[Takashi]

Someone asked me to read Dragon Tamers by 13-year-old-wiz Emma Maree Urquhart. I'm on page 21 and not only this is easily the worst edited piece of printed reading I have ever laid eyes upon (albeit I can understand the unwillingness of a decent copy editor picking this up vs let's say, Microsoft Word), I think I've been mentally insulted with every single paragraph, either as a game designer, a science fiction author-in-hoping or even as a regular reader.

Dear god.
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low-end.net | Whimsy (soon) | Serfdom 2.0

[remote]

[slipstream]

I know it's not literature, but Cards As Weapons is one of the greatest books I have ever read.

I don't want to alarm you guys, but I could probably kill all of you with a deck of cards now. It's a tad pricey, but the knowledge is worth every penny.
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[gooktime]

Do any of you enjoy the works of Marquis de Sade? 120 days of Sodom is... wow.

[Adilegian]

For Christmas, I received the following books:

Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry, by David Smith

Brink Road, by A. R. Ammons

Crux: the Letters of James Dickey, edited by Matt Bruccoli and Judith Baughman

and

The Kid Who Wanted to Be a Spaceman, by Jack Butler

Anyone else read Butler's poems?

[Broco]

I've never got poems, myself. Try as I might, I can't generally see the advantage over prose. Most poems are really indirect and cryptic, but the only thing that achieves from my point of view is that every reader projects whatever they want onto the poem, and the text itself is almost an empty vessel. I overgeneralize I know, but...

The only verse I like is stuff like Eugene Onegin, that would work great as prose too. (That, and a contemporary poet called Mark Irwin, but that's only because something connects with me in his preferred imagery and it's really a whim rather than a sober critical assessment.)

I'm open to the possibility that this is a blind spot in my aesthetics -- a looking for the wrong thing -- rather than a failure of the form, but I can't see what exactly I should be appreciating. At least I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, since poetry barely sells, even in comparison to highbrow novels.

[BalbanesBeoulve]

I'm reading World War Z right now. It's a semi sequel to The Zombie Survival Guide. The format is different though. it's not a survival guide, but a collection of first person accounts of a world wide zombie breakout. If you dug the first book, you should dig this one.

[PianoMap]

Oh shit yeah the 120 days of Sodom... yeah I did not enjoy that shit.

The movie, "Salo", was just the kinda stuff I firmly attempt to avoid remembering or thinking about.

I am reading Mishima's "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea." I'm suprised that I'm actually really enjoying it.

Man, Yukio Mishima. What a joke. What a gong show.
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[SplashBeats]

[slipstream]

In something of a malaise I purchased Love In The Time of Cholera and I'm enjoying it so far. Story of unrequited love spanning five decades in South America. Reading it makes me hopeful.
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[rabite gets whacked!]

[Wall of Beef]

Just finished "The curious incident of the dog in the night-time" by Mark Haddon. Its about an Autistic boy who tries to discover who killed his neighbors dog Wellington. Its a fantastic book. Tons of details as to what an autistic person does when trying to do things that are normal to an average person. But its written in his perspective, and ends up just feeling very normal to have to count colored cars and hate brown colored things.

I am now reading the fallowing books:

"How to be Free" by Tom Hodgkinson. Its his fallow up to "How to be Idle" I had to import the book from the UK as its not released in the U.S. yet.

"Freakenomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The chapter titles get you more excited than the actual information provided. Usually its not as an amazing link as you would hope. Its still neat though.

"Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace. About 30 pages into this massive book. So far I have no idea how any of the things are going to link up, or where the hell the book is going to go. But everything is very interesting a bizarre, so that will keep my going. Ive never read a book this big so its going to be a challenge to keep me interested for however long it takes me.
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[sync-swim]

To fill my required non-fiction quota, i'm halfway through "Life Along The Silk Road", a pretty excellent ethnography and cultural history of the golden age of Central Asia's now-evaporating historical pride. The different eras are enumerated through the perspectives of less-illustrious people, merchants, Tibetan soldiers, Buddhist/Nestorian monks, civil servants and etc.

I picked up a copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto the week after finals to try to get a leg up on the reading material of a "New Media Technologies" class i'm taking this coming semester. The class has gained quite the cult reputation within the school of journalism here as a maverick warband, but i'm beginning to have my doubts. As a classic skeptic, i'm very suspicious of such one-sided tech evangelism in a journalism building. Anyways, the book seems pretty unbearable and i'm probably going to be the pariah of the class.

In fiction, I have my hands on "Story of the Stone" by Cao Xueqin, an 18th century Chinese gossip novel, "The Worm Ouroboros" by E.R. Eddison, a Tolkien-era fantasy by an outcast from the Inklings, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" by Gene Wolfe and of course, i'm always plugging away at Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en.

[PianoMap]

[rabite gets whacked!]

If you've got culturally Buddhist roots, can it still be considered Nihilism?

[Felix]

reading blind willow, sleeping woman because i received it for a christmas gift.

it's pretty good!

[Dracko]

[Rucio]

The Count of Monte Cristo is something I recently read. I love 19th Century Literature.

Also, one of my favorite books is A Moveable Feast by Hemmingway. It is about his time living in Paris and hanging out with all the other expatriates.. I read it when I was there, and I was able to see the locations he was describing. Very neat.
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"Say, that's a nice fez!"
"Thank you very much. Why do you like it?"
"It's better than a sharp stick in the eye."

[PianoMap]

I have thought over nhilism and... while I agree it's an outlook that is good to consider and learn about [and certainly that a work rife with it is not demerited because of that, just that I end up taking it with a couple dozen more grains of salt.], it most certainly leads to the dark side.

So to speak.
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[Dracko]

That's a bit too simple. I suggest reading Camus, either his essays, like The Myth of Sisyphus or The Rebel, or his fiction, in particular The Fall or The Plague. Camus rejected the notion that every individual creates their own meaning to life, as the existentialists suggest. I'm inclined to agree, mainly because saying that life has no meaning, then telling people that they can make it themselves, is disingenuous and resolves nothing. It's simply distruthful. Saying everyone has their own subjective reality is akin to saying there's no reality at all. So, Camus explores an absurd world, and answers any questions you might automatically ask when confronted with nihilism, such as "Why be good?" or even "Why do anything at all?". To him, the only philosophical question worthy of consideration is that of suicide. He promotes empathy as force, even in the face of Sisyphian odds (The plague in the eponymous book was partially representative of the actions of the Nazis against their demonised minorities). Beyond compassion, he promotes comprehension as means to empathy, and life as being livable for its own sake.

There's more to it than that, of course, but he held some pretty good answers to what Nietzsche prophesised.

[Vikram Ray]

[SplashBeats]

I really like absurdism.

[winkerwatson]

W. H. Prescott's The Conquest of Mexico and the Conquest of Peru arrived today
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tim?

[Toto]

I read Football and Gangsters, and it was about well...the effect of the underworld on professional football. It was trashily written, yet highly entertaining and slightly informative.
I am currently reading many various comics, and Foul!, a book about corruption at FIFA.

[falsedan]

[108]

[Wall of Beef]

Books are already free at Libraries, so I don't think many people feel it necessary to pirate them.
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[sync-swim]

I really can't stand to read more than a page of regular paragraphed prose on a digital screen. After that, my eyes start to ache and my attention to wander. I also like the tactile satisfaction of having a hard copy paperback tome one can pop open anywhere.

Don't take my word for it though, I only recently realized that writing prose out longhand before typing it up on a computer is considered totally luddite (I still do it though).

[haze]

there's Project Gutenburg, which has most everything in public domain in online text files... maybe somebody already mentioned it, i forget. though, I'm not all too comfortable to read those either, if I have the book available. (The Wind in the Willows has been sitting on my computer untouched for years, doh) I only ever really used it for high school essays, for all that meticulous mandatory quoting. It felt so nice to just run a search through a file for the page I was looking for.

just, not any pirating of recent books this century. I'd love to pass around some of the horrible novels I've found, show people how terribly written some parts are, for laughs. my very own book club. Like this one book I got out of a bargain bin, which Disney already has plans to adapt into an animated movie.... hrmm!



has anyone read Sayonara, Gangsters by Genichiro Takahashi? I'm afraid to mention it, as possibly it's way too dada-ist and people will hate it and think I have bad taste. but for me, it was the most fun I'd ever had with a novel, and it was before I even started reading Murakami. in a strange way, since I like E. E. Cummings, it was like a novel with a poetic rhythm to the pages. it's mostly post-modern and nonsensical, but in a whimsical psychedelic way, rather than pretensious.

[Hondo]

I've always wanted to read "Cards as Weapons" but alas it is far too much then I'm willing to spend on it. I do keep my eye open for it though.

I'm currently reading "Fragile Things" by Niel Gaiman. Most people I know scoff at his work, but I really like it. I find his ideas fun and strange and I love the personnas he gives to things that nomally wouldn't have one.

Before that I opened "Tuck Everlasting" because I had nothing better to do.

[PianoMap]

I just re-read "The Catcher In the Rye" and that seemed to get me back in the mood for reading things until they're finished. So I'm getting back to Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore", now.

I think 'Catcher in the Rye' is one of the most uplifting books I've ever read.

and I just read Camus' "The Outsider", and I really enjoyed that. I don't really understand where this whole absurdism thing could end up but I love the concept. Right now it seems like something I can get behind. As you mentioned, Dracko, Camus' responds to the question of suicide. Since suicide appears to be the endpoint of nhilism to me, I'd all but ignored it. I've just got no desire to approach that well again. Still though, it's always time for changing perception and things are never so simple.
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[Adilegian]

[boojiboy7]

[Dracko]

People give me weird looks when I say Camus' body of work is optimistic and hopeful, so whatever. There's always something to be found in the worst of situations presented.

[Adilegian]

And now to get this stuff typed. I wrote my response to you in longhand while sitting in a scratched cubicle at the County Public Library on 27 December 2006, but I wanted to sit on the response before committing myself to it. I think I can stand behind it.

I read your post both as what it was—your post explaining your thoughts—and a widely held confusion about what to do with poems. If my response comes off as apologetic (in the ecclesiastical sense), it's because I am, in a way, attempting to justify the ways of poetry to men.

[sync-swim]

The above reminded me of that massive lumbering academic introduction in the poetry textbook of Dead Poets Society that Robin Williams summarily had the students tear out. You'll forgive me if I don't have very much respect for formalism. Prose can be poetic and poetry can be prosaic. Not every culture developed its manners of genre and styles in writing the same way The West has.

Poetry of virtually any stripe or silly school, like music, can be consumed and even admired without rigorous education on How to Appreciate. The question of whether or not one appreciates said stanzas is a lifestyle thing more than anything; the thing that determines what speaks true and what's sophomoric jibba-jabber.

Like Dao, like jazz, you need be at a certain point in your life to understand where the artist's craft is coming from. Once you're at that point, you understand it, digest it with crystal clarity the moment you read the words. Like the Dao, all attempt to define it in formal terms fail, but it rings true in your mind and body with the visceral immediacy of satori.

Like jazz, knowledge of all the complex chord structures, arrangements and time signatures may enhance the depth at which you appreciate the composition, but one can appreciate the song regardless of such stuff.

Just read one of Li Bai's poems, probably better known for its cameo in Alpha Centauri:
"Together we stand
the mountain and I

Until only the mountain is left"

I'd flood this with stuff from Bai Juyi, Charles Wright, Ryokan and Al Young, but I don't have their books with me right now so you lucked out. Instead, like Zhuangzi said: "The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?"

[Intentionally Wrong]

[slipstream]

Of course he couldn't throw the cards hard enough. The learned elders would never show the true power of card throwing to the unwashed masses.
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[boojiboy7]

[rabite gets whacked!]

[Adilegian]

Hi sync-swim!

I don't think that our tastes differ as much as you might have thought.

I use my laptop at a desk with an elevated second shelf, and I place all the books that I am currently reading (or that I plan to return to) upon that shelf. It currently holds:

Country Music: the Early Poems (Charles Wright)
Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Paul Fussell)
The Strength of Poetry (James Fenton)
Selected Poems (James Applewhite)
The Selected Poems of Li Po (David Hinton, translator)
New and Collected Poems (Richard Wilbur)
Remembering the Kanji I (James Heisig)
The Glass House: the Life of Theodore Roethke (Allen Seager)
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shunryu Suzuki)
The Kid Who Wanted to Be a Spaceman (Jack Butler)
Old English Grammar and Reader (Robert Diamond)
A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (J. R Clark Hall)
Mountain Home: the Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (David Hinton, translator)
The Clouds Float North: the Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji (David Young and Jiann I. Lin, translators)
Brink Road: Poems (A. R. Ammons)

I don't present this list to drop names but to illustrate that I appreciate poetry from Asian cultures as well as Occidental. Poetry has been my greatest love, aside from people, and I would never cleave myself from literary pleasure by a blade as dull as a principle. The building blocks of principles—standards—can be pretty useful, though.

On to specific responses: