The Gamer's Quarter

[seryogin]

Dudes, I think Shaper is great.

I just wanted to say that somewhere.
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[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

[helicopterp]

I finished Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. It left me unimpressed. The style was ultra-scientific/rationalist/accurate. If it was parody, and I hope it was, then I wish Poe had either handled it more delicately or blown it out of proportion into absurdity; it occupied instead a very ambiguous space in between. If it was serious, I shudder for his legions of devotees.

Having effectively dispatched with Poe (and eschewing the traditional means for the accomplishment thereof involving Baltimore gutters and inebriation), I trained my sights at that other Leviathan of 19th century American literature, Mr. Herman Melville. I have sallied a full fifth of the way forth into the monstrous Moby Dick, and report to you with glee that it may be, once I draw its back cover leftward to a close, the best novel I have ever read. No amount of fair warning could have prepared me for its surprising readability. In fact, since my last major novel (in terms of both length and reputation in the English language canon), Ulysses, is vehemently and self-righteously unreadable for significant portions, Melville's work seems all the more an elegantly constructed narrative. Hyperbole reigns in Moby Dick, in style, subject, and spirit. The way Ishmael narrates--he is above all else the Orator of the Ordinary, exalting the minutiae of his experience in a style rhetorically reminiscent of Edmund Burke, whom he admires, advocating the worth of the story he tells as a pillar of humanity--becomes a bloated extension of that whale who looms in briney majesty over every paragraph.

It really is a marvel. I haven't even been introduced to Ahab yet (but I will be in the next chapter, if I am to believe its title).
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[dhex]

moby dick is the best book about god (much in the same way that conan the barbarian is the best movie about jesus). (yer wrong about ulysses though).

as a changeup i'm reading the power of babel by john mcwhorter. it's fun!
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[Scratchmonkey]

Moby Dick is the shizzat. The best metaphysical book ever?

McWhorter is pretty damn interesting in his own right.

[helicopterp]

[dhex]

ok well i can dig into this in serious depth if you like (unfairly i must admit: my wife is a doctoral candidate in english and irish modernism) but i can say shortly that ithaca is fucking hilarious. dude, the whole thing is a frigging catechism! he's so drunk he's unable to think in anything but jesuit!

oh wait if you're not catholic you might not find it very funny.

if anything the whorehouse play is far more tedious in my book (the book of the law!)
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[helicopterp]

There's nothing unfair about it. It isn't as if I didn't read the thing under the direction of a professor. Plus, there can only be unfairness if we are to consider this discussion some sort of contest, which I certainly do not.

I get (read: have been told before, since I am not catholic and did not pick up on it myself) that it's catechism. I understand that the concept of writing a whole episode as catechism is hilarious (although Bloom, the person on whom most of the questions and answers hinge, is not at all drunk). The joke is not lost on me; the execution, however, is painstaking. Joyce regurgitates with scrupulous precision a superfluous bounty of facts facts facts, all laden with the most niche jargon imaginable in the fields of astronomy, physics, linguistics, etc. He calculates ages by obscene mathematical formulas. He provides Bloom's daily account, listing each deposit and deduction--well, almost, since Bloom lies a little bit. These and many more constitute the ingredients necessary to concoct overwhelming tedium. I therefore hold that "Ithaca"--and for other reasons I would include with it both "Eumaeus" and...the third chapter, last of Stephen's, the name escapes me--is defiantly unreadable. It is still intensely interesting, even wonderful. However, none of that reward can take anything away from its laborious style, nor from the immense effort required to slog through it.

Now, dhex, I hope you'll throw your best my way. I wouldn't have engaged you, of all people, in a talk about Ulysses if I had wanted only to toss about careless remarks.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[helicopterp]

P.S. I thought the whorehouse play a rollicking good time!
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[dhex]

i just meant its unfair cause i can outsource the work to her.

also i find out horrible things like these nerds call the middle six chapters of ulysses "the bloomiad" which is just so dorky it made me cry.

anyway, i don't really have much of a defense for that chapter beyond it's supposed to be that way. i think it makes a difference that having read a catechism uh, under duress, and trying to imagine a culture where a half-jewish man was force-fed such a method of teaching from an alien religion gets so drunk and has such an adventurous day that he devolves into an itemized list of the moral and financial implications of everything in a drawer. admittedly, i have a somewhat bent sense of humor, but i don't see it as being deliberately tedious beyond adapting a somewhat tedious form, and making it magic.

eumeus has a nice lilt to it, and showcases the most amazing thing about mr. joyce's work, his sense of banter and dialect. not my favorite chapter, though. cyclops is definitely up there, though.

to be fair, at the close of each re-reading, i walk away thinking "jesus, molly bloom's a real bitch." despite being married to a somewhat sympathetic, somewhat useless creepy pervert sad-sack.

also, whoa:

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rac101/concord/texts/ulysses/ulysses.cgi?word=Ulysses

and i really don't get that stuff about buck mulligan being gay. i really don't. (my household is such that this can spark an argument at nearly any time)
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[Dracko]

I really missed the mark with my Virgil course. As I've told my tutor, I have a hard time taking either The Aeneid or Dante's The Divine Comedy seriously. He's sympathetic, but here I am trying not to mess up with my essay like I did the first one, on the subject of Virgil as a character in The Divine Comedy. I'm hoping to argue that Dante's choice of guide is far from gratuitous in the sense that Virgil also comes out with something through the journey as well.

Once I'm done with that, I'll be back to re-reading a variety of contemporary plays for my exam on the matter - Sarah Kane being a favourite of mine, and Cryptonomicon. I'm only 150 pages in on it, but by God, it's charming and clever and so completely readable.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[helicopterp]

I never heard a thing about Buck Mulligan being gay. I mean, he's funny. Like, haha funny. But I never heard anyone argue that he's game.

Someone please explain hypertext to me.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Shapermc]

[Dracko]

Well, The Divine Comedy features an almost gratuitous inclusion of Virgil, as well as generally being just a way for Dante to get his own back at political figures of his age, and is not as terrifying or awe-inspiring as its depiction would like to be. In a lot of ways, the imagery can be fairly trite, though this may be due to it being cannibalised for so long over the ages.

Now, I realise I may come off as somewhat intellectually dishonest here, and I wouldn't want people to get the impression that I didn't enjoy reading it, but I didn't come off with the sort of philosophical insight, let alone spiritual revelation, that it seems people told me I would. Or perhaps I can't get into it.

In a way, what I'm trying to do with this new essay is get over it. See, I can understand all the points made to me about structure and such, I admire its place in history, but on a personal level, a lot of it is ridiculous. What I'm going for here is exploring Virgil as Dante's salvation, Dante as Virgil's recollection. And surely Virgil has to gain from the journey through Hell and Purgatory as well?

As for The Aeneid, it's almost too self-contradictory even by Roman standards. Self-conflicted, I'd say. The ending is great, however, but is just another symptom of just how radical the contrasts are.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Shapermc]

[dhex]

the contemporary politics part of the divine comedy is what's most divine about it.

never has revenge been so fleshed out.
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[Dracko]

Dripping Wet, by Stacy Garratt and Nikki Cook. Genre subversion after genre subversions, in 28 panels. Not work safe.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dessgeega]

that is pretty nifty.

i am reading zami: a new spelling of my name after having it on my bookshelf for years. it is probably one of the most amazing books i have ever read. i am using the contra: hard corps bookmarks (all the bookmarks i ever use are gamer's quarter bookmarks. i have like a bunch of these things).
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[Dracko]

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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dessgeega]

i'm reading masters of doom. the story is fascinating but the writing is so artless. so much is explained by crude analogy that would be better left ambiguous. lots of details are gratingly wrong, presumably to better serve the narrative; the author is writing to an audience he presumes has no knowledge of these things, but i do, and it bugs me.
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[Dracko]

Salman Rushdie receives a knighthood, Iran protests and claims Britain is insulting Islam.

Trying to save face over the stupidest of things.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Scratchmonkey]

Stayed up until nearly 5 in the morning to finish In Cold Blood. The most fascinating part of it was the role played by Capote himself -- he's never explicitly mentioned in the book (although he slyly refers to himself a number of times); however, he exists just as plainly as the people that are in the book because you can feel his presence as literary negative space, somebody who's never mentioned except that you know they're there because of how it affects those people who are talked about.

[helicopterp]

Neat!

My reading has been boring lately. I need to read a real book again.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Swimmy]

I started Infinite Jest.

This is going to be trouble.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[seryogin]

I picked up Against the Day for fifty scents at the library. This would be the third time that I have tried reading a Pynchon novel.

After ten pages I left my apartment, walked over to the trash and flung the book down the garbage chute.

I'm getting really pissed off here, folks. Someone please explain why Pynchon is supposed to be good. As far as I can see, he's all about cheap literary posturing and really dull wordplays and unfunny jokes.

I'll still try reading V. one of these days, if I can find it for fifty cents somewhere, only because dhex said it was good.
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[Scratchmonkey]

Have you tried Gravity's Rainbow? That and V. were the only ones I was really able to read.

[dhex]

i think he's funny. mason and dixon made me laugh a lot. it was frustrating, but worth it.

sorry.
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[seryogin]

[not a zombie]

[Harveyjames]

[Crazy Bacon Lips]

I've blown through roughly half of The Watchmen in two days. I've . . . never though of comics this way before. Recently, I started Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but I have the sinking feeling that it's not worth reading. I still like it, although sometimes I feel that the precious few books I read in my life should be life-altering pieces of literature.

[Dracko]

Four Conceptions of the Page
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[GSL]

[Crazy Bacon Lips]

I plowed through Wonderland, realizing that no, it wasn't an incredible piece of literature, but I still had FUN reading it. That's never happened before!

My roommate has a Barnes and Noble Classics edition of Kafka's Metamorphoses and other short works, and on the back it says something like "I think we should only read the works that stab and wound us," and at first I thought that perhaps he was insane, but no, no he isn't. I've never seen a movie with a happy ending that I genuinely liked, and I've never consumed any positive-attitude media that effected me in a positive way.

Off of the suggestion of absolutely no one, I picked up Gravity's Rainbow. I enjoy it because it takes me roughly 20 minutes of general confusion for the rhythm of the text to click. When it does, I feel like I am a little neutral conscience sitting on the shoulder of every character in the book, influencing and understanding their thoughts and actions.

Yeah!

Intentionally Wrong, I will search for the Sot-Weed Factor around town, and if I see it, I will pick it up.

[Crazy Bacon Lips]

I want to do a book-exchange thing, wherein we all decide to read a book, but only one of us technically owns it. S/he reads it, sends it to the next person who asks, and so on, until the book is a battered scrap of paper, its pages clinging to one another with microbes of glue, coffee stains and finger grease wrinkling every page.

Suggestions?

[simplicio]

[Scratchmonkey]

Just finished Will Storr vs. The Supernatural. Regardless of whether you agree with his various conclusions, he does a good job of allowing you to disagree without feeling churlish about it and the book is pretty entertaining and brisk -- I finished it in an evening with time to spare.

Now if only the Joe Matt book I'd ordered would show up...I have a real weakness for autobiographical comics and he's probably my favorite just because he seems to treat it as some extreme form of therapy/confessional booth (for intance, one of his strips is about getting a handjob from a crackhead in a porno theater).

[dhex]

been re-reading a lot of fiction.

- death on the installment plan
- the godfather and fools die (puzo had moments of sublimity)
- black spring
- the baroque cycle

kinda fun. long though. novels tend to be really long.

edit: also, the funniest part of installment plan is the seasickness sequence at the beginning, pages upon pages of people vomiting on each other. it may be the earliest literary example of *extreme* gross out humor.
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[Crazy Bacon Lips]

[GSL]

Stop complaining. Just read it and pass it on.

[seryogin]

Death on the Installment Plan has one of best beginnings I've ever read.

At the moment, I'm reading Death in Venice.
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[not a zombie]

I've started reading The Dog Fighter by Marc Bojanowski. It's Hemingway-esque almost to the point of nausea but the premise (see title) is captivating enough to keep me going.

[helicopterp]

"The title of this book would justify the inclusion of Prince Hamlet, the point, the line, the plane, the hypercube, all generic nouns, and, perhaps, each one of us and the divinity as well. In sum, virtually the entire universe."
--from the Foreword to The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

This book is one of the most beautiful and daring pieces of literature I have ever encountered.

[dessgeega]

i just finished reading angela carter's the bloody chamber.

i liked it.
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[simplicio]

[seryogin]

[Isfet]

i've been going through books that i purchased for college classes but that we never ended up reading. i just finished The Trial and i have to say that i really enjoyed myself with that one. the matter-of-fact way that Kafka writes just really delivers the bizarre scenarios in a great light.

i'm about to start reading The Cossacks. it was another story in this small collection that i have, where initially i had read The Death of Ivan Ilyich. i have no idea if it will be good, but we shall see.

[not a zombie]

[dhex]

love in the time of cholera is good. no worries.

i have not yet started the new pynchon yet. i will at some point next week.

i will report back.
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