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I just started Faust part two after having completed the first. I've got to say I was real intimidated by starting to read a novel that took an entire lifetime to compose. But reading David Luke's translation I flew through the first part, in all honesty I found myself reading quicker than my brain was interpreting the words and had to keep going back and rereading sections. The first part was great and one of the few books that I can say I actually felt better about myself after reading. Some of the realizations that Faust has seems more relevant in the modern times of social isolation then they even might of in Goethe's day. And it certainly inspired me to try and live a little more and enjoy the life I have instead of wasting it. The introduction to Part II was not appreciated though it was nearly as long as the first part and while it would be interesting info for a reread or an amateur scholar researching Goethe. Him going through and trying to puzzle out exactly when each of the sections was created would've felt better as a separate section at the end when I had more context. As an aside there's a website called Librivox that does free Audiobook versions of out of copyright novels and it's version of Faust it hilarious. Gretchen is a little flat but fine. Mephistopheles is weird but okay. Faust Is good, but nearly every side character is awful. I ended up laughing to myself, alone, at 3 in the morning at the end of the first act just from the final lines being delivered so poorly. Imagine a chorus of Angels announcing someones soul is saved with all the Gravitas of a bunch of Kindergartners putting on their first play.
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Oct 24, 2017 08:38
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 17:59 |
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I'm reading Karamazov right now and can vouch that it's amazing. I don't know what it is with russian writers but they seem to have a much better grasp of characterization then most of the anglosphere. I actually had to put down War and Peace, It was fantastic but one of the main guys reminded me too much of a buddy of mine.
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Feb 12, 2021 03:37
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Jupiter Jazz posted:Whom? Anyways I had to google the characters but it looks like it was Pierre Bezukhov. I obviously didn't get far into the novel, but it seems like he was a guy who was trying his best to follow a moral life but was absolutely incapable of resisting others who would try and bring him down. I think it was a passage where he had just left a party or something and was trying to get things straight in his life before and then got dragged off into a brothel right afterwards. Not to get too deep into it but this was right around the time when my best friend had gotten way deep into meth because of the group of friends he'd keep. He lost his job, his parent's disowned him, and his girlfriend of five years left him. Me, my other buddy, and his dad finally got him into rehab, and he went into the Military after that. He seems to be doing a lot better now, but when I was reading the book was right in the middle of the worst of his addiction and seeing someone the character reminded me so much of him. It's truly one of the only times I've ever felt cut right down to my soul. I just couldn't read it without thinking of him.
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Feb 12, 2021 04:16
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Him being an ultranationalist makes his writing more Interesting, now you can consider how his work reflects on his actual life and ponder what drove home to make the decisions that he made. Or just summarily dismiss a dead man for having the wrong politics I guess.
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Feb 19, 2021 06:10
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Sun and steel is the best mishima work don't @ me
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Feb 19, 2021 06:28
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I fully support your move. Think of the millions of disaffected young men who could've been turned into dangerous white nationalists if you had tweeted about the works of a gay japanese man. You've single handedly prevent the rise of not only the Fourth Reich, but probably the fifth and sixth as well.
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Feb 20, 2021 04:10
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Engaging with opposing viewpoints is extremely useful both in solidifying and expanding upon your own, and understanding the how and why other people have come to the viewpoints they hold.
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Feb 20, 2021 07:10
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Ya gotta read the words to understand the nerds
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Feb 20, 2021 07:49
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I thought it was his second and third both failed before he did himself in.
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Feb 24, 2021 04:57
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You okay bro?
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Mar 14, 2021 17:12
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mdemone posted:Pretty sure the hatred comes from people feeling disdain and shame about their own younger selves. I've always got that impression, or people being performatively angry at Holden because they see others doing the same. I can say Holden was a lot like my own younger self. I think Franny and Zooey might be something that speaks more to Teens nowadays though.
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Aug 24, 2021 16:51
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They're just trying to live up to Salinger's example
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Aug 24, 2021 17:59
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Try and at least make your bit funny next time.
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Sep 20, 2021 09:20
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Even if you don't understand any of the Subtext of Gravity's Rainbow, I think it does a great job of showing what an absolute shitshow the end of WWII was. Humanities just come down from the absolute peak of insanity, Millions of youngpeople being funneled into their graves by insane, incompetent, and megalomaniac leaders. Neighbors turned against neighbors, blood flowing in the streets, cities burnt to cinder. And then the orgy of death and destruction ends, and people need to figure out some meaning to all of it.
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Oct 7, 2021 02:46
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That's where that quote is from?
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Oct 27, 2021 03:50
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If she had just called it an adaption instead of a translation there would be no problem.
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Nov 18, 2021 19:51
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I thoroughly convinced that everyone complaining about history education in the US just didn't pay attention, and then vents about it online to cover up their own ignorance.
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Nov 29, 2021 19:56
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Read Faust
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Jan 1, 2022 19:55
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Proust Malone posted:I really wish I had read east of Eden in high school or maybe college. I needed to hear timshel as a young man. I read it my senior year of highschool but I can't say it made much of an impression. It's one of those messages that doesn't really resonate until you've already gotten past the point where it would be useful I think.
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Jan 3, 2022 16:30
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Sorcerer's apprentice was loving Goethe? The gently caress man, I woulda never guessed
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Jan 8, 2022 07:53
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Knauer extolling the virtues of nofap is killing me. My buddy sent me paragraphs talking that at 3am once. Swore he now inhabited the real world instead of the false one, that his lifts went through the roof, and his mental acuity was razor sharp. Then of course a week later he tells me it was all bullshit. Now I can't even focus on the story because this poo poo.
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Apr 17, 2022 17:21
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I've found myself in love with Truffaut's work as a director, and seeing his own devotion to Balzac I was going to jump that train now that I've finished Demian, then I head to the book store and realize the dude was a one man printing press. Any recommendations for something to use as a starter, or do I just YOLO myself into La Comédie humaine
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Apr 17, 2022 20:56
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The only problem I have is remembering the names. I find the works as a whole enthralling
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May 11, 2022 18:12
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Has anyone read Bleeding Edge? I don't think I've ever seen someone talking about it
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May 11, 2022 21:36
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It's good to see Bleeding Edge seems to be good, I hesitate on it because it's the only novel of his set in my lifetime. I think without that temporal removal I have from the other novels it's going to hit different.
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May 11, 2022 23:26
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I rec Crying to many many people in my life, and many bounce from it. It kills me, it's short and snappy, but still distilled Pynchon. And these fools bounce from it
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May 12, 2022 03:58
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Balzac is the opposite of a page turner. His work so far is enthralling, but you know that the second you do some character or another's gonna gently caress up their own happiness.
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May 17, 2022 03:42
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That is certainly an interpretation. ∨∨∨∨∨∨∨ Jesus, It's too bad that the Online media race to the bottom ended with all the journalists being dumb kids without a clue and all the editors were non existent cause someone really needed to step in and say "What you just wrote makes you look like a total loving idiot" Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 01:11
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Invitation to a beheading is a fun little Kafkaesque story
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Jun 3, 2022 19:54
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Yeah he's really just sad and possibly insane.
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Jun 16, 2022 22:21
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Coffee stains everywhere though
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Jun 28, 2022 03:31
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La Chinoise is supposedly an adaption of Demons which is wild. I guarantee the novels better than that lovely movie, but Brothers is an incredibly good work so probably just read that.
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Jul 22, 2022 21:33
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Besson posted:It’s the best one by a long shot. I never got it. They say it's semi autobiographical, but then how did he type it up then?
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Aug 14, 2022 02:32
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David Luke
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Aug 29, 2022 14:30
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ThePopeOfFun posted:Started Goethe’s Faust. Occasionally Arndt’s translation reads clunky, but I haven’t run into anything egregious. Sad to hear ardnts translation is stilted. Luke's is the only one I've read all the way through but it's exceptionally easy to read. One of the things I love about the novel is how unorthodox Goethe is in his approach to faith and to the tale of Faust himself. It's a really off kilter work, but one that manages to live up to Goethe's immense ambitions for the work and pretty drat funny. Part one is this Shakespearean tragic comedy with a nerd trying to get laid. And then Part II is this insane rumination on metaphysics, classical history, contemporary art, and philosophy. Where centuries pass and kingdoms fall in a single stage direction. But at it's heart is still about one dude trying to quell his insatiable ambitions. Its a shame that so many in the anglosphere shrug off Pt.II when it's really the far more interesting work. Although the few laymenish people I've seen talking about it didn't really understand much of what it was saying at all.
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Aug 30, 2022 23:41
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ThePopeOfFun posted:Further into Goethe’s Faust. Another reminder that lonely, isolated, bored and horny men abound throughout time, getting into trouble and following people who wish to use them. Being too Online, it is impossible to not read Faust as some as incel-adjacent. He listens to the devil because he sees no hope of escaping his current situation. Even so, it’s fun to watch him romp around with Mephistopheles as the devil dazzles a pub with magic tricks. One important thing to note is that Faust's predicament is entirely self caused, he's been seeking knowledge in order to escape his own fate for so long that he's ended up with his entire life gone to the endless study and toil and left nothing for the "real" experience. When he at first succeeds at summoning the Earth Spirit it says to him that he's strived for so long to summon it and yet when he does so he hides from it. And more than that the Earth Spirit tells him that it and Faust are the same in character but still Faust is afraid. The work is very heavily focused on the difference between the received or studied knowledge and the experienced knowledge. Faust might have studied enough to lay out the Macrocosm in front of himself, but in those dusty and dark years his own life has atrophied. He cannot comprehend the Earth Spirit, how could he he's spent his time on earth locked away from the splendor of the earth. Reading the opening again after the end of PT.II is highly recommended to see how different Faust is in perspective despite theoretically holding the same goal. Also while you can see the Incel adajcentness of Faust, and I myself have made jokes to the effect of that, I've seen some people double and triple down on that trait to the effect that they lose the whole rest of the plot. There was a podcast called the Canon Ball that looked at the western canon, and despite professors of some level they spent most of the PT.II discussion arguing about nonsense because they fell right into the sex groove and couldn't escape. It did a disservice to the work and showed their critical thinking and analytical abilities to be very subpar. Digression aside, the work deals with the sensuous, experiential, and emotional values of love and loss, but also with the aesthetics of beauty but most importantly with the value of change. The change of elements, the earth, time, empire, art, culture, and the human soul. It's also hilarious, Mephisto is an absolute lad
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Sep 9, 2022 03:05
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Solitair posted:Are there any good podcasts about literature? There's a few depending on your definition. Elder Sign and The Gene Wolfe Literary Podcast by Brandon Budda and Glenn McDorman discuss Weird Fiction and Gene Wolfe's oeuvre respectively and they manage to do a great job breaking things down, bringing in history and discussing the text in an interesting and open way that isn't overly reliant on the current consensus of the texts. Honestly that might be it, I got on a big Nabokov kick awhile ago and decided to check out some podcast on Pale Fire while I traveled across the states. Horrible mistake, they spent a good 30 minutes debating if it was Modernist or Post Modernist for zero purpose and then introduced me to the Hazelite interpretation which can just get fully hosed. NikkolasKing posted:The accusation of Incel being applied to people living hundreds of years ago seems extremely silly. I agree both because I don't like post labeling things, and I don't like what the internet has done with the idea of the incel given it's a symptom of our deeply sick culture. But Faust's very first Soliloquy is about how he wasted his whole life reading books like a nerd instead of "touching grass" so it is in a sense apropos.
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Sep 9, 2022 05:39
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Not to be confused with Sacred and Propane Love my King of the Hill rewatch podcast
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Sep 10, 2022 01:10
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Click the question mark and go back a page of my posts and me and another person were talking about it. The gist is that some people have gone past the Idea that John Shade is the actual author of Pale Fire (novel) instead of just the poem and that the commentary is an inherent part of what he was doing, into the idea that Hazel shade was the author speculating on her life and the lives of her family after she embraces her last name. I just think it's a ridiculous idea that is just throwing poo poo at a wall to find something new instead of a particularly insightful or interesting way to read the work.
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Sep 11, 2022 22:24
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 17:59 |
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Ada, or Ardor Nabokov and possibly America’s greatest work of literature. Nabokov started out the novel as a parody of the classic family chronicle, managing to out write most of his influences in terms of prose, cleverness, and humor in the process. But then also creating the masterful philosophical work on the nature of time and memory, that becomes more and more solid the farther into the contemporary we get culminating in Van’s trip to meet Ada in Switzerland. The whole of the structure is truly beautiful. Of course the halcyon days of Van and Ada’s youth take up such a prominent place in the narrative, they’ve both spent decades reliving those memories over and over, together and in private, reliving them when they were young children, young adults, professionals, and senior citizens. We think of what’s current as the most real and the past as mostly ethereal, but for memories the farther back they are the more you’ve had time to relive them. Van’s time adoring arbors didn’t last fifteen minutes forty years ago, it lasted fifteen minutes for forty years. More than that the memories of the first Ardis visit themselves seem to take on this fantastic heightened quality, like a fairy tale. Guided by Nabokov beautiful prose every branch on every tree, family included, is made as beautiful as it is ethereal. The sun beams are always casting their rays just so, and the grass is always perfectly verdant. Van and Ada are both wise far beyond their years, precocious, and always have the perfect jab or thrust to counter any phrase thrown their way. How much of this is Van’s embellishment and romantic nature, a fact that Demon calls out in reply to Van’s letter of Lucettes fate, and how much is them just being savant’s is anyone's guess. I’ve seen a few people point out something I noticed, when we finally see them come into careers they don’t seem nearly as luminescent as their previous descriptions would lead you to believe they would be. Van is a career Psychologist and a very young member of the board, but it seemed that Demon was bribing and cajoling the faculty and boards partly to support his son, and partly to keep him focused on not loving his sister(s). He explicitly supports Ada as well, whom it seems carried on in the Marianan fashion of taking strings of lovers and having children from said affairs. A fact that she allows Van to mistake as Demon getting up to some Humbert business. But, I also think the fracturing of the ardis affair left them both adrift, and each chose to cope in ways that don’t necessarily play into their strengths. I don’t think Ada seemed all that excited about her mothers career in the starting chapters, she seemed pretty turned off about the whole filming in the second ardis episode, and yet we see that she’s incredibly desperate to get ahold of Van again, somehow, after he fights his duel. Using the Letters, but also in becoming an actress she’s attempting to at least get him to see her again in the same vein as Jesse’s novel in the Before Trilogy, it turns out her plan works but in a disastrous way. Van might have gone into Terrapy given what happened to Aqua, but when you read the beginnings of his career it coincides with and helps satisfy his writing career. The culmination of which, Letters from Terra seems physically based on his insane patients ramblings, but emotionally based on his conflicting desire to see Ada and the feeling that the affair would always be doomed and they’d always be apart. Ada stays an actress for most of the text of the novel, but seems not at all bothered about giving it up when she shacks up in Cordula’s Crib. And her talking of trying to be a great actress felt more like her wanting to master a skill than to follow a passion of hers, and after she discovers Vineland it serves as a convenient excuse to not be stuck in Arizona watching cows gently caress. Van also throws himself into his career whenever he’s apart from Ada, but his enthusiasm seems to wane heavily whenever a meeting nears, most explicitly when he fakes a heart attack rather than lecture for even a single second more. Hilariously the Venerated Veens best works are a movie where Ada didn’t act, and Van’s greatest contribution to Terrarist thought is from a movie he inspired but can’t take credit for. I’ve heard that Nabokov found both the Veen’s pretty reprehensible, which is pretty objectively true. Van is an rear end in a top hat constantly flaunting his wealth and privilege to his staff and servants, he kills and maims other people who get in his way ( the captain and Kim), and he constantly cheats on his pseudospouse so much so that the way he stops cheating is to think about how much he wants to cheat and takes pleasure in the denial. Ada meanwhile cuckolds her husband and is more culpable than even Van in the death of Lucette ( a fact that seems still haunts her even into her nineties). Both of them act like the absolute worst kind of rich assholes that you can possibly imagine, their only saving grace is that their ambitions is after one another and not political or monetary power. And yet, I don’t hate either one of them, or perhaps I don’t hate their love for eachother. On Terra it would be reprehensible, but I find it hard to read the text as a condemnation of that specific aspect of them. Demonia or AntiTerra feels malicious and suffused with evil in such a way that even a sin like incest doesn’t feel as immoral; If one sins in hell is it really a sin? Can their souls travel together to Terra, will they become one like in the end of the book. Will they be separate and meet again, hopefully as nonsiblings. Or is everyone and everything on antiterra as doomed as Lucette? Regardless the text takes this shape, one thinks it to be like a butterfly. A form of symmetry. But it seems to be a spiral to me, the work purports to be a family chronicle, but the incest laden tale ends with the Veens Vanquished. The family tree collapses, AquaMarina, and DemonDan, funnel into Van and Ada, who in turn vanish into a single point of Vanaida. Perhaps their only refuge is not to live on terra but to be written on terra, their deaths into the pages of the work serve the same function as the death described by Van Veen in Lucettes words. An endless series of subdivisions of partial death, from the second you open the book the Veens exist, living and dead, their memories endlessly stretching forwards unto death. The work gave me an odd feeling, I almost felt like Van without Ada or vice versa when I’d finished. The work is huge, filled with detail, masterful prose, description and philosophy but something always feels missing. It’s incomplete by design. For a novel called Ada, or Ardor it’s calling out for its non existent companion, Van, or Vanity (name subject to change). Near the end we see that the two have become near enough to one being, but what about the other frayed end of that rope? For as much as Van tells us of himself and his sister, she still maintains the enigmatic quality that Van is so attracted to. Like if you made an entire character from Catherines smile. Other Misc. thoughts I didn’t really get a hang of Dan Veen. I thought for awhile the text was implying him to be gay. But he is still Lucettes father. I don’t know how aware he was of Marina’s constant cheating or what exactly how strange Demon’s description of him is in his first scene or in his death scene. Is Lucette, the woman who can’t find any meaning or pleasure in her life without someone else, being the person who can’t find KLITORI Nabokov’s most meanspirited joke? Demon showing up, high as hell, in his son’s suite unaware that sisters suit his son is such a funny scene. drat near had tears in my eyes, that and Demon getting around Van’s bribery of the doorman by just being more generous with his gold. I’ve not read that, or any, Chekov play that is adapted with Marina starring as the deaf nun. Is it to imply that she was on some level aware of the Ardis Affair the whole time and was just ignoring it. She brought up for Van to stop seducing Lucette, but once we’re out of the Ardent narrative it’s clear that most of the staff understood what was happening, Blanche, Lucette, Boutellian, and Kim at least. She was open enough with her realization late in life that she told Vinalander’s sister. But is it true that Demon told her, or that her failing health collapsed her mental barriers preventing her from seeing the truth. Secondly, Am I the only one who thinks that she was trying to seduce Van when he comes to her room to talk about Lucette, the same scene where he’s desperate to try and see her as his mother? Why did he end up in such a relationship with Cordula, she didn’t seem anything like Ada. And he never had anything more than flings with anyone else. But something made him hang on to her in a way that he didn’t with anyone else? Would everyone have been better off if he had just returned to Ardis with Lucette? What exactly is the nature of Demonia. Are they all demons or fallen angels. Some descriptions border on either demonic or angelic, Lucette could be Lucifer? Van loses his innocence plucking a fruit, Ada, from a tree in the garden. How much of Demonia real? Maybe it's just me but there's a phantasmal quality to the world, characters seem to all fall into strange categories or titles and places and people seem to exist only to remind Van of Ada or Ada of Van. Things don't seem to exist beyond the senses of the pair, culminating in the book closing off to just a few rooms for the last 40 years of their life vs. the vast tapestry of their life previously even if it's the most happy moments of their lives. And then in the end as they both embrace oblivion the story itself closes and ends with a review of itself. What exactly is the meaning of water in the novel. Marina and Aqua are both named after it, Aqua believes it’s talking to her, Lucette drowns in it, Dorophones take the place to Electrophones. If Terra is Demonian heaven, are the voices in the water the voices of angels trying to baptize the damned? Are van’s words more impactful than he realized and Lucettes are doomed on Demonia, because their souls are saved and moved to Terra? Is their meaning in Ada and Van moving to the area of Europe farthest from the sea or ocean? Is there a single worse feeling in the world realizing you'll never reach the prosaic heights of Nabokov? Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Sep 12, 2022 |
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Sep 12, 2022 04:20
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