08-15-2012, 04:28 AM | #61 | |
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But, yes, I feel I get him too, straight to the centrebrain like an icepick of enlightenment. I've not read Ulysses by James Joyce, but I will, as I've read excerpts and I got the very same sense that I get from Hunter S. Thompson, but better. Finnegan's Wake may be more difficult. Cheers, Marc |
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08-15-2012, 08:41 AM | #62 | ||
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Burroughs and Ginsberg also talk about assembling Interzone from a Sargasso Sea of notebooks and tattered papers (some of which might originally have been attached to a cardboard roll! (jk)), and mention that, without Kerouac and his prodigious typing skills, that book would not exist. The film Naked Lunch worked in part because Cronenberg's own fetishes are far from those of Burroughs -- he needed the distance from the subject, I think, to give the film those levels (there's a lot of carefree finger-painting with feces in the book). I've always thought his adaptation of Crash wasn't nearly as good because C's impulses got the better of him. He and Ballard seem to have the exact same fetishes, with Ballard being the more objective of the two. Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 08-15-2012 at 12:49 PM. |
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08-15-2012, 09:00 AM | #63 |
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I also wanted to say that To the Lighthouse isn't at all difficult in terms of meaning and I love the way V. Woolf writes stylistically.
What I find most tedious are books without any music in the style, and Woolf and Joyce were both musicians. Instead of endlessly asserting that only pompous asses could possibly like [Insert name of book by Joyce, Woolf, etc.], why not try this little exercise in empathy? If you're a fan of Game of Thrones, then substitute the title of any book by George R. R. Martin for the one you're criticizing and imagine crowds of people calling you a vast inflated rectum of self-importance. Consider how it feels to be vilified in the abstract simply because you enjoy reading a work of fiction. None of the other books cited in the OP are as difficult as Finnegan's Wake. People who have trouble with FW should try the earlier versions in Pynch's epub edition of the Collected Works (available on this very site for free). A friend of mine even insists that the earlier versions of FW are better. In his view, Joyce's overarching ambition left him nothing to do after writing his last novel than to squander his remaining days packing in more unnecessary layers. To quote the great Ron Kolm (after a few drinks), "He couldn't exactly follow that up with a cookbook." Asserting that any of the layers in Joyce are unnecessary is a hard sell to those who've spent time decoding them, but here's my question: How many writers genuinely picked up where Joyce left off in FW, let alone, did something memorable with the exercise? You can think of writers who were influenced by Joyce (Thomas, Levertov and O'Brien, for example), but how many went as far as or further than he did? And beyond the difficulty of FW, how many of us thought we'd ever reach a single reader if we tried to imitate it? Far more people have imitated Joyce's great student, Samuel Beckett (who is also supposed to be difficult but isn't). Despite my admiration for late Joyce and belief in studying him, the better models have always seemed to me to be Bernhard and late Beckett for music, Nabokov for style, precision and structure, and Borges for readable compression. That's not counting earlier Joyce, however, which every student ought to try to study (Portrait, Dubliners, etc.). Borges: Now there's a supposedly difficult writer who loved genre fiction and tried his best never to bore anyone. In terms of texture, Gertrude Stein can be difficult semantically but has the syntax and diction of a fractured nursery rhyme. Another book I might add to the difficult list is Derrida's Glas (here's a page from the English translation), which isn't terribly hard to follow in terms of the actual writing, but imitates the anarchic layout which any page of text had for Derrida himself. The author, you see, was severely dyslexic. Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 08-15-2012 at 01:01 PM. |
07-07-2013, 01:48 PM | #64 | ||
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This one's for Pynch -- a rather incisive review/essay by Lynn Tillman:
Reconsidering Gertrude Stein Quote:
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07-07-2013, 02:19 PM | #65 |
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I seam to me that a good book is an easy one. It's mean to tell a story / deliver information, not to be a pain to read.
Then there is of course the fact that that language evolves though time. |
07-07-2013, 07:01 PM | #66 | |
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The reader's intention comes into play later, in terms of selecting which books to read. We can likely agree that that is essentially a personal choice and that absolute taste does not exist. The problem is when any group of people assume their taste is normative: When those who prefer an easier (or harder) style would impose their preferences on everyone else. That happened famously in Germany in the '40s (to all the arts and not just lit, of course), but it continues to happen today wherever a group of people assume they have the right to tell everyone else how to write and what to read. Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 07-08-2013 at 04:12 PM. |
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07-09-2013, 02:34 AM | #67 | ||
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Thanks for the link, Prestidigitweeze, it’s an interesting essay. This phrase Quote:
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07-09-2013, 05:05 AM | #68 | |
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07-09-2013, 05:30 AM | #69 | |
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07-09-2013, 07:42 AM | #70 | |
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Maybe because it was using many words that referred to distinctly Chinese concepts it was increasing the amount of unique words - like your animal book example. |
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07-09-2013, 07:14 PM | #71 |
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And it apparantly starts with the title already.
Sorry, couldn't resist I didn't think that book was hard, but then again, I'm I die-hard Tolkien fan, who re-reads all of of his books every so often One day, I must get that "History of Middle-Earth" series. About Ulysses... do people mean the novel by James Joyce or The Odyssey by Homer? I haven't read the first, the second is on my To Re-Read list. (I read it in English, a long tie ago; in school, actually.) Last edited by Katsunami; 07-10-2013 at 11:03 AM. |
07-10-2013, 04:17 AM | #72 |
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Neither did I, but I see where it can be if you come to it expecting something LOTR-ish. It's not, and it's not meant to be; it's more the mythology underpinning it, if anything.
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07-10-2013, 12:08 PM | #73 |
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I don't know how many times I have tried to read Delany's Dhalgren but it is at least a dozen and I just cannot make it past 20 pages or so. I've read Paradise Lost and, of course, Moby Dick. Milton is just a PITA and odd so I agree there about Paradise Lost. Read as a class though it was at least a bit interesting. I actually quite liked Moby Dick and did not find it a tough read as a pre-teen.
Hands down impossible reads for me would be Homer. Illiad & Odyssey are, to me, totally incomprehensible to the point of inducing the need for therapy. |
01-14-2014, 01:11 AM | #74 |
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On the back of my copy of One of Our Conquerors by George Meredith,
it says it is arguably the most difficult book with the possible exception of Finnegan's Wake. I've heard that James Branch Cabell's books can be quite difficult, because they have a lot of obscure references in them. |
01-15-2014, 07:23 AM | #75 | |
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FW is indeed more poetry than prose. Metalinguistic experiments with form and narrative. And it certainly has predecessors like Lewis Carroll. BTW, upon reading this thread went on to read the first 5 chapters of To the Lighthouse. Another experiment in narrative where things are not quite told , but rather inferred from the thoughts by the multilayered points of view of characters, which turns the reading as fun as unfolding Sherlock Holmes mysteries. There is a story there, but it's not the simplistic family-goes-to-a-lighthouse as I've heard some people diss it before... |
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