 21, 2011 05:19
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Idonie posted:George Orwell: An Age Like This 1920-1940: The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters which is incredibly readable. So far I'm still early in his career, so he hasn't quite decided on calling himself George Orwell yet, and the pieces are mostly short book reviews, some of his early exploration of working-class life & a lot of letters to friends. I'm in the middle of 1984 myself. Something tells me this book is not going to have a happy end.
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Aug 5, 2011 03:04
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De komst van Joachim Stiller (the coming of Joachim Stiller) by Hubert Lampo. Probably his best-known novel. Beautifully written, especially the dialogues, but somehow I doubt many people in 1950's Antwerp actually talked like that.
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Aug 8, 2011 02:55
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I'm reading Sean Russell's World Without End. I had this lying around for some reason even though I don't normally read fantasy. It's an okay book, though not much has happened so far and I'm almost 400 pages in.
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Oct 7, 2011 23:54
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Encryptic posted:Yeah, that is a very slow-moving book, I gotta admit, and the second book (Sea Without A Shore) is pretty good but rather slow as well from what I remember. I finished it a few days ago. Still not entirely sure about it. The dialogue is good - the pseudo-archaic English works -, I like the protagonist, and the duchess of Morland is a great (if overly perfect) character, but not enough happened plotwise. Also, I could have done without the naval battle at the end. I bet even plenty of native English speakers had trouble figuring out just what the hell was going on, given his propensity for using obscure nautical terms. But if you recommend it, I'll check out the second book. Don't know where I'm going to find it in Flanders, though.
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Oct 13, 2011 14:58
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Puskarich posted:Half way through Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson. About the Civil War and the decades leading up to it. Very well written and encompassing for one book. Especially interesting is the rhetoric used by the politicians of the old south sounds eerily familiar. "States Rights!" Read this as well. It's a good book, really taught me a lot about the American Civil War. Right now, I'm in the middle of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (the English translation, yes I know I'm a phony). It's fairly entertaining other than the exhaustive summations of the marine species he encounters. Oh, so there were scores of pavonari, caryophylliae, lepisacomthi, dactylopteri and acetabuli? I don't know what these words mean! Do these species actually exist or is he just making it up as he goes along?
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Oct 26, 2011 16:43
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Encryptic posted:Been a long time since I read the book but he's likely referring to sea creatures by their scientific names in Latin. For instance, I Googled for pavonari and it turns up a passage from the book that implies he's talking about a nautilus - "I saw there (but not dried up, as our specimens of the Nautilus are) pavonari spread like a fan as if to catch the breeze". I actually googled for pavonari as well and all I found were links that had to do with the book itself. That's the thing, a lot of the species names seem now-defunct, and even the legitimate Latin ones I don't always recognize. I don't really mind though, I just sort of zone out when I get to those passages. I have to be honest here, I always thought the title meant that the protagonist would, at one point, travel to a depth of twenty thousand leagues. This is a remarkably stupid assumption considering that this is almost ten times the Earth's diameter. Even 19th-century science fiction wouldn't push it that far. Hey, I didn't know how much a league was.
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Oct 27, 2011 17:43
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Started reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita a week ago. In French, so half the time I barely know what's going on. The pedophilia is predictably weirding me out, but I like his lyrical writing style, even though that sort of thing usually isn't for me.
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Dec 10, 2011 05:30
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Octy posted:I hated Anna Karenina but loved War and Peace. You're weird. I think I personally preferred War And Peace as well, especially once you start figuring out who the truly central character is. I just finished Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune. On one hand, it's amazing how much they already knew about astronomy, physics and science in general back in 1865. On the other hand, their plan literally consists of encasing themselves in a giant cannonball and then shooting the cannonball at the moon. Without protective suits of any kind and without any way to return. Are you sure you've thought this through, protagonists?
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Jan 15, 2012 04:27
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Johnbo posted:Just started Albert Camus' The Plague on the way in to work this morning. I've read The Outsider a few years back and enjoyed so, so looking forward to this one. And would you say it is readable? I admire Camus's standpoints, but I'm not sure how I feel about him as a writer. I really tried getting through one of his philosophical books, L'Homme révolté, but I had to give up a few pages in. I was simply unable to follow his train of thought, to put it mildly. Now I have La Peste sitting here on my bookshelf, and I'm a bit apprehensive even though it's a novel this time around. Thread relevance: starting on La Duchesse de Langeais by Balzac. Should be a good read, but it will more than likely take an embarrassingly long time to decipher some of his run-on sentences in French. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Mar 2, 2012 |
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Mar 2, 2012 05:20
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I'm reading Jules Verne's Michel Strogoff. The book itself is fairly entertaining, but why did this edition have to spoil most of the plot on the back cover, including the fact that Strogoff is blinded by the Tartars in the middle of the story? The fact that it's a historical classic doesn't mean you have to spoil everything beforehand.
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Jun 17, 2012 09:56
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Reading a three-in-one police novel featuring the one-eyed detective Belascoarán, written by Paco Ignacio Taibo. It's alright, but I'm struggling with some of the Mexican regionalisms. The dialogues in particular are sometimes a bit unclear for this reason.King Christmas posted:The one I just started is Cat Among the Pigeons. It's one of her later novels (written in 1960!) and takes place in an all-girls school called Meadowbank that apparently has some connection to a revolution in the Persian Gulf. I usually enjoy Christie, but for some reason I didn't really like that one. Maybe it's because, as you said, it takes so long for Poirot to actually show up, but I couldn't get into it.
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Jan 2, 2013 01:27
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So then it's a bit like La peste, allegorical but with an accessible writing style? I will have to check it out, then. I ask because I bought L'homme révolté (one of his more philosophical works) a few years ago and I had no idea what the gently caress he was talking about. I can say without exaggerating that I was lost from the very first page.
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May 22, 2013 05:14
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Have you read The consumer society? I tended to dismiss Baudrillard as yet another impenetrable and mostly irrelevant postmodern author until I read that. Together with Elias and Bourdieu, he really helped shape my view of class dynamics in human societies and in Western (post)modernity in particular. I don't know what your preferences are like, but I would personally ignore the parts where he dabbles in psychoanalysis; if you manage to distill the 'hard' sociology from his work, it will probably change your worldview. Interestingly and paradoxically enough, it helped push me further towards views that a lot of goons would probably dismiss as 'evo-psych'.
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Jun 28, 2013 23:49
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screenwritersblues posted:
Is the author as insufferable as you'd assume she is?
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Jun 22, 2014 19:38
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I can't imagine why, it's a classic. All of the pre-WWII Tintins are really entertaining, for various reasons.
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Jun 29, 2014 00:11
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You agree with Ayn Rand? Hahaha you are going to fit in well here. e: wait just saw the EVE Online part so I guess it's probably just a gimmick.
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Oct 1, 2014 20:43
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I'm reading the fifth book of the Song of Ice and Fire series. A friend had given me the first book a few years ago, but I had no interest in the franchise or fantasy in general, so it sat there gathering dust until I picked it up and started reading it on a whim this summer. Now I'm hooked. It's pretty much a soap with all the cliffhangers and plot twists, but it works.
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Nov 21, 2016 08:07
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