[wpham]

[rabite gets whacked!]

The Human Stain is quite nice!

But mostly I just posted cause I noticed your sig is from Sim Tower and therefore [you are likely] categorically awesome. good on ya.
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[sync-swim]

[CubaLibre]

ELEVATOR MANAGEMENT!
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Let's Play, starring me.

[CubaLibre]

Wait, THAT'S what I'm waiting for?

All I'm reading for now really is to see how many more people Achilles can kill. Even though I hate his handling of Achilles.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[shrugtheironteacup]

[wpham]

[CubaLibre]

Any other Streets of SimCity fans? No?

About 3/4 through Olympos now and it's becoming more hilarious by the moment. For my money, I liked the twist on Sleeping Beauty (fuck her to wake her up!) to be particuarly and deliciously fanctiony.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[shrugtheironteacup]

[CubaLibre]

[shrugtheironteacup]

I think I just came.
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[wpham]

I just finished Haruki Murakami's After Dark in one sitting. Compared to Kafka on the Shore, it's a refreshing read, and evokes the same kind of resonance that his better short stories have for me (i.e., 100% Perfect Girl, Year of Spaghetti, Second Bakery Attack).
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last.fm

[PianoMap]

Oh man I am so excited for that. Forgot that it came out yesterday. Going to the bookstore tomorrow to get it.

...I think this is the first book I have ever been truly anticipating the release of.
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o-/< --- o-\< --- o-|-| --- o^-<

[parkbench]

Holy crap did not realize Murakami had a new book. I enjoy about 85-90% of his stuff (even the more mediocre ones), so I'll probably like this.

I really wanted to like Kafka on the Shore. The emotional side of me did. The rational side of me didn't. The emotional side of me loved reading Murakami's wonderful words. The rational side of me kept saying, "what the fuck is going on."
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metafilter vs. youtube comments

[skonrad]

I liked Kafka on the Shore a bit, actually. Its strength over some of his other pieces was that it took us to semi-familiar places (the forest as the afterlife) but didn't feel the need to justify the absurdities and contrivances. I get more out of those sorts of things when they're less explained. On the other hand, Kafka's story took a long time to ferment, and in the end Nakata's story struck me as being the more compelling part of the book, even though it arguably wasn't the intention.

I also had no idea he had a new book - I'm excited!
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[wpham]

[parkbench]

No, the absurdity in the Second Bakery Attack is better left unexplained. Kafka needs explanation. You don't go on that long about rocks and pushing them and cats without saying a thing. I don't even care if it's a threadbare explanation. I just want to know. Murakami insists that it's layered and actually has a lot of meaning. Okay, then WHAT IS IT?
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metafilter vs. youtube comments

[Broco]

parkbench, at first I thought you were talking about actual Kafka there (as opposed to Kafka). The same thing is often said about his works.

There are literally thousands of books devoted to interpreting Kafka's pure symbols as allegories for God, Marxism, Judaism, sexuality, parent-child relations, whatever. They are all plausible but finally pretty unsatisfying. One recent critical essay I read argued that Kafka's symbols were designed intentionally to be fraught with strong yet undetermined meaning, goading the reader into endlessly, fruitlessly trying to interpret them -- much as the characters in the stories obsess over their own futile quests.

Kafka's first great story, The Judgement, is probably the worst in this regard. As I recall there even exists a book entitled Thirty Interpretations of Kafka's The Judgement. I myself tend to take most of Kafka's books more or less at face value, but when I first read that story I felt compelled to spend several hours rereading it over and over to concoct an elaborate explanation for it. It is just too perfectly tight and self-consistent and carries too many implications and undertones for it not to have some ultimate hidden meaning -- and yet you can't find it. I don't remember what I came up with anymore, except that it involved multiple layers of deceit and the claim that one character was an oblique renaming of the narrator (because of his shame, he externalized a part of himself). All this for a 10-page short story.

Of course, if Kafka had ever gone out and provided an "official" interpretation of anything, that would very much have cheapened his work.

[shrugtheironteacup]

I've decided that birds disrespecting Dickens are relevant to this thread.





Meanwhile I've been reading a Clark Ashton Smith collection, because trash from the early thirties is my kind of trash. It's great because he verbs words like crazy in even his best stories.

I guess he did whatever he damned well wanted in his little cabin.
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[Broco]

Yeah Dickens kind of deserves a little birdy disrespect though.



"You would need to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell." -- Oscar Wilde

(Ohhhh burn.)

[CubaLibre]

Plato and Nietzsche are the best we-ain't-tellin' philosophers of all time. They also happen to be my favorite philosophers. There's a lot to be said for willful deception and the creation of context rather than the logical advance of content.

So I'm reading Snow Crash - for the first time. I know, right? Yeah, it's exactly as good as everyone always says it is.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Broco]

I also like Kierkegaard's way of creating multiple characters and ascribing different points of view to them. (Although, er, admittedly I haven't read him. But I like it in principle.)

As for things more recently written, J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (which is halfway between a novel and a work of philosophy) also makes very effective use of the multiple character technique. What's particular about that one is that Elizabeth, as brilliant as she is, seems to be going a little crazy in her old age and her opinions are clearly extreme. So there is an unusually large distance between the opinions expressed and the author. The overall effect of the book is very unsettling -- like truth always has elements of falsity and falsity elements of truth, and they almost seem to blend together in all the ambiguity and complexity after a while.

I'm inclined to say methods like this are the only way to honestly philosophize, once you've accepted that philosophy is built on mud and it's mud all the way down.

[boojiboy7]

[shrugtheironteacup]

[CubaLibre]

[Dracko]

The Neuromancer game was better than the book.
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[Adilegian]

I've undertaken to read all those books on my shelves that have a thin dark scar along the edge: the compressed dogear that marks the last time I read the book with intention to finish.

I've made good on one of the objects. I finished reading Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which is dear to me for many reasons. I had quit reading the book a year ago because it had accidentally soaked water on my windowsill during a heavy rain, and flipping through the pages smelled like a mildewed fart.

Now I'm reading Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough. I've made headway through about 233 pages over the past several days, and I'm currently holding ground at page 525. My edition--the abridged version, if you can believe it--runs 827 pages long. Frazer could have used a better editor; much of his evidence could have been presented more economically, and several paragraphs seem like a repetition of the same stock sentence.

"Again, the _(tribe / village / province)_ of _(nation)_ also practice _(magical propitiation / taboo / sorcery)_, as they _(description of ritual)_."

Many of the examples are interesting for their novelty, but, still, it makes me want to skim longer paragraphs and look for the guy's main point. Part of this might be due to the fact that I'm not taking him seriously as an anthropologist, owing to the book's dated theses. He's surely writing to convince contemporaries of the rectitude of his ideas, which creates his burden for evidence. Still, given that he's mainly interesting now as a figure in the development of Western thought--not to mention a figure relevant to much early 20th century literature--his argumentative form gets tiresome.

Frazer's main weakness is his flattery toward Europe generally and England in particular. I'm aware that his contemporaries wouldn't have perceived it as a weakness, though, since that kind of ethnocentrism was more easily adopted before its extreme application during World War II. It was an assumption without real consequences. Still, Jesus Christ, it's convenient how the man can flatter ancient European superstitions as the work of "scientists whose experiments were conducted upon slender, precarious foundations"--and then unload the Oxbridge wit upon "the poor ignorant savage in the bush."

Also reading The House of Glass: the Life of Theodore Roethke, by Allan Seager. It is an exquisite biography.
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[shrugtheironteacup]

I've always been curious to read the unabridged Golden Bough just to see how much more tedious it is than the original for all the reasons you mention, Adilegian.

I haven't read the abridged since my mid-teens fascination with The Wasteland led me to that + From Ritual To Romance. Maybe I should pull them each down and see how they hold up to my memories.
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[Renfrew]

I am probably gonna read A Confederacy of Dunces soon.

[Felix]

i am too!

though i read neon bible a little while ago (i'm not sure what my thinking was there, in retrospect - he wrote it in middle school for an audience of elementary schoolers; let it be a curiosity, really) and didn't think tremendously much of it.

also i haven't gotten around to this thread in a while and i'm glad to see you guys liked after dark better than kafka. i did too. although it seems to me that after wind-up bird, he's content to leave his best work behind him; if his stuff didn't read so effortlessly, still, that might be a problem.

i mean - i'd still recommend sputnik or after dark to people (certain people).

while i'm on the topic, has anybody read hear the wind sing? i noticed white rabbit press has the translated edition for only $15 shipped, which is perfectly reasonable even if i never spend that much on books, though i'm weary of spending it because i wasn't a huge fan of pinball 1973 or wild sheep chase.

it's strange how pinball is so readily available online (http://members.cox.net/ethoscapade/pinball1973.pdf) and hear the wind sing isn't.

[Broco]

Yeah I like Hear The Wind Sing. It is better than Pinball and Wild Sheep in my personal opinion (I didn't much like those two either). It is very short, in brief fragments and disjointed compared to Murakami's later work, but the essence of what makes him good is there.

[Renfrew]

Its so fragmented, I wasn't sure if I had downloaded the complete story or not.

[slipstream]

[winkerwatson]

guys i can't read :(
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tim?

[Adilegian]

[shrugtheironteacup]

[Broco]

Just read Primo Levi's If This Is a Man (a.k.a. Survival in Auschwitz). At some level I did not really want to read it, but I'd been a great fan of Levi since I read The Periodic Table last year, and bought it along with A Tranquil Star. Now I can't stop thinking about death camps all day. But it was worth reading.

[Krazii Bakon Lypes]

I have finished Catch-22 in three days. It has technically taken me, literally, five years to complete. I have read and reread the first 200 pages countless times, but this time I have actually completed it. I purchased it while at my grandmother's house before my senior year of high school. I am now a junior in college, and am once again at my grandmother's house, thus completing the cycle. This may be the most significant day of my life.

[Renfrew]

Are you going to read the sequel?

[Felix]

[Krazii Bakon Lypes]

I don't know if I have the heart to go back to Heller unless I buffer it with something else. More Vonnegut, I suppose.