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Good science fiction exists: Stanislaw Lem.
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Sep 12, 2014 00:10
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novamute posted:I've read a bunch of him and he's very hit or miss. His "humans exploring alien world" type books (Solaris and Eden are the ones I've read so far) are amazing and capture the potential incomprehensibility of alien life really well but his "robot alien fable" books either lose a lot in translation or are meant to be amusing and the joke is lost on me. I've only read Solaris so you might be right. I don't think Solaris is so much about alien life or anything related to space, the actual aesthetic of the world is 50's/60's pulp style on purpose, all with checkerboard walls and silver rockets and stuff, obviously the world itself is superfluous, just a stage to set a story about the unconscious. The descriptions of "solaristics" are just an analogue of the development of science about the human mind (note how at the time of the novel, solaristics is just about cataloging and describing phenomena, rather than theorizing about their meaning, an attitude similar to modern day cognitivism). The reason it's great sci fi is, I guess, because it's not really about space or aliens, since "scientific" topics like that make for pretty stupid novels if they become more than window dressing. All literature is about humanity and human or inhuman feeling, all genre novels make the mistake of being about something else. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 09:21
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Solaris really is genius though, I just flipped through some parts again because this thread reminded me, and it's probably one of the best novels out there.
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Sep 12, 2014 12:45
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Literature doesn't always affect a distance, I would say it's at its best when it doesn't, as long as it avoids being sentimental.
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Sep 17, 2014 06:54
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Coetzee is probably the easiest entry level literary writer because of the way he writes, waiting for the barbarians in particular is basically a fantasy novel, only not poo poo.
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Oct 2, 2014 16:02
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I liked V. but not really any of the other ones.
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Oct 6, 2014 22:11
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Smoking Crow posted:Pun Pun.
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Nov 12, 2014 11:41
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Travic posted:This is going to be a difficult post, but please bear with me. I'm trying to broaden my horizons here Just read something simple and fun for starters then. Kafka's Metamorphosis is fun as all gently caress because it's about the main character turning into a beetle which sounds just like a Family Guy episode and reads that way too, except it's good and also short. Everybody can enjoy the Metamorphosis.
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Nov 20, 2014 08:31
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I like how The Man who was Thursday reads like he kind of made it up as he went along with increasing absurdities like an improvised kid's bed time story.
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Nov 21, 2014 11:46
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I love the Dutch writer Nescio's "Amsterdam Stories" (they chose a clunky, milquetoast name for the English translation): http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/amsterdam-stories/ It's modernism but with a lot of black humor. It's mostly about useless but virtuous characters versus successful but largely cynical ones, a lot of it is about the details of daily life as a bum in early 20th century Amsterdam. A bit like the Benny Profane chapters from V. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Dec 9, 2014 |
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Dec 9, 2014 23:04
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From Murakami I liked Pinball but I'm generally not too impressed with him.
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Dec 10, 2014 18:46
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Dystram posted:No, my friend, it is not capital L literature according to some arbitrary standard, hence, it is a bad book, for the pretension of the thread must be maintained. People with anime avatars always have good, and correct opinions. None of the reasons he gave for why he liked it sounded convincing though. Goofy genre fiction deconstructions are so commonplace. Why would you defend that stuff.
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Dec 21, 2014 23:16
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fozzy fosbourne posted:QBAFCARSRL thread, what are your thoughts regarding the term "middlebrow literature"? You seem to imply that highbrow is the same as convoluted postmodernism. Better writers than Pynchon and Foster Wallace exist whom you might like and who are not difficult to understand. Antwan3K posted:I am going to pimp yet another Dutch guy, WF Hermans for everyone who likes Camus (esp. The Darkroom of Damocles). If there is such a thing as existentialist literature, it's an emblematic example Yeah WF Hermans is good. I don't really like Mulisch much as far as Dutch writers go, but I love Nescio, Hermans, Voskuil and guilty pleasure Marten Toonder.
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Dec 23, 2014 22:53
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Earwicker posted:I think Pynchon gets a reputation as being "convoluted" due to Gravity's Rainbow, which can certainly be a challenge, but several of his other books are pretty straightforward and not at all hard to understand. I actually think V. was his best book and it got less good from there, V. is basically an interesting take on Hoffman's Der Sandmann with more likable characters, his political writing from that period was also more engaged with working class and anti racist struggle and it just seems less "postmodern" in the way we would understand it today, except in terms of style. The more straightforward, later books like Inherent Vice veer too much into Hunter S. Thompson hippie nostalgia territory for me, so I wouldn't recommend those for that reason.
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Dec 23, 2014 23:10
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Boatswain posted:From what I've been reading lately: Sebald, Marias, Melville, Salter, Yourcenar, Gracq. Yeah I agree about Coetzee, he only writes that way because most of his protagonists are cerebral cynics who come to experience some kind of ethical moment through suffering. Disgrace is very moving and the scene where he's interrogated by the school committee is pure joy, you get so much of infuriating contemporary ideology condensed in a few short conversations and there are a few moments in the prose where you suddenly feel anger and irritation coming through. It's only cerebral so that the shell can occasionally be poked through.
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Dec 24, 2014 02:18
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Smoking Crow posted:Poll: what is the name of the current trend in literary fiction? Post-Postmodernism? Could you give an example of a work that you want categorized?
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Jan 18, 2015 00:03
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Battle Royale is a good, leftist book.
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Feb 17, 2015 17:09
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Reading Old English is fun to learn. It's probably a lot easier if you already know some other Germanic language, you can guess the meaning of a lot of the vocab if you know German, Dutch, Frisian or a Nordic language.poisonpill posted:What's interesting is to read Chaucer alongside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. They are roughly contemporary but Chaucer was from London and the author of Gawain was rural. One is part of the English language's direct lineage but the other is almost illegible, despite them ostensibly being the same language. Yeah as I recall, the Southern dialect of ME became the prestige dialect after Anglo-Norman fell out of use among the nobility, and gradually became dominant. I forgot the details though.
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Mar 7, 2015 02:18
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blue squares posted:The sad fact is that most philosophers are terrible writers. I'm reading Heidegger this semester and fuuuuck I think it's partly because a lot of philosophers' ideas could be written out in a more straightforward way to us because we are readers who live in later times, and a lot of their ideas already make some kind of intuitive sense to us, and whatever terms they've introduced have already become familiar to us. Like if you want to explain Freud for instance (though Freud was actually a pretty good writer I think) you wouldn't really have to explain what the unconscious is to a modern reader, we would probably already know it. They wrote for an audience to whom their ideas were entirely new. Like, the distinction between Sein and Dasein seems just kind of obvious once you understand what it is, it's really not a difficult thing to understand (particularly if you explain it using examples, rather than in the abstract), but it was difficult to introduce I guess. Are you reading Heidegger in German? Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Mar 13, 2015 |
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Mar 13, 2015 14:09
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What's a good text if you want to understand different currents within Buddhism in general? I am trying to understand Buddhism in Japan, like the way different sects are tied to political currents (like New Komeito is tied to Soka Gakkai), but when I try to read about it I just get a bunch of Buddhism jargon about sutras and dharmas and whatnot. I just want to know what the main theses and ideas of different currents are, in summary, for someone who isn't really familiar with it.
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Mar 14, 2015 03:44
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I don't think most of the authors we now think of as postmodern actually believed in or wanted to promote the kind of caricature of postmodernism that most of us now associate with it.
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Mar 17, 2015 04:51
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I liked the banana party at the beginning of Gravity's Rainbow.
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Mar 22, 2015 04:35
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I've honestly never even bothered to read him because he seems Oprah book club-esque The covers of his books are too smooth and colorful.
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Mar 23, 2015 00:58
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I didn't like Inherent Vice much and still think V. is the best one, had more memorable scenes and more human characters.
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Mar 29, 2015 00:13
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Nanomashoes posted:TCOL49 is Pynchons worst book, it gets recommended because it's short or its all that person was able to read. Yeah I didn't like it, it had none of the powerful imagery of V. or Gravity's Rainbow.
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Apr 4, 2015 09:11
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Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica will enter the canon.
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Apr 6, 2015 01:26
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The only Stephen King I ever read was "Running Man" when i was 10 or something. It was alright for a kid's book.
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Apr 14, 2015 23:18
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quote:On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going?
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Apr 22, 2015 04:32
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Lots of people always come in here saying that they've never read proper literature, and ask what they should read first, and the answer should always just be Coetzee. Anyone can read Disgrace and get something out of it, and it's very straightforward prose. There's no point recommending Dante or whatever because new readers would never finish it, and most "accessible classics" like anything by Orwell or Dickens tend to be aesthetically shallow and bad introductions to what literature is really about. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 02:16 on May 30, 2015 |
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May 30, 2015 02:11
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I really liked Disgrace but it seems an odd choice for most accessible literary novel ever I think it has that combination of very easy to read prose (except for some unusual words maybe, like "uxorious", but you can just look those up) combined with interesting events that make it perfect for that, yeah. There are other books you can choose of course, but it's the most thrilling one I can think of that I guess might make somebody want to go on reading other things as well. It has a very interesting kind of ethics that goes against common sense in a way that's still accessible without being conventional, if that makes any sense.
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May 30, 2015 02:52
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Mishima is my favorite Japanese novelist. This is one of his weaker books I thought though. Why didn't you like it? Decay of the Angel is my favorite I think, but Sailor is a close second, mostly because it's a bit like an earlier draft of Decay of the Angel, they're both about evil, sea-obsessed boys. My least favorite Mishima is Shiosai I think, because it has all this symbolism that seems to build up to something (the cliffside place with the ominous name, the boys in the cave predicting some kind of catastrophe), but then nothing really happens and the book is over.
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Jun 9, 2015 05:22
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Dawkins is an idiot who doesn't understand counterfactual faith. It'd be a disaster for faith if god really did exist.
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Jun 10, 2015 00:50
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Dragon Ball Z is not garbage.
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Jun 19, 2015 00:37
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I read only one lovecraft story and it was on an airplane and it helped me sleep through turbulence. I'm terrified of turbulence.
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Jun 24, 2015 14:55
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Most mainstream postcolonial literature is crap which glorifies an easy retreat into traditional values.
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Jun 25, 2015 03:05
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Burning Rain posted:i haven't ready any that does tbh Once Were Warriors I mean that's an archetype, but you do find something like that in most of the postcolonial works I've read, even if I've not hated all of the ones that did. I just don't care to read about identity as this thing from the past that needs to be recovered. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Jun 25, 2015 |
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Jun 25, 2015 14:45
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Its not so much return I had an issue with as his specific use of recovered, which is why I quoted that post. The core focus of postcolonial literature is the event of colonization as a massive shift in the cultural identity of a people. The question is of who a people are before being colonized and how to recover what was lost. I don't think a lot of post-colonial lit explicitly states a people should return to who they were, mostly because, as you said, its impossible. But I do not think you could claim to find a single piece of post-colonial lit that doesn't concern itself with at least recovering the identity that was lost through colonization. Honestly I just don't like it when authors (or anyone else) dwells too much on identity at all. Colonization is material, it's the subjugation of a society which itself was already oppressive by a stronger force for the extraction of labour and resources, usually with some racist ideology or other to justify it. There was nothing "before" it that was meaningfully different from that except a greater or lesser degree of exploitation. There was never a harmonious, happy time where everyone was in their right place. This is the case for individuals as well, there is never going to be a moment where you are really happy and fully realized, and books, music or anything which suggests that you can be are either sentimental or deliberately lying. And yes there are quite a lot of books which explicitly do this, and theorists who explicitly say this in its most vulgar version where they simply want to reinstate the customs of some lost tribe or whatever as the antidote to all kinds of problems. I also just don't like the term because it's too often used in the same way people say "world music". Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jun 25, 2015 |
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Jun 25, 2015 16:48
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Earwicker posted:There are certainly various kinds of nationalists in postcolonial societies who do have that mentality with regard to traditional precolonial societies (or their intepretation thereof) - but most of them are not novelists, and when they are tend to be more interested in traditional or historical forms of art rather than examining postcolonial identity questions It's an important difference (I'd rather live in, say, social democratic Sweden in the 80's than in India under British rule), but I meant "meaningful" in a very literal sense. The difference between India before and India during and after British colonization, for example, is not one of meaning but of contingent changes. Mel Mudkiper posted:All fiction dwells on identity, you are just noticing it when the identity is othered. The human experience is inseparable from subjectivity and identity is at the core of subjectivity. But identity is never self-identity. Nobody is anything in itself, nobody is fully Japanese for example, although most Japanese would claim that they are, and nobody was ever fully Indian. Cultural identity is something imposed from the outside. Subjectivity is not identity, subjectivity is the gap between the self and identity, the degree to which you are able to recognize the contingency of what you are and live with that, subjectivity is alienation. You can dwell on identity and subvert it, mock it, reject it or live with it somehow but a lot of books do ask this question in a way that makes no effort to separate the self from identity. I don't think this is purely a strawman.
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Jun 26, 2015 01:04
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blue squares posted:I do not understand a single thing here. That's strange because it's an easy, basic concept.
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Jun 26, 2015 01:36
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blue squares posted:So if I were a character, my Identity would be all the adjectives that you could use to describe me and my place in society, and my self would be how i behave, the deep down root of it all underneath the surface? Identity, in the way it's usually talked about (especially by postcolonial theorists in this purely cultural, "authentic" way) is the Lacanian symbolic, the set of signifiers you are born into and are a part of you. Subjectivity is the Real of the inconsistencies in the Symbolic and your attempts to mediate them. Which doesn't mean that you should aggressively discard your identity either ("the escape from bourgeois life is itself bourgeois"), just that you cannot as a human being exist as a consistent identity without feeling somehow uneasy, and you will always experience some degree of alienation from what others tell you that you are. It's these feelings which make us produce art at all. And any attempt to return to some perceived earlier wholesomeness are illusory, sentimental feelings, equivalent to wanting to return to the womb. There was nothing particularly "wholesome" about Indian or African identity before colonization, it was more or less a chaotic, premodern mess with its own evils. Intelligent writers living in postcolonial societies (Fanon, Coetzee) always explicitly reject any return to an imagined past like that. What I said was a bit hyperbolic but there are many postcolonial writers who really do want, like, a return to caste society or Maori warrior tribes or whatever. But I guess I sound like a huge bore now, ugh.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:41
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