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derp posted:constantly impressed by how well people remember highschool I was at my sister’s wedding the other weekend and some woman was there I went to high school with. She started asking me about poo poo from high school and who I was in touch with and I just said “no one? I barely even remember anyone’s name” I didn’t even remember her name. I feel like maybe that’s related to how formative and important high school was to you ThePopeOfFun posted:I’m starting Faulkner’s Light in August. Bought years ago, but couldn’t make it click. His isn’t exactly the easiest prose out there. I’ve read several Faulkners and picked up an old (1940s printing) of this one at a book store a couple of months ago. Added to the pile, of course apophenium posted:Yeah poo poo there's that whole interpretation where each of the parts are dictated by some astrological sign and that various tarot cards factor in to character arcs, i.e Slothrop as the fool, Blicero as death. It's cool as hell. I’m reading Mason & Dixon atm and in that context this is plausible but Pynchon puts so much work into doing his astrology in full detail there i reckon you’d have to be an expert, as it were, to get much of such a reading
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Oct 13, 2021 02:15
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Shibawanko posted:american history is presented as a straight line from columbus to washington to lincoln and the end of slavery, and the first major thing after that is wilson and the versailles treaty the lesson here is when people talk about how bad historical education is in the us, it's garbage everywhere else too Antivehicular posted:which the author regards as a dangerous and bestial tendency. how are you getting that from this passage? it doesn't ascribe bestiality to felix's thoughts, but to the woman herself. it seems also to be very misleading to call appeals to "racial memory" and capability "nostalgia"
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Dec 17, 2021 19:19
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knox posted:How would you characterize an Oprah Winfrey endorsement? the article seemed fine if a little histrionic until the bit where he insists that the joke about a crook riding a crook holding a crook isn't funny because he believes for some reason that the translators didn't get their own joke or realize it was a joke. just bizarre
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Aug 1, 2022 19:03
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Finished Mason & Dixon. I think it's better than Gravity's Rainbow. Got a couple of Ishiguro and State and Revolution by Lenin on the pile next and then I have to dive into the full collection of Encyclopedia Britannica great (western) books i got an antique shop. Lots of foundational stuff i've only read excerpts or none of in these motherfuckers
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Aug 9, 2022 06:20
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fridge corn posted:I am nearing the end of Gravitys Rainbow and I vastly enjoyed Mason & Dixon over it to be clear gravity's rainbow is also one of my absolute favorite books
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Aug 10, 2022 05:30
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thehoodie posted:i don't think it is really productive or even possible to evaluate pynchon's books by which is "better". they are setting out to do different things and accomplish them exceedingly in each case. btw would add against the day to this conversation - recently finished my second readthrough and it is on par with gr and m+d. i was very interested to see that the phrase "against the day" appears in mason& dixon. pg 683 in my copy, when they finish the line and have just turned back east
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Aug 11, 2022 03:16
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Franchescanado posted:There's only one digression in M&D that threw me for a loop, and that's about 3/4 of the way through when the book shifts focus and becomes an erotic thriller with BDSM elements for like two chapters. It's eventually cleared up that some of the kids have snuck off from the main group and are secretly reading chapters of the serial The Ghastly Fop, and the book refocuses. it's even wilder than that: it happens, but then the characters from the book simply enter the main story afterwards
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Aug 11, 2022 03:17
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Idaholy Roller posted:If you read it and you like it it’s a good book imo. You absolutely should not “like” a book
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Dec 8, 2022 00:22
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Magic Hate Ball posted:They're not unrealistic, they're just kind of stupid and Tolstoy's really good at laying out the ways they're stupid, which is why it's so fun to read. The bit where Pierre goes to someone's house and fucks up their obsessive furniture arragement by sitting in the wrong chair is extremely funny. It's like The Sopranos. Anna Karenina is the same way. Everyone is so loving dumb and doesn't realize it. The part where Levin goes for a walk to mope and invents...blood and soil fascism is grim and really funny.
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Dec 13, 2022 05:24
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a.p. dent posted:i liked Anna Karenina because i could picture everything that was happening, like a movie Just watch a movie, saves a lot of time. You could watch several movies instead, even
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Dec 15, 2022 05:16
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Hat Thoughts posted:Once u find something u u can start to trace back the author's inspirations/contemporaries/referneces/personal beefs, etc. and all of those can be interesting jumping off points dpending on what you're seeking out & looking to read. I love Cane so much.
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Jan 3, 2023 20:46
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I like to go in used book stores and just grab a volume of “best short stories iof 19XX” collections. A lot of it will be mediocre but there will always be at least a few bangers and it’s fun to get a sense of what people in 1942 thought was the best contemporary work
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Jan 3, 2023 20:48
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TrixRabbi posted:Manliness and Gayness are in no way mutually exclusive if you live in reality, but the person who made that tweet almost certainly believes in a strictly heterosexual form of masculinity. Of course, that type of fetishization -- buff manly men who fought and hunted and conquered and hosed -- is in itself immensely queer and it's why poo poo like Tom of Finland, leather culture, etc. were so prominent for so long; they were an appropriation of heterosexual conceptions of masculinity into an openly queer form. All these Reject Modernity online misogynists love the Greeks (gay as hell) and poo poo like Moby Dick because of the violence, individualism or cultural signifiers of manliness they read into them (out on the seas trying to kill an animal for revenge) and they almost certainly are subconsciously responding to the queer subtext but refuse to recognize it. This is not to say that all these guys are secretly gay or whatever -- that's a bad assumption to make -- but I think it's a good example of what happens when someone is deeply insecure in their own sexuality and gender identity, often because of cultural pressure from their fathers or childhood peers or just the general culture that enforces a certain concept of the jacked, meat-eating, gun-toting, hyperviolent Man. at least some classical and hellenistic greeks, like plato, considered gay dudes the essence of masculinity because they were untainted by femininity or desire for it plato with bracketed commentary by crompton posted:Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called androgynous [made up of a man and a woman] are lovers of women, adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men. The women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments: the female companions [that is, lesbians] are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they have affection for men and embrace them [the Greek verb implies a sexual sense], and these are the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.
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Jan 6, 2023 06:34
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derp posted:anyone here read a normal book now and then? i find that i just can't. i can't go back. i just got no time or energy for anything that isn't Great anymore. every time i think i'll just read something simple to relax, it only ends up annoying me Yeah I can’t manage to read any kind of more…casually written, so to speak, novels anymore.
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Jan 10, 2023 20:40
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ulvir posted:im reading Present tense machine in the original Norwegian, it’s about a mum who creates a parallel universe by misreading a swedish word. lol explain the joke in ruinous detail, please
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Jan 25, 2023 03:49
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ulvir posted:it’s not a joke, that’s what the book is about. I just find that premise worthy of a chuckle. book’s okay tho No I mean what is the word and how does she misread it
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Jan 26, 2023 01:07
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Oh, it’s actually a common mistake, reading tard instead of trad, I do it all the time Lol Carthag Tuek posted:according to the internet: trädgård (orchard or garden) which she reads as tärdgård (which isnt a word, but can sort of be taken to be a misspelling of something like "corroded farm" or "wasted yard" tho idk if thats what she thinks it means in the book) Thanks
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Jan 30, 2023 17:09
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Segue posted:I think I got Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra from this thread and HOLY poo poo why I have never heard of him boggles my mind. Apparently he's Mexico's most famous writer but I guess he got swallowed by the Marquezes and Llosas of the Latin American boom. You’re reading it in Spanish, then?
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Feb 13, 2023 23:42
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ulvir posted:i’m reading alone in berlin by Hans fallada sorry you're lonely in germany but you forgot to tell us the title of the book
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Mar 8, 2023 05:40
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Gaius Marius posted:The occasional flashes into numismatic events sorry the what now is there just a subplot about coin collecting or am i misunderstanding what you mean DeimosRising fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 16:45
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Lex Neville posted:lacrimal events lol
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Oct 30, 2023 16:59
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Gaius Marius posted:Question for the thread. I'm a pretty young guy forums wise but recently I've started to see more and more people appealing to a sort of mediocrity. Disliking anything using five dollar words, having harder than average prose, being challenging to their base worldview in any way. I must ask. Do you guys also feel this? And if so, do you believe it's becoming more present in society, or at least forum society? Are you talking about the weird argument you had in CineD or something else? I haven’t noticed any kind of general trend toward anti intellectualism but it’s a big forum
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Nov 1, 2023 17:33
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Gaius Marius posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4020963&pagenumber=294&perpage=40&userid=0#post535647702 i think they were just reacting to the idea that it's good to be difficult to understand in and of itself, which no one really presented and i would say doesn't really exist (or barely does). you were arguing that it's good to challenge yourself and to make art that is likely to challenge the reader, because that opens up space for expression and communication impossible without those challenges. It didn't seem like you were ever having the same argument as one another. anyway i think these forums of course have lots of threads where any unorthodox or rigorous or even particularly careful analysis is rejected in favor of a lot of low content posts, but not more than in the past and there are lots of other threads/forums (and in general I'd say cined is one of them) where it's common to see people write seriously and carefully. these days i really only read one or two threads in here and nmd, the basketball threads, cined, and a smattering of other sports threads so I guess I couldn't say very accurately what it's like elsewhere.
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Nov 2, 2023 04:55
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Lobster Henry posted:It’s not as good as ice-nine we're up to ice 19 i think. also there are amorphous ices and a theoretical scenario in which ice becomes a metal. none of them do the vonnegut thing yet though
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Nov 21, 2023 16:48
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Konstantin Lyovin is such a drat Mary Sue it's unbelievable. I like the part where he invents blood and soil nationalism while taking an evening stroll
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Dec 7, 2023 21:04
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Gaius Marius posted:Watching Florencia en el Amazonas right now got me in the mood for some of that Latin American magical realism, what's the real heat? I'm going for some 100 years or love in the time of cholera or is there some b sides that I need to be checking out. love in the time of cholera is only just barely "magical realism," if you're particularly interested in that as a, whatever, movement or style then it's not the place to go. I don't know how much stock I put in it as a subgenre, maybe the connections would be more obvious if I could read the seminal spanish and portuguese novels in the originals but e.g. 100 years and blindness and like water for chocolate aren't very similar books in any way other than "from latin america" and "have a fantastical conceit"
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Dec 14, 2023 23:32
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Heath posted:That isn't funny at all who's laughing? nice obelisk idiot posted:There's 𒀭𒅎𒂂 (Anzû), the gigantic half-lion, half-eagle demon/dragon who was also said to be half-man. It was slain by the god Ninurta in the Epic of Anzû. It also had a snake for a dick for some reason. The Sumerians had a lot going on. three halves??
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Dec 28, 2023 16:41
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Gaius Marius posted:It makes me worry that I'm missing references to the man when I read other works. oh don't worry. you are
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Jan 18, 2024 21:02
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Bilirubin posted:how many copies of the Divine Comedy do you need? I’ve got at least 4 editions/translations of the Iliad and odyssey. I’ve only done the divine comedy once but I get deciding on a difficult to translate classic and diving in but being too much of a wuss to learn the original language
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Jan 19, 2024 06:51
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cryptoclastic posted:I just finished Light in August by Faulkner. Really enjoyed it. It was only my third Faulkner. I first read him last year after finishing everything by Cormac McCarthy. I have Go Down Moses from the library, which I’ll get to in a few months. Then I’ll go for Absalom, Absalom! after that. i have a really awesome old copy of light in august, not a first edition or anything valuable but from the late 30s and in perfect shape.
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Jan 22, 2024 04:41
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derp posted:this happened to me, an uneducated person who only read sci fi until my mid thirties. all it took was a couple good books and then i saw all the trash for what it was and couldn't go back. i have read 1 sci fi series, and a handful of christies in the past six years, other than that its been all Real Literature. from all trash to no trash on a dime basically much earlier for me but yeah i basically cannot make it through any kind of light and breezy pulp anymore, i just don't enjoy it and it isn't fun. which betrays the basis of these claims that other people are "pretending" to like certain books - it's just a failure of theory of mind. Heath posted:I find a lot of people who exclusively read trash fiction stop almost entirely once they do make a sincere jump to reading more challenging stuff some selection bias there. people who are apt to try new things are more likely to enjoy them, and of course you can't make the jump if you don't try at all anyway i'm trying to decide which holiday gift books to read first, i'm down to MIddle Passage, Mumbo Jumbo, or Her Body and Other Parties. any votes?
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Jan 30, 2024 17:56
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Gaius Marius posted:I found Mumbo Jumbo quite interesting and very different from what I'd usually read. One of the more unorthodox ways I've seen to relate the experience of Black Americans and how their culture was both imposed and adapted by them from white men. I hope that it's a physical copy and not digital though, I had the digital copy and it made reading some of the sections that were pictures of letters almost unreadable. physical, i almost never read digital. Volcano posted:Yeah I read a mix of literary fiction and "trashier" genre stuff and I think that's fine. It's like sometimes you want a fancy gourmet meal and sometimes you're just craving a greasy takeaway pizza. But insisting anyone who doesn't exclusively want the pizza is bourgeois is just silly, c'mon. i usually have a book of short stories i'm reading alongside whatever novel, so maybe i'll just do that and mumbo jumbo, they seem very different stylistically so i can use one as a break from the other
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Jan 30, 2024 20:30
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hannah posted:pacing of the plot, frequency of events that occur which meaningfully impact the characters, etc answered over and over but on any given page between 0 and 400 incidents might be conveyed, and you may even notice some or all of them if you're on a roll
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Feb 6, 2024 20:31
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Isnt Stoner like the pre-eminent sad professor fucks his students book that most people joke all American literary fiction is I would say Disgrace, maybe, but I guess it's not american and at least partly a satire of the subgenre
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Feb 7, 2024 06:44
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Tree Goat posted:Anyway hail satan
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Feb 7, 2024 20:59
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Gaius Marius posted:Wolfe's the GOAT i admired the trolling attempt in that thread but botl's wolfe takedown was low effort, you could tell he didn't even read the books. a couple of quotes he picked at random from the first half of the first book, then he extrapolated from some posts that there's a "puzzle" (if he'd finished the books he'd know almost everything is laid out extremely explicitly in the final chapters, and most things well before that), that Severian is only a put upon hero in his own mind, etc. he didn't even pick up on the fact that he was in part reading a catholic allegory, which he fucken loved. he was always playing the game of critiquing posts and posters in the guise of critiquing art. i didn't read a lot of the stuff he posted here that ended up getting him banned but in CineD he was very often clearly writing about movies he hadn't seen.
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Feb 9, 2024 15:43
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derp posted:as far as genre goes gene wolfe is good imo, though i havent read him since i got into lit, so i probably wouldnt enjoy him much now, but his book of the new sun was close enough to being an actual good book that it made me notice how trash most sci fi and fantasy actually was, and i had to start looking around for other stuff to read - then i found lit, the end. try reading peace and see how you feel
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Feb 9, 2024 18:39
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Bilirubin posted:Read Some Real Literature: Abridged Edition tbf only some of those are abridged, a lot are just shorter works. Blurred posted:Last year I had the urge to get back into reading 'real literature' after several years of reading almost exclusively non-fiction books. I have two young children which makes it difficult to find any consistent, quiet reading time, which really discouraged me from getting stuck into any long, dense novels. So I decided to buy the Penguin Little Black Classics box-set, because each of the books are only ~50 pages long, and I thought it would be a great chance to expose myself to authors I've never read before without needing to invest too much of my (rare) free-time. What did you think of the book of Tang dynasty poetry? I assume the four poets are Li Bo, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and...maybe Yishan?
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Feb 11, 2024 18:32
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Blurred posted:It was only three poets, and yeah it's the first three you mentioned. I remember enjoying it, but it's difficult for me to cast any meaningful judgement it because I don't really have any frame of reference to measure it against - this was my first time reading Chinese poetry, ancient or modern. There's a good mix of styles in it - some poems are more lyrical, others are more prose-like; some are impressionistic sketches of nature, others are more narrative-driven, etc. - but I remember finding the content and imagery of the poems to be very stereotyped. Everything was autumn breezes, cherry blossoms and flowing streams. Maybe that's just a function of the genre at the time, though - like I said, it's difficult for me to judge. A lot of the more narrative-driven poems seemed to be about men leaving their families to go to war for some reason, but I'm not sure if that's because it was a typical subject for poets at the time, or if it's just an editorial decision made by the collators. The poem written by Li Bo from the perspective of a soldier to his children sticks in my head for being particularly touching. Li Bo and Du Fu lived during the An Lushan rebellion, a war so devastating that China's population dropped to 1/3 its pre war level from a combination of war deaths, starvation, and mass migration of refugees out of the area controlled by the Tang dynasty. It was on their minds a lot
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Feb 12, 2024 17:12
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Heath posted:Very little of his fiction (at least what I've read) is fascist or even especially political -- the major exception being Runaway Horses since the protagonist is a student who is an aspiring right-wing revolutionary, and even then the narrative is about him as a person and not a political essay. The other main character (and the one around whom the tetralogy comes to focus) is Honda, who is really more like a Westernized liberal, and who admires Isao's youth and doomed passion and romance, and sees in him that same ineffable ethereal beauty that he sees in the ephemeral cherry blossom or the spring snow that is beautiful but destined to melt, the same thing that attracted him to Kioyaki. The politics of Isao and his revolutionary aspirations are more romantic than prescriptive -- his efforts are stifled, and his singular anti-capitalist act of violence at the end of the novel is a dramatic, but ultimately petty, victory. i don't think you can (or perhaps should) separate obsessions with youth, romantic adventure, a lost golden age/culture, and heroic struggle from the politics of fascism, especially not in the context of post war japan.
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Mar 21, 2024 15:40
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