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If you were to subscribe to one big name lit mag which would it be? I'm torn between The Paris Review because of their pretty great online presence, and Granta because they're based in the UK which means they're closer to me and maybe more likely to feature Irish authors. Cost and reading time wise means I would probably only get one, along with the other less prestigious lit mags I get.
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Jul 10, 2017 12:00
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Burning Rain posted:it's better to just buy an issue here and there, when you see something really interesting, rather than subscribing, imo, because usually there's a bunch of stuff in each mag that just won't interest you. There's nowhere in my mid-sized Euro city that stocks any of them. There's a few of the Irish journals in the biggest of the bookshops, but if you're talking about getting anything beyond that you pretty much have to subscribe.
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Jul 10, 2017 13:01
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at the date posted:If you're willing to wait, LRB and the Paris Review often run a combo subscription deal. For anyone wondering that's running right now. I just don't have $120 spare for the international option. ($80 US, $100 CA.) https://twitter.com/LRB/status/881436671325155328
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Jul 11, 2017 15:11
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Apart from a few short stories available for free on some decent websites and a few Irish lit journals (of which there is an abundance, with a resulting quality of writing) I've never read some real literature. My sole attempt in the past year was trying to get through The Castle, but the quality of the prose didn't whip me through it (apart from one early scene) so when I decided it was a bit of a shaggy dog story about a shaggy dog life/situation/pursuit I put it down (also, I was quite ill reading it, so that wouldn't have helped.) I'm not looking for literature for the sake of appearance in reading high falutin' thinky books, I would actually like to read something with a degree of profundity. I'm particularly looking for something that deals with mental health and how that applies to isolation and relating to the world outside of the self (inspired by the illness I was in the depths of while reading Kafka.) Any recommendations would be appreciated.
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Jul 11, 2017 21:38
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Thanks for the recommendations. It seems the libraries near me have some of the books. The Beckett is even available as an e-book if I wait a week or so.fridge corn posted:The Castle is one of my favourite books I appreciated what was happening. K on a futile quest, or what seemed to me was being set up as being futile, with a whole village either working against him, or him simply not counting in their concerns. A lot of the town pretty much finding ways to make him settle and be at some level of peace or acceptance of his situation, but him relentlessly ignoring them all the while thinking he is correct in what he's doing. Then all of this happening with the reader having no understanding of whether his desire to reach the castle is justified. It's just that after seventy or so pages I thought this is what's going to play out for the rest of the book; K pursuing, K being pushed back, and K being sure of his purpose despite this. It dealt well with someone chasing a goal (or actualisation to go all high school business class) in spite of everything pulling him back, and possibly the foolishness of letting that certainty in your desire override better knowledge, including that of those around you. Basically the foolishness of chasing something, and looking for purpose when so much stands in your way, even to the point of not accepting what you're looking for is even valid. It's just that after hundred or so pages I'd already seen that, and was looking for more from it Worse, as it went on K didn't seem to have any insight on his situation, and was steadfast in his pursuit of The Castle and I thought it had been established and dealt with what this meant for him. I was looking for more. And in that way the prose didn't pull me through (apart from the early dancing scene) when the underlying meaning was getting laboured and tired.
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Jul 12, 2017 10:56
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Foul Fowl posted:Anything by Camus, basically. He's immensely readable and his prose has a subdued and wonderful power. The Fall and The Stranger are probably your best bets. I found an old copy of Exile and the Kingdom (costing 2/6) on a bookshelf in the house here. The pages are nicely yellowed. I just read the first story in it, The Adulterous Woman. Like you said, very readable and quite powerful in a way. I'm a big fan of the review extracts on the back of the book. 'Such is the evocation of atmosphere and scene that ... one is forced on stage to suffer vicariously the hapless characters ... These are powerful, jolting, thought-provoking parables told skillfully and with detached precision.' - Sunday Times 'These violent yet controlled stories confirm ... that Camus is no simple, superficial humanitarian. He is on the side of the angels, as he should be, but he gives the devil a very good run for his money.' - Observer
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Jul 13, 2017 19:25
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I finished Camus' Exile and The Kingdom at the start of the weekend. It was a nice read, really easy to follow, and actually quite hopeful. There's a nice gentleness to his writing, everything progresses methodically and with a steady pace. The story about the artist reassured me in a lot of ways; a painter who doesn't particularly care about other artist' work and when he does he doesn't make much of their efforts. He's happy to have a few people like his work and receive some money for his paintings. He wants to live his life without trouble or strife, and not that much bothers him while he's plodding along. It made a change from the stereotypes of struggling, hurting, or sharply ambitious and deadly artist. Anyway, an important question, how do you pronounce Camus' name? "Kah-moo" was how I was told, but I've previously hosed up concréte by missing the accent on the e. Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is next to my bed right now, translated by Richard Zenith. I'll get cut into it tomorrow.
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Jul 18, 2017 16:56
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I'm reading my way through The Book of Disquiet at the moment, very slowly. A lot of the slowness is because every few pages I'm brought to wonder about the significance of situating my lonesomeness via a wall I once sat atop that placed me in a warm embryonic breeze, or the self-acknowledgement I feel when someone smiles at a friend and I'm caught between their looks of passing awareness. It's very annoying. I need to really set aside time for it, purposefully for the feeling he inspires. I'd like to get at the heart of everything he says, but there's so much of it that makes you ponder I feel I'm going to have to buy my own copy and having it sitting on the desk near me for whenever I want to feel ok in loneliness. In a coincidence, I was at a poetry night on Monday with one of the "top" poets in Ireland (as in she's recognised and funded by the Irish state, and is friends with all the other top literary people.) She mentioned Pessoa, and his heteronyms being important to her work, and while it's poetry not without issue, it did have a depth to it that showed she'd spent serious time in consideration of the subject matter, even if it's not something she's fully immersed in herself.
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Aug 2, 2017 18:08
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Heath posted:I picked up The Book of Disquiet again. I bought it a few years ago and had to put it down because it was hitting close to home in an uncomfortable way. The book straddles this weird line between being crushingly sad and optimistic but melancholy. It's been my bus book for the past few weeks. Something that really strikes me is his seeming content in a passive role in the world, made active through his writing. Even more telling from this is that it was all found locked up in a trunk and posthumously published so the writing wasn't even couched in ambition to be an influential writer or thought-maker. In my edition there's a piece in the introduction about how Soares is closest to Pessoa in outlook, if a little more depressive or glum, but he really came across as a man content to live in his own writing world. I've tried using it at time, to take the simple satisfaction of being caught in the moment of something, and caught in thought about it. The book comes across like someone invented mindfulness in the 1930s but had no desire to turn himself into a guru, or gain fame with it. Reading it there's no way you can imagine the author being happy, but he repeatedly says that's not something he's concerned with, or that what he does is his happiness. In many ways I wonder about it as a response in privilege. A man who is contended by his life, and with little to worry about it beyond his simple day to day. Is it because of his lack of ambition that he comes across so few barriers, or is it because he has so few barriers he's content to live this simple life of writing, going to a café for wine and a meal (to conflate Soares and Pessoa in the intro,) and conjure up his rumination in writing. I know if I was him, I'd definitely want something external to justify all that I'm doing, but there's no evidence that suggests this was ever a thing for Pessoa/Soares.
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Sep 5, 2017 20:57
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Heath posted:Are you reading the Serpent's Tail publication? That's the one I have and I think it's the most recent one. I am. I have about twenty/thirty pages left. I got the Penguin Classic's one from the library about two months ago, but it was a three inch thick hardback which made it a pain to carry anywhere. This is a lot slimmer, and I've been reading it on my two or three bus trips a week and taking a few pages in. It seems more of an effortless translation than the Richard Zenith one. His was trying to carry through some of the poetics and rhythm of the original I feel, and in doing so making it a little more obtuse of a read. While still poetic the Serpent's Tale version reads more like someone talking and writing to themselves, and I think it works out better for that.
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Sep 5, 2017 22:56
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Some of the people in The Fiction Advice Thread have been published, at least short stories, in journals and lit mags, and have had readings at lit events. It's not all completely unsuccessful people. Mostly it's people trying just as hard as Burkion (and I don't mean that in a snarky way.) None of the regular posters want to poo poo on him for anything he did. I just finished Solar Bones by Mike McCormack. It was longlisted for the Booker, and Irish lit twitter was a little peeved when it didn't make the shortlist, although some of that might be dramatics for the sake of encouragement. It's not bad. The conceit of it being one long sentence mostly works, and it draws you through the novel quite easily. That could as well be the prose not being really challenging, and the events of the story not very out there. Like the other book I read from the publisher it seems more like a single idea really hammered home over the course of a 200 page novel, with not much that draws thought out as you read, until the end, which I did really enjoy. The blurb on the back of the book tells you the protag is dead, so everything is coloured by that, and I do wonder if it wasn't for this knowledge and a desire to see how it ties together would the story work as well. It's mostly a treatise on family. Family, relationships, and what a nondescript life means to someone. I read most of it in two days, so if you're looking for a quick read it's worth a shout. I haven't read any of the shortlisted books for the Booker so I don't know if it was hard done by, but my immediate thought without being able to reference it against anything else is it's a fair call from the judges. I have another Booker novel (Shortlisted) ready to go next, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
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Sep 15, 2017 13:08
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derp posted:thats not saying much, ive been published at pro rates 3 times I've only skimmed the thread but for me it seems like people who are genuinely trying to help. Their pronouncements might be a little over-egged, but that's typical for a lot of writing things for me. I've spent the past two days listening to award winning and just generally 'published' short stories at a short story festival, and in a lot of the cases I can't see what other people saw in the stories. I've heard maybe 12 short stories, plus a lot more snippets of short stories and if I'm being generous just two of them really stood out as something seriously worthy. With that being said, I've only just had one of my stories accepted by a free, non-paying, online journal so maybe I'm just blind to what others are taking from the writing due to inexperience, but in a lot of cases I couldn't tell why someone rates one story above any of the other pieces I've read or heard. The level of subjectivity when it comes to middling writing, and so the abundance of middling writing seems profligate in literary circles. Of the past few books I've read, all with good reviews and having won awards only one stands out as seriously great literature, mostly free of problems. There's a lot of tepid writing, and tepid stories, and I would say most writing is exactly that. You have the obviously bad, then a big band in the middle of writing that might just hit it off with you and a certain scene of people, and then very few pieces of writing that could stand as exemplary. My point being if the only writing, and so encouragement, critique, and sharing came from the top tier level there'd be a lot less out there. Possibly a good thing, but not the way the writing world is going. There's definitely a little jealousy that Burkion managed to bang out a full novel in a month, I just don't see anyone really wanting to put him down rather than up the quality of writing. It's not quite a kingdom of the blind, but for any open internet site it's mostly going to be a lot of one-eyed men.
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Sep 15, 2017 17:45
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I heard an author, Danielle McLaughlin read at a short story festival last Wednesday, then just happened by chance upon a short story she had published in the New Yorker. I'm really impressed by her writing. There's something very quiet and slow about it, unpresuming in a lot of ways and not pretending to be dressed up in deep literary metaphysics. What really strikes me is how the small moments she tells, and little bits of description really stand out as instructive in and constructive for the entire element of what she wrote. The story she read on Wednesday was about a little girl, and there was a very brief moment of an old man being leery with her, grabbing her, and getting chased away by another woman who lived in the same building with the girl. It was a very small element of the story, almost an aside, but the reaction of the little girl, almost a lack of reaction and misunderstanding of the situation really set up the mental space for the author to see the world as the girl sees it, and so understand that broader narrative. Anyway, it's only a short read but I'd recommend this New Yorker story to get a taste of her writing. I could have bought her short story collection at the time, but didn't so now I'll have to hunt it down elsewhere. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/dinosaurs-planets
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Sep 17, 2017 15:05
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Is there a literary equivalent of mumblecore? Not necessarily about middle class white twenty/thirty somethings, but similar in attempting to make the everyday resonate without looking to hyperbole, allegory or heightened significance. The Reluctant Fundamentalist was a good read. Possibly even more interesting was reading the reviews after, and the focus, especially the US newspapers give to post 9/11 sentiment and comment in the book, which is evident and the lessor focus they give to the individuality of the protagonist narrator. Mohsin Hamad is obviously trying to set metaphor and allegory in a lot of what he's written, but apart from the occasional comment about the protagonist being "not entirely likable" (to paraphrase,) the critical commentary on it quite often doesn't engage with the significance of the narrator''s experience. There's definitely something, "other," about the narrator, but then again that's the whole point of the book. He's supposed to be other to western ways, despite his attempts at opposing his instincts, and in his attempts to live the American Dream. The language of the storytelling is also, "other." The prose is written in fluent language but with a fluency from a narrator whose mothertongue isn't fully anglicised and speaks with an educated phrasing. There seems to be a reluctance to read the book and its story at a personal level. This may be typical for literary review, trying to cast the book in light of greater significances but its especially telling in this instance because humanisation and huamnity is at the core of the story.
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Sep 27, 2017 18:06
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I only really needed to read this bit:quote:What the public wants, as the Pulitzer sees it (and as Mr. Stuckey correctly concludes, I think) is an exciting story with a timely theme, although it may have an historical setting. The material should be handled simply and delivered in terms of sharp contrasts so that problems can be decisively resolved. Ideally, it should be written in a style that is as invisible as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, so that the reader can let go of the words and grasp the situation. Not necessarily about the Pulitzer, but about books in general. "Yeah, it's alright."
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Oct 5, 2017 18:57
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I'm reading One Hundred Days of Solitude and it's pretty dense in what's happening, so far. There's child rape, marrying young kids. There's a lot of longing for loves lost. There's making mechanical wheels whirr. There's non-sexual longing for gypsies. There's a lot happening but I would really only care if I had a few months of lifetime. living with the subjects lifetime (or near enough,) to live these lives. Is that the point? Complexity, and life goes on? There's machinations between all these Marcus Aaurelino's. Tell me something. And holy poo poo is there a lot of telling me what's going on. Build something up. Let me feel a sensation instead of burying me in another two page paragraph where I dig some meaning out of every soap opera (soap operas are good) back and forth. I don't want to live every minute of every year of every lifetime. It's good, yes, that you can do this. I want a point to it. I don't want to reminisce. I'm still young. Let me live my life, and someday I'll reflect on all that's passed me by. Maybe even someday I'll sit in a position where I can say all this went before me. For now I don't care. Create something! You've created a world but I'm not going to pick through it looking for fantasy. Dream about loving young girls, you total weirdo.
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Nov 9, 2017 01:48
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Solar Bones What did you think of Solar Bones? The publisher, Tramp Press, are real literary darlings here.
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Mar 29, 2018 04:19
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I picked up Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War yesterday for a stupid price. It's not fiction, but she is a Nobel Laureate for literature. I read an extract of it online (cunningly published to coincide with the new edition release and get people like mt to buy it.) The prose was different and good. I also picked up a Northern Irish lit mag and read it all in a day. And another Kafka book, The Trial. I still have to finish The Castle but I was reading it during a strange time in my life so we'll see how The Trial goes. As my father said of The Castle, when he read it in his twenties it sent him mad. Kafka is like that, I guess.
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Apr 7, 2018 18:27
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fridge corn posted:the castle has the best ending I was reading it while recovering from a mental health issue that had already shook my thoughts quite a bit. I was seeing my own life mapped out, to a degree, in both K's steadfast following of his purpose and not recognising where he was in his life, and the futility of his circumstance and certainty not being recognised from the other people in the village. It was a little bit destabilising for me at the time, but also there was a lot of benefit for me in finding some mad purpose in the story. I think I stopped reading it because it seemed like Kafka was playing a trick on his readers. That the point and message had been written in the opening few pages, and every situation following his arrival was a repeating of what had already been. I was "winning" by stopping reading having realised the futility of the situation. That K would never learn, grow or better himself. And in essence, by continuing to read you had become a reflection of K's obstinance and failure to comprehend his situation. Then I found out about the great ending when I looked up a synopsis a few weeks later and felt entirely justified. All in all, it was a good, mad trip.
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Apr 7, 2018 22:11
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I finished The Trial this evening. I'll probably go back and finish The Castle at some point because I really enjoyed finishing this one. The openness of the story and lack of contextual information ends up giving a nice dive into thought, mind, guilt, doubt and purpose. Similar to what I got from the start of The Castle, but I was in good enough frame of mind to finish this one. The Trial really surprised me when K met the advocate, and the advocate went into a rant. It felt like Kafka was giving you a lot more to latch onto, then pulling the carpet out of what I felt was the religious subtext by putting the second-last (possibly last) chapter in a cathedral. Addressing for me, straight on, what I thought was the "mystery." And that gave me a good few laugh out loud moments as well. Funny K. I do wonder what a modern take would be on it. Adding to it doubt about situational morality rather than just the personal experience of a trial. K never seems to doubt his privilege, which would be an interesting topic from the current day.
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Apr 13, 2018 20:50
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Has anyone read Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream (nominated for the Booker a few years ago.) This was the article that put me onto it. https://lithub.com/samanta-schweblin-on-revealing-darkness-through-fiction/ Gonna order it today if no-one has horrific stuff to say about it. Also other books, but I have no clue which.
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Apr 16, 2018 09:35
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I just ordered Fever Dream and Beckett's Murphy. The Beckett was suggested to me by a guy I know from the pub (an artist and big reader) who read a short story of mine and said I'd get a lot out of it if I could get a hold of Beckett's ideas beyond the madness.
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Apr 17, 2018 14:15
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Mrenda posted:Has anyone read Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream (nominated for the Booker a few years ago.) This was the article that put me onto it. https://lithub.com/samanta-schweblin-on-revealing-darkness-through-fiction/ This came today. I was annoyed that I ordered it as a hardback by mistake but it's only a small book. 150 pages, big print, not exactly big pages. I started and finished it today. 'twasn't bad. At the very least there were some ideas nicely presented that ran through it. It seemed a lot more ambitious than the modern Irish writers I've been reading.
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Apr 25, 2018 20:52
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I just finished Murphy. The parkbuilding was good but it's possible he cheated and copied a real life park. It's also a book that's quite possibly got the most laugh out louds out of me since I was a teenager. And that's with a lot of it going over my head but my version isn't annotated (is there even annotated version?) I'll read the follow up at some point but for now it's time to think while I figure out what book I go to next.
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Apr 29, 2018 23:15
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Apart from the lit journals I'm reading I finished two books in the past few days, Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream and Beckett's Murphy. Fever Dream was pretty decent. It's a rather visceral book, not entirely in the descriptive elements but more in mood. It's very in the moment and quite real. A woman is dying, for some reason, and a child sits at her bedside in the clinic asking her to remember what brought her here and recount her story. As he does this he tells her what is and isn't important to her story, which is a rather dark one of disfigurement and poisoning in a small South American town (although it could be anywhere warm and sunny.) In a lot of ways it's a story about mothers and children, and in other ways it's about what we give to the future. I think I pretty much finished it off in one sitting. There's strong themes running throughout that take the entire story to come to fruition, and unlike other stories I've read it really nails them on the head, at least in suggesting possibilities to the reader and asking questions. If you can pick it up cheap I'd recommend it if any of my review speaks to you. A nice book, definitely meriting its award nominations, that isn't about a nice topic in any way. Murphy is quite literally the funniest book I've read in well over a decade. There were parts of it where I was laughing out loud, and that happened quite often. It's basically the story of Murphy, who traipses about London having a grand aul time with his girlfriend, and escaping his girlfriend (and very often the entire world,) while some people from Ireland hunt him down because of promises he made to them. A huge amount of the wordplay and references went flying over my head, but that didn't detract from the book as it's probably a story you could spend years in a university poring over. It deals with some very interesting topics about the nature of pleasure, purpose, etc. But it more presents a viewpoint, what must have been a talking point at the time, and lets the story play out as a message on them. One review I read about it after said that the reviewer had a very hard time appreciating a lot of the prose, the redundancy (as it were) and the repetition. Until he stopped reading in his proper English tone of voice and started imagining a dirty Paddy talking the words. Maybe this is valid, I don't know because I'm a dirty Paddy, but to me the language was very much in tune with my own state of mind. Possibly why I found it so funny. Murphy is a must read for me, genuinely one of the best books I've ever read and definitely one of the funniest. I have two Joyce books available to me now, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and somewhere in another room is an old collection of Chekhov, Lady With Lapdog and Other Stories. I don't know if I want to continue along the masters of Irish literature thread, or dip into some short stories from Russia.
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Apr 30, 2018 19:41
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A really good article on literary style. One to trot out in the genre v lit debates. https://lithub.com/john-keene-elements-of-literary-style/quote:My style is—or should I say styles are—shaped in part by modernism and its capacity not just to depict, but capture the flow of and embody consciousness, and yet I can say about all my writing that, like our contemporary society, it is also the product of postmodernism, with its emphasis on portraying overlapping and at times seemingly incommensurate realities. If modernism ushered in access to a grasp of human psychology that prior prose authors lacked—yet many nevertheless figured out how to represent the human mind and its complexities to readers—postmodernism and its heirs have opened a window onto the complex ontologies in which we live and move today.
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May 1, 2018 16:27
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I didn't know anything going into it but even then Dubliners is far from what I was expecting. Also, my version is extremely annotated as well. I think it's the copy my sister used for her English degree. No underlining, but the odd scribble from mixing it up with a pen in a bag.
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May 3, 2018 13:31
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Ras Het posted:I feel like this LRB article from five years ago I just read is quite relevant to ye olde what makes a genre a genre why do you think you're better than me debate so I'll c/p it from behind the paywall: That brings up a recent pet peeve of mine in a lot of short stories I've read: the helpful encapsulation of the story's meaning in the final line. The helpful pointer, the final announcement, the finishing "aha!" It pisses me off no end and means I drive through some journals, reading short story after short story, hoping for something to chew on. Unlike a novel, where my thoughts and debate with the story twist and turn through my reading, with a short story I'm near the finish line as soon as I begin. With these short stories I'm given a lot of nice twisting and turning, often nothing at all to grasp on to, and at the very end told exactly what to think of it. It all comes clear and the author smiles at me as if asking, "Wasn't that wonderful?" I don't want to think the author can wrap a present, I want to unwrap the present. If I'm so near the end once I've started surely I deserve a single question brought from myself? And I don't mean leave the story unfinished. The whole thing can be about a feeling, or a mood, or circumstance. All those I experience with a novel, many times over like a quilt making up a final image, with the short story I want a weave of threads that gives me one solid image but allows me to dwell on its purpose. Too often short stories are like a magician pulling a tablecloth out from under your dinner, leaving all the plates, cutlery, glasses intact and waiting for applause for them. Really I just want something to eat.
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May 7, 2018 20:41
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I finished Dubliners there yesterday. It was pretty decent. Ending on The Dead showed a level of improvement in Joyce's belief and conviction, with it written a year after all the others. There's a lot to it, including the title, and I could spent a long time thinking about it. I think it also balanced really well with its opening story, The Sisters. A story that got to me a lot, enough that I riffed on it in my own work. The thing that most strikes me is the idea of if it was released now. It was a lot of quiet despair and sometimes resilience in the face of middle class (lower middle class) occupation and trials. I can imagine the tightness of its perspective, as internally broad as it is, would clash against views of modern openness and equality.
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May 11, 2018 13:56
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If anyone's interested in the Irish lit scene this has a pretty decent idea of what's going on. As someone said to me (one of the editors quoted in this article) The Stinging Fly is the gold standard. It's often featured writers who've gone on to do great collection, serious novels, or been featured in The New Yorker and Granta. And you'd see people published in both mentioning it among those publications. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/ireland-s-thriving-literary-magazine-scene-space-for-tradition-and-experimentation-1.3496202
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May 19, 2018 19:25
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CestMoi posted:A mate of mine did his master's with Sally Rooney and he's incredibly annoyed at her rampant success while he edits erotica and fails to get poems published Anyone from a debating society annoys me greatly. Although Rooney seems annoyed at herself for it, which is fair. And I imagine bitterness and faked smiles in the literary scene, if tapped, could provide power for every bitcoin miner in the world. A force stronger than all the solar panels combined.
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May 19, 2018 20:08
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I finished Molloy today after finishing Murphy a few weeks ago. From a book about craving with Murphy, with Molloy Beckett seems to have progressed to, "Well gently caress it, gently caress you, and gently caress me as well, sure why not."
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Jun 3, 2018 16:58
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Can anyone offer some recommendations? The most personally significant books I've read in the past year have been The Book of Disquiet (recommended by people here) and the two Beckett books I've read recently. I'm worried about wearing out Beckett by bingeing on him. Murphy, Molloy and The Book of Disquiet all tickled my love of mental flights made material. Molloy, for me, was hinting at post-modern significance, so maybe something more recent than that that fully embraces it, or a female author to see a different view of mental agitations.
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Jun 4, 2018 14:53
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Anything more to work with? Eh, often solitary people. Sometimes down-and-outs. Navigating their personal ambition or lack of it, content or lacking contentment with their way and knowing or not knowing it (Molloy had this parallel.) An engagement with finding satisfaction in the world, or at least satisfaction in their personal understanding of thought and meaning. Existentialism would be ok, Beckett was painted as nihilistic but I'm not sure I buy him as straight-up nihilism. It seemed more hedonism than nihilism to me, however close they may be. Nothing as everything, personal experience amounting to entireties of the world, or limited, personal worlds. Sartre's Les Mouches was recommended to me, but it's a play and I'm a little unsure of that. I read a collection of Camus short stories, which was enjoyable, but didn't fully get across its existentialism to me. I want to avoid Joyce after reading Dubliners because that seemed like a light introduction and his other work is more of a task. And I'm Irish, so I'm not sure I want to spend all my time with Irish writing. I might be wrong but a lot of Russian work seems to be about the personal/societal divide butting against the internal. Kafka was just funny, and a bit maddening. Possibly too on-the-nose and obvious for me. Apart from that I've mostly been reading (and being disappointed by) Irish lit mags as they come across as a little tame and prosaic, and when they try for experimental it's obfuscated and lacking clarity. Then a few modern authors like Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream which was the best modern author I've read recently. The two Tramp Press books, McCormack's Solar Bones and Sara Baume's A Line Made by Walking were good, but not revelatory. That's most of my recent reading history, in a nutshell. I'm not a fast reader doing most of it sitting in a beer garden when I can afford to drink and I'm happy to take my time with a book. And I did try to read One Hundred Years of Solitude but that was almost the opposite of what I wanted. All materiality that had to be read into, as a history or folk tale, rather than more internal work.
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Jun 4, 2018 15:14
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Have you read any Eimear McBride? I picked up A Girl is a Half-formed Thing in the bookshop and read few the first few pages. I'd have to be in a particular frame of mind to get through the whole thing. Potentially that time is now when beer gardens present plenty of opportunity for time killing.
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Jun 4, 2018 15:52
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WASDF posted:I just bask in the empathy, and feel something kind of cosmic about things like DEATH and LOVE. You're saying it's been done before? Well that's a waste of the forty thousand words I wrote about death.
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Jun 6, 2018 23:36
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I've only read Barthes' Camera Lucida, but if you're interested in photography it's very much worth it. Having not read much serious critical work is it was very different to what I expected. It's extraordinarily accessible. Susan Sontag's On Photography is another staple of photography literature. It's hugely controversial and some people hate what she wrote, but I think there's a lot of validity to it even if it's confrontational to photographers, and asks you to reassess and understand what you're doing when you photograph. I don't know if her other work is worth approaching or if she ever focused on literature. She wrote fiction as well. Judith Butler is a strange one, quite contentious, but massively important. Her arguments on gender are important for third wave feminism, but are as much used as a critique of third wave feminism, especially its pro-trans stance. She's often a way to start an argument. I like what I've read of her but I'm equally suspicious of others who use her arguments. There's a lot of nuance and fine lines to it. Mel: Which of those books you've recommended are closest to the act and effect of writing/reading/literature? And which are more general on society? I'll look them up, but commentary as close to writing as Barthes and Sontag were to photography would be appreciated.
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Jun 7, 2018 19:34
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fridge corn posted:do you suffer from ennui Is there something similar to ennui, but for thickos? I don't feel like I have the intellectual might to tackle the deepest disappointments of privilege in a way other disappointed people can relate to, and that's a real let down.
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Jun 8, 2018 00:39
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Foul Fowl posted:you can't really build up to kafka, there's no literary tradition which will ease you into his insane fever dream of reality. just jump straight into the trial and then read some of his short stories and if you really like it read the castle and amerika. i don't think kafka is very difficult, just very good and very troubling. I didn't find Kafka troubling at all, rather funny in fact. The big problem for me with him is that it's very much like spinning in a hamster wheel. There's people who are very sure of their way, but the world simply doesn't care. Maybe that's only a surface reading, but people struggle on in his stories, but unlike happy lit, with a happy ending, their struggle means very little. His characters rarely find purpose in the immediate sense, possibly to their downfall, or possibly, if they did, Kafka would gently caress that up for them as well. It isn't something he addresses often, instead leaving his characters engage with the ridiculousness of the world while being their ridiculous selves, rather than engaging with their own purpose. With Beckett I started with Murphy, which is perhaps a little more of a traditional story that points his way towards Molloy (I've yet to read the others) and is probably more straightforward funny. It also has Beckett's protagonist dealing with craziness and crazy people, rather than falling into it (kind of,) which I think is more honest from the author's point of view. Insanity seems to be a big deal for Beckett, at least from the limited amounts of him I've read. Again, I'm sure there's depths there waiting for me to discover them, but reading it the same as any other novel provides a lot. It's good enough to work at whatever level you take it at.
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Jun 8, 2018 13:59
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Shibawanko posted:Kafka, just like Lem, is a pessimistic writer who can't help being really funny and oddly not depressing, at least not to me. Reading The Trial, throughout, I just kept thinking, "You fool! Stop caring! You're going nowhere with this. You arrogant prick, thinking the world cares." The only part of it, for me, that offered any hope or even a little direct view on Kafka's thoughts was with the priest, at the end. Reading The Castle I was in the midst of serious mental health issues, and all I could think was how pointless K's endless travails would be (which somewhat bore out by the "end" of the book.) And how the only purpose anyone finds is in accepting their lovely lot, not giving up on ambition and purpose, but finding it in the immediate. Which was helpful at the time, with what I was going through. Kafka kind of reminds me of seven year old me decrying the world and loudly announcing, "But that's not fair!" I think his difficulties with endings highlights that to some extent, he can't bring himself to take his stories to their conclusion, as that would be finally accepting all that he's said before. Even then, the protagonists of both The Trial and The Castle are absolute arseholes. Sure, they've had their world taken out from under them, but it's not hard to find some of your jollies in their impotent flailing.
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Jun 8, 2018 14:36
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