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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 think at the very least the lit thread should be a place where details matter to everyone participating. Here's a detail to supplement this post: Japan is a country that, a quick Google search reveals, has 125.7 million people in it.
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Mar 21, 2024 13:32
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Mishima is great and all, but you know what else is great? Reading both him and other authors! Anyway, I've read a couple of really cool books recently - Elin Cullhed's Euphoria about the last year of Sylvia Plath's life with some great angry prose, and Álvaro Enrigue's You Dreamed of Empires, a fun psychedelic trip thru the final days of Moctezuma's reign that reads like a fantasy novel except good also read a few mediocre books, but I'll leave them be
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Mar 21, 2024 13:47
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PeterWeller posted:The entire time this process is going on, you know that future has already been written and you could just flip forward and make it the narrative present, but you don't because you want to experience the process of anticipating that future from the details presented in the text. He further argues that this process is essentially the process by which we use retrospective narrative to make sense of our own lived experiences. We can't anticipate the real surprises in our human lives, but we can retrospectively see the signs by which we could have anticipated them had we known they were coming, and we use narrative to make sense of that. Hey, yeah, this is really cool. This idea of how we intrinsically feel something. Whether it an idea or an emotion, or a thought. Or an arguument in a debate. We're convinced, for a moment. Whether we're convinced for longer is a different matter. Sounds like Barthes' Studium and Punctum. Which, admittedly, is about photography, but I feel it carries through to general ideas of perception. The idea of this moment making a puncture in us, in the present, and then moving forward reconstructing it from our past in our present. Which circles back to how interest is created in Mishima. I don't have the experience of reading him, so someone making elaborate justifications of why he's valuable doesn't hit me the same way as something direct and to the point. As for Heidegger, I've only looked at Being and Time. Yes, he does go batshit from everything I've read about him, but that doesn't devalue the work in Being and Time. And that you bring up "the Nazi's favorite pet philosopher" as some kind of dismissal of Heidegger shows you're just as willing to dismiss other authors for their politics when it suits you, especially when I've never argued against reading Mishima because of his politics. The same is being done to Segue. Arguing against points they haven't made because jumping around in joy about Mishima is this threads "favorite pet" hobby, to the point it's become a meme. This is the type of poo poo I'm talking about... Heath posted:The silliest thing about this discussion, whenever it comes up on the forums, is that when someone pops up to be like I'm certainly not arguing against Mishima for his politics. No-one trying to bait anyone just to call them a chud, and that defenses go to that automatically is a lot more revealing of those posters than anyone else. Edit: Heath posted:This is making me insane. You must have something in your brain that can explain why a particular thing appeals to you. A specific scene or a theme you can relate to yourself as a person and not just... "he dealt with absurdism, he dealt with madness." What about absurdism? What about madness? Why does it matter to you to read these topics in prose? How the gently caress can I relate to a scene or theme from a point when I hadn't read Beckett? I can do that after I've read him, which is now. To cast my mind back to before I'd read him I gave you the reasons "Why did Beckett appeal to me? Probably because he was a Nobel winner, he fled Ireland, he dealt with philosophy, he dealt with absurdism, he dealt with madness. I read Murphy, it was good. I read more." It was nothing complex. You're the one looking for a complexity to it, from after I've read him, to justify why I decided to read his stuff before I'd picked it up. Such complexity doesn't exist. I didn't spend years reading scholarly reviews of Beckett then decide to read the actual books. Mrenda fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Mar 21, 2024 |
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Mar 21, 2024 13:58
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ive been gone so long I forgot what everyone's deal was and thought mrenda was deliberately poo poo posting I forgot they were sincere
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Mar 21, 2024 14:01
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I read The Makioka Sisters a couple of years ago and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it for how "boring" of a story it is. It was nice to have a classic novel, and especially a Japanese one, that was superlatively focused on the women in the story and their conflicts. The book was criticized at the time for being too focused on female troubles in a time when the country needed to be unflinchingly masculine during WWII Otherwise I've read Some Prefer Nettles, which is going to need a reread at some point since none of it stuck with me for whatever reason, and Naomi, which is like a farcical inversion of Lolita (though it long predates it) in which the weirdo sadsack groomer gets repeatedly owned by his adoptive bride
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Mar 21, 2024 14:02
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Mel Mudkiper posted:ive been gone so long I forgot what everyone's deal was and thought mrenda was deliberately poo poo posting I forgot they were sincere That you can't imagine a sincere shitpost shows your limits Mel. Edit: I'd suggest you read some Beckett.
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Mar 21, 2024 14:05
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no thanks all I need to know literarily about the culture of Ireland I got from reading O Henry
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Mar 21, 2024 14:08
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I'm glad you've reached a point of contentment and I won't be the one to scream at you that you're actually wrong in your state of satisfaction.
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Mar 21, 2024 14:10
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Mel Mudkiper posted:no thanks all I need to know literarily about the culture of Ireland I got from reading O Brien
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Mar 21, 2024 14:14
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Mrenda posted:How the gently caress can I relate to a scene or theme from a point when I hadn't read Beckett? I can do that after I've read him, which is now. To cast my mind back to before I'd read him I gave you the reasons "Why did Beckett appeal to me? Probably because he was a Nobel winner, he fled Ireland, he dealt with philosophy, he dealt with absurdism, he dealt with madness. I read Murphy, it was good. I read more." It was nothing complex. You're the one looking for a complexity to it, from after I've read him, to justify why I decided to read his stuff before I'd picked it up. Such complexity doesn't exist. I didn't spend years reading scholarly reviews of Beckett then decide to read the actual books. It is not clear that you meant "I decided to read an author based on these things" since you write "he appealed to me" about an author you've apparently read, so sorry for misunderstanding. Like I said, it is clear you made up your mind about all of this way before engaging with any of the discussion and none of this was destined to be productive in any way, since it never is. If Mishima doesn't interest you and the buck stops there, then just stop posting about it.
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Mar 21, 2024 14:24
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that O Henry joke was fire just saying
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Mar 21, 2024 14:24
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I remember the time years back when I would look up the political beliefs of each classic author recommended to me so that I would be able to read just the morally upright left-wing ones. I think I got out the mindset by reading Borges, later contemplating his support for the Argentine Junta, and hammering it into my head that correct(TM) beliefs or personal integrity do not correlate with the ability to write. Anyway, I read page 238 of Gravity's Rainbow, which contains That Scene. It was several notches more depraved than I had imagined before, but also an oddly tender look at the selfhood of a man shattered by the Great War.
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Mar 21, 2024 14:25
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Mel Mudkiper posted:no thanks all I need to know literarily about the culture of Ireland I got from reading O Henry look at this dweeb who refuse to read Beckett, Joyce and McBride 
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Mar 21, 2024 14:35
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If you like the depravity of Pynchon I think Rob Doyle's Threshold is worth a read. It's "auto-fiction" and also taking the piss out of auto-fiction in that you can't tell how much is the author and how much is thumbing its nose at auto-fiction. Basically a guy travels the world taking drugs, thinking about writers, philosophy, sex and a bit of psychoanalsysis, while generally being a grody weirdo annoyed by contemporary literature. It's well written. To the point it's kind of shocking how well it's written when you consider modern, young (Irish) fiction. It's also worth reading so you can enjoy the Goodreads reviews after.
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Mar 21, 2024 14:39
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FPyat posted:I remember the time years back when I would look up the political beliefs of each classic author recommended to me so that I would be able to read just the morally upright left-wing ones It's an especially moot approach when you consider that a lot of the authors whose explicit political opinions were on what most people here would consider the right side of history, like André Breton or Jean-Paul Sartre, were also odious pieces of poo poo in most other matters
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Mar 21, 2024 14:41
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Mrenda posted:If you like the depravity of Pynchon I think Rob Doyle's Threshold is worth a read. It's "auto-fiction" and also taking the piss out of auto-fiction in that you can't tell how much is the author and how much is thumbing its nose at auto-fiction. Basically a guy travels the world taking drugs, thinking about writers, philosophy, sex and a bit of psychoanalsysis, while generally being a grody weirdo annoyed by contemporary literature. I checked and it was you that recommended it to me several years ago. It's good to have another reminder of it, books get lost in the pages my to-read list easily.
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Mar 21, 2024 15:00
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Heath posted:Very little of his fiction (at least what I've read) is fascist or even especially political -- the major exception being Runaway Horses since the protagonist is a student who is an aspiring right-wing revolutionary, and even then the narrative is about him as a person and not a political essay. The other main character (and the one around whom the tetralogy comes to focus) is Honda, who is really more like a Westernized liberal, and who admires Isao's youth and doomed passion and romance, and sees in him that same ineffable ethereal beauty that he sees in the ephemeral cherry blossom or the spring snow that is beautiful but destined to melt, the same thing that attracted him to Kioyaki. The politics of Isao and his revolutionary aspirations are more romantic than prescriptive -- his efforts are stifled, and his singular anti-capitalist act of violence at the end of the novel is a dramatic, but ultimately petty, victory. i don't think you can (or perhaps should) separate obsessions with youth, romantic adventure, a lost golden age/culture, and heroic struggle from the politics of fascism, especially not in the context of post war japan.
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Mar 21, 2024 15:40
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DeimosRising posted:i don't think you can (or perhaps should) separate obsessions with youth, romantic adventure, a lost golden age/culture, and heroic struggle from the politics of fascism, especially not in the context of post war japan. I mean to say they are not didactically political in the sense that they are generally speaking not a heroic extollation of the ideal fascist hero who enriches his country by his faith in the Emperor. Isao is the most explicit representation of that archetype and even he fails in the end.
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Mar 21, 2024 15:58
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Mel Mudkiper posted:imagine not reading books because you morally disagree with the author lmao that is the post that started the whole thing off I just remembered why Mel is forum banned from the wrestling forum
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Mar 21, 2024 16:47
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you'll find he's quite based
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Mar 21, 2024 16:51
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fez_machine posted:lmao that is the post that started the whole thing off They cannot handle the light of Islam
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Mar 21, 2024 16:57
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cumpantry posted:you'll find he's quite based yeah in Saudi Arabia
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Mar 21, 2024 16:57
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its genuinely funny that people still think I work for the saudi government or even live in saudi arabia ahem I mean oops all hail the house of saud of whatever
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Mar 21, 2024 16:59
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I know nothing about you, Mel. If that's any consolation.
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Mar 21, 2024 17:01
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Mrenda posted:I know nothing about you, Mel. If that's any consolation. long story short the wrestling forum has bad reading comprehension and somehow believes I work for the saudi government because I said they were racist once. also they are mad I challenged one of their mods to mutual combat
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Mar 21, 2024 17:04
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Mel Mudkiper posted:long story short the wrestling forum has bad reading comprehension and somehow believes I work for the saudi government because I said they were racist once. Thanks for that, but I wasn't asking.
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Mar 21, 2024 17:06
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Mrenda posted:Thanks for that, but I wasn't asking. I am a story teller, it is in my nature to tell stories
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Mar 21, 2024 17:06
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Mel sucks, I hate his posting, but has good taste in books. Them’s the breaks. I enjoyed him more when he didn’t post for like two years
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Mar 21, 2024 17:19
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I read Mel's posts. But I could go with him getting a new avatar
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Mar 21, 2024 17:21
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Heath posted:I read Mel's posts. But I could go with him getting a new avatar the problem is that someone bought it to insult me and prove that I would change an avatar if it was ugly enough and these colors dont run
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Mar 21, 2024 17:26
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I've had the final volume (Fitzcarraldo) of Fosse's Septology sitting here for the past few weeks. Afraid to start into it, and I dunno why. What if it doesn't live up to my expectations? What if it doesn't resolve things? What if no-one dies? What if Asle turns out to be an unlikeable character?
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Mar 21, 2024 17:29
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If we could focus back onto books and less onto Mel's life story ITT that would be great
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Mar 21, 2024 19:26
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ulvir posted:I personally approach my reading more from the position of Felski and Nussbaum, but I really like the point about the temporal gap that you referred to. it’s a good attempt at describing the why in why we read and become engaged I'm not too familiar with Felski. I read a decent amount of Nussbaum when I was interested in affect, but the only thing I still carry from that is her reminder that emotions always have an object. Mrenda posted:Hey, yeah, this is really cool. This idea of how we intrinsically feel something. Whether it an idea or an emotion, or a thought. Or an arguument in a debate. We're convinced, for a moment. Whether we're convinced for longer is a different matter. Sounds like Barthes' Studium and Punctum. Which, admittedly, is about photography, but I feel it carries through to general ideas of perception. The idea of this moment making a puncture in us, in the present, and then moving forward reconstructing it from our past in our present. Which circles back to how interest is created in Mishima. I don't have the experience of reading him, so someone making elaborate justifications of why he's valuable doesn't hit me the same way as something direct and to the point. Yeah, Currie doesn't mention Barthes' Punctum, but he does reference the philosophical concept of the Event, which is a similar sort of idea. Like I said, Currie is hardly the first person to assert that we understand the world via narration. I was introduced to the idea via Walter Fisher and his concept of Homo Narrans, which is apparently not even the first use of Homo Narrans, so the idea probably goes back even further than I think it does. But I think you misapply that to the conversation around Mishima. Nobody can give you the Event or Punctum of reading Mishima. You can only experience that phenomenon yourself. All they can give you is their retrospection of that experience, their "elaborate post-hoc justifications." quote:And that you bring up "the Nazi's favorite pet philosopher" as some kind of dismissal of Heidegger shows you're just as willing to dismiss other authors for their politics when it suits you, especially when I've never argued against reading Mishima because of his politics. No. I made a bad joke. I was dismissing you for name dropping Heidegger and phenomenology as some sort of forums flex. Like I said, that's why everyone reads him, especially if they're taking an introductory Continental Philosophy course. I've read Heidegger, and I haven't suggested that anyone shouldn't read Heidegger. Heidegger was an important philosopher. But also, Heidegger was a loathsome Nazi who sent his own colleagues to the camps. And it's important to remember those crimes are just as much a part of his legacy as is Dasein. Also, for anyone seriously looking for more Irish fiction to read, let me once again recommend Ciaran McMenamin's The Sunken Road. It's heartbreaking novel about divided loyalties in a divided country that's also a solid adventure thriller. PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Mar 22, 2024 |
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Mar 21, 2024 22:57
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Mel Mudkiper posted:long story short the wrestling forum has bad reading comprehension and somehow believes I work for the saudi government because I said they were racist once. The Saudi government was racist once? 
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Mar 22, 2024 08:58
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quote:The doll's hair was human. The smell of it burning is horrible. I do keep noticing how Pynchon keeps briefly drawing notice to the Holocaust without directly speaking of it. quote:"Why are you burning my doll's hair?" Never mind, I guess this instance is explicit.
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Mar 26, 2024 07:57
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Finished Snow. Was very good. Not my favourite Pamuk novel but still very good. Will have to think on it more
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Mar 26, 2024 18:32
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finished V, it was a really wild ride. that entire deal leading up to the actress' death was fascinating, the whole imagery of her and victoria performing under mirrors felt vivid, vivid like the plastic surgery scene but in a way where my eyes actually wanted to be on the paper hahaha. cool stuff Pynch i will check you out again another day. that was such a monolith to read. i haven't ever that many pages, 540 or so, bound to a single book. and i'll read em all again someday cuz V is definitely that kind of book. gonna be sticking to novellas for a bit now just to cool off from being with one work for so long. went through the first two chapters of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and it's a light breeze, enjoying the mystery through Utterson's eyes. lol though this edition i grabbed off the street has three different intros and the third one is like thirty-five pages long. goddamn! why not an outro? in conclusion, reading is cool
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Mar 26, 2024 22:05
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start reading GR immediately
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Mar 27, 2024 04:34
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 my god it's nearly twice the size. and my god against the day IS twice the size. that better be a good loving book
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Mar 27, 2024 05:39
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Natsume Souseki's I Am A Cat has a lot less cat stuff and a lot more gentle social satire of middle-class Meiji culture than I expected.
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Mar 27, 2024 06:22
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