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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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scratchmonkey
Final Finasty
Joined: 21 Mar 2007
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 Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 6:49 pm |
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I'm in the mood for a Lolita discussion. I think we've had this before, screw it though, full steam ahead. Anybody else read it?
Highlights of when I was reading it: I was reading it at work and the co-worker who thinks that he's everybody's intellectual superior* came over to comment on it. He said that he didn't like it, that Humbert was "a dork" and that Lolita "just needed to grow up".
I've just been talking about it with dhex and he shared with me the information that in one of his wife's lit classes, there were female students who were sympathetic with Humbert. Not that they felt some sympathy for Humbert, that they identified and felt he was a sympathetic character. Which is pretty boggling/scary, although on one hand I understand it because Nabokov is such a good writer and Humbert is so sincere about his perceived right to his manipulations that it becomes hard to say "this man is sick". I'd compare it to In Cold Blood in terms of entering the mind of a sociopath and the power associated with such.
* - We called him CBG behind his back because he had all the physical characteristics and most of the vocal ones of Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. We only found out months after that he'd left the company that his previous job was in fact running a comic book store. |
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 2:04 pm |
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chriservin22
Joined: 29 May 2007
Location: Portland, OR
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| Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 4:44 pm |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
| chrisservin22 wrote: |
| If you would be so kind as to quantify "best," I would be eternally grateful. In my (admittedly very limited) reading of Heidegger... it's, like, his whole definition of thinking is Husserl's "Back to things Themselves," school of phenomenology expanded upon, only confusing and severely defined and above my level of comprehension. |
I admire Heidegger for taking Husserl's general philosophical approach and turning it inward – with specific attention to language as its conductor – and asking higher level questions that refresh my own approach to asking questions.
On the most formal level, I admire the way in which Heidegger performs philosophy as a creative act that has language as philosophy's primary influence – and that has language as central to comprehending both what is thought AND the act of thinking itself. Also, for having the lucidity to realize the difficulty (if not the impossibility) underlying any attempt to deal with HOW we think about something apart from WHAT thing we're thinking about.
[...]
I'm mainly interested in what could proceed from his philosophical work as an alternative from Derridean deconstruction. I'm no longer wholly against deconstruction, as I once was, and I see the value in what it has (and can) perform – but it feels insufficient for its own purposes. I'm not sure I can clarify that last statement further just yet, though. |
I found your paragraph-long synopsis on Heidegger very helpful -- mostly in defining his view of philosophy as a creative pursuit. This is my problem: I find the sort of pseudoscientific parsing of language encouraged by Heideggar's writing and teaching to be, at the very least, unrewarding, and I blame him for inspiring the post-structuralist indoctrination I was subjected to during my brief graduate student career. I dunno -- Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, I get, because I think they know how to communicate their ideas with some degree of literary grace and clarity, whereas I think most continental philosophy in the 20th century was written primarily for other philosophers.
In other words, fuck the Frankfurt School and all that bullshit. Just let me read Edmund Wilson or something. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 5:27 pm |
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| Vehicular Manslaughter wrote: |
| II've just been talking about it with dhex and he shared with me the information that in one of his wife's lit classes, there were female students who were sympathetic with Humbert. Not that they felt some sympathy for Humbert, that they identified and felt he was a sympathetic character. Which is pretty boggling/scary, although on one hand I understand it because Nabokov is such a good writer and Humbert is so sincere about his perceived right to his manipulations that it becomes hard to say "this man is sick". I'd compare it to In Cold Blood in terms of entering the mind of a sociopath and the power associated with such. |
Oh yeah I mean Humbert Humbert is a charming hilarious guy: how could you not like him at least on a superficial level. It's not so much that it's hard to say he's sick: after all, he himself insists repeatedly that he's a monster that the reader/"jury" should be reviled by. His very pseudonym has been chosen by him because it sounds appropriate for some kind of hideous goblin. He defuses our anger in advance by admitting he deserves it (while simultaneously spinning his stories to make himself sound not so bad). |
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chriservin22
Joined: 29 May 2007
Location: Portland, OR
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| Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 6:22 pm |
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Weirdly, considering this is like my favorite thread on all the internet, I only remember to check in once every couple weeks or so. So there's been a lot of literature-related activity on my end.
Along with my friend Carolyne, I started a book club; we're going though the lists of Pulitzer and Man Booker winners at the moment. We just wrapped up "Midnight's Children," which was much better than I assumed it would be. Has anyone else read Salman Rushdie here? I was under the impression that he was an Indian clone of Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the longest time. Not so!
"All the Kings Men," is in the queue-- the timing seems appropriate, election season and all -- and was next on the agenda before David Foster Wallace hung himself.
Wallace's death has left me crestfallen. If Richard Ford (completely different type of writer, but a personal favorite) died tomorrow, at least he left behind the three Frank Bascombe novels as perfect representations of his talents. I don't feel like DFW has left us anything like that. Yet he was unquestionably a narcissistic genius who hated his narcissism and cynicism, and his struggle to reconcile the Pynchon-esque love of satire, wordplay, and Byzantine structure with the completely and touchingly empathetic portrayal of his central characters (wether they be fictional or only quasi-ficitonal, in the case of his Rolling Stone profile of John McCain) made him unlike any other "postmodern" writer I can think of.
Speaking of that McCain article, DFW was in the best tradition of narrative journalism. I rank him behind Norman Mailer, neck-and-neck with Joan Didion, and far ahead of overrated cultural phenomenon Hunter S. Thompson. Who was far and away a better writer, thinker, and person than Tom Wolfe,
Finally, Lolita is a remarkable book, most likely the best one Nabakov ever wrote, but once Humbert Humbert starts fantasizing about kidnapping another girl he sees during a parent-teacher conference near the end of the book, because - hey - his Lolita will inevitably grow out of her "Lolita" phase before long, all of his flowery justifications for his actions are exposed -- well, I found that really creepy.
Granted, I haven't read the book since I was in high school, before I even knew who Nabakov was. I should pick it up again. |
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 9:43 pm |
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Have you read Pale Fire or Ada or Ardor?
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rabite gets whacked!
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 9:58 pm |
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| chriservin22 wrote: |
Along with my friend Carolyne, I started a book club; we're going though the lists of Pulitzer and Man Booker winners at the moment. We just wrapped up "Midnight's Children," which was much better than I assumed it would be. Has anyone else read Salman Rushdie here? I was under the impression that he was an Indian clone of Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the longest time. Not so! |
Good pick with the Bookers, but I'd take Nobel Lit. or PEN/Faulkner over Pulitzers; those have consistently disappointed me.
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chriservin22
Joined: 29 May 2007
Location: Portland, OR
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| Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 10:11 pm |
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| Dracko wrote: |
| Have you read Pale Fire or Ada or Ardor? |
I have read Pale Fire and I have attempted to read Ada. I do love Pale Fire, and some day I hope to return to the other unfinished Nabokov novels lying around here -- Although I enjoyed Pnin, Invitation to a Beheading, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, stuff came up and I never got around to finishing them.
Pale Fire is just more antiseptic than Lolita -- Nabokov, for all his literary pyrotechnics, cares exclusively about the aesthetic beauty of his sentences -- he spends little of his time giving one a reason to believe, say, Charles Kinbote is more than a very strange fellow - a collection of neurosis instead of a real person; there is something inherently soulless in Nabokov's work, except for Lolita, and Speak, Memory.
And maybe The Original of Laura? We'll find out, soon enough. |
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chriservin22
Joined: 29 May 2007
Location: Portland, OR
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| Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 10:21 pm |
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| rabite gets whacked! wrote: |
| chriservin22 wrote: |
Along with my friend Carolyne, I started a book club; we're going though the lists of Pulitzer and Man Booker winners at the moment. We just wrapped up "Midnight's Children," which was much better than I assumed it would be. Has anyone else read Salman Rushdie here? I was under the impression that he was an Indian clone of Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the longest time. Not so! |
Good pick with the Bookers, but I'd take Nobel Lit. or PEN/Faulkner over Pulitzers; those have consistently disappointed me. |
Well, our first pick was Kenzaburo Oe's "A Personal Matter" which neither of us responded to. Having read more of Oe's oeuvre since then, I do understand why he received a Nobel -- "The Silent Cry" is an absolute masterpiece -- but since the Nobel is not given to a single book but rather to a body of work, we figured it would be easier to have everything already mapped out for us.
We also read the 1996 (?) Pulitzer winner, "Martin Dressler: American Dreamer," by Steve Milhausen. Our conclusion? 1996 must not have been a great year in American lit.
Still, there are members of the club who have yet to read anything by Richard Ford or Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, and I feel obligated to rectify that.
Also, I'll keep the PEN/Faulkner in mind for future book ideas. |
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crispyambulance
Joined: 09 Dec 2007
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| Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 11:00 pm |
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I somehow ended up reading Lolita (for the second time), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses at the same time.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I finished first, and, while at times the prose was a bit plain, it was a mostly enjoyable and easy read. It seems to me one of the most tactful pieces to discuss any sort of religion; nowadays I'm surrounded by poseurs who tell me 'Yeah, man, christianity is suffocating the world!' (not kidding) and pseudo-intellectual "entertainment" like The Golden Compass people drag me to see. The aesthetic philosophy at the end was at least interesting, and the whole 'oh my god what if I can't measure up to my literary forebearers' aspect was mildly heartwarming because I'm an angsty obsessive youth myself.
Lolita is pretty much covered by Broco so I won't be redundan/display my intellectual ineptitude just yet. I have to write a thematically analytical essay for it, and I think I can basically boss it. Least hopefully.
Ulysses I'm on page two hundred and some of the seven hundred in my edition, and I find it perversely entertaining despite my inability to understand why. It's been a hard read, though; I can't get through much more than about thirty pages in a sitting when I actually have time to just sit down with it. What's the concensus on this one? |
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Felix
unofficial repository
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: vancouver
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 12:57 am |
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| chriservin22 wrote: |
| there is something inherently soulless in Nabokov's work, except for Lolita, and Speak, Memory. |
Only his English-language work. Try Mary or Glory. |
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 2:19 am |
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| chriservin22 wrote: |
| there is something inherently soulless in Nabokov's work, except for Lolita, and Speak, Memory. |
I...
Jesus...
What the fuck?
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 2:19 am |
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| crispyambulance wrote: |
| Ulysses I'm on page two hundred and some of the seven hundred in my edition, and I find it perversely entertaining despite my inability to understand why. It's been a hard read, though; I can't get through much more than about thirty pages in a sitting when I actually have time to just sit down with it. What's the concensus on this one? |
My consensus is that it is a fucking awesome book that nobody reads, and it is hilarious, and really sad at certain parts, but you can kinda miss a lot of that.
Also, just wait till Circe (the play). God that section is spectacular. |
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Felix
unofficial repository
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: vancouver
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 2:28 am |
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| Dracko wrote: |
| chriservin22 wrote: |
| there is something inherently soulless in Nabokov's work, except for Lolita, and Speak, Memory. |
I...
Jesus...
What the fuck? |
It's easy to confuse a love of language with too much distance from one's characters. I don't think it'd be an exaggeration to say that it's sometimes hard to account for his loving all humanity, in the abstract, considerably more than he's willing to love any one character - with, of course, a few notable exceptions. |
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Vikram Ray
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 2:42 am |
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| boojiboy7 wrote: |
My consensus is that it is a fucking awesome book that nobody reads, and it is hilarious, and really sad at certain parts, but you can kinda miss a lot of that. |
I like this description. And Circe is indeed spectacular. It is pretty much The novel, and together with Finnegans Wake makes James Joyce pretty much The literary figure this side of Shakespeare. At least in terms of the most amount of books you'll find in their sections of the (any) library. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 4:59 am |
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| Dracko wrote: |
| chriservin22 wrote: |
| there is something inherently soulless in Nabokov's work, except for Lolita, and Speak, Memory. |
I...
Jesus...
What the fuck? |
I actually agree with the general thrust of this criticism. Along with his total lack of interest in pacing, it's basically the reason I've lost much of my enthusiasm for Nabokov over the years. Although soulless is not the right word: it's just a lack of warmth, without a thematic framework that gives meaning to coldness (as in, say, J.M. Coetzee or Kafka). Pale Fire and Pnin, among others, I think are somewhat dismal novels for this reason. Unattractive, neurotic men, presented with dispassionate humor. Without a poignant undercurrent, Nabokov's meticulous prose and intricate patterns are little more than a technical exercise.
Strangely, Lolita is one of his novels which suffers least from this problem, yes, despite having a certified sociopath for a narrator. |
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shnozlak
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: pushing crates in the sewer level
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falsedan
Joined: 13 Dec 2006
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 9:29 am |
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shnoz, the pdf goes all the way to 10
re-reading Gödel, Escher, Bach because I'm felling all mathsy after my holiday
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 3:37 pm |
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| Broco wrote: |
| Dracko wrote: |
| chriservin22 wrote: |
| there is something inherently soulless in Nabokov's work, except for Lolita, and Speak, Memory. |
I...
Jesus...
What the fuck? |
I actually agree with the general thrust of this criticism. Along with his total lack of interest in pacing, it's basically the reason I've lost much of my enthusiasm for Nabokov over the years. Although soulless is not the right word: it's just a lack of warmth, without a thematic framework that gives meaning to coldness (as in, say, J.M. Coetzee or Kafka). Pale Fire and Pnin, among others, I think are somewhat dismal novels for this reason. Unattractive, neurotic men, presented with dispassionate humor. Without a poignant undercurrent, Nabokov's meticulous prose and intricate patterns are little more than a technical exercise.
Strangely, Lolita is one of his novels which suffers least from this problem, yes, despite having a certified sociopath for a narrator. |
So he writes because he enjoys writing. His work is playful and humane. I'm not seeing where the problem lies. Not every character in a work of fiction needs to be one a reader can emphasise or even relate to.
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 4:05 pm |
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| Quote: |
| And Circe is indeed spectacular. |
Circe and Oxen are pretty much the birthplaces of postmodernism, I generally think, though the rest of the book has its moments in that regard.
Really, it is the only book anyone "needs" to read. Pretty much most of the 20th century in English is right there, as well as a ton of understanding of the past.
Someday I will get to Finnegan's Wake. Every time I start it, though, I end up reading Ulysses again. |
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chriservin22
Joined: 29 May 2007
Location: Portland, OR
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 6:54 pm |
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| Broco wrote: |
| Dracko wrote: |
| chriservin22 wrote: |
| there is something inherently soulless in Nabokov's work, except for Lolita, and Speak, Memory. |
I...
Jesus...
What the fuck? |
I actually agree with the general thrust of this criticism. Along with his total lack of interest in pacing, it's basically the reason I've lost much of my enthusiasm for Nabokov over the years. Although soulless is not the right word: it's just a lack of warmth, without a thematic framework that gives meaning to coldness (as in, say, J.M. Coetzee or Kafka). Pale Fire and Pnin, among others, I think are somewhat dismal novels for this reason. Unattractive, neurotic men, presented with dispassionate humor. Without a poignant undercurrent, Nabokov's meticulous prose and intricate patterns are little more than a technical exercise.
Strangely, Lolita is one of his novels which suffers least from this problem, yes, despite having a certified sociopath for a narrator. |
Yeah, soulless wasn't the right word to use. But... he's a genius at noticing things and describing them in that Nabokovian way, but there's noticing (cf Henry James) and then there's noticing as a visual fetishist.
This is from some half-remembered college lecture I got in 20th century lit, but I remember being told this telling story about Nabokov: While he was lecturing at Cornell on Russian literature, he spent an entire class period on Anna Karennena's final moments at that train platform. Where was everyone standing? What did the train look like? How fast was it moving? He drew a diagram on the chalkboard.
Nothing about what Anna was thinking about, in those final moments before suicide.
That's just the way he viewed art -- it doesn't make him a lesser artist at all, and I don't begrudge his choices at all. They aren't quite for me all the time, is all. |
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Vikram Ray
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 7:08 pm |
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| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| Someday I will get to Finnegan's Wake. Every time I start it, though, I end up reading Ulysses again. |
I think the best way to read it is to just open it up to random pages and read it out loud and marvel at the language, and to have Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake handy. To read that thing linearly is nearly impossible, I think, without plenty of support and maybe a graduate seminar reading with you or something, and possibly no life to speak of. And besides, the end just goes back to the beginning, so reading it from front to back is a little beside the point. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 7:51 pm |
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| chriservin22 wrote: |
| Broco wrote: |
| Dracko wrote: |
| chriservin22 wrote: |
| there is something inherently soulless in Nabokov's work, except for Lolita, and Speak, Memory. |
I...
Jesus...
What the fuck? |
I actually agree with the general thrust of this criticism. Along with his total lack of interest in pacing, it's basically the reason I've lost much of my enthusiasm for Nabokov over the years. Although soulless is not the right word: it's just a lack of warmth, without a thematic framework that gives meaning to coldness (as in, say, J.M. Coetzee or Kafka). Pale Fire and Pnin, among others, I think are somewhat dismal novels for this reason. Unattractive, neurotic men, presented with dispassionate humor. Without a poignant undercurrent, Nabokov's meticulous prose and intricate patterns are little more than a technical exercise.
Strangely, Lolita is one of his novels which suffers least from this problem, yes, despite having a certified sociopath for a narrator. |
Yeah, soulless wasn't the right word to use. But... he's a genius at noticing things and describing them in that Nabokovian way, but there's noticing (cf Henry James) and then there's noticing as a visual fetishist.
This is from some half-remembered college lecture I got in 20th century lit, but I remember being told this telling story about Nabokov: While he was lecturing at Cornell on Russian literature, he spent an entire class period on Anna Karennena's final moments at that train platform. Where was everyone standing? What did the train look like? How fast was it moving? He drew a diagram on the chalkboard.
Nothing about what Anna was thinking about, in those final moments before suicide.
That's just the way he viewed art -- it doesn't make him a lesser artist at all, and I don't begrudge his choices at all. They aren't quite for me all the time, is all. |
Yeah. Speaking of Nabokov and suicides, the suicide near the end of Ada falls completely flat, even though (if we believe Boyd anyway) it's supposed to be the centerpiece of the novel. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 8:01 pm |
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| Vikram Ray wrote: |
| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| Someday I will get to Finnegan's Wake. Every time I start it, though, I end up reading Ulysses again. |
I think the best way to read it is to just open it up to random pages and read it out loud and marvel at the language, and to have Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake handy. To read that thing linearly is nearly impossible, I think, without plenty of support and maybe a graduate seminar reading with you or something, and possibly no life to speak of. And besides, the end just goes back to the beginning, so reading it from front to back is a little beside the point. |
There was a graduate seminar at OSU while I was there on the Wake, and I knew the prof and he would've fudged me in if I had the time, but they met twice a week, once in class for serious discussion, then once at a bar to get trashed and read it aloud. So yeah. |
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Vikram Ray
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 8:49 pm |
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| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| There was a graduate seminar at OSU while I was there on the Wake, and I knew the prof and he would've fudged me in if I had the time, but they met twice a week, once in class for serious discussion, then once at a bar to get trashed and read it aloud. So yeah. |
That is excellent.
I have to wonder, though, since you're a Joyce fan (which would seemingly assume along with it that you don't mind putting in a little extra work) how you can't manage to get past the endnotes in Infinite Jest, and I'd implore you to give it another shot as I always considered DFW to be as close as our time would come to having its own James Joyce.
edit: just noticed your user title. heh. sry. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 9:08 pm |
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No need for a "sry" dude. I just thought it was really funny.
I guess the big difference between Foster and Joyce for me is that Joyce just charges forward ever faster, not demanding I turn to anywhere other than the book. Constantly being dragged out of the text in the way Infinite Jest does drives me nuts. The whole footnote/endnote thing was because at least with footnotes I don't feel like I am physically removing myself from the text at hand.
Are you a Pynchon guy at all? I think he is a lot closer to (Ulysses)Joyce for me than anyone else, given how he draws on a massive body of historical knowledge but just relies on his reader to put it in there. And the love of terrible jokes helps with the mental comparison as well.
I don't really think any time will ever have anything that comes close to Joyce again, for good and bad. |
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 11:10 pm |
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| Broco wrote: |
| Yeah. Speaking of Nabokov and suicides, the suicide near the end of Ada falls completely flat, even though (if we believe Boyd anyway) it's supposed to be the centerpiece of the novel. |
I don't see how it does, but I'd sooner intellectualise a character's actions and take them holistically than expect to be hit with an emotional hammer.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 11:13 pm |
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| Dracko wrote: |
| Broco wrote: |
| Yeah. Speaking of Nabokov and suicides, the suicide near the end of Ada falls completely flat, even though (if we believe Boyd anyway) it's supposed to be the centerpiece of the novel. |
I don't see how it does, but I'd sooner intellectualise a character's actions and take them holistically than expect to be hit with an emotional hammer. |
This surprises: no one
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Let's Play, starring me. |
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 11:18 pm |
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Emotional dickplay is over-rated anyway.
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Vikram Ray
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 11:35 pm |
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| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| Are you a Pynchon guy at all? I think he is a lot closer to (Ulysses)Joyce for me than anyone else, given how he draws on a massive body of historical knowledge but just relies on his reader to put it in there. And the love of terrible jokes helps with the mental comparison as well. |
I read the first 150 or so pages of Gravity's Rainbow (I think up until around where Slothrop starts eating the shit out of the asshole of some dominatrix), then had to take it back to the library, and I confess that a whole lot of it went over my head. But what DFW and Joyce have, I think, that Pynchon does not (quite) have is an incredible empathy for people, humans in general--a kind of sentimentality towards everyday human shit (no pun intended) that makes it somehow comforting to read, while at the same time also being difficult and erudite and postmodern and a mental workout yet eminently readable and funny and unbearably sad all at once. Pynchon just seems so cold and clinical in comparison. |
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Felix
unofficial repository
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: vancouver
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| Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 11:57 pm |
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| Broco wrote: |
| Yeah. Speaking of Nabokov and suicides, the suicide near the end of Ada falls completely flat, even though (if we believe Boyd anyway) it's supposed to be the centerpiece of the novel. |
Good lord, I don't even remember it. Beyond the excellent first couple hundred of pages where Nabokov finally gave childhood love the due he always seemed to want to, Ada seemed to me like (another) homage to hope-he-knew-what. Granted that I enjoyed the vast majority of it.. if memory serves. |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 2:23 am |
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| Vikram Ray wrote: |
| I read the first 150 or so pages of Gravity's Rainbow (I think up until around where Slothrop starts eating the shit out of the asshole of some dominatrix), then had to take it back to the library, and I confess that a whole lot of it went over my head. But what DFW and Joyce have, I think, that Pynchon does not (quite) have is an incredible empathy for people, humans in general--a kind of sentimentality towards everyday human shit (no pun intended) that makes it somehow comforting to read, while at the same time also being difficult and erudite and postmodern and a mental workout yet eminently readable and funny and unbearably sad all at once. Pynchon just seems so cold and clinical in comparison. |
I'd actually tell you to read GR. He seems cold and clinical towards Slothrop to start, but as the novel goes on, he starts feeling for Slothrop. One of the main sorta ideas in GR is that you have a main character who slowly comes to realize how little control over his own life he has ever had, and while Pynchon laughs at this, he also does a really good job of expressing the terror of those moments, the terror of paranoia not just being paranoia, but maybe being something more than that. Of course, then Pynchon likes to expand that out, and nobody has any control over the War at all, and there are some characters in the novel that give such a human aspect to that lack of control (Enzian) that it's hard not to find sympathy.
The Roger Mexico/Jessica Swanlake (really, nobody does names quite like TRP) plot has a lot of this, as well as my favorite closing for a chapter ever ("They are in love. Fuck the war.").
Actually the shit eating scene you mention (probably the most disgusting thing in the book) isn't Slothrop, but Colonel Pudding, and it too is loaded with the kind of sympathetic symbolism that permeates Pynchon. Earlier on the book, when Pudding is introduced as head of the White Visitation, the weird lab where all sorts of strange research goes on in England, it is revealed that what he is is an old WWI colonel who was commended becasue only 60 percent (I think that is the number, might be higher) of his troops died in the war. There is a brief mention of how he saw them dying in the trenches, eating and breathing mud and filth, pure degredation. The chambers Pudding goes through that culminate in the eating of shit our of the asshole of the dom (shit, I can't think of her name) is a tool set up by Pointsman to control Pudding (and thus the agency). Pudding feels he deserves to be degraded, deserves to be punished for all those men dying. Pointsman only knows about this because Pirate Prentice (as revealed right away in the book) can see people's dreams. Prentice saw Pudding's nightmares (as I recall, it has been a bit) and Pointsman uses this.
Basically, Pynchon is (in his weird way) exploring the shame of WWI, and exploring how even such shame is exploited by the people behind WWII. Pynchon has the sentimentality for the people in his books, just in weird ways. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 5:28 am |
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| Felix wrote: |
| Broco wrote: |
| Yeah. Speaking of Nabokov and suicides, the suicide near the end of Ada falls completely flat, even though (if we believe Boyd anyway) it's supposed to be the centerpiece of the novel. |
Good lord, I don't even remember it. Beyond the excellent first couple hundred of pages where Nabokov finally gave childhood love the due he always seemed to want to, Ada seemed to me like (another) homage to hope-he-knew-what. Granted that I enjoyed the vast majority of it.. if memory serves. |
Yeah, I enjoy Ada as well, regardless of the largely correct consensus that it's a self-indulgent mess. That one scene with the honey and the wasp... perhaps Nabokov's most erotically charged. |
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 2:32 am |
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http://fleursdumal.org/ - Collection of Baudelaire's poetry
http://realitystudio.org/ - William S. Burroughs resource
http://bookkake.com/ - Now this is very interesting, and I'm compelled to order their set of books in spite of the price because it's the sort of initiative I approve of
Good books there, too.
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2008 4:46 am |
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Enjoy Banned Book Week with a copy of Ulysses and an Ambushed Trifle.
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somes
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
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| Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2008 10:57 pm |
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| has anyone read Snakes and Earrings? |
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kzkb1
Joined: 29 Apr 2007
Location: a city where you don't come to find love, you come to find the truth
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| Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2008 11:52 pm |
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This is an excellent book. |
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shrugtheironteacup
man of tomorrow
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Location: a meat
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| Posted: Sun Oct 05, 2008 5:05 am |
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I read Proust all summer with frequent breaks for other things.
Maybe I'll post actual content re: this some time.
I re-read The Book of the New Sun during my 3.5 days on the ferry between Skagway and Bellingham.
I found myself thinking that Marathon echoes it uncomfortably.
It might be time to seek therapy.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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Winona Ghost Ryder
lives in a monochromatic world
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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