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wourme
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Building World
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 Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 2:17 am |
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My favorite Russian novel is The Brothers Karamazov. I don't like a lot of fiction that I'm supposed to like to be cultured (especially modern stuff), but I think Dostoevsky really deserves his fame. I was planning to read Crime and Punishment very soon. Is it really not all that interesting? I guess old books are cheap enough that it doesn't matter.
House of Leaves was a huge disappointment for me. I didn't like it at all. I was taken in by a claim that a fan of the Silent Hill games would appreciate it.
| sethsez wrote: |
| Borges feels like he had all sorts of great ideas for novels, but never really felt like sitting down and actually writing them, so he wrote short stories about them instead. |
This is actually the case. He even made up fake novels and summarized them in some of his stories so that he wouldn't have to write them. I kind of wish more writers (and filmmakers) would use shorter formats--I think that a lot of stories are much longer than they need to be. |
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108
fairy godmilf
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: oakland, california
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 2:21 am |
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| sethsez wrote: |
| I still have no idea how I feel about Ulysses. |
Oh. Oh.
I have a pretty good idea how I feel, captain.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 2:31 am |
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| wourme wrote: |
| This is actually the case. He even made up fake novels and summarized them in some of his stories so that he wouldn't have to write them. I kind of wish more writers (and filmmakers) would use shorter formats--I think that a lot of stories are much longer than they need to be. |
Every imaginative person has his own Kilgore Trout. |
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108
fairy godmilf
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: oakland, california
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 2:53 am |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
| wourme wrote: |
| This is actually the case. He even made up fake novels and summarized them in some of his stories so that he wouldn't have to write them. I kind of wish more writers (and filmmakers) would use shorter formats--I think that a lot of stories are much longer than they need to be. |
Every imaginative person has his own Kilgore Trout. |
I named mine "tim rogers"
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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: Wed Dec 06, 2006 3:00 am |
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Personally, I wouldn't compare pynchon to borges, but that is just me. It kinda seems like they have different goals. Borges likes getting these random ideas and painting the tiniest, most intricately beautiful postcards he can of them. Pynchon likes taking random ideas, exploring them as far as they can go, going a bit farther, connecting them with a bunch of other random ideas, finding some sort of present day relevance for them and making them a comedy/musical.
It's totally cool to like them both, you know. |
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sethsez
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 3:17 am |
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| wourme wrote: |
| sethsez wrote: |
| Borges feels like he had all sorts of great ideas for novels, but never really felt like sitting down and actually writing them, so he wrote short stories about them instead. |
This is actually the case. He even made up fake novels and summarized them in some of his stories so that he wouldn't have to write them. I kind of wish more writers (and filmmakers) would use shorter formats--I think that a lot of stories are much longer than they need to be. |
Well then! I can't say it's a surprise.
| 108 wrote: |
| sethsez wrote: |
| I still have no idea how I feel about Ulysses. |
Oh. Oh.
I have a pretty good idea how I feel, captain. |
Since the book seems to either inspire gushing adoration or seething hatred, I'd like to see you expand on this. I've got a pretty good feeling for which side you're on, but it's always entertaining to see people expound on that tome. |
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108
fairy godmilf
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: oakland, california
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 3:42 am |
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| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| Personally, I wouldn't compare pynchon to borges...It's totally cool to like them both, you know. |
Yes. I'm not comparing them, either. Let's just say that by some strange force the two of them are somehow connected in my mind as producers of the same emotion. As different things produce different emotions in different people, you have no right to question my emotional reaction to two very different authors. For example, :(
I'm not saying I dislike Pynchon, either. Quite the contrary! It's just that whenever I feel in that mood that either author made me feel upon first reading, I reach for Borges' "Fictions" -- I guess it's because I tend to be a browser of literature more than a reader. Then again, I can read whole novels in an hour, so what do I know. Maybe I'm just not appreciating things correctly.
Kawabata once felt sorry for himself, then his readers, then the human race, when he saw a man reading a Kawabata novel on a train in Tokyo. He found it a boring place to read a novel; he found it an impossible place to give "literature", if that's what it was, one's full attention. Or, he found it evidence that his novel had failed to evoke in his reader the literary desire to sit in a chair in a quiet room. Perhaps that meant his novel was not literature, after all.
I was reading Lolita yesterday on the train, and I got the impression that Nabokov wouldn't have disliked my doing so. To the Japanese, who will cancel your internet contract if you don't pay your bill, without even asking for the money or giving a warning beforehand, principle is almost everything. Nabokov would no doubt understand that people can enjoy literature, and use it as something to pass idle time, without insulting the nature of the literature or credibility of the author.
I was born maybe twenty years after Kawabata's complaint. What the Japanese consider literature (or film, which is problematic) is currently tailored to fit browsers.
Hence Shigesato Itoi's writings. Hence Nintendo DS.
Here I'd recommend Matsuo Suzuki if, well. Any of his writings were translated.
Fluffy stuff!
Borges is the antithesis of fluffy, yet if there's anything that sticks, immediately, at least, it's pretty fluffy. For example, the story "The Aleph", about the man whose friend takes him to his house and asks him to lie down under the stairs and stare at a specific point in space after the lights were out. Basically, what he ends up seeing is a single point, smaller than a needle-prick, from which all of existence, from the beginning of time to the end of time, is visible in an instant.
Conceptually, that's kind of fun to talk about -- specifically the "a friend's basement" aspect of the situation. In execution, there's a whole lot more to it.
That's Borges in a nutshell, basically.
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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: Wed Dec 06, 2006 4:01 am |
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| 108 wrote: |
| Yes. I'm not comparing them, either. Let's just say that by some strange force the two of them are somehow connected in my mind as producers of the same emotion. As different things produce different emotions in different people, you have no right to question my emotional reaction to two very different authors. For example, :( |
You do understand that I was not questioning your emotional reaction to anything. I was mostly just putting in my emotional reaciton to these things, and saying that my emotional reaction differed from your because I felt that the authors were doing different things.
It's totally cool that they work like that for you. They just don't for me. You know, different peoples and all that.
I mean, you did compare them in terms of personal preference, which is a comparison. Just sayin'. And so I said that I don't compare them on personal preference. Most authors I really love I won't do that to. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 4:18 am |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
On other books: I loved Lolita, and I think it's one of the absolute best novels of the twentieth century. It panders to nothing but the belief that literary education makes a man more moral |
Hmm, are you implying that Lolita teaches something about morality to its readers? I don't think it does. The novel carries different messages depending on how deeply one reads into it, and one is only able to take out of it the morality one already carries.
It's not really possible to understand the moral implications of Humbert's crime without insight into his victim's thoughts and feelings. But this is precisely the thing that Humbert tells us almost nothing about, despite going on and on in fantastic detail about her body and his own obsessions that he projects onto her. We know everything about Lolita but Dolores remains out of sight. The reader's only way to achieve moral understanding is to rely on what he himself imagines -- the text of the novel tells us nothing.
(Yes, there are a few tossed-off, poignant details -- for example, she cries every single time he rapes her. But do we really know anything about why she cries? Is it physical pain, is it shame, is it an existential emptiness that overcomes her in those moments? Humbert does not care and we do not know.)
By the way, in this connection, one of my favorite passages in Lolita is the following, an easy-to-miss gem hidden in Part 2:
| Humbert wrote: |
| "In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce new paper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead the last thirty years." |
This passage could be said to summarize Humbert in a way, but it's also a pointed jab at the reader. Even if you're one of the few that recognized this passage as significant before having it pointed out to you in Nabokov's author's note, can you say the same about other passages in the book? Did you sympathize with Charlotte for the loss of her son, or were you too engaged with the plot to pay any attention to it? It is all too easy to read Lolita with as little attention and empathy as Humbert treats the Kasbeam barber.
| Adilegian wrote: |
| and it even subverts that. |
Yes, I wonder if that isn't a subtle poke at French literature, Humbert's speciality, which all too often is obsessed with style at the expense of humanity.
| Adilegian wrote: |
| It's really shameful that the novel's been associated as a positive support of the perversity. It really hurts the general perception of the novel to associate it with a brand of child pornography, when, in fact, it's a story of one man's failure to understand his need for love. |
Well, Lolita is among other things a novel about pedophilia, so I'm not really seeing the problem with the association. If anything I'm more bothered by the film which makes Lolita sixteen and thereby seriously distorts the story. Of course the pornographic terms "Lolita" and "Lolicon" make me wince, but considering what they refer to I would probably wince no matter what it was called.
Also, keep in mind that a pedophile reading Lolita would, I imagine, have a very different interpretation. He might focus on Humbert's misery rather than Dolores's, taking it as a tale of the unhappiness brought on by the social stigma against pedophilia. After all, if society accepted their relationship, Humbert would not be constantly blasting himself about his "monstrosity", and they could live out in the open and make friends instead of shuttling aimlessly in solitude from town to town. It could have been a happy relationship! And perhaps Lolita cries because she misses her mother?
You only arrived at your interpretation after peeling back many layers of misdirection. But the novel as seen by Humbert or his like is one of Lolita's faces, too. |
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sethsez
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 4:43 am |
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| Broco wrote: |
| If anything I'm more bothered by the film which makes Lolita sixteen and thereby seriously distorts the story. |
Actually, she was fourteen in the movie (as was the actress). Considering Delores was twelve and a half in the book, an added year and a half doesn't bother me too greatly, especially when you consider that the movie was made in the early sixties when the Production Code was still in full swing. |
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Mokhir
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Location: The 'Great' North
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 6:35 am |
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| sethsez wrote: |
| I still have no idea how I feel about Ulysses. |
I'm with you. |
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sync-swim
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: scissorgun
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 6:47 am |
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| Mokhir wrote: |
| I'm with you. |
Mokhir, you can't read.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Book of the New Sun, Urth of the New Sun, Book of the Long Sun, Book of the Short Sun is a multi-volume fantasy/sci-fi sequence that's actually worth following.
The books lack the semiotic tinkering of Danielewski's stuff (which Ray Ogar has been doing pretty consistently as well), but are no less fun in that they're as much cohesive narratives as they are toys. The closest term would be "puzzle books". It's stuff to read closely, reread (with great pleasure) and read in synchronization with friends to share theories and speculation with. They're a world, really. |
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 6:56 am |
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Broco,
I've made my spoiler-ish comments in a very tiny font, since I don't understand how to navigate the spoiler-clearing coloring.
| Broco wrote: |
| Hmm, are you implying that Lolita teaches something about morality to its readers? I don't think it does. The novel carries different messages depending on how deeply one reads into it, and one is only able to take out of it the morality one already carries. |
No, I don't mean to imply this. I like to gauge works on their own terms. Nabokov's priorities in Lolita were aesthetic, so I don't look at his work as a statement upon morality. Character, desire, corruptibility, and the beauty in the eyes of the damned, yes—but not morality. We are in agreement.
| Broco wrote: |
| It's not really possible to understand the moral implications of Humbert's crime without insight into his victim's thoughts and feelings. But this is precisely the thing that Humbert tells us almost nothing about, despite going on and on in fantastic detail about her body and his own obsessions that he projects onto her. We know everything about Lolita but Dolores remains out of sight. The reader's only way to achieve moral understanding is to rely on what he himself imagines -- the text of the novel tells us nothing. |
I don't think that the novel is that sparse on judgment. It's tricky, because the authorial voice (as you have mentioned) is Humbert's own, yet it is Humbert recollecting Humbert. When he relates his marriage with Charlotte, he ducks into a theatrical aside and expresses relief that he no longer has to put up the front of contempt for Charlotte. He explained that he was portraying Charlotte contemptuously because he wanted to remain faithful, as a narrator, to his perspective at the moment that a given event occurred.
I recall several places where Humbert condemns himself as a monster, confessing to know that he will burn in Hell for who he is, and so on. It would be fallacious to presume that the novel (and Nabokov by implication) intends to impress the point upon the reader simply because Humbert's confession of shame rings true with most people's natural opinions of pedophiles. However, the shame is present in the character.
| Broco wrote: |
| (Yes, there are a few tossed-off, poignant details -- for example, she cries every single time he rapes her. But do we really know anything about why she cries? Is it physical pain, is it shame, is it an existential emptiness that overcomes her in those moments? Humbert does not care and we do not know.) |
At the end of the novel, Humbert calls attention to the fact that he did not care. He laments it. This struck me as the most significant character change in Humbert. That's where his character's tragedy lies, I think: he sees his failure to love and also sees that he doesn't know how to overcome it. What's more, he will not again receive the chance to prove himself better than his weakness, which is ultimately a self-absorption that excludes all interest in the inner worlds of others.
| Broco wrote: |
| Yes, I wonder if that isn't a subtle poke at French literature, Humbert's speciality, which all too often is obsessed with style at the expense of humanity. |
Well, I more meant the fact that Humbert draws the reader more easily into his confidence because he is better educated than most of us. The Old World European and American lines are often drawn in the novel, and I think that's part of how the book shocks us. We see an eloquent, multilingual, highly literary man who we somehow trust because of his cultivation, and we're then shown how brutal and harsh he really is. That's all I meant.
| Broco wrote: |
| This passage could be said to summarize Humbert in a way, but it's also a pointed jab at the reader. Even if you're one of the few that recognized this passage as significant before having it pointed out to you in Nabokov's author's note, can you say the same about other passages in the book? Did you sympathize with Charlotte for the loss of her son, or were you too engaged with the plot to pay any attention to it? It is all too easy to read Lolita with as little attention and empathy as Humbert treats the Kasbeam barber. |
In all honesty, the passage didn't jab me very much. I try to presume ignorance when considering the personal affairs of others, and my efforts redoubled when in the company of someone as obtrusively judgmental as Humbert. He is a monstrous person, completely ignorant of the inner worlds of others, and willing to indulge himself at their expenses.
Quoth the perv: "Now, squirming and pleading with my own memory, I recall that on this and similar occasions, it was always my habit and method to ignore Lolita's states of mind while comforting my own base self."
| Broco wrote: |
| Well, Lolita is among other things a novel about pedophilia, so I'm not really seeing the problem with the association. If anything I'm more bothered by the film which makes Lolita sixteen and thereby seriously distorts the story. Of course the pornographic terms "Lolita" and "Lolicon" make me wince, but considering what they refer to I would probably wince no matter what it was called. |
Actually, you've hit upon my problem with the association right there. The subculture's adoption of the novel's name implies equivalence. That is to say, it's assumed that Lolita in some way endorses the Lolicon crowd because the Lolicon crowd take its name as their banner. This is untrue, of course, but it turns many people away from the novel than might be otherwise, and it makes too close an association between the subject matter of one of the best novels of the last century and its theme.
| Broco wrote: |
| Also, keep in mind that a pedophile reading Lolita would, I imagine, have a very different interpretation. He might focus on Humbert's misery rather than Dolores's, taking it as a tale of the unhappiness brought on by the social stigma against pedophilia. After all, if society accepted their relationship, Humbert would not be constantly blasting himself about his "monstrosity", and they could live out in the open and make friends instead of shuttling aimlessly in solitude from town to town. It could have been a happy relationship! And perhaps Lolita cries because she misses her mother? |
I have a problem with this reading of the novel because I personally know and have worked with children who have been sexually abused. Humbert is a monster, and not just for his pedophilic libido. As I read the book, I felt that it was apparent that Dolores was very hurt by the relationship, emotionally and developmentally. This is what happens to all children who get raped by adults. The reading is flawed because it is self-piteous—and suffers from the exact same kind of social blindness that characterized Humbert.
The quality of the reading depends (mostly) upon the quality of the reader. I don't want that taken out of context as a way to make me sound as though I call all other readers inferior. I most certainly don't. However, I don't favor a sense of universal validity. No reading's the best, but some readings are better than others. The pedophile's reading of Lolita falls comfortably in the dregs.
I'm very cautious on this point, because I absolutely don't want to be misunderstood as a self-appointed tyrant on literary experience. It's just that I lose sympathy for the dignity of the pedophile when I intimately know his victims.
I would also add that I don't expect all readers with pedophilic bents to read the novel solely in the terms of their forbidden desires. I think that a pedophile is capable of a strong reading of Lolita, but for reasons that go beyond his pedophilia.
| Broco wrote: |
| You only arrived at your interpretation after peeling back many layers of misdirection. But the novel as seen by Humbert or his like is one of Lolita's faces, too. |
Actually, I would think that a pedophile would be too close to the subject matter to see the book's theme, assuming he has a self-centered reaction. The subject matter works so well because it draws out the theme so well. While the ends are perverse, no one can say that the emotions fueling a pedophile's spirit are any different from our own. Humbert struggles with a human need—love—and a need that most people have for carnal expression of that love.
Humbert's nymphets are the highest expression of his notion of beauty. This is the really amazing thing about his character: he carries one of the lowest sexual obsessions while maintaining the loftiest aesthetic ideals. He even sees sex as derivative of art. His struggles are everyone's, and his arena is our libidinal gutter. Tragedy: the noble person put by fate into a villainous situation.
Humbert is beautiful and monstrous. That's one of the things that makes this novel so goddamn great. |
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negativedge
banned
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 11:22 am |
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| Man, I am the opposite of well read. |
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luckystrike
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Location: drunk creepin
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 3:24 pm |
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Finished Blood Meridian a few weeks ago. If you like Faulkner or Hemingway or any of the other American authors post-1900 you should definitely pick it up. Or if you just like massive bloodshed, cowboys, or swearing. Or if you like to kill indians, then it will also be good for you.
HoL was interesting enough for me to get through the end, but I thought at it's very core it just didn't use very interesting language, and as such I didn't like it as much as some. Also, it reminded me very much of the kind of thing I would have written for creative writing class circa-10th grade (not a compliment, i guess), had the class required a 1000-page work as a final project.
Also, As I Lay Dying is basically the funniest book I've ever read. If you aren't laughing and grimacing at the plight of those miserable fools, something's wrong.
I went back recently and started re-reading some books from my childhood, including some classic Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series after unearthing them in a corner of my parent's basement. Shit's weak. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 3:25 pm |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
| I don't think that the novel is that sparse on judgment. |
Morality for me is more about empathy than judgement, so we're kind of talking at cross purposes here.
| Adilegian wrote: |
| he sees his failure to love and also sees that he doesn't know how to overcome it. |
He never says so in so many words. At any rate, I don't know if I want to go into the question of the reality of Humbert's apotheosis right now. I have no strong opinion either way.
| Adilegian wrote: |
| The pedophile's reading of Lolita falls comfortably in the dregs. |
Yes it does; I didn't mean to argue that the "pedophile reading" I proposed was valid, it's obviously a terrible misreading. My point was that, unlike most terrible misreadings, this one (or something like it) is quite intentionally contained in the novel as a layer of misdirection. It's therefore not really an act of misrepresentation to describe Lolita in subject-matter-centric terms -- because the novel misrepresents itself.
| Adilegian wrote: |
| That is to say, it's assumed that Lolita in some way endorses the Lolicon crowd because the Lolicon crowd take its name as their banner. |
Nabokov does not endorse it but Humbert (at least the unapotheosized, Part 1 Humbert) might, and isn't this Humbert's book too?
| setzsez wrote: |
| Actually, she was fourteen in the movie (as was the actress). |
Hmm, okay. I didn't watch the film too closely (or even entirely, to be honest). I should probably check it out again. |
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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: Wed Dec 06, 2006 5:25 pm |
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| luckystrike wrote: |
| Finished Blood Meridian a few weeks ago. If you like Faulkner or Hemingway or any of the other American authors post-1900 you should definitely pick it up. Or if you just like massive bloodshed, cowboys, or swearing. Or if you like to kill indians, then it will also be good for you. |
So it is worth getting through? I have started it about 4 times now, each time making it about 100 or 150 pages in, and then getting distracted. There is some damn creepy stuff in there though (the tree with the babies comes to mind). |
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rabite gets whacked!
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 6:39 pm |
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| boojiboy7 wrote: |
| luckystrike wrote: |
| Finished Blood Meridian a few weeks ago. If you like Faulkner or Hemingway or any of the other American authors post-1900 you should definitely pick it up. Or if you just like massive bloodshed, cowboys, or swearing. Or if you like to kill indians, then it will also be good for you. |
So it is worth getting through? I have started it about 4 times now, each time making it about 100 or 150 pages in, and then getting distracted. There is some damn creepy stuff in there though (the tree with the babies comes to mind). |
Oh god yes. 100-150 pages doesn't really get you to the good stuff on The Judge, who's one of my favorite characters ever written.
I'm reading McCarthy's The Road right now, which is much easier but still just incredible. |
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Mr. Apol
king of zembla
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: a curiously familiar pit
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| Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 11:09 pm |
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i remember really enjoying the library of babel. my friends and i discussed the whole mathematical end for days. fun stuff.
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108
fairy godmilf
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: oakland, california
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 4:31 am |
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| negativedge wrote: |
| Man, I am the opposite of well read. |
it just takes a couple of books
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slipstream
hates LOTR films
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:06 am |
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| Intentionally Wrong wrote: |
Yeah, I picked up Lolita because of something Tim wrote. |
ugh
Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama is the last thing I really remember reading. I went into it expecting another American Psycho, and that's sort of what I got. Glamorama is perhaps less satire and more disorientation, but I'd recommend it heartily to anyone around these parts. The first 200 pages are boring, but they set up something special! And I liked the cameo by Patrick Bateman a lot. At that point I knew this was going to be a great book. I know this lacked any summary of the plot, but it's not the type of book that you can easily sum up in a few sentences... unless you hate it.
I just remembered I read The Genocides by Thomas Disch last week for a paper I never bothered to write. The book is basically a green postapocalypse.
next insert credit/select button book meme: Coin Locker Babies
I'm surprised Tim hasn't already name-dropped this for his new-games journalism Reading Rainbow racket he has going on here. It'd fit right in splendidly. But don't take my word for it... |
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SplashBeats
Guest
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:31 am |
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Lolita is an utterly beautiful book.
I just got my roommate to pick up Burroughs' Junky. This is good!
This thread needs more discussion about the best writer of the 20th century, one William S. Burroughs. |
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negativedge
banned
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:43 am |
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| 108 wrote: |
| negativedge wrote: |
| Man, I am the opposite of well read. |
it just takes a couple of books |
Yeah, I guess, but I'm no good with books. I mean, I enjoy them, but while I'm reading a good book, I get all excited and I start thinking about the book and I underline stuff and I smile. Then I finish the book and I kind of nod my head and go "Yeah, that's right." Then I never think about it again. It feels too...smarmy. |
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slipstream
hates LOTR films
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:50 am |
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| Just watch the movies, and if anyone tries to corner you with differences between the book and movie, just laugh it off and continue. |
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negativedge
banned
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:52 am |
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| The things I tend to look for in movies are not the kinds of things you're often getting from book to film conversions. |
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 9:32 am |
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Hi Broco!
| Broco wrote: |
| Morality for me is more about empathy than judgement, so we're kind of talking at cross purposes here. |
Perhaps so—but I hope that's not necessarily the case.
I see morality as both empathy and judgment—understanding and discipline—forgiveness and justice. Each balances the other, and each makes the other humane. The thing that's weird about Humbert is that he hardly ever mixes the two, even regarding himself. He either indulges in his craving for nymphets—to the absurd point that he envisions himself in a kind of Candyland surrounded by them—or he hates himself for what he desires.
| Broco wrote: |
| He never says so in so many words. |
You're right, he doesn't. I deduced as much, though, given how he has given up on love. His self-directed epithets suggested as much, and especially that gorgeous, heart-breaking epitaph at the very end of the book.
| Broco wrote: |
| My point was that, unlike most terrible misreadings, this one (or something like it) is quite intentionally contained in the novel as a layer of misdirection. It's therefore not really an act of misrepresentation to describe Lolita in subject-matter-centric terms -- because the novel misrepresents itself. |
The problem that I have with this idea is that the misrepresentation stops after the first third of the book. The sexuality becomes a dull, fluorescent hum against a flush of commonplace triviality and aimlessness. It strikes me as an extravagant way to indicate how the things we love about other people are connected with our ideas of highest beauty. The novel doesn't propose to make the experience of pedophilia relevant to the reader; it has to induct the reader into the nymphets' charm in aesthetic language, rather than erotic.
I mean, I'm sure it sounds pretentious to use a phrase like "our ideas of highest beauty," because the idea of high culture is pretty unpopular—moreso than high culture itself. Still, I think that the notion works in this context because it forms much of Humbert's Old World European perspective. I kind of think that a better case can be made that the novel misrepresents pedophilia (!?) moreso than it misrepresents itself with pedophilia.
| Adilegian wrote: |
| Nabokov does not endorse it but Humbert (at least the unapotheosized, Part 1 Humbert) might, and isn't this Humbert's book too? |
Yes, of course! ^^
Mainly, it bothers me that parts of the novel are chosen as defining the novel at the expense of the majority of the novel. Apotheosized Humbert puts pedophile Humbert into perspective and vice versa. They're both part of the same craving, craven man. |
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108
fairy godmilf
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: oakland, california
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 9:36 am |
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| slipstream wrote: |
next insert credit/select button book meme: Coin Locker Babies
I'm surprised Tim hasn't already name-dropped this for his new-games journalism Reading Rainbow racket he has going on here. |
I don't know. I just didn't really like it. It's too posery.
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sync-swim
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: scissorgun
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 5:56 pm |
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| 108 wrote: |
| slipstream wrote: |
next insert credit/select button book meme: Coin Locker Babies
I'm surprised Tim hasn't already name-dropped this for his new-games journalism Reading Rainbow racket he has going on here. |
I don't know. I just didn't really like it. It's too posery. |
Between the center of Tokyo being a giant ozone-emitting wasteheap guarded by SS troopers with flamethrowers and scenes involving butt-sex in the middle of a bedroom converted to be an alligator swamp, it read like a 400-page transcription of a music video for The Cure. |
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!=
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: the planet of leather moomins
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:00 pm |
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Coin Locker Babies was ok, but very very raspy. To the point that it killed the album I was listening to at the time. (an album by an african immigrant singing in an invented language) I can't entangle anymore the voice of this african singer and the text describing the voice of the unfortunate other baby.
From Ryu Murakami I hear 1969 is a rather nice one.. Yet I haven't read it. What I can tell is that I found his trilogy of monologues: Ecstasy Melancholia Thanatos rather enjoyable. The first one, ectasy being quite powerful in its effect. It reminds me a bit of one of Magritte's paintings. |
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Toups
tyranically banal
Joined: 03 Dec 2006
Location: Ebon Keep
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 7:23 pm |
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| wourme wrote: |
| My favorite Russian novel is The Brothers Karamazov. I don't like a lot of fiction that I'm supposed to like to be cultured (especially modern stuff), but I think Dostoevsky really deserves his fame. I was planning to read Crime and Punishment very soon. Is it really not all that interesting? I guess old books are cheap enough that it doesn't matter. |
Crime and Punishment is one of my favorite books of all time.
So... yeah.
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108
fairy godmilf
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: oakland, california
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| Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 5:03 am |
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| sync-swim wrote: |
| 108 wrote: |
| slipstream wrote: |
next insert credit/select button book meme: Coin Locker Babies
I'm surprised Tim hasn't already name-dropped this for his new-games journalism Reading Rainbow racket he has going on here. |
I don't know. I just didn't really like it. It's too posery. |
Between the center of Tokyo being a giant ozone-emitting wasteheap guarded by SS troopers with flamethrowers and scenes involving butt-sex in the middle of a bedroom converted to be an alligator swamp, it read like a 400-page transcription of a music video for The Cure. |
Yeah, that too.
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hipkondo
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Location: fun in the sun
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| Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 9:51 am |
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| slipstream wrote: |
next insert credit/select button book meme: Coin Locker Babies
I'm surprised Tim hasn't already name-dropped this for his new-games journalism Reading Rainbow racket he has going on here. It'd fit right in splendidly. But don't take my word for it... |
Awesome fucking book. The movie adaption with Val Kilmer is probably going to be terrible though *cry |
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option
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 4:04 pm |
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Perfume by Patrick Suskind is a pretty incredible book.
I also love most works by Kafka.
Judging by these examples, does anyone have any reccomendations for me? When it comes to finding new reading, I struggle!
I am going to try Lolita next week I think... |
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GcDiaz
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: Clinton, MA
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| Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 6:17 pm |
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Just finished rereading 1984 for the umpteenth time. I can't get enough of it. Now I'm reading Clive Barker's Books of Blood. Haven't read them in nearly a decade, so the stories are basically new all over again.
Hey, it's literature to me.
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Steam/PSN/Xbawks: GcDiaz
Let's bring sexy back!
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 6:31 pm |
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| option wrote: |
Perfume by Patrick Suskind is a pretty incredible book.
I also love most works by Kafka.
Judging by these examples, does anyone have any reccomendations for me? When it comes to finding new reading, I struggle! |
Some good books that come to mind as vaguely similar to those in some respects are, for Perfume, John Folwes's The Collector, and for Kafka, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled or J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. They're not really similar of course, but anyway I'm throwing them out there.
Also, it's always good to just read more Kafka. His less famous stuff, diaries included, is also amazing. |
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slipstream
hates LOTR films
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 9:07 pm |
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| GcDiaz wrote: |
Just finished rereading 1984 for the umpteenth time. I can't get enough of it. Now I'm reading Clive Barker's Books of Blood. Haven't read them in nearly a decade, so the stories are basically new all over again.
Hey, it's literature to me. |
What's there to get out of Nineteen Eighty-Four? I've read the book once or twice and it's hard to see justification for cult of personality surrounding this book. It's not prophetic in any meaningful way. Everything is so distorted and one-sided that it comes off as some libertarian adolescent's nightmare wrapped up in some nice prose.
Is this good? I got a hardback copy at a free bookstore a few years ago and I feel like I ought to read it. |
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Dracko
a sapphist fool
Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 12:11 am |
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| sync-swim wrote: |
The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Book of the New Sun, Urth of the New Sun, Book of the Long Sun, Book of the Short Sun is a multi-volume fantasy/sci-fi sequence that's actually worth following.
The books lack the semiotic tinkering of Danielewski's stuff (which Ray Ogar has been doing pretty consistently as well), but are no less fun in that they're as much cohesive narratives as they are toys. The closest term would be "puzzle books". It's stuff to read closely, reread (with great pleasure) and read in synchronization with friends to share theories and speculation with. They're a world, really. |
I've read the first volume of the Book of the New Sun so far, and was somewhat impressed, if only by virtue of it being slowly paced and detailed, something which might usually put me off, but yet felt utterly necessary considering the nature of the central character. It never felt excessive, though it does feel rigorously planned and manipulative, which may very well be the point in light of Severian's attitude. I'm struck that its written in a manner that would imply that nothing much really happened, though obviously much of consequence did, as if there's a lingering fear of revelations as yet uncovered.
This is the way most fantasy should be written. It's not a genre I can fully enjoy, but that might mainly be that it seems too many are concerned with ripping off Tolkien ad nauseam.
As for Borges, you've got to love a writer who understands the utility of concision, and who's naturally lazy. Why write 400 pages where 20 would suffice? I find it all more evocative that way, feeding new and fascinating thoughts and worlds to let your mind linger on. Definitely becoming one of my all-time favourites, his stories always bring me something new and a fresh way to look at the world around me in moments where I'd find it dreary or even defeatingly depressing.
Has anyone here read Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric? The concept and a few extracts have me simultaneously intrigued and in fear of utter meaningless pretension. |
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Broco
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters
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| Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 1:14 am |
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| slipstream wrote: |
What's there to get out of Nineteen Eighty-Four? I've read the book once or twice and it's hard to see justification for cult of personality surrounding this book. It's not prophetic in any meaningful way. Everything is so distorted and one-sided that it comes off as some libertarian adolescent's nightmare wrapped up in some nice prose. |
I agree that 1984 has almost no value as literature, but I think it's excellent as a political tract. The book's world is basically an amalgam of the fascist and communist governments of Orwell's day, with some exaggeration for effect. And I would say not so much exaggeration, actually, as bringing things to their logical conclusion -- all the elements of the book, from Newspeak to two-minutes-hate, exist in totalitarian goverments in some form.
| slipstream wrote: |
Is this good? I got a hardback copy at a free bookstore a few years ago and I feel like I ought to read it. |
I think it's Ishiguro's masterpiece, personally, but opinions are polarized about it.
The thing about it that frustrates some people, I think, is that only does it not have dramatic momentum, it repeatedly and quite intentionally hooks the reader onto a subplot and then just when it seems about to reach a climax, it's cut off anticlimatically and with brazen illogic. Then there is a smooth segue into another interesting story which will also eventually be cut off, and so on for the entire novel. It's also written entirely in stilted, formal, distant prose. All this is done for very good reasons -- the structure of the novel reflects its themes -- but it's easy to see why some people can't stand it.
I've phrased the above to sound like bad things, but in the right frame of mind all this is totally awesome. For example, by "brazen illogic" I mean things like at one point, while driving to his destination, the protagonist runs into a literal brick wall which is senselessly built across the street. Or he spends hours preparing for an important speech, but after he steps up to the podium he only has time to say one sentence before the flimsy nightgown he is wearing (he was too rushed to get dressed that day) falls open and he finds himself naked in front of everybody.
And the individual stories themselves are fascinating, moving stuff, each of them deeply resonant in some way. I think the people that hate it are so lost in the forest that they forget to pay attention to the trees. I'd recommend if you read it that you savor it slowly, without attempting to find traditional drama or logic, and internalizing in advance the fact that any expectations you have about the plot will be thwarted.
That said, a safer place to start with Ishiguro is The Remains of the Day, his most famous novel, which has a traditionally formed narrative and is beloved by everyone who has a soul. |
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OtakupunkX
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: Houston, TX
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| Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 1:42 am |
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I went out and bought Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Lolita today. I'm reading Hard Boiled Wonderland right now, but I spilt coffee all over page 3 earlier.
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chompers po pable
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2006 9:10 am |
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| wourme wrote: |
| I was planning to read Crime and Punishment very soon. Is it really not all that interesting? |
first of all, if you're going to read it, definitely go for the version published by Vintage, translated by Richard Pervear. the best translation available.
and to answer your question, i found it to be interesting. Dostoevsky can get into his characters minds brilliantly. it took me about a week or so to finish, a very smooth read. pretty absorbing...though it is always a good idea to keep the expectations bridled, so.
i would say, go forth wourme, and read the fucking thing.
i just finished The Catcher in the Rye, which reminded me of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in good ways.
p.s. @ Apol -- "Library of Babel" (and Borges in general) is amazing. I tend to enjoy short stories more than most novels. |
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gooktime
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: no
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| Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2006 12:33 pm |
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| negativedge wrote: |
| Man, I am the opposite of well read. |
Me too, and I'm a literature student :( |
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