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Comments
I really, really, really tried to get into Gaunt's Ghosts. But frankly, it wasn't doing me any good, and I wasn't having very much fun or felt particularly invested with the characters or the plot.
But Ciaphas Cain is fun. And that's what I like about it.
I finished The Lais of Marie de France yesterday. Even though the quality of the writing was as bad (converted from poetry to prose, at least) as The Song of Roland, it was a collection of stories all of which were more interesting than the entirety of the latter work, especially when considered in historical context; though there is that idealized romantic motif where pretty people with money fall in love at first sight, the Lais surprised me in how they wholeheartedly approved of extramarital relationships if it led to happiness. Plus, a collection of stories that begins with a dude getting an arrow through his junk is after my heart.
Has anyone read The Accursed Kings?
American Gods was good, had really random and out of place sex scenes.
I hear the climax of that was lackluster. No spoilers.
IIRC, the climax comes really wait until the story. I'd imagine how much you like it is depending how much you like the mythological basis of everything.
Looking back, the climax does seem kinda anticlimactic, but I'm pretty sure that's the whole point of it, actually. Since you asked for no spoilers, you'll just have to read the book to see what I mean.
Edit: Or are you saying that you aren't going to give away any spoilers? I'm confused.
Iain Banks has announced that he has terminal cancer.
^ I found out about that earlier. It's no less saddening now.
An aside related to the article discussed on the previous page: I think that the author of the article misses that DeLillo's narrator in White Noise is supposed to be viewed as a pretentious twit. That's what makes the novel funny. On one level, it's a somewhat shallow satire of '80s culture; on another, it is a satire of the kind of people that think that way about '80s culture and pride themselves on their cleverness.
The problem is, of course, that people fail to understand the irony and take it all purely at face value. It's a bit like trying to take Donald Barthelme at face value, although Barthelme was fairly consistently far enough in the realm of the abstract and ridiculous to avoid getting pinned down as some super-serious writer's writer.
Also, while I agree that "literary canon" is frequently complete nonsense and the devaluing of more direct writing is unfair, I feel that my tastes may lie in a somewhat different area than the article's author's—and I do occasionally question their perceptiveness: For example, I get exactly what Proulx was going for with the swallows in the scene with the arm-severing. In a traumatic situation, time seems to move differently; she simply extended the metaphor in a small and slightly bizarre way. Yet the author chooses to select that passage without considering this possibility. Yes, some of those metaphors are horribly tortured, but that one actually isn't.
I don't see what's fun about being stuck inside the head of someone who's both a pretentious twit and who's thoroughly uninteresting in his stale pretensions. I'm not sure where the humor is supposed to be there.
Although I can totally grant that Proulx is the least terrible out of the writing he criticizes (although early McCarthy seems like it's actually pretty good).
I guess you don't have the same kind of demented sense of humour that I do. I found the whole "Toyota Cerica" thing so extraordinarily over-the-top that I actually laughed out loud.
Context is also important. Here is the Wikipedia synopsis of the plot.
I would like to point out that the author of the article was seriously cherry-picking with McCarthy. His later, "straight" Western works are widely regarded to be his weakest and most pretentious, while his other work uses a lot of similar devices to much stronger effect. Partly this is because his stories are usually as twisted, hallucinatory and stark as his prose: Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, Child Of God and The Road are all deeply messed up stories set in places that are theoretically within reality but could be anywhere.
In other words, McCarthy was born to write Faulkner-meets-Burroughs acid trip Southern Gothic horror novels, and he wrote them damnably well... but then he decided to write Westerns and failed hard because his writing style had gone so far into the Crazy Zone that he had no chance of coming back.
One interesting point, though: While I love Henry James and appreciate that Myers does, too, the man could be downright impenetrable and I feel it intellectually dishonest to imply otherwise. Even more so Joyce. God, Joyce! Seriously. Finnegan's Wake. It's really fun to read if you know the jokes that he's making, but jeez, he makes DeLillo look positively straightforward.
P.S. In other words, I'm saying that I agree with what the article was trying to say but feel that the piece itself is more than a little intellectually dishonest and even hypocritical. I do not like being misled without my express permission.
In the spirit of fairness, I'll throw it out there that I also didn't see what was so funny about Hitchhiker's Guide, so it could very well be my sense of humor that's off. :V (Though it's been two years, and I was a very dumb seventeen-year-old, so I might need to re-read it)
That's an interesting point, and I have to grant that I'm not that familiar with McCarthy (though familiar enough that I didn't like Myers's criticism of the Comanche attack; I thought that was a very well-written passage, whether or not it was offensive on some levels or unfitting from the specific perspective McCarthy employed). But at the same time, I'm pretty sure part of Myers's point was that there were critics who actually were using the quotes he pulled to make their cases, even though those passages were weak, with Myers's point being that it didn't bode well for works in question that those were supposedly higher-quality passages.
Hmm. I must have missed that specific comparison. And I think that would severely diminish Myers's argument, or at least it would in my opinion. I've recently found a quote that pretty well demonstrates my distaste for Joyce. I mean, it apparently took him seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, including the research, and it seems to be largely a self-indulgent creation (though it apparently sounds pretty neat in, say, French). How long does it take to become familiar enough with all the damned multilingual puns to appreciate them? Because I don't see the poetical value in, say, Chapter 4 Paragraph 1 (the page won't load, unfortunately) as someone who's only fluent in English, and I don't know that the words would sound any better even if I did. I mean, the sound quality of word choice is pretty subjective, and I'm pretty picky about that, but the underlying philosophical reasoning behind this work leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Though I'm actually kind of excited to read Ulysses, because that one at least seems to have a plot.
I wonder if maybe the difference is that writers like James and Joyce are (hypothetically) at least fascinating and genuinely artful in their musings.
Just finished The Tempest. 5/5, would watch on stage. I was surprised at how contented and settled I felt after reading it. I'm also really glad that a good teacher is tackling it, and that the class as a whole is able to make good observations on it.
EDIT: Reading more of Moby-Dick. Dammit, Melville, stop being such a genius, you're making me look bad.
Ooh, another fun critique. Or, rather, another tearing apart of modern writing.
Also, Moby-Dick is still really good. And, God damn, it's actually funny. Admittedly pretty slow at times, what with chapters like "Knights and Squires" where we get character info dumped on us. But it's written so charmingly.
-reads the review-
Holy hell, did they eat nothing but thesauruses as a child or something? They seem incapable of using one word when 20 will suffice.
Seems fine to me. Well, except for "diagnostic, hermeneutical genealogy," though I haven't finished the review quite yet.
... You're joking, right? You don't recognize how this is ridiculously wordy?
Seems fine to me.
Really? Just for starters,
is the same thing twice, either because the author thinks more words automatically makes something better or because they think the audience is too dumb to know what "nuance" means.
I guess I don't generally mind wordiness as long as the words make sense (and sound nice (see my apparent preference for older writing)), and I had no trouble knowing what he was saying, even if he used a lot of words to make his points and sometimes repeated himself. And I found the writing he sampled from Moody to be abhorrent and nonsensical enough that I can tolerate a drawn-out lambasting of it.
The thing about wordiness is that it's the writing equivalent of taking a single episode of a TV show and stretching it out into a full-length movie without adding anything.
I don't feel that all wordy indulgences are a full three or four times the amount of words necessary, nor does a dragged-out TV show have the sheer aesthetic appeal to it that can make wordy writers (and, I'll stress, writers whose excess words still at least make sense) sound well even if they're excessive. Then again, you'll notice that I can drag a sentence out pretty far without even trying, so you could chalk it up to a stylistic preference that I'm defending.
Here's the thing, though. Wordiness isn't needed to sound good. For example, here:
This is the same thing three times. Each of them sounds fine, but the repetition is just padding.
Well, sure, but that's repetition. Wordiness and repetition aren't exactly the same thing--one can result from the other--and I'll totally grant that he was wrong to keep repeating himself like that, but in other cases, where the reviewer moves along straightforwardly in spite of using lots of words, I think it can work fine, if not well. I think there are just good and bad ways to be wordy, depending on what's really being said and how much you would lose by shortening things down.
I was being facetious, and having a joke at my expense.
Well the review did succeed in convincing me that Moody's books are most likely terrible, if those excerpts are anything to go by. It also convinced me that there is no way I would want to read the reviewer's own novels because wow, I do not like being talked down to as a reader in such a repetitive manner.
Well, strictly speaking, it really isn't. Each phrase has a different connotation. The issue is that the way in which he is using them deprives them of their semantic separateness. He is trying to underline the basic point by approaching the same notion from multiple angles and inverting his subject's lack of nuance in the process—which is, in theory, very clever—but the device which he is using is a bit trite, and so the statement loses power.
So I was reading outside, minding my own business on a bench, and a bird shat on the paragraph I had just finished reading. It's not even my book; I'm renting it. (the book's Things Fall Apart, if anyone's curious. I'm reading it for a class)
not really related to book discussion, but that's my fun reading experience for the day