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CestMoi posted:What's the good Chinese poetry I'm also willing to accept prose suggestions even tho it's objectively inferior as an art form thank you My classmate wrote her bachelor in chinese on this guy, Xu Lizhi, who worked in a factory in Shenzhen making iphones and killed himself by jumping from the roof. He published his poetry on his blog, and it was "discovered" after his death. http://time.com/chinapoet/ http://newbooksnetwork.com/rountable-on-the-poetry-of-xu-lizhi/ https://www.vice.com/read/death-poems-are-a-thing-in-china-right-now https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/11/12/the-haunting-poetry-of-a-chinese-factory-worker-who-committed-suicide/ I swallowed a moon made of iron They refer to it as a nail I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents Youth stooped at machines die before their time I swallowed the hustle and the destitution Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust I can't swallow any more All that I've swallowed is now gushing out of my throat Unfurling on the land of my ancestors Into a disgraceful poem. *** A screw fell to the ground In this dark night of overtime Plunging vertically, lightly clinking It won't attract anyone's attention Just like last time On a night like this When someone plunged to the ground.
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Jun 4, 2016 20:29
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But the best Chinese poet is Tao Yuanming (365-427) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/T%27ao_Ch%27ien White hair covers my temples, I am wrinkled and gnarled beyond repair, And though I have got five sons, They all hate paper and brush. A-shu is eighteen: For laziness there is none like him. A-hsuan does his best, But really loathes the Fine Arts. Yung and Tuan are thirteen, But do not know "six" from "seven." T'ung-tzu in his ninth year Is only concerned with things to eat. If Heaven treats me like this, What can I do but fill my cup? "Blaming Sons" (An apology for his own drunkenness, A.D. 406) Shu-hsiang Lü, Yuanchong Xu, Gems of classical Chinese poetry in various English translations (1988), p. 100 Heaven and Earth exist for ever: Mountains and rivers never change. But herbs and trees in perpetual rotation Are renovated and withered by the dews and frosts: And Man the wise, Man the divine— Shall he alone escape this law? Fortuitously appearing for a moment in the World He suddenly departs, never to return. How can he know that the friends he has left Are missing him and thinking of him? Only the things that he used remain; They look upon them and their tears flow. Me no magical arts can save, Though you may hope for a wizard's aid. I beg you listen to this advice— When you can get wine, be sure to drink it. Substance, Shadow, and Spirit, "Substance speaks to Shadow" (translated by A. Waley) Quoted in One hundred & seventy Chinese poems (1945), 'Poems By Tao Ch'ien', p. 74
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Jun 4, 2016 20:37
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I remember reading Mao's poetry and being impressed, but it's a long time ago. He was probably good though. Only a poet could contain such an ego No people have ever held poets in higher esteem than the chinese imo
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Jun 4, 2016 20:40
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Here is a live performance of what goes through Tao Yuanming's non-physicalist mind as every year lesser poets are celebrated as the best poet ever, adapted for modern sensibilities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShXKblxYCVYulvir posted:started the year of the death of ricardo reis and loving it so far. I'm also glad I waited until after I went to lisbon before reading it. though it's a pretty trivial thing really, I feel like having an actual mental image of all the places that he describes in town kind of adds to the enjoyment Have you read Pessoa? That also adds to the enjoyment. There was a Norwegian translation of the poems by the pastoral poet Pessoa invented, don't remember his name. Have you read that?
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Jun 4, 2016 22:44
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ulvir posted:Yeah I've read book of disquiet and collected poems of alberto caeiro, the latter in Norwegian, maybe that was the one? obviously that adds to it as well due to the intertextuality I was going to read the caeiro poems at the time but forgot all about it. Are they similar to O. H. Hauge?
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Jun 5, 2016 00:44
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corn in the fridge posted:what is the threads consensus on catch 22 because it is my favourite book of all time although i read it at a very impressionable age and ive only revisited it once and not recently???????? In my opinion it's fine and often the favorite book of people who don't read much since it's often assigned in school, like books by Vonnegut and Catcher in the Rye.
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Jun 5, 2016 22:24
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ulvir posted:maybe a bit of Stein Mehren and Olav H. Hauge? they're hard to compare, but it's well worth it Unrelated, but I skimmed parts of this thread, and if you're still interested in Knausgård, I think his best book by far is En tid for alt / A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven. I loved that book when I read it and was disappointed by My Struggle at first because it was clearly written in a hurry. It grew on me though. It's funny that one of the world's best writers of fantastic literature is now famous for his autobiographical books.
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Jun 5, 2016 22:29
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Mr. Squishy posted:Too long to be assigned in school. I have been exposed as a fraud
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Jun 5, 2016 23:48
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GlyphGryph posted:the Illuminatus Trilogy Some suggestions based on this: You might like Maugham's The Magician. The character of the magician is based on Aleister Crowley, who Maugham knew for a while, and it's pretty funny. Crowley is portrayed as a lecherous evil mastermind and I think I remember reading that Crowley loved it. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150555.The_Magician The Big U by Neal Stephenson is a Nerd Book, but unlike Stephenson's other books, it's short and without pandering. Takes place in an American University, nerds and jocks and a weird hallucinogenic mass psychosis spreads. What can it be?! It's also really funny, and introduced me to Julian Jayne's wonderful The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Stephenson hates this book because it was his first and he's been going downhill since. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/826.The_Big_U Saerdna fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jun 9, 2016 |
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Jun 9, 2016 21:28
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WAY TO GO WAMPA!! posted:should I be worried that every time I read The Stranger I feel closer and closer to Meursault? Why do you reread it? I can't remember anything that would make me go back to it
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Jun 9, 2016 21:34
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ulvir posted:ignore contemporary and just gun for war and peace
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Jul 6, 2016 02:01
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Actually the best fantasy book since "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is Karl Ove Knausgård's "A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Every_Purpose_Under_Heaven
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Jul 10, 2016 16:49
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Mr. Squishy posted:Secret Agent is my favourite; it's relatively concise for Conrad, the narrative skwonkiness serves a convincing purpose, still packs an emotional and analytical punch. People say it's relevant today because it's about terrorism but I'm never fully convinced by that. Maybe modern-day terror cells share a lot with lazy anarchists, I really wouldn't know. It's also out of the tropics so you've got more palatable prejudices like against the French or the Russians and it doesn't hang everything on who's white or not. The main prejudice is against democracy, which is imo what makes this book notable. It's radically different from what a western intellectual would write today, if only because western intellectuals today have to pretend to be in favor of democracy
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Jul 10, 2016 16:51
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:Secret Agent is really good, seconding it. It's a long time since I read it, but from what I remember of it, all the socialists/democrats are either a) evil or b) hopeless idealists who can never achieve anything. I felt a strong message that the masses could not be trusted to make reasonable choices, and that people should accept their position in society, or the whole thing would collapse. Similar views have been expressed recently in connection with Brexit/Greece/Trump/Sanders/Corbyn by the right and "left", just couched in liberal terminology Saerdna fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Jul 10, 2016 |
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Jul 10, 2016 18:28
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:It's a penetrating insight to revolutionary impulses and failures. If the system is broken, can it be expected to produce even good revolutionaries? The Professor is the end-point of the destructive fantasy that fuels revolutions. It's not penetrating if you look at actual socialists of his time. He only knew aristocrats who played at being socialists though, and for all I know it might be all kinds of penetrating insights into them. 
Saerdna fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jul 10, 2016 |
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Jul 10, 2016 18:32
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What is the worst book you've read in the last few years? Mine is "World War Z" by Max Brooks. This is just bad, not bad literary fiction, but it was still interesting because of the ways it failed. Some of these ways were normal, like it was incredibly badly written, and every character in it (it consists of interviews with people from around the world) all speak with the same voice and are essentially the same person, and nothing interesting ever happens. But it also failed in a way I had never considered before, so even though reading it was a miserable experience there was still some value in it: Max Brook is unable to properly use poetic language. He doesn't understand the difference between first-person and third-person poetic imagery, and I had never seen anyone fail so awfully in that way before. The main thing he did was use a poetic image that would have been hackneyed and bad in third person, in first person. The one example that stuck with me was a member of the japanese or chinese navy who had been set ashore and was watching the ship (I think it was a sub) disappear out to see, at night, with the captain looking at him, and he thought something like "and the last thing I saw were the lights of Shanghai reflected in the captain's eyes". It's bad in many ways (such as you have to be very close to someone to see lights reflected in their eyes), but this person would never ever ever have said something like that when interviewed about his life. It would never ever have happened. And every character did this, they all said, in first person, the bad lines that the hack writer had thought up, and no one ever stepped in and said no. After this book I started noticing it in other books, but no one has gotten it wrong as much, it's usually just one instance here and there, and not as jarring. So reading bad books can be good, in that you learn more about how literature works by seeing how it can fail. Saerdna fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jul 23, 2016 |
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Jul 23, 2016 22:21
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