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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
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Location: Occupied Stalingrad
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 Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2006 11:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Shapermc wrote: | Seryogin, I am going to do my best here, but I am not an expert lit analisyst, and even futher from the field of Japanese lit. SO!
Murakami's work is not about the begining or the end. At all. After the Quake exemplifies this. It is about leaving the character as blank a slate as possible for you to project yourself onto. It is about the Journey, not the end. There is also something about his wit that I really like (and I like deadpan, so...). South of the Borader, West of the Sun is a book about how you deal with relationships. He goes to the extent of completly throwing out the begining and the end of the story and only really giving you the journey. I will frequently not finish books with only about one chapter left because I don't want to know how it ends.
He also has (as you state) an uncanny ability to get inside the head of someone who is very average in somewhat odd situations. I really like this. I would have to guess that he is the [REMOVED FOR INDECENCY] of Japan: putting fairly average into witty and silly situations that are almost dreamlike.
Honestly if you make the same points you made in a positive spin that is exactly why I like it. So, I guess you can roll you eyes or something. I have also not read a great deal of his work and did not really like where Wind Up Bird was going at the very end.
All that said, I am going to look into Yukio Mishima. |
It seems that Murakami’s books are not so much about how you deal with relationships, but about how Murakami deals with the fictional relationships of his characters—as in unrealistically and filled with that wistful wish fulfillment that plagues most modern anything. I don’t know what your relationships have been like, Shaper, but my first love, whom I still pine after pitifully, didn’t end with my girlfriend finding me a few years after the fact and blowing me with an envelope full of cash in her purse. I’m sure she’s fucking with some Orange Revolution bastard, his breath stinking of gorilka, somewhere in the Ukraine right now having forgotten me along with so much rubbish, while I meditate pathetically over my keyboard, penis in hand. To make things clearer, how come his characters never have an argument, how come every time they seem to come to a disagreement, they develop some oxymoronically annoying consensus about whatever it is they were speaking about? How come there never seems to be any pain to any of them? In fact, if any pain ever does appear in a Murakami novel it’s not real pain, as in the pain that strikes like a dagger-thrust to the heart, but the pain that one receives from an inoculation shot: sterilized, quickly administered, and promptly forgotten. Honestly, I’ve seen more pathos generated by the Tenchi movies or a random Japanese pop song.
Why is it that most Murakami books have women lusting after their narrators, and how come the narrators ward off this attention with all the conviction of a born-again-nerd? How come these uninteresting salarymen get to go on so many adventures? Might his inability to produce any kind of tragic sense in the reader be the reason for his popularity? Might the very essence of his books rest on being a homeopathic remedy that seeks to instill that the lives of the men who work for the tedious, soul and will eating office machine might have some meaning? Might then it be assumed that his books are a willful escape from life? With the superficial sadness of his narratives merely window-dressing for the dark message of the greatness of willed mediocrity?
That his characters are a “blank slate” is not something one should flaunt, for they exist because Murakami lacks the invention to conceive a character that’s in any way unlike or hostile to his bourgeois sensibility. They’re boring everymen, made more boring by Murakami’s own painfully dull and assured worldview (which doesn’t mean that great everyman can’t be great characters when in the right hands; Philip K. Dick’s Barney Mayerson comes to mind). Murakami understands that his characters are boring, that’s why he injects his books with trademark “weirdness,” his imagination and landscape is so blandly narrow that he has to do something--anything-- to keep his narrative, which slogs through with all the gusto of a snail crossing the sidewalk, from shriveling up in the sun (Hard-Boiled Wonderland being the only finely and quickly plotted book in his bibliography).
As a counterexample why don’t we look at “Moonlight Shadows” a short story by Banana Yoshimoto, published along with her novel Kitchen. It’s more haunting, painful, and utterly beautiful than anything Murakami has ever written (with “A Slow Boat to China” perhaps being an exception) that uses exactly the same tools as Murakami does: wistful longing through a first person narrator, “weirdness” (in her case exemplified by a boy who refuses to stop wearing his girlfriend’s school uniform after her death), and a sad resolve to the ways of this world. Yoshimoto manages to make all of these elements glue together into a concise, measured symphony that ends convincingly hopeful, with a nice memorable twist of the knife in the end. Her story works because her narrative doesn’t strike me as being composed of lies, that I'm reading a piece of human truth and not another press release from the world's mediocrities, telling me not to get excited, to continue living as a house-pet, that the world of the offices has beaten the world of the berserkers and there's nothing you can do about it.
| Quote: | | And I guess I would say that I like Murakami because I do find it strangely optimistic and comforting in the sense that the books are centered around the beauty and strength of interpersonal relationships. |
I don’t see how. Give me a few examples. Without that much-flaunted weirdness his relationships are no more hopeful, interesting, or profound than the typical superficial relationships that most people sadly spend their lives in. All the truly great human relationships I’ve formed and lost over the years have been the result of circumstance and extraordinary situations. And they weren’t as trite as the ones that Murakami has his characters having.
I guess my biggest problem with the man is that I don’t believe him.
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Scratchmonkey
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Joined: 02 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 3:00 am Post subject: |
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| seryogin wrote: | | Quote: | | And I guess I would say that I like Murakami because I do find it strangely optimistic and comforting in the sense that the books are centered around the beauty and strength of interpersonal relationships. |
I don’t see how. Give me a few examples. Without that much-flaunted weirdness his relationships are no more hopeful, interesting, or profound than the typical superficial relationships that most people sadly spend their lives in. All the truly great human relationships I’ve formed and lost over the years have been the result of circumstance and extraordinary situations. And they weren’t as trite as the ones that Murakami has his characters having. |
Have you read "Norwegian Wood"? It's light on the weird, heavy on the people. They're still lonely, pathetic people, so you might not like it anyway.
Also: I now think my earlier quote is BS. I'm not sure that I can tell you why, exactly, I enjoy reading Murakami. I do know that I should stop posting at this time of night/morning. |
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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
Posts: 886
Location: Occupied Stalingrad
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 10:13 am Post subject: |
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| Scratchmonkey wrote: | | seryogin wrote: | | Quote: | | And I guess I would say that I like Murakami because I do find it strangely optimistic and comforting in the sense that the books are centered around the beauty and strength of interpersonal relationships. |
I don’t see how. Give me a few examples. Without that much-flaunted weirdness his relationships are no more hopeful, interesting, or profound than the typical superficial relationships that most people sadly spend their lives in. All the truly great human relationships I’ve formed and lost over the years have been the result of circumstance and extraordinary situations. And they weren’t as trite as the ones that Murakami has his characters having. |
Have you read "Norwegian Wood"? It's light on the weird, heavy on the people. They're still lonely, pathetic people, so you might not like it anyway.
Also: I now think my earlier quote is BS. I'm not sure that I can tell you why, exactly, I enjoy reading Murakami. I do know that I should stop posting at this time of night/morning. |
I mean, hell, there's nothing wrong with liking Murakami. I'm just trying to get across why I don't like him and looking for someone to convincingly explain why they enjoy what he does.
There's also nothing wrong with pathetic, lonely characters in novels. My problem comes from the way Murakami handles these characters; the implicit message that I get from them.
I have read the first few chapter of Norwegian Wood and didn't really like them. It was the last time I attempted to read a book by Murakami. I had decided to resume reading Murakami after reading a way-too-derivative memoir by Dmitry Kovalevin, Murakami's first populizer and translator in Russia, called Sushi Noir, which deals with his journey to Japan to interview Murakami and also serves as a rather exhaustive study of H.M.'s novels.
And while I enjoyed certain bits, I walked away displeased with too much. After reading those first few chapters it became way too much of an effort to continue reading without wincing. I just didn't like the assumptions that one had to have to enjoy his books. So I just returned to Kono Taeko (one of the finer, sadomasochistically-inclined authors of modern Japan) and Yukio Mishima.
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GSL
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Joined: 16 Nov 2005
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 6:46 pm Post subject: |
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It seems like you're pretty set against liking his works already - which is fine, it just makes it hard for someone to present a compelling argument for the author. You've pretty much stated that you don't like the qualities of his writing - the same qualities that most fans love - so odds are nobody's going to say anything that will change your mind. But that's the nature of books - one man's Murakami is another man's Dan Brown.
I personally like his writing because it evokes feelings I can relate to. In nearly every one of his stories, the character is a relative nobody - a college dropout, working some lousy low-level job, or just flat-out unemployed. There's a feeling of being trapped in a crummy routine that just can't be broken - and the inevitable breaking of that routine into something utterly alien once the wheels of a typical Murakami story get turning. And at the end there seems to me to be a kind of acceptance, once the weirdness is over: acceptance of being a nobody, of a crummy routine and a directionless life. But the most striking thing is that the main character seems to reach the ending with a certain amount of grace. There's a resolve I guess I see in the main character - sure, he's still as directionless as ever, or he cheated on his wife, or whatever, but he just seems more willing to take what comes his way and roll with it, make the most out of it.
Like Shaper, I'm no literary analyst either, so obviously I present a view that could be called neither 'compelling' nor 'an argument'. Tastes in literature are fairly subjective though, and once you've read something and determined you don't like it, it's pretty hard for anyone else to change that first impression.
Granted, there are some things about Murakami (or at least, his English-translated works) that I don't care for, either. The frank and fairly up-front nature of the various sexual trysts that often appear as slight plot devices always manage to disturb me. In that regard, I think Pinball, 1973 is one of my favorite Murakami novels because the narrator spends the length of the book living with a pair of twin girls in a simply platonic relationship. I also have a slight problem with Alfred Birnbaum's translation style, as he comes across a bit drier and more choppy than the original Japanese. |
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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
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Location: Occupied Stalingrad
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 7:30 pm Post subject: |
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I don’t understand why people assume I’m a literary critic. I took two mandatory courses in rhetoric and criticism in college (courses which didn’t teach me a single worthwhile thing about reading or writing) and that was it. Everything I know about books comes from reading and experience.
For what it’s worth, I don’t hate Murakami. Compared to the wealth of literary charlatans polluting the world today he’s relatively harmless. And I actually like Burnbaum’s translations best.
And, well, your response is exactly the type of reaction I was looking for here. You honestly and elegantly wrote exactly why you like Murakami’s books. Reading your response almost makes me feel ashamed for being so rough on him. It reminded me exactly why I somewhat enjoyed many parts of his books (particularly South of the Border, West of Sun and Hear the Wind Sing). It’s made it clear why I’ve stuck with his books over the years even if they have proven consistently irksome for the most part.
| Quote: | | I personally like his writing because it evokes feelings I can relate to. In nearly every one of his stories, the character is a relative nobody - a college dropout, working some lousy low-level job, or just flat-out unemployed. There's a feeling of being trapped in a crummy routine that just can't be broken - and the inevitable breaking of that routine into something utterly alien once the wheels of a typical Murakami story get turning. And at the end there seems to me to be a kind of acceptance, once the weirdness is over: acceptance of being a nobody, of a crummy routine and a directionless life. But the most striking thing is that the main character seems to reach the ending with a certain amount of grace. There's a resolve I guess I see in the main character - sure, he's still as directionless as ever, or he cheated on his wife, or whatever, but he just seems more willing to take what comes his way and roll with it, make the most out of it. |
You’re absolutely right. Yet this is precisely why I have spent so much time accusing him of villainy. It’s that lie that gets me. Writing about a loser stuck in a dead-end routine, who has something weird and strange and unsettling happen to him, is a lie. At the moment my lot is horrid, depressing and not subject to change anytime soon. That’s why I don’t have the patience to have my hopes raised again, especially not by someone I find as boring as H. M.
Oddly enough, the way you’ve described H. M. seems to correspond exactly to the way I’ve spent my summer. Which began with me stuck in a hopelessly pitiful routine, and then found me going on an unexpected adventure after a chance encounter with a strange girl I met. I even wrote a novel about it.
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Mister Toups
Hates your favorite videogame
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 8:22 pm Post subject: |
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You're such a communist sergei.
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seryogin
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 8:26 pm Post subject: |
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How so?
And, well, I'm not, you know. I'm what we call a "red nationalist" in Russia; a loyalist to the Soviet cause, which, while it uses Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, is firmly grounded in the nationalist tradition.
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dhex
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 8:29 pm Post subject: |
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you should read the tsognomicon.
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Mister Toups
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 10:04 pm Post subject: |
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Just your comments about Murakami. It just struck me as uh... having a communist tone, in an admittedly stereotypical sense.
Some of us like to have dreams and fantasies like that, comrade.
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Shapermc
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 10:17 pm Post subject: |
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| seryogin wrote: | | (Hard-Boiled Wonderland being the only finely and quickly plotted book in his bibliography). |
This probably sums things up a lot. That was the first book of his I read. Then I read Wind Up Bird (which I got almost done with but never finished). Then South of the Border, then After the Quake. I loved Hard Boiled so much that I keep hoping for that to happen again. Wind Up Bird hits a point where it stops being the same novel anymore and it lost me. South of the Border ended up being very different from the other two, so I read it on its own merit and enjoyed it dispite myself. After the Quake was just H.M. masturbating I think, more like a bunch of things he wrote to get through a tough part of his life. Next I shal read Wild Sheep Chase.
I also wanted to point something out about his "weirdness." It is not just that it is weird, it is also that it relates to some overarching secrete that we are not let in on. Which goes from making it weird to bizarre and mysterious. Why does the narator have that odd birth mark? How do the two storys connect? How did he get into the sewer system? Where did the girl dissapear to, and was she even real? Not so much that they are weird, but that we don't know why they happen or if they did.
So, yea, that aside, I agree with a lot of St. Louis' remarks too. |
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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 10:32 pm Post subject: |
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| Mister Toups wrote: |
Just your comments about Murakami. It just struck me as uh... having a communist tone, in an admittedly stereotypical sense.
Some of us like to have dreams and fantasies like that, comrade. |
It's still not clear. You can, with a stretch, read Nietzscheanism into my comments, were so you inclined. Though I still don't understand how communism has anyhting to do with it.
Perhaps you mean Stalinist? Which would, of course, make sense were I an NKVD colonel in Lubyanka and not a jobless loser with a freelance assignment due tomorrow, which I have no desire at all to write, posting on an internet forum dealing with videogames.
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Mister Toups
Hates your favorite videogame
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 11:09 pm Post subject: |
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I um, have a poor understanding of communism?
I don't know, it's hard to explain. Just the idea that it's wrong to have fiction which writes about fantastical things happening to ordinary people strikes me as, uh... well, I guess fascist is maybe more the word I'm looking for.
In conclusion, I'm sick right now and my brain is fried so maybe you shouldn't take what I'm saying too seriously okaysorry.
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seryogin
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 11:26 pm Post subject: |
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| Mister Toups wrote: | I um, have a poor understanding of communism?
I don't know, it's hard to explain. Just the idea that it's wrong to have fiction which writes about fantastical things happening to ordinary people strikes me as, uh... well, I guess fascist is maybe more the word I'm looking for.
In conclusion, I'm sick right now and my brain is fried so maybe you shouldn't take what I'm saying too seriously okaysorry. |
What’s next in the long line of epithets? “Gay” perhaps?
Honestly, Andrew, it’s hard to take you seriously when you base your opinions on such crude misreadings.
I never said that it’s somehow wrong to have fantastical things happen to ordinary people in novels—I am a science fiction fan after all—my disapproval comes from the way Murakami writes about such things. In that I find his version of the fantastic mundane and shallow.
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GSL
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Joined: 16 Nov 2005
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Location: Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 4:43 am Post subject: |
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| seryogin wrote: | | You’re absolutely right. Yet this is precisely why I have spent so much time accusing him of villainy. It’s that lie that gets me. Writing about a loser stuck in a dead-end routine, who has something weird and strange and unsettling happen to him, is a lie. At the moment my lot is horrid, depressing and not subject to change anytime soon. That’s why I don’t have the patience to have my hopes raised again, especially not by someone I find as boring as H. M. |
You make a good point - in real life, it's a fairly uncommon occurrance to have lousy fortunes turned upside down by commonplace events, much less by the spectacular. I guess, though, that it's this sort of escapist fantasy that draws me not just to Murakami, but decently written fiction in general. It sounds like one of those cheesy posters you'd see on the walls of the children's section of the public library that proudly proclaim, "EXPLORE NEW WORLDS THROUGH READING!", but for the most part it's the truth.
| ShaperMC wrote: | | Next I shal read Wild Sheep Chase. |
To be honest, I liked Wild Sheep Chase much better than South Of The Border. It's actually the third in a four-part series beginning with Hear The Wind Sing, followed by Pinball, 1973, and ending with Dance, Dance, Dance. The first two books were - oddly enough - published in English only in Japan, as part of a series by Kodansha designed to help Japanese readers improve their English or something. Both are long out of print, and while Hear The Wind Sing (Murakami's first novel, incidentally) is found easily enough on eBay, the English translation of Pinball is ridiculously uncommon, with the book fetching prices of $80 and up. A university library with some sort of inter-library loan system is a good way to get your hands on a copy for reading - that's the route I went. Barring that, I found the complete text on some Japanese fan's website; while I'm not sure of the legality or policy behind the posting of such links, it's yours if you want it.
Wild Sheep I thought felt a lot like Wind-Up Bird in a good way, and odds are if you liked one, you'll like the other. Hear The Wind and Pinball contain little to none of the otherworldly oddness characteristic in Murakami's later novels and tend to carry more of a wistfully nostalgic, "Gee, remember back when, and what it was like, and isn't it a shame we can never really go back?"-type of theme.
Murakami aside, I am now reading The Descent by Jeff Long, which is a strange novel in which Hell is actually a physical place on - or actually, in - Earth. The whole idea is pretty bizarre, but I feel compelled to read through it every two years or so. If anyone else has read it, please speak up, because I've not come across another human being who admits to having done so. |
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Mister Toups
Hates your favorite videogame
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 1693
Location: Lafayette, LA
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 9:57 am Post subject: |
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| seryogin wrote: | | Mister Toups wrote: | I um, have a poor understanding of communism?
I don't know, it's hard to explain. Just the idea that it's wrong to have fiction which writes about fantastical things happening to ordinary people strikes me as, uh... well, I guess fascist is maybe more the word I'm looking for.
In conclusion, I'm sick right now and my brain is fried so maybe you shouldn't take what I'm saying too seriously okaysorry. |
What’s next in the long line of epithets? “Gay” perhaps?
Honestly, Andrew, it’s hard to take you seriously when you base your opinions on such crude misreadings.
I never said that it’s somehow wrong to have fantastical things happen to ordinary people in novels—I am a science fiction fan after all—my disapproval comes from the way Murakami writes about such things. In that I find his version of the fantastic mundane and shallow. |
Well, this was less an opinion and more a, uh, off-the-cuff cheap shot.
So I take it back, forget I said anything.
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dhex
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Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 12:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
every kumrad is a bit
of quite unmitigated hate
(travelling in a futile groove
god knows why)
and so do i
(because they are afraid to love) |
everyone's a little bit fascist.
(by which i mean "the ultimate expression of the technocratic desire to control" and not a specific spanish/italian etc expression of it - particularly the call to a return of the great day of yore, the most central of all human mythopoetics. fnord.)
as for reading, i forgot to mention that loompanics is going out of business. which means they're having a big sale! they already ran out of copies of "pirate utopias" but i was able to get a copy of men against the state (a classic), the principia discordia and RAW's "natural law - or don't put a rubber on your willy."
that last one might only be funny to me, though. but get your survivalist/anarchist/whacko fringe literature today!
http://www.loompanics.com/
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dhex
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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
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Location: Occupied Stalingrad
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 12:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | by which i mean "the ultimate expression of the technocratic desire to control" and not a specific spanish/italian etc expression of it - particularly the call to a return of the great day of yore, the most central of all human mythopoetics. fnord.) |
I don't get where technocratic comes in with all of this.
Oh, and is "fnord" a Brave New World reference. Because that book kicks a considerable amount of ass, I'll write exactly how it goes about this in a few days, when I'm not four hours before deadline without a line of my article yet written.
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Shapermc
Hot Sake!
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 2:33 pm Post subject: |
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| Greatsaintlouis wrote: | | Barring that, I found the complete text on some Japanese fan's website; while I'm not sure of the legality or policy behind the posting of such links, it's yours if you want it. |
Having no university, nor the want to ever pay over $20 or so for a book, yes please. I am sure we can keep the link up here and take it down if asked.
| seryogin wrote: | | Oh, and is "fnord" a Brave New World reference. Because that book kicks a considerable amount of ass, I'll write exactly how it goes about this in a few days, when I'm not four hours before deadline without a line of my article yet written. |
I am currently (slowly) reading Brave New World. It is ok so far.
Yes, please write articles. More the merrier I say. |
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dhex
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 4:33 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | I don't get where technocratic comes in with all of this. |
it's statism (+new game). society is not a hot rod.
| Quote: | | Oh, and is "fnord" a Brave New World reference. Because that book kicks a considerable amount of ass, I'll write exactly how it goes about this in a few days, when I'm not four hours before deadline without a line of my article yet written. |
brave new world is very purple and plasticky. but tricky, which is good. i'm sure there are people who have read it and thought "hey, that's not so bad, really."
http://is-root.de/wiki/index.php/Fnord
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~boogles/Illuminati/fnord.text
p.s. armlocks stop terrorism. fnord.
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seryogin
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dhex
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 6:06 pm Post subject: |
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awe-some.
this is no way to meet a deadline, though.
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seryogin
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 6:17 pm Post subject: |
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Well, you know, I live by the old Soviet formula:
"I pretend to work, they pretend to pay me."
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dessgeega
loves your favorite videogame
Joined: 16 Jun 2005
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Location: bohan
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 6:24 pm Post subject: |
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that's hot.
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seryogin
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 6:36 pm Post subject: |
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| dessgeega wrote: |
that's hot. |
It's my father's parade jacket, the only piece of military paraphernalia from his serice in a Red Army Guards Regiment in East Germany that I still have left. The sleeves barely reach my hands and the whole thing's been dragged through too many countries to look clean, though I like the inherent historicity of it.
Almost as much as I like my grandfather's WW2 discharge papers, signed by the divisional commissar, with a huge portrait of Stalin taking up half of the document, the other half listing the battles that his division took part in. The parchment is pretty old and crumbling.
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Mister Toups
Hates your favorite videogame
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 1693
Location: Lafayette, LA
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 7:08 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, that's pretty awesome.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii? |
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simplicio
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Joined: 03 May 2005
Posts: 1091
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 7:23 pm Post subject: |
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| Also, you look a lot like my cousin when he was about 16. It's kind of uncanny. |
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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
Posts: 886
Location: Occupied Stalingrad
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2006 7:29 pm Post subject: |
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All strangers look alike.
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GSL
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Joined: 16 Nov 2005
Posts: 725
Location: Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:44 am Post subject: |
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| Shapermc wrote: | | Having no university, nor the want to ever pay over $20 or so for a book, yes please. I am sure we can keep the link up here and take it down if asked. |
Ask, and ye shall recieve!
Actually, that sounds a little pompous, and insinuates that I'm actually providing some great service unrenderable (Is that even a word? Do I win Scrabble?) by just ANY mortal. A more proper link title could be:
I probably waste too much time on Google.
That aside, the Loompanics store loses points for using the word 'irregardless', which is most definitely NOT a word, in their going-out-of-business comic. |
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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
Posts: 886
Location: Occupied Stalingrad
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 2:57 am Post subject: |
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| Greatsaintlouis wrote: | | Shapermc wrote: | | Having no university, nor the want to ever pay over $20 or so for a book, yes please. I am sure we can keep the link up here and take it down if asked. |
Ask, and ye shall recieve!
Actually, that sounds a little pompous, and insinuates that I'm actually providing some great service unrenderable (Is that even a word? Do I win Scrabble?) by just ANY mortal. A more proper link title could be:
I probably waste too much time on Google.
That aside, the Loompanics store loses points for using the word 'irregardless', which is most definitely NOT a word, in their going-out-of-business comic. |
Sankyuu.
I've been wanting to read Pinball 1973 after I lost my Russian Hear the Wind Sing/ Pinball 1973 omnibus a few years back.
Expect a review in a few days.
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dhex
Breeder
Joined: 13 Dec 2004
Posts: 6319
Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 8:13 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | That aside, the Loompanics store loses points for using the word 'irregardless', which is most definitely NOT a word, in their going-out-of-business comic. |
usually they lose points for selling revenge manuals and books about how to kill people with homemade tools. and for opposing natural law.
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GSL
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Joined: 16 Nov 2005
Posts: 725
Location: Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 10:18 am Post subject: |
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| Eh, that's one of those 'different strokes...' sort of situations. Irregardless, however, is a crime against God and humanity, and may those who seek to wield it be haunted for all eternity by the vengeful ghost of Noah Webster. |
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dhex
Breeder
Joined: 13 Dec 2004
Posts: 6319
Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 11:22 am Post subject: |
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i agree. but loompanics is/was like...the internet before the internet. the pre-net. they were the natural outgrowth of the fanzine explosion of the late 70s. their loss, even though most of their catalog was nonsense, is the death of an earlier era.
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TheRumblefish
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Joined: 29 Jan 2006
Posts: 258
Location: Florida
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 12:05 pm Post subject: |
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| On the subject of books, I've just finished Mark Bowden's "Killing Pablo". It was exciting. Not as exciting as Black Hawk Down, but it was up there. I'm about to start on "Crime and Punishment" if my fiance still has her copy from school. |
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Scratchmonkey
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Joined: 02 Mar 2005
Posts: 1439
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 1:02 pm Post subject: |
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| Greatsaintlouis wrote: | | Eh, that's one of those 'different strokes...' sort of situations. Irregardless, however, is a crime against God and humanity, and may those who seek to wield it be haunted for all eternity by the vengeful ghost of Noah Webster. |
Silly grammarians.
The day I'm scared of ghosts of jerkwad spelling reformers is the day I attach myself to a lead weight and walk into the sea.
Language is freeeeee, maaaaaaaan.
Irregardless, I'm willing at this point to lump R.A.W. and Gravity's Rainbow in the general category of Conspiracy Fiction. Not in the lame Da Vinci Code sense; in the much cooler sense of drug-and-sex-addled triple agents partying with each other in grey market bars, existing in the colorful band of Weird that lives in the intersection of illegal legality and legal illegality. A celebration of the paranoid nature of the modern world, with R.A.W. being the spirit of the Conspiracy Sixties and Pynchon pointing backwards, saying that the Conspiracy has been here all along.
Pynchon is a lot harder to read than R.A.W. because he feels like flexing his writing muscles a bit more, going over on colorful metaphysical tangents at the drop of a hat, lengthy descriptive paragraphs that span several pages, reminding me somewhat of Moby Dick, which everybody should read if they haven't. R.A.W. feels less like genius (or somebody writing who thinks that they're a genius, depending on your taste) and more like focused insanity, although he's probably too lucid to be considered legitimately unbalanced.
The point is that if nothing else, there's a ton of sex in these books. |
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Lackey
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Joined: 11 Jul 2005
Posts: 1107
Location: Canada
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GSL
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Joined: 16 Nov 2005
Posts: 725
Location: Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 5:23 pm Post subject: |
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| Scratchmonkey wrote: | | Not in the lame Da Vinci Code sense |
Thank God! What a horrible piece of writing.
I have, in the past few months, found several people I formerly considered my close friends to be utterly untrustworthy in any literary recommendations they offer, simply because of the glowing nuggets of praise they've heaped on that lousy book. |
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sawtooth
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Joined: 02 Nov 2005
Posts: 419
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 6:29 pm Post subject: |
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For art history class I'm going to be in a group that dissects why that book sucks so badly. If anyone wants to offer some help, I'd appreciate it (even though the book from writing style to content, is broken so thoroughly it's hard not to find something to rag on).
I attempted to read it about a year ago; I dropped it after Intelligent Professor Who Only Wants to Know the Truth and Busty Love Interest with Cute Accent (With Glasses so We Know She's Smart Okay) solve the puzzle where they figure out that the text is written backwards. argasdghasghasdgda;sdklfja;sdfl kjro   |
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dessgeega
loves your favorite videogame
Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 6563
Location: bohan
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 6:30 pm Post subject: |
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i loved the part where they solved the ancient lock puzzle to discover...another ancient lock puzzle inside it!
i'm really not sure how that book came to be in my possession or why i read it. it...seems to be gone now, though.
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dhex
Breeder
Joined: 13 Dec 2004
Posts: 6319
Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 6:56 pm Post subject: |
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saw: well, start off by how badly it plagarizes holy blood, holy grail. which is a fucking ridiculous book on its own. it's actually back in print due to dan brown's magic touch.
speaking of conspiracy fiction - good term, btw - foucalt's pendulum is the shit. eco is a hell of a writer.
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sawtooth
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Joined: 02 Nov 2005
Posts: 419
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 7:52 pm Post subject: |
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thanks, dhex. holy blood, holy grail sounds like a fun read; I'll read it before I get into that whole dan brown business.
I had trouble with foucalt's pendulum, though. I think I mentioned this before. I read 300 pages into it and it just seemed like exposition. I was kind of disinterested in reading in general at the time, and maybe I was just having a hard time getting into it. maybe. |
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Scratchmonkey
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Joined: 02 Mar 2005
Posts: 1439
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 7:58 pm Post subject: |
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| dhex wrote: | | speaking of conspiracy fiction - good term, btw - foucalt's pendulum is the shit. eco is a hell of a writer. |
Yes. Davinci is pretty much a hack attempting to write something similar to Pendulum and crapping his pants in the process. |
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dhex
Breeder
Joined: 13 Dec 2004
Posts: 6319
Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 8:24 pm Post subject: |
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try in the name of the rose. bad movie, good book!
shit, that's always true.
also: fools die by mario puzo is one of the undiscovered classics of the 20th century.
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Scratchmonkey
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Joined: 02 Mar 2005
Posts: 1439
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 8:27 pm Post subject: |
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| dhex wrote: | try in the name of the rose. bad movie, good book!
shit, that's always true. |
Princess Bride. It gets away with it because the movie is really nothing like the book, which seems to be the way to go about that sort of thing.
Last edited by Scratchmonkey on Mon Jan 30, 2006 9:20 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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sawtooth
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Joined: 02 Nov 2005
Posts: 419
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| Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 9:19 pm Post subject: |
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| It certainly helps that william goldman wrote both the book and script for the movie. I heartily enjoyed both of them. |
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GSL
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Joined: 16 Nov 2005
Posts: 725
Location: Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong
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| Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 12:57 am Post subject: |
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My favorite part of The Da Vinci Code is that it starts with a note from the author claiming he's researched all of these secret societies and traditions included therein and swears by their authenticity. By about the 2nd chapter, I had the inkling that the story was completely immersed in total bullshit, and indeed anyone willing to do even the slightest amount of fact checking will discover that Brown apparently got what he considered a good idea in his head, put on his bright yellow vinyl raincoat and rubber boots with the duckies on them and just started wading through the feces, selecting only the tastiest and tenderest morsels for inclusion in his bestselling masterpiece.
I mean, his main character is a Harvard professor of symbology. Symbology, for God's sake! Harvard!
Apparently this sort of bluffing through a plot is nothing new for the author though - I've heard his first novel, Digital Fortress, referred to as some sort of evil antipode to Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I am almost tempted to read it and discover truely how bad it is. Almost.
| dhex wrote: | | also: fools die by mario puzo is one of the undiscovered classics of the 20th century. |
Tell me more. The Godfather is possibly one of my favorite books of all ever, and I found The Family to be an amazingly enlightening and engaging read. I haven't read anything else by Puzo, but those two were good enough that I'm sold on the author. |
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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
Posts: 886
Location: Occupied Stalingrad
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| Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 1:54 am Post subject: |
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I finished Pinball 1973 and was disappointed. Murakami is a very lazy man, who doesn’t spend enough time looking for characters that are compelling. He thinks that having a translator, who reads The Critique of Pure Reason for pleasure, as a narrator is somehow “quirky.” No, Murakami-san, that’s what real writers call “lazy.” As in, throwing in an unrewarding, obviously-contrived trait like having the narrator be so enthusiastic about an unreadable book is a way of faking depth in characters that have none. It’s the same thing with the twins that live in his apartment. Why the hell don’t they just tell him what their names are? Stop throwing out cheap paradoxes and find a good fucking story to tell! It’s eerie how dull this man is! His formula for characters, all of them, seems to be: take a completely fake, non-existent person who doesn’t have a single characteristic other than the fact that he’s a character in a Murakami novel then add a completely unrealistic, manufactured, ridiculous detail that makes that character “weird.” Now that’s deep! Why didn’t Shakespeare think of that?
The only thing that made me finish Pinball 1973 was this familiar feeling that I received, a memory of the things that I felt when I read my first Murakami novel in one sitting two years ago South of the Border, West of the Sun, in a house that my family and I have left since then. I lay in bed, a stack of modern Japanese novels on the table next to my bed, reading the hardback version loaned to me by my college library. I read it entirely while everyone else slept, pleased with certain moments, though very angry with others. The only things I remember about the book now was that the narrator’s name was Hajime, that he made note of something Russian at one point, something that seemed taken from Solzhenitsyn, and that he gets blown at the end, which was quite possibly the best scene in the book.
I won’t belabor you with any more commentary about Murakami. I’ve already said enough on the topic already. I’ll just quote the only two passages that I actually liked in Pinball 1973.
“ I picked up the switch-panel the twins had stood by the side of the sink, and looked it over. No matter how you turned the thing over, front or back, it was nothing but a meaningless piece of fiberboard. I gave up and put it back where I’d found it, brushed the dust off my hands, took a puff on my cigarette. Everything took on a blue cast in the moonlight. It made everything look worthless, meaningless. I couldn’t even be sure of the shadows. I crushed out my cigarette in the sink and immediately lit a second.
“I could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me? Like, for example, where? After lengthy consideration, the only place I could think of was the cockpit of a two-seater Kamikaze torpedo-plane. Of all the dumb ideas. In the first place, all the torpedo-planes were scrapped thirty years ago.” [This is profound in a way you can't imagine, like the music in Kefka's Tower only more so]
“Skirting the hills, the tracks ran so straight they seemed ruled. Far ahead you could see woods, like little wads of dull green paper. The rails glinted in the sun, merging into the green distance. No matter how far you went, the same scenery would go on forever. A depressing thought if there ever was one. Give me a subway any day.”
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dhex
Breeder
Joined: 13 Dec 2004
Posts: 6319
Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork
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| Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 5:18 am Post subject: |
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sergei loaned me a book called "the dreams our stuff is made of" about science fiction's influence on culture, etc. it's pretty good. it gets polemical in parts that make no sense to me, since i don't follow the genre, and his grasp on burroughs is paper-thin at best, but he makes a really good case for the deep influence of sf as a way of imagining the future.
that said, i would not call 1984 science fiction.
fools die is a book about writing and women.
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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
Posts: 886
Location: Occupied Stalingrad
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| Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 5:24 am Post subject: |
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Yeah.
It's hard to appreciate his Truman Capote-esque bitchy take-downs Heinlein and the Science Fiction right wing if you're not familiar with it and haven't always wanted to see those bastards get the comeuppance they deserve.
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Shapermc
Hot Sake!
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
Posts: 6279
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| Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 10:12 am Post subject: |
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I should mention that I am slowly making progress on Brave New World and it is just blowing my mind. Nothing about it is particularly shocking or (by todays standards) a new idea, but this has this insane impact of actually looking in on the society being written about. Blowing. My. Mind. Can't explain it at all.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
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