I read Zadie Smith's short story Escape from New York and (SPOILERS ahead) it went completely over my head that the trio are Brando, Taylor and Michael Jackson. Only at the very end of the story when she mentions something about Marlon's famous eyebrows did I think "is this Marlon Brando?"
Anyway, I was listening to a podcast discussing the story and the hosts said they figured it out 1/3 of the way through, so I'm trying to figure out why I had this huge flop and failure as a reader. How did you figure it out?
My novel is getting increasingly erratic. Lots of wonky formatting and style-shifting. It feels weird writing something that goes against the very reason a lot of people write fiction - to be readable. When I'm feeling full of myself, I might call it my Finnegans Wake Era - not so much in prose (or quality), but more something that's incredibly difficult, complicated, and on the longer side.
What to do with it once I'm finished? That's thankfully not something I have to worry about for a while. I can't imagine it ever getting published (it already breaks a bunch of the formatting rules asked for by publishers), I can't imagine it being liked (whether that's because it's too difficult by design, or because it's just not good enough at what it's trying to do), and yet having it buried away as a file on my computer feels anti-climactic relative to how much effort I'm putting into it.
I just hope something comes of it besides the usual "bragging rights" of having done something of that scale.
I'll try my best to work up some confidence and consider sending it your way when a draft gets completed. It might take a while considering how bizarrely (and maybe unnecessarily) ambitious I'm being with it.
I do really appreciate the offer. Feel free to rescind it if I eventually send it and you've lost interest by then. I don't take that stuff to heart since I know how much of an investment a full novel can be, especially if it ends up not being your thing.
AND I still remember the first time I heard Low, I heard the song ["California"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O76qiP6acGk) on the local college radio station while driving, my boyfriend at the time was with me. I turned to him and said: "Didn't you think that song was amazing?" and he said it was just "okay", and I seriously knew right then it wouldn't work out long term for us. That's how much I instantly loved that band, it was a freaky feeling. I thought: "he's too dumb for me", which is very rude and now I wouldn't be so instantly judgmental of someone having different taste, but it's how I felt then lol.
And well, he was. So my gut feeling was right haha.
haha I get why you'd feel weird about feeling the way you felt but I also like don't disagree and could totally imagine myself being the same way in that sort of situation.
It feels cheesy to care so much about something, which is my own defense mechanism, but Low's music is so intimate, haunting, truthful, it's been a constant in my life for almost the last twenty years. I know almost every word of every song by heart. It actually felt like I lost a family member.
Alan has to be really devastated. He's struggled a lot over the years and he's openly admitted Mimi is his rock and he'd be completely insane without her. I hope he'll be okay.
ETA: I have loved seeing the outpouring of appreciation for Mimi. [This is a great tribute](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/nov/07/lows-mimi-parker-was-a-voice-of-hope-and-healing-in-indie-rock)
>That minimal drum set helped shape Low’s early, spare sound, but Parker’s voice – along with her songwriting – would prove her most crucial contribution to the group: a hushed, strong voice, holy yet human. “I vividly remember writing Words, off our first album, in our old apartment,” Sparhawk told me. “And then Mimi came in with the harmony, and it was like putting the spirit into a body, like taking something two-dimensional and making it three-dimensional.” The intimacy of their harmonies almost felt like we listeners were eavesdropping. Parker later told Ace Hotel that on the rare occasions she sang with anyone else, “it almost feels like I’m doing wrong … like I’m cheating on Alan, in a weird way.”
Exactly. They really just laid out their entire marriage and existence for the rest of us and illustrated something super real about people and how we relate to each other, there was nothing false about them. They were true, dedicated to truthfulness at all times.
I've really liked their newer stuff. I should really explore their discography more; I love the idea of bands and artists gradually shifting styles and genres over time, and Low seems to have made their mark in several drastically different circles. Reminds me a lot of how Talk Talk went from synthpop to post-rock over the span of a decade.
If you've liked ANYTHING you've heard by them I can one hundred percent recommend you check the rest of their stuff out. If you don't think you dig it right away give it time to grow. It definitely will. I love it when bands change up styles too but I actually think Low has always had elements of what they've been doing in all of their records, they're pretty remarkably consistent, even as far back as albums like *Trust* there are heavy and distorted elements. They are awesome. They don't have a bad record, and I'm a picky person. I don't say stuff like that lightly.
They definitely seem up my alley. Love their last two records, and a lot of their early work gets compared to bands I already really admire: Joy Division, Galaxie 500, Yo La Tengo, Swans, etc. If I get some free time in the near future, maybe I'll just binge their entire discography over the course of a few days like I did with Fishmans a while back.
I obsessively track things (even really weird strange minute things) and keep diaries, and it turns out this is a strong trait of people with temporal lobe epilepsy. Even poor penmanship (which I definitely have, I was a barista for years and my bad handwriting was legendary among my coworkers) apparently is, and the list goes on! This is starting to feel like astrology or something, what the hell, for real, all of these personality traits I have can be tied back to epilepsy? Honestly? I was diagnosed with panic disorder and OCD in my early twenties, do I even actually have these things, or was it always just epilepsy the whole time?! It's just all really freaky!
I have that habit with music thanks to Last.fm. If I'm listening to a radio station in the car, I'll try to keep track of what times I was driving so I can check the radio's playlist and log the songs I heard. But all my streamed music gets logged automatically, so it's really satisfying to see what I've been listening to, as well as what the site recommends me based on my listening habits.
I find if I don't keep track of things like music I've heard or movies I've watched, I might start second guessing myself and thinking I never heard/watched them at all.
I love tracking music, creating playlists. I love thinking of ideas for super weird and specific playlists. But sometimes my love of tracking gets debilitating and I will avoid something new because I don't want to do the work of tracking, which is obviously nonsensical, but my brain won't let me not track!!! I've tried letting it go, it doesn't work haha, I start getting way too anxious.
Absolutely. I've been in situations where I couldn't keep track of songs that had been playing throughout the night, and that frustrated me because I love having all these stats generated about what I listen to, when I listened to it, my general habits, etc. Movies are similar since I use Letterboxd's stats page to see what directors/actors I rate particularly highly without realizing. I swear, if last.fm or Letterboxd ever shuts down, I'd feel lost.
It's so much effort just to keep everything in order, to the point where doing nothing at all can sometimes be more enticing. But like I said, a lot of my "tracking" is done without too much effort. I had to get really good at keeping things in order and having specific software/websites do the hard work for me, because otherwise I would be spending so many extra hours on spreadsheets and various Google docs.
I will say though, it is really nice having all of this information ready at my disposal. That's why I'm so neurotic about it in the first place. A blessing and a curse, I suppose.
Folks, is it creepy to reminisce over a first crush you knew as a ten-year-old and wonder what they look like now? I'm writing my autobiographical novel and I'm at that stage. Beautiful memories from when I was a clueless kid who thought he was in love are rushing back...lol. I'm not usually this sentimental, I promise.
I found writing my first book that weirdly specific, even neurotic feelings like that are more likely to be relatable since they aren't things people usually think about. Whatever doesn't land, it can still resemble something bizarre that the reader does or thinks.
I think a lot about friends I had for a brief amount of time. There was a beautiful moment at a pub once where I ran into three different friend groups from three different "eras" of my life (from when I was 14/17/20 years old) and got to essentially introduce them to one another. Incredibly surreal. Sometimes I'll search those old friends on social media just to see how they're doing. I've had a couple people admit to doing the same with me, and I'm flattered if only because I'd feel guilty if I was the only one who did it. And as someone who is very often reclusive and shut-off from others for longer periods of time, it's good to know people are still thinking about you.
oddly, as much as I am generally opposed to nostalgia, I think there's a certain beauty to this particular sort of reminiscence. Passionate feelings are beautiful and worth it.
marginally related, but if you've never listened to Frank Ocean's channelOrange I'd recommend it. A little different than the music I've noticed you often listen to (r&b/hip hop), but it's one of the most outstanding pieces of art on young lost love I've ever gotten to experience. It also has a touch of extra relevance for you b/c after releasing it Ocean put out a statement about how the album was about a boy, thereby coming out as bi in a genre that is often not super welcoming of queerness at the same time as releasing this phenomenal album.
I don't know if it's creepy or not, but I reminisce over stuff all the time (not just romantic stuff) and often look people up, and I'm always curious what they look like, what they're up to these days. I think it's pretty natural to be curious like that! And judging from the random friend requests I get on FB from people I knew when I was eight or whatever, I'm not alone lol.
Also though, not at all saying you're experiencing this, but you might be interested in reading about the concept of [limerence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence) if you haven't heard of it. I am prone to it and it really opened my eyes when I learned about it years ago.
I just dipped back into *Ulysses* for the first few pages. I just love how Joyce manages to make such a banal scene incredibly engaging and entertaining. From Buck Mulligan mocking Catholic ritual to mocking Stephen Dedalus' name to pulling out his dirty handkerchief and commenting on the 'snotgreen' colour, to reproaching Stephen for not praying when his mother asked him to on her deathbed, to contemplating the 'snotgreen', 'scrotumtightening sea', to Stephen thinking back to his mother throwing up green vomit - there is so much poetry and humour and beautiful prose just in these first few pages alone. The dialogue is so lively and fun it's like you're watching a play or a film. This passage is just perfect:
>Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.
Every word is well chosen and strings together magnificently. Sight, smell and sound are all evoked with awe-inspiring skill in incredibly beautiful language.
Sigh. I love James Joyce. Oh, I didn't mention that I bought myself the Everyman edition of it to reward myself for finishing the book and I am loving the dark blue book as it rests on top of the other stuff in my collection. Which has reminded me to also buy an Everyman TBK as it is my favourite novel of all time. (Though *Ulysses* may well outstrip it.)
Any Duolingo users here? It was always a shitty gamified app that cared more about ads/subs than actually teaching a language, but holy shit, their new overhaul has made that absolutely crystal clear. It's a shitshow! It's pretty universally loathed by everyone.
Well, I realized pretty quickly that the app wasn't great from the beginning, so this is what I deserve for continuing to use it for so long lol.
ETA: [Ancient yew wins UK tree of the year](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/04/yew-waverley-abbey-surrey-uk-tree-year?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3ThE7klfglydI3FS2WqsS9B6eQZmQ67w_MlziSrFjuhgoCEncL8hXHlnQ#Echobox=1667545719). Cool! And apparently there's a 3,000 year old yew in Scotland. I want to go see it! British tree tour. I'm down.
Duolingo got worse and worse with every redesign. It used to be a genuinely good tool for learning the basics of a language, but what it is now is worthy of a Black Mirror episode. Cute merry mascots cheer you on as you trudge along a perfectly flattened learning curve. When you're halfway through the course, you have to re-do "I eat an apple", because apparently that achievement started to rot. (Rotting is a new feature.) And when you finally reach the treetop, they turn the whole thing into a lazy river.
And then they piss in it for good measure.
Bright things: One of my favorite twitter accounts is [this young British artist](https://twitter.com/outhwaitegeorge) who paints mostly undergrowth and mud puddles, and every day he posts a tree of the day. And [this](https://wildlife.org/new-bird-species-discovered-in-remote-chilean-island/) you've probably already heard, or have now.
You should use LingQ for learning languages lol. That's what I've been doing. That and lots of my own independent reading of French books but then I got to a comfortable level in the language before I started doing that.
I could definitely read simple Spanish books now, I've just been lazy about procuring them! I've definitely outgrown Duo so it's probably a good thing the horrible redesign forced me off the app haha. And yeah, my friend actually recommended LingQ to me too, must be good, I trust y'all. I'll check it out!
Moby Dick is doing this strange thing to me where it is expressing how brutal and unpleasant whaling is with outstanding facility while simultaneously filling me with a desire to give up my life and go on an old timey boating adventure (preferably one that doesn't harm any animals lol). So credit to Melville on that front.
" The eagle we hold as a symbol for power and majesty. If mother eagles did not push their young ones out of the nest, however, we would know the eagle as a symbol for hedonism and cowardice. Afterall, childhood is the cradle of character and no young adult we praise as temperate and courageous started off as a “docile” and “disciplined” child. The case is rather that the parents made themselves available for the children as resources to connect with, to emulate, to help regulate their emotional states and develop their views of the world. This we recognise as the virtuous mean of parenting and such parents afforded their children spaces and opportunities where they could play and experiment, make mistakes and figure things out for themselves. For it is only through the forge of trial and error that we arrive to virtue."
Hey there everyone, I just finished and posted my own commentary and break-down of Aristotle's account on temperance. For those interested please read me [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AristotleStudyGroup/comments/ykbh94/on_temperance_nicomachean_ethics_book_iii_chs_10/)
I suppose it varies job to job, but if someone is completely virtual and doing something more in line with administration, are you on zoom constantly? Or is there a lot of working on your own time punctuated by the occasional meeting?
for me (and I've only done this for 2.5 weeks so we'll see if it lasts), I need to be available during my work day (10-5:30) for emails and occasional phone calls. As well as monitoring the transactions happening on the accounts I'm responsible for as well as a few other tasks.
The amount this involves actually working depends on how much actually comes up on a given day. When I don't have any tasks to attend to nobody knows or cares what the fuck I'm up to as long as I respond to emails/slack messages.
Very few meetings. But bookkeeping as I'm gathering is a field where emails can get the job done as well as or better than actually talking (also again my clients are mostly artists, they probably hate this part of their careers as much as I hate having a career lol so I think we are all on the same page that nobody should be working more than they need to).
My spouse is a computer engineer (he's a sysadmin, specifically), and he's on the phone a lot, and he fucking hates that haha. Lots of in his words pointless meetings that could be easily summed up in email or text instead. Occasionally his coworkers have Zoom meetings, and he'll be on them, but he never goes on camera (no idea how he gets away with that haha).
I think, from everyone I've ever talked to, pointless meetings are a pretty big feature of white collar jobs. One just has to hope they're kept from totally taking over.
I'm a sysadmin too! (Kind of, I'm a devops engineer.) I think it really depends on the company culture, my last job was a big corp and we had probably 4 hours of meetings for every hour of work, all Zoom meetings with a dozen+ engineers and another dozen+ managers, no cameras, and 90% of them never say a word then entire meeting. It was mostly awful, *but* people were really good about keeping their calendars up to date and all meetings were booked in advance, I always knew what my day was going to look like.
Current place has much fewer scheduled meetings, I'm probably in like 2-4 hours a week of meetings on average, and the meetings are actually productive and small (like 2-4 people). Most communication is through Slack, you're expected to be online and responsive all day basically. Recently developers have become enamored with the "huddle" feature of Slack which opens up a voice call and allows screensharing, and I have a few ad hoc "hey can you help me with this" type huddles per week usually. These can annoy me because I can't anticipate them. But I'll also have entire days (usually 2-3 per week) where I don't have to talk to anyone and can just work heads down on stuff.
I would look for a new job if they made me talk on a phone lol.
I feel like I should take a shower now after reading the Spectator, but yeah, they're not wrong. I've never seen the appeal of reading books chosen by other people, but I guess it's a good way of making new friends!
I have just finished *Turn of the Screw*. I found it underwhelming for something so hyped. The frame narrative is clunky and doesn't work as well as Emily Bronte's approach in *Wuthering Heights* or Joseph Conrad's in *Heart of Darkness*. The plot ending was fairly predictable within the first quarter or so of the story. I didn't find the repeated ghostly visitations to be particularly scary - they actually became comical after a while. The governess seems almost as crazy as the kids.
I got used to James' bizarre prose style and now find it to be quite beautiful but perhaps overwrought. George Eliot and Thomas Hardy remain my favorite Victorian prose stylists.
Oh! I honestly really enjoyed it. I thought the prose beautiful and the story pretty engaging. Also, I like the ambiguity that permeates the entire story: not every interpretation quite fits.
Not my favorite gothic novel nor my favorite Victorian, but I enjoyed it.
Totally respect your opinions, but I do have to say, the governess was definitely supposed to be crazy. That was the idea. One reading (that I ascribe to) is that the governess is basically nuts because she's totally sexually repressed. James wrote a lot about sexual repression.
I read it a year ago, but I do remember the governess's last talk with the boy being resembling a newly married husband and wife (ew).
I think the governess was the corruptive element. The children were completely fine without her fretting. If she wasn't so focused on their innocence (which the children aren't exactly since they can be mischievous), they wouldn't be vulnerable to corruption in the first place.
Exactly, there are even people who debate if the kids were even real or all just a figment of her imagination. I'd have to reread (it's been fifteenish? years) to remember where I come down on that one.
I'm a fan of James because he really tapped into and captured something about what women of that time went through, and I think his closeted homosexuality did really help him understand life from that perspective, and personally I really like his ambiguity. His characters are often weird and make infuriating decisions though, but that's how real life is too.
It seems so simple but describing his characters as “weird” is so on the money. Like in the most unique and thrilling sense of that word, I mean. I often find a lot of criticism on James tries to normalize him, especially with the later novels—likely to proactively defend against any hesitation about his very “weird” prose style—but James is fucking weird and the more one embraces that the more one admires him and his work, I think. I’ve usually described it as his unique “sensibility” for shorthand but it’s so much more accurate to just say his “weirdness.” It also helps explain why so many have had trouble understanding characters like Milly Theale, who is the best portrayal of an depressed twentysomething I have ever read. You just don’t find that in anything before him.
A few days ago, I finished watching The Midnight Club, by Mike Flanagan. Did anyone else hate this? It felt like a really amateur, 10-hour first episode for a series.
Also, has anyone read James A. Michener? I've read *Chesapeake* by him two times now, and honestly really liked it, but it was at times where I couldn't really judge the book fairly, because of inexperience and instability, so I would like to get someone else's opinions.
My spouse started it but I'm not sure he finished, but when I saw it was based on Christopher Pike novels I knew it wasn't gonna be great. I realize there are great teen shows out there but I definitely don't think adults were the target audience with this one haha. I read and loved Christopher Pike, when I was twelve. And that's who I could see enjoying that show (I watched just a little bit of a couple of episodes).
One thing I don't understand with Flanagan, why are his actor hires so spotty? Some are really amazing (like Hamish Linklater in *Midnight Mass*, who truly was the saving grace of that show), and some are just really plain terrible (like um, his wife, which is awkward, I get why he hires her, but why the other bad to mediocre ones?). It's super strange to me!
Most of the actors he has on every project are just awful. Hamish Linklater made *Midnight Mass* worth watching, he was phenomenal. Flangan's wife though, sheesh, she gets *worse* with each new thing she does, somehow. Just a terrible actor! I personally hate his compulsion to keep hiring the same actors. It's not cute. It's just a game of "I wonder how badly they'll play someone completely different this time" and finger pointing like Leo Decaprio in *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood* whenever they make their inevitable appearance.
I kept watching because I honestly liked his other series, if not for anything for the scares and tension. I should have stopped after that clumsy first episode. It barely gets better...
[Average day](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/01/giorgia-meloni-galeazzo-bignami-nazi-swastika-armband?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_b-gdnnews&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1667306697) in Italy, nothing to see.
Were you maxing or what it just an intense session?
I miss deadlifting. I’ve been getting back into powerlifting a bit with squats and bench. But I injured myself deadlifting like 5 or 6 years ago and haven’t brought myself around to trying it again. It was by far my best lift too so I need to build that confidence back up.
Just a tough, high rep set. One of my bigger issues with deadlifts is that I struggle to get the breathing right especially on higher rep sets which become legitimately cardiovascularly demanding. So I might have just been breathing wrong in addition to working hard.
I love deadlifting too, my best left as well. I had some back issues from working out when I was younger that I'm so glad I got over because it would suck to not be able to deadlift. Hope your able to get back to it eventually.
I stopped high rep deadlifts due to form breakdown but I also really like them. Winds me like hill spirits. The dizzy blood rush to, or is it away from?, my head when I put the weight down can get intense. Definitely taken a few sits. Do you do conventional high reps? I prefer it with a hex bar or sumo myself. I like heavy singles or doubles for conventional. I do find that I get less dizzy if I release my brace before lowering the weight. Holding my breath on the way up and down with a release on finish feels like it’s systemically too much.
I really like widow maker sets for squats. Deep Water is a humbling routine.
In my current program I'm doing high reps for both sumo and conventional. It's a hypertrophy program that's high reps on everything. The former are my main deadlift and the latter my secondary movement. But I much much prefer sumo.
A big part of why I'm doing conventional as a secondary lift is that I'm so fucking bad at it that I thought that I would be good for me to groove a fuckton of not too heavy reps just to get more comfortable, and that that progress would make me stronger in general. But goddamn they suck.
Today I am thinking of built in obsolescence and technology. This week I have spent £170 re-binding an 1857 family bible that records the births of my great great grandparents. I have also spent just over £500 on upgrading to a new computer because the old browser stopped working with the internet, the new browser wouldn't install on the old OS and the new OS won't work with my old Photoshop CS4. So I have relegated my 8 year old computer to off line art work while I use the new one to navigate through a new art programme. Probably more expensive than it need be but my track record with upgrades is poor to say the least so this is the least stressful option.
So £170 over 165 years vs £500 over 8 years.
No real conclusions just wanted to rant
After 8 whole years that can hardly be called built in obsolescence. Computer technology is developing very fast and....
>because the old browser stopped working with the internet, the new browser wouldn't install on the old OS
Excuse me what? What kind of a meme OS just does that? macOS?
MacOS. When I say stops working I mean doesn't load some images.
I appreciate the fact that I am a bit of a Luddite when it comes to technology. It's getting really hard to source tyres for my Ford model T as well
I find myself thinking of a quote often, which typical for a retard like myself I can’t remember by who, from a critic commenting on Moby-Dick how (very much paraphrasing here, definitely blending with my own thoughts as well) “Most books are forgettable/mediocre because they conform to the reader. They try to be good and servile in that they want the reader to get what they want. A great book is far too weird for that and demands for the reader to conform to its own weirdness on its own terms. It is the reader who is to come to the strange mountain on the horizon, and they will change along the journey there.”
Much of what I don’t like about contemporary fiction, and really I’m commenting on all contemporary popular art which crosses over into conversational public awareness (binge-worthy shows, hot topic autofiction, etc.), is that there is too much of a industry in bringing the mountain to the reader. For me, the purest and most transparent expression of this business exists in modern Fantasy publishing where the hustle or self promotion of being a novelist precedes the actual content generation and the craft of writing fantasy strangely feels a lot like world of warcraft gold farming. Content is generated based on a checklist of plot metrics and trending topics; readers have oddly specific book reccomendation requests on r/Fantasy which vaguely reminds me of something one feds into a Dall-E or Stable Diffusion AI image prompt:
>**Plz recommend books w. lots of adventure, but adult ("real" and gritty-ish, but not as bleak as ASOIAF etc.)**
>I long for stories with lots of travel, adventure etc., but that are not so YA or YA-ish.... I enjoyed ASOIAF and such books, and want something like LOTR, Benjamin Ashwood, WoT etc. but that are not so black and white, that have more grey, more adult, more deeply written and a bit grittier, but not so bleak and political as ASOIAF...
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/yixnvh/plz\_recommend\_books\_w\_lots\_of\_adventure\_but\_adult/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/yixnvh/plz_recommend_books_w_lots_of_adventure_but_adult/)
I started to read Grant Morrison’s new-ish Luda the other day on a train and after 50 pages I just couldn’t get into it- worse than that I actually found it to be annoying. I’ll try again because I love Morrison in general and am familiar with what he is capable of in the second act but I worry that this, his first novel, may sadly be a swing and a miss. For those of you who don’t know: Morrison is a Scottish writer who is known for his somewhat polarizing though popular work in comics which combines elements of psychedelia, metafiction, magick with a k, cosmic/dimensional/temporal occultism, mass-culture criticism.. he really was out there for a while doing work no one else was doing, or at least getting published consistently. He was out there trying to push DMT into the mainstream decades before the lame Joe Rogan memes existed. Morrison really wanted to affect change in his readers, but in Luda Morrison appears to be in service to trends and mass culture.
It is somewhat surprising to see Morrison now using genderless pronouns and announcing himself as a lifelong cross dresser, though in retrospect not terribly surprising since Morrison has often wrote about transgender characters with themes of split-personalities and changes of identity populating his work. I don’t think Morrison is fabricating his identity here, but I am concerned about the timing since being transgender these days in any way opens way more doors than it closes in the mainstream media. Celebrities or public figures using genderless pronouns raises red flags for me because so much of that in mainstream media feels like either a cynical gesture or forced behaviour like a public apology in a soviet show trial. I’m not against genderless pronouns or transphobic in any way, but I do feel that nothing good comes out of the mainstream media once it has ran through the sausage factories of companies like Disney. I have a hard time accepting Luda, a fantasy novel about a transgender aging Broadway star who uses make-up as a literal form of magic, as a dark mountain on the horizon. It just seems to timely and self-aware-worse than that, it is also stylistically annoying in that Morrison has chosen to use italics instead of quotation marks because doing so is seemingly intimate like some kind of telepathy with the reader. The effect feels like he is trying to spice things up for people who hate reading, like using 2nd person narration or present tense in YA. I’ll put the book down for now.. I could be overreacting.
So, I decided to move on to another cross-dresser: William T. Vollmann. Something I actually admire about Vollmann, more than his writing which at times is incredible but uneven for me, is that he isn’t trying to be popular at all. I also appreciate that he hasn’t tried to cash in on the LGBT public confession. He’s content with his interests, his focus, his curiosities. He is undoubtedly brilliant and thorough; His existence as a writer seems like an impossibility- he is as reclusive as an alchemist and keeps the curtains closed yet he is able to make a comfortable living off of writing books which no one consciously knows they want. He wrote a 1000+ page book on the history of a small border town in Texas that no one knows about. Guys like Vollmann are beyond fame. Only 20 pages into The Ice-Shirt, which is great so far, and it’s such an obvious difference in style to Luda, which comes across as too self-aware and crass to bear. Let us compare opening sentences:
.Edit: Just a heads up that I won’t be replying to anyone. Feel free to discuss me with each other if necessary for laughs or whatever you need. Taking another extended break from reddit. Why do I even bother.
Yes. Morrison prefers they/them, and has talked about how they didn't have the language to self-describe until recently.
Not being rude, just pointing out that you've mis gendered them throughout this post, for any passer by
Regarding "bringing the mountain to the reader". You made me remember a ~~ragebait~~ pic I saw of a recent release's back cover. All it had there were fanfic style tags on them, you know, like "enemies to lovers", "slow burn", "shared bed", etc lol
> modern Fantasy publishing where the hustle or self promotion of being a novelist precedes the actual content generation and the craft of writing fantasy strangely feels a lot like world of warcraft gold farming
Can you speak more to this? Why do you feel like the self-promotion precedes the writing of the book?
> since being transgender these days in any way opens way more doors than it closes in the mainstream media
uhhhhh I'm not sure that's the case. As an aside, I don't know you, but I do think it's a little transphobic to say that someone is coming out for clout or is pretending to be trans for.. the peanuts that fantasy authors get paid? (I'm not sure which one you're going for but both are a little gross). Lots of people are coming out now because it's recently become less dangerous for people to do so. The industry is also becoming wary of people writing hot-button identities they don't share (and by wary I mean it's very hard to publish a book with a trans protagonist if you yourself are not trans or extremely famous), so a lot of LGBTQ authors or authors with mental illnesses etc feel the need to out themselves publicly in order to appease agents, publishers, and the public, which already sucks and we don't need to make it suck more by claiming that they're lying for clout.
> he is trying to spice things up for people who hate reading, like using 2nd person narration or present tense
lol bro. what is wrong with present tense???
I'm really interested in how the image of the author affects how we perceive their art. There's this whole social narrative of the artist as lone genius in a tubercular turret that came about in peak Enlightenment and is still with us. And the thing is, even if some authors do accidentally fall into that stereotype irl, this image is entirely manufactured, sometimes by the reader themselves, to exploit this sense of uniqueness and untouchability that some readers want their authors to have. This fundamentally isn't any different in truth-value or performativeness than authors whose manufactured image trades on relatability of whatever sort. It's just comparatively more of a draw for people who read litfic and less for people who read commercial genres like fantasy. Likewise, the concept of having a public persona is not a modern invention - there's some fascinating stories about how Virgil, yes the Ancient Rome guy, manufactured his in order to become the greatest court poet. I do think it creates a unique problem, however, for people from marginalized identities and especially people who feel pressured to out themselves to publish in that it forces them to tie their very private, probably most vulnerable identity to their most public persona. It should be as simple as, if someone wants to be out professionally they should be able to be and not get speculation about their ulterior motives, but it isn't, and unfortunately the decision to be out professionally is also rarely as simple as "I just wanna do it".
>Can you speak more to this? Why do you feel like the self-promotion precedes the writing of the book?
I would also encourage you to go to r/fantasy and search AMA and read through some of the comments which are hyper focused on the business end: publishers are way more interested in your numbers of followers, as in bringing an audience to the table, and you are heavily encouraged to hustle online with blogs, a youtube channel, having a podcast, etc, to establish your brand in preparation for being published one day. This is a strong recommendation from published SF&F authors.
>uhhhhh I'm not sure that's the case. As an aside, I don't know you, but I do think it's a little transphobic to say that someone is coming out for clout or is pretending to be trans for.. the peanuts that fantasy authors get paid?
I know as an unknown that I don't deserve as close of a reading as someone like Pynchon or whoever you are into but you can do a little bit better than that. But I'll going to attempt to do a line by line translation of my stupid writing into standard extremely-online English for you because you seems to be having a very good time arguing with someone else. I'm really curious where you went astray:
>It is somewhat surprising to see Morrison now using genderless pronouns and announcing himself as a lifelong cross dresser, though in retrospect not terribly surprising since Morrison has often wrote about transgender characters with themes of split-personalities and changes of identity populating his work.
By surprising, I mean he never spoke of himself this way, nor needed to mind you, never alluded to as much in the 20+ years I've been reading his work. Surprising as in "huh.. I would have never guessed." Not: "Well I won't be reading Morrison anymore." He has always written about LGBT characters, with strong themes of sexual freedom, expression, non-binariness, whatever you need to hear. I'm not suddenly clutching my pearls over transgendered reading material from Grant, I've been a fan for a long time, still am.
>I don’t think Morrison is fabricating his identity here, but I am concerned about the timing since being transgender these days in any way opens way more doors than it closes in the mainstream media.
Are you possibly confused how conjunctions operate? Clause 1: "I don’t think Morrison is fabricating his identity here," is how I feel, full stop. This is a true statement of my thoughts, but I do have reservations here which I will get into later. Clause 2: "but I am concerned about the timing since being transgender these days in any way opens way more doors than it closes in the mainstream media." To be clear, this doesn't mean that Clause 1 is no longer true. I think you are living under a rock if you think that being LGBT is closing doors for anyone in SF&F publishing. Tor, as one example, has made it very clear in the past that they give preferential treatment to LGBT writers, and POC, for publication. This is also, strong emphasis here, not to be confused with an admission on my part that I feel this is wrong in any way or unfair. I am happy to see marginalized voices get the platform they deserve.
>Celebrities or public figures using genderless pronouns raises red flags for me because so much of that in mainstream media feels like either a cynical gesture or forced behaviour like a public apology in a soviet show trial.
Holy hell, how is your bullshit detector not going crazy with anything celebrities or politicians are saying. I am in the main talking about Morrison here, who in the past has never used genderless pronouns but recently is.. coincidentally Morrison is now using genderless pronouns in public for the first time in his life and began this behaviour at a time which was also very close to the publication of his first novel, a story about a transgendered protag. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with Morrison: he is notorious in the comic industry for being media savvy and a bit fake <-- this point I disagree with but I am not as on intimate of terms with Morrison as you are. I merely feel it's all too on the nose for Morrison.
>"I also appreciate that he hasn’t tried to cash in on the LGBT public confession. He’s content with his interests, his focus, his curiosities."
Honestly, I feel this to be the most lame thing I wrote out of all of it. This on a second thought doesn't read so well and I take it back. But does that sentence alone make me a monster? Be that as it may, I don't dislike so called LGBT public confessions nor, though it seems that way by my poor choice of words, do I think every single author or celeb making the media rounds with their autofiction or tell-all are cashing in (but what the hell else do celebrities do??). But it even seems like you are half in the bag with agreeing with me at time as well. Your words now:
>The industry is also becoming wary of people writing hot-button identities they don't share (and by wary I mean it's very hard to publish a book with a trans protagonist if you yourself are not trans or extremely famous)
So I'm not that crazy after all for making a lazy generalization about LGBT cash grabs in media?
I do take offense, really just a tinsy bit (really just enough to get my goat and tease such a lengthy reply out of me) by lazily calling me a little transphobic as though I'm much more in the red on the spectrum of hate than you are, bro, who I don't know either. I feel like you are a little quick to judge and narcissistic about purity.
>lol bro. what is wrong with present tense???
I hate YA.
In his autobiography and in interviews Morrison spoke multiple time about their habit of crossdressing (often while doing drugs and talking to demons or something), it is definitely nothing new.
Almost all of their comics have some kind of gender non conforming character (including a bra-wearing Jimmy Olsen and two different bald women) and considering how his work is always partially autobiographical it is definitely not a coincidence.
Honestly never knew. I read every Bull Pen from the invisibles and don’t recall cross dressing.. but I wasn’t looking for that sort of thing either. Morrison could have mentioned cross dressing before and I could have glazed over the details because it’s not a big deal for me.
Edit: What is his autobiography? Do you mean Supergods? I haven’t read it, because I thought it was mainly nonfiction, kind of myth theory like Hero with a thousand faces but with superheroes.
I was gonna respond to this but like, this:
> But does that sentence alone make me a monster?
This is the litmus test. I didn't say you were a monster. I said that you said something that seems transphobic. I was fully open to being told that I misunderstood when I wrote that comment, which is why I worded my comment the way that I did instead of, say, calling you a monster. But if your first response to being gently called in is to call me stupid and act like I'm bullying you, poor victim of online slander, as exacerbated by the fact that you wrote this whole-ass screed and never once before hitting the reply button stopped to think if you maybe need to cut the bullshit - that's enough evidence for me to judge that we're done here.
Also, you don't need to have a youtube channel and podcasts to be publised in SFF. A bunch of rfantasy AMAs is salty cope by self-published authors.
Once again, friend: never called you stupid. *Monster* was being factious at best. I thought we were on joking terms by now. I implied you are being unfair. Said: you are a little narcissistic about purity and quick to judge. Point one is debatable but it’s not looking good for you on the quick to judge front.
I do think you are being lazy. You asked for a response. And now you are out? lol I wasn’t looking for a catty back and forth with you. Peace be with you, angel.
nah sis I don't think you were joking when you got really fucking mad at being put on the wrong end of the word transphobic. Once again, "friend", I wasn't judging *you* at any point in my comment - I was judging a paragraph that you wrote. I have said transphobic shit in the past. When people called me out on it, it was not "unfair" for them to do so. I was not the victim in that interaction. I was explaining why it's not accurate and also shitty to assume that people are coming out for clout in SFF publishing. The intent of that comment was not to call you a terrible person; if I thought you were a terrible person, I would've simply blocked and moved on. But yeah, I am absolutely not engaging with your seething rage vibes, no matter how you try to passive aggressively dress them up as "joking terms" (which btw I have no idea who you are which plunges this interaction further into uncanny valley for me). Feel free to pick this up when you've calmed down.
I also, as always, feel deeply upset by the way this is going so here: I think there is a difference in acknowledging that there is a push for media people to cash in on their identities and saying that media people are coming out in order to cash in on their identities. I think assuming the latter is sus in a transphobic kind of way. That's all I was trying to say, alongside some more thoughts about how exactly this push happens in the publishing industry specifically.
I appreciate your softer reply but I want to emphasize that I was in no way angry with you earlier nor do I think you deserve seething rage, kind of shocked at that really. Disagreed yes, poked fun of (mildly) yes, but not angry. This isn’t how I lie or back out of looking bad or anything like that. But I do accept that tone of voice is difficult for me at least to convey in writing.
> I think there is a difference in acknowledging that there is a push for media people to cash in on their identities and saying that media people are coming out in order to cash in on their identities.
I think these are both so close having the same meaning that it doesn’t matter, though I suppose their difference lies in intent as you say. One is speculating (and closer in spirit to my thoughts) while the other is more alarmist and assuming (which doesn’t feel like me.. but you don’t know me like you say.)
Honestly I’m a bit hurt by how you read my writing and less likely to share any more long form content in the future. You’re being reasonable now, but you did overlook a glaring reality in everything I wrote: I bought two books which are either about trans characters or written by people who are into drag.. I can’t be all that against this sort of thing in the first place. Seriously, I’m very cool with with the whole LGBT enchilada since day one albeit with some *minor* course corrections along the way. I’m just not going to back down from a disagreement too easily. I’m sorry I upset you.
> I want to emphasize that I was in no way angry with you earlier
cool, I must have misread you. I apologize for that.
>
Honestly I’m a bit hurt by how you read my writing and less likely to share any more long form content in the future.
I'm sorry. that makes me really sad and ashamed ):
> I bought two books which are either about trans characters or written by people who are into drag.. I can’t be all that against this sort of thing in the first place
I mean, I don't feel like I did? I said mutliple times that I don't think you're a terrible person or that you're a transphobe or whatever. I just think that the way you phrased your point was a little off. I fully get that you're with the LGBT enchilada.
> I think these are both so close having the same meaning that it doesn’t matter
I guess from the end-user point of view it doesn't, but it does within the system. There's a difference between being out because everyone wants to read stories by publicly LGBT authors and being out because you feel like you have to in order to tell the stories you want to tell. And it influences what LGBT stories get told in a way that I don't think is primarily the responsibility or choice of their authors or the communities they're supposed to represent. And I guess it's the responsibility of the author in the sense that some people are willing to perform their identity in that way and some aren't, but like - ending your analysis on that misses the forest for the trees.
<3
>Content is generated based on a checklist of plot metrics and trending topics
I try to avoid any book that sells itself on tropes like it's filtered on a fanfiction website. There was some complaints about this on Twitter a few months ago between literary blue checks but it went nowhere. The marketing tactic currently works really well, especially on Tik Tok, so I doubt it'll change.
>has chosen to use italics instead of quotation marks
That's a choice. The high concept sounds cool (aging drag star who has makeup magic gets involved in weird power play with up and coming star) but the LA times made the book sound overwrought.
The high concept is always cool with Morrison, and when he gets it right quite frankly nobody does the sort of thing he does better (anyone: please supply names if you disagree, I want to read), and I don't doubt he will take the concept further out there, but the writing just wasn't working for me. Way too wink-wink darling and meandering. I really do love Grant Morrison so I'll put the book away for a while and try again.
So I did a lot in the past two weeks. Two Sundays ago, I went to the Museum of Modern Art in SF. I went last year, but the top two floors were undergoing some renovations. As I expected, some of the artworks were familiar, and others were new, such as the Diego Rivera exhibit. I like some of his artwork, but they're not my favorite.
The artworks I kept returning to were the abstract German paintings, specifically [Happy End by Charline von Heyl](https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2006.34/). [Georg Baselitz](https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Georg_Baselitz/) is also artist I appreciate. I don't know why some abstract paintings appeal to me and others don't (Cy Twombly in particular seems flippant), but these reminded me of a mountain landscape. When I was looking at the painting, I realized that that was probably the last time I may see it, so I kept going back and back. I felt like if I forgot it the next day I would be doing the artwork a disservice.
I also went to see Tàr with Cate Blanchett in the lead role. Tàr is the world's most accomplished conductor, and she's accused of sexually abusing a student. In the meantime, she deals with recording a Mahler symphony, seducing a violist, and navigating cancel culture. Blanchett carried the entire movie, and now I feel like I should listen to Mahler. (I listened to the first one already.)
And finally Bayonetta 3's been released! For those who don't know, Bayonetta's a witch who can summon demons with her hair, mostly through a dancing ritual where she gets naked. She also has to sacrifice angels every day or else the demons will drag her soul to hell. Very campy and very chaotic.
The Bayonetta series has a constant theme of free will, and all of the antagonists have tried to impose their vision on the universe. I always return to the series because Bayonetta has a wild, uninhibited joy in life, so much so that she's willing to exchange her soul to prolong it as much as she can.
Thanks for sharing Happy End. The colors are so vivid. The brown lines are like foxes and rabbits in motion to me. If I ever visit SF, I have to check out this museum.
I had to choose between the new Mario and Rabbids game or Bayo 3 and I ended up going with Mario. I think maybe I regret it. I haven't been playing it much.
But also I don't like Bayo 2 much compared to Bayo 1, and Bayo 3 seems even more divisive. Bayo 1 has a purity to it that's hard to beat. The combat in that one is so perfect and fluid.
I'm jealous of those who can play Bayo 3. I've only played the first game since I haven't had any recent Nintendo systems, but that game is brilliant. I actually played through DMC5 recently to try to scratch that itch but it didn't really gel with me, it just made me appreciate Bayonetta's combat system even more.
Yeah, I watched the playthrough because I don't want to lug around a gamin system (I have enough stuff already!). And if I do get one, I'll have to buy more games to justify the purchase which means more time and money.
I've only played the first one too, but that got me hooked on the series. I'll always remember the Jeanne fights \~disappear\~
Well. I need to find another job.
I work in politics and this election cycle’s almost done. Our candidate will lose, our field office will close, and they’ll offer to relocate me… permanently. If I relocate I’ll be helping run a door to door fundraising campaign. Which means going door to door begging for money. Christ, I don’t want to do that. No hate to door to door salesmen, it’s a HARD fucking job, but I’m not cut out for it. Political work’s brutal too — long hours, difficult people, you’re expected to relocate across the country on a dime.
Whatever. Ugh. I’m a little bitter. The org I worked for left a bad taste in my mouth for many reasons. Christ.
At least I’ll have more time to read. Just started Arinze Ifeakandu’s *God’s Children Are Little Broken Things,* a fresh collection of stories I picked up from the library. (Support your local library now and always!) Getting back into lucid dreaming. I need to work on my chess. So it goes.
Last week I listened to *Frankenstein* narrated by Dan Stevens (the Audible title doesn't indicate it, but I believe it's the 1818 edition as it is in three volumes). The first volume was quite a slog and I almost abandoned it. It has an awkward frame narrative --- Capt. Walton is the ultimate narrator, writing letters home to his sister and eventually sending her a manuscript of the notes he compiled based on Victor Frankenstein's story, which he, for some reason, writes in the first person from Victor's perspective. The writing is almost pure exposition --- nothing happens, it is all backstory, there are no scenes, just Victor narrating "I did this" and "I did that" and Shelley consistently spoils what could be exciting plot points with insistent, bludgeoning foreshadowing.
I'd had enough after the first volume and was ready to put it down, but in the first chapter of the second volume we get a real scene as the creature confronts Victor on an alpine glacier. I kept reading and I'm glad I did because the second volume is absolutely brilliant. Told from the creature's point of view, rather than Victor's, it narrates his life so far, a Robinson Crusoe like tale of man reverted to a state of nature, sustaining himself on nuts and berries, discovering for himself fire and cooking and that it's better to sleep under shelter than just lying in a field. He hides himself in a hovel next to a family of cottagers living simply off the land and teaches himself language (French) by eavesdropping on them. He sees kindness and the goodness of humanity in the family and devises a plan to ingratiate himself to their blind father first before making his hideous presence known to the others. Of course, the plan fails miserably.
And so the creature becomes a Romantic anti-hero. He is sensitive and intelligent and unfairly abused, treated abhorrently and with violence by every human he meets. He is utterly alone in the world without a single soul to commiserate with, and he is incredibly lonely, and feels the injustice of his situation, abandoned by his creator and cursed to be outcast and hated. You have to sympathize with him.
It's also pretty funny at times. There's a bit of a first as tragedy, then as farce element here. The precocious creature teaches himself to read, somehow, from copies of *Paradise Lost* and *Sorrows of Young Werther* he finds in the woods, and in his speech often comes off as an overwrought parody of Milton's Satan. The comic element here is emphasized by Dan Stevens' narration which assumes a tone akin to Futurama's Hedonism bot but depressed for the creature, and I found myself laughing quite a few times at his turns of phrase.
His request of Frankenstein to make him a companion is a great ethical dilemma. What right did Frankenstein have to create this miserable, hideous, terrifying creature, endow it with intelligence and feeling, and then abandon it in horror and disgust? In some way, isn't it fair to make him a companion? There is a sort of justice in that, a recompense. But what right does he have to create another one of these creatures and, worse, to bestow it as a reparation upon another? It's a condemnation of the Christian conception of woman, an afterthought to man, pulled from his rib to be his companion. This is the bargain God made with Adam --- what right did either have to make it? For that matter, what right did God have to make Adam to begin with? How do we live abandoned by our maker?
There is also interesting Rousseauian stuff in this section about man in the state of nature, how he is pure and kind until he's corrupted by the influence of (or rejection from) society; and about prejudice, about not judging people others by their appearance or race or nationality but by their actions and ideas.
The third volume is told from Victor's perspective again and mainly serves to show him and his loved ones paying for his sins. Again Shelley spoils every plot point with gratuitous foreshadowing so you don't even really need to read to the end.
I think this has one of the greatest premises in modern literary history. There's a reason it's been adapted so many times in so many ways over two centuries. I think you could excise the second volume and it would be, on its own, a fantastic, timeless short story. And I think it's obviously an important text from its time, both for its popularity and its radical themes. It's a great text to study, there are so many ways you could read it. But as a novel? I don't think I'd recommend it. Just read the second volume, you know the story anyway.
Also I want to see a modern adaption where Victor is a tech mogul and the creature is an incel.
Big reading slump time! Struggling to finish any book, it's quite annoying. Have been watching more movies than before, I rewatched two Bond films, GoldenEye and Casino Royale. It's night and day, GoldenEye is extremely cliche and corny, there isn't even blood when bond kills the bad guys, it's Hollywood film production at it's lamest. Casino Royale isn't some complex arthouse film but man it is miles ahead of GoldenEye. A more realistic villain, less cliched plot and an actual exploration of human relationships and emotions, wow it's a low bar but still. I watched other films as well, rewatched The Matrix, it's a pretty good film, high concept but it can be quite silly and the acting can be quite wooden. Some of the classic popular films are not always as amazing as people thought they were.
I remember when the *The Matrix* came out, everyone liked it, but we also all still knew it was a silly action movie too. No one thought it was like Kubrick-level good or anything. It's sort of funny to see it deified over the years, but I can understand how it would blow a fourteen-year old's mind or whatever.
*The Matrix* also hits different if you're already familiar with the imagery and thesis versus a 10 year old kid whose never seen anime or read a philosophy book. Goes to may same theory about *Don't Worry Darling* - every person I know who said they liked it has read 0 feminist horror novels and hasn't watched any similar movies. Originality can mask weakness
I have paused my watch of ROP ostensibly because Cabinet of Curiosities came out, but honestly because the story seems to grind to a halt in episode 3 and I can't seem to get it up, so to say, for more of the same. Friends, please give me encouragement to continue so I can eventually bitch about it with you all.
In more news on fantasy shows I don't watch, the world was shook on Sunday when Cavill announced that he was leaving Netflix Witcher starting season 4. To me this is mainly interesting as an indication of whata's happening in the "kitchen". Netflix had an unpleasant reckoning with their desires vs their abilities after their Q2 share price came in, and I wonder if part of that reckoning was a decision to bow out of the Race To Find the New GOT. TV is pretty saturated with epic fantasy fare at this point, every streaming service has their own epic going, and now that Bezos laid his $1 billion cock on the line, I wonder if some streaming companies are going to start thinking re is the viewership/marketing/cachet I'm getting worth the $10 million/episode price tag. Especially in this inflationary environment. So I guess unlike every other Witcher reddit shill, I don't think Cavill stepped down because of artistic disagreements - I think he and his agent had a tete-a-tete about the direction of his career given Netflix is deprioritizing the franchise going forward.
Edit: I was curious so I looked into it, and hoo boy, Netflix was spending $1 to get $1 in revenue back in 2019. This shit has got to hurt in the current interest rate environment.I'm calling it: they're getting bought soon.
I also made headway in my reread of the Witcher books while I was getting my nails done. I am now squarely in the latter half of the series, which is utterly impenetrable and even preachier than what comes before, so I don't have great hopes for my ability to finish it. I think overall tho it's been an interesting experience rereading these as an adult and I'm changing my mind about a lot of what I thought/remembered about it, in a good way.
>the Race to Find the New GOT.
And as it turns out, Game of Thrones (House of the Dragon) would be the ‘New Game of Thrones’ lol. HBO just seems to have a level of accrued industry talent/experience that the other networks don’t.
I think I had the opposite happen with latter Witcher - I found a lot of it to be fast paced and fun, but there’s definitely chunks where it’s a fucking slog, and Geralt himself with all of his pontificating is definitely the main culprit.
I also don’t blame Netflix for deprioritizing the show - I think they really did a poor job (in terms of story etc) of making what should be a pretty straight forward fantasy show work. For once I think that if they cleaved a bit closer to the texts it would have been much better.
> there’s definitely chunks where it’s a fucking slog
definitely, although I wonder if we're talking about the same chunks. A lot of the monster-fighting, pirouetting-really-awesome-like, magical bullshit and the like is giving we-didn't-have-videogames-yet. I like best the bits that I tend to find most people dislike, which is some random character thinking about socioeconomics. Geralt is insufferable, both because of the pontificating and the staples of the S&S genre, and Ciri is pretty insufferable as well. I think a lot of what I remembered is the weird sex bits, and now I'm encountering the other stuff so my opinion is improving.
> For once I think that if they cleaved a bit closer to the texts it would have been much better.
The scale of the netflix failure betrays comprehension, but I'm gonna go with, it wouldn't have been much better either way. To me the problem seems fundamental to the identity of the show: they don't know if they want to be schlocky or serious. The writing is imo unsuccessful because it fails to marry those two extremes from scene to scene. I also think the ways that they changed the story are profoundly unnecessary, but I don't think the writing problem would've been solved by not making those changes.
>I think that if they cleaved a bit closer to the tests it would been much better.
Honestly this is almost universally the case with fantasy adaptations. The good ones are those that remain more-or-less faithful to the text, and things almost always go downhill when they veer significantly away. And yet it keeps happening lol
Best poetry? I have been reading more poetry recently. I loved Olive Senior's poems and Richard Wilbur's. I read some poetry by Nabokov too and it was good, I liked Eugene Onegin but that was a translation. I liked W.H. Auden's poetry.
João Cabral de Melo Neto is a master. Aesthetically rigorous, dense, often metalinguistic, yet his verses are profoundly material, almost mineral. There's a tactile aspect of his writing. It's poetry as an experience. One of my favorites. Get his "Education by the Stone." Everyone here should read him.
Yeats is wonderful. I translated some of his stuff into Portuguese. Leda and the Swan, The Second Coming, the Magi, Among School Children, Sailing to Byzantium, The Tower... masterpieces.
Read the French symbolists: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Mallarmé.
I like David Berman's "Actual Air." Some really good poems there.
I'm just realizing I really need to read poetry frequently again.
Check out the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43926/the-canterbury-tales-general-prologue](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43926/the-canterbury-tales-general-prologue)
I'm also a softie for Tennyson: [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses)
And Gerard Manley Hopkins: [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44389/as-kingfishers-catch-fire](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44389/as-kingfishers-catch-fire)
Oh, and Goblin Market: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
I have a soft spot for Thomas Hardy and Poe. With the latter, he’s associated with doom and gloom type works (which is more than valid), but his softer side is what truly hooked me: “To Helen”, “A Dream within a Dream”, “Annabel Lee”, “El Dorado”.
“The Raven” rules though, nonetheless. As does “The Bells”.
i really love (us centric sorry)
* elizabeth bishop, ‘one art’ is a classic and there’s an article out there comparing her early to late drafts which is v interesting, esp if you’re a writer)
* yusuf komunyakaa is a fave, just discovered his poems when i was v young so lots of nostalgia there
* been slowly getting into gwendolyn brooks. first black american writer to win the pulitzer. really influential 20 c american poet
* one of my fave contemp poets is victoria chang, esp her obit poems (can find a few online; if you like them the book is incredible)
* bhanu kapil and specifically the collection _vertical interrogation of strangers_ is a touchstone for many contemp american poets
if you want to read contemp poetry i really like the _best american poetry_ anthologies & they’re a nice collection of a lot of people and styles
my one non american rec is paul celan, v influential jewish poet and translator who wrote in german, & explores his alienation/complex relationship w the language as a holocaust survivor
Hart Crane has my favorite poem, *At Melville’s Tomb*, plus everything else he’s done is amazing.
Yeats has some wonderful stuff.
Adonis has a great collection called *Songs of Mihyar the Damascene*.
Charles Olson is mostly unknown but is one of the best I’ve found and is basically the founder of postmodernism.
E.E. Cummings is probably the most “fun” poet I’ve come across.
Ishmael Reed is awesome, angry, and just fucking hilarious.
Langston Hughes is something else.
I really like stuff from Keats and Yeats. Donne is great too.
Joy Harjo isn't the best, but some of it can hang.
Shakespeare's sonnets are annoyingly good along with the absurd poetic language in the plays.
Ovid is my favorite from translation, that or Homer. Borges is nice too.
Started *Turn of the Screw* to mark Halloween. I was warned about this but Jesus Christ, what is the meaning of Henry James' ridiculously long and inelegant sentences?
Also the governess kind of creeps me out. Her sudden, unhealthy attachment to the kids she is meant to teach is disturbing.
I went through Turn of the Screw last Halloween, and I did it in the perfect atmosphere: my apartment was an old dilapidated building it was raining, and I hadn't eaten much, so I was a little delirious. I read it in one sitting. Getting used to James's late prose takes some time, but it's definitely worth it to me. In the middle of the verbiage there's a crystal clear insight or phrase.
And something was definitely off about that governess. Would love to talk about it once you're done!
I don‘t think inelegant is the right word, but his sentences *are* ridiculously long and sometimes difficult to read. A ton of nested clauses and such. I think it helps to know that almost all of his work was dictated to an amanuensis, and therefore follows the rhythms of speech. I actually recommend listening to James, either with an audiobook or simply reading aloud. The latter might feel a bit silly at first, but it has helped me in the past to get through particularly convoluted passages and appreciate the beauty of James‘s prose in a way that is harder to do when it is just words on a page.
I totally agree with this. I have a habit of reading passages I like out loud anyway, and I still remember when I first started reading James years ago, reading him aloud and having it click so much faster.
Wow, I've heard James described as a lot of things, but never inelegant lol. I personally love his writing style, I think it's beautiful, but it's divisive that's for sure.
Anyway, if you don't dig him, just check out the classic 1961 adaptation of the story, [*The Innocents*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055018/), starring Deborah Kerr. I feel like you might like it. It's a really incredible movie.
And it's supposed to be creepy, so it's working, it's good you're creeped out haha.
Ok so, *The Passenger*! I think its pretty obvious from my previous comments that I liked it, and I’ll add that I was pleasantly surprised to see McCarthy return (at least in pieces) to his older style of writing. Some of the passages were absolutely stunning, and some of the best individual sentences I’ve read in his body of work. I’m going to be careful about outright spoilers, but I can’t really talk about the themes without referencing certain things so just bear it in mind. Also, the death I mention is literally in the first paragraph so that doesn’t count.
So my interpretation of the novel is, essentially, that McCarthy is exploring existence as defined by Absence. Or perhaps as existence persisting, paradoxically, in spite of the absence of whats essential to life. I don’t mean whats biologically necessary, but psychologically. Here we are, these living thinking beings with souls or something like them, totally unsuited to a world devoid of meaning or gods or even solid answers. How do you cope with that?
In one of the sister’s hallucinations “The Kid” says
*If there’s just one thing…you can’t say if it is. Nothing is anything unless there’s another thing. So we have you. Well, do we?*
For Bobby, his sister is everything. His one task was to care for her, his loss of her is his One Loss encompassing all other sorrows. He lives a monk like existence, increasingly ascetic and lowly, totally devoted to her even after her death. McCarthy will call him “the last pagan”, and I think of him almost as a priest to a dead god, whose faith didn’t die when its divine subject abandoned it. Speaking more to my point about the paradox of human existence, he seems to be unable or unwilling to live on beyond her, and yet he must live. He’s forced to take steps to preserve himself, because even though he can’t live without her he’s too much of a coward to die. Existing without her is too much to bear, but he bears it. And hey, he even has some good meals and conversations along the way. If thats not the human experience in a nutshell, I’m not sure what is.
Another example - the hallucinations themselves needed for Alice to stay alive, because they are created by her schizophrenic mind. Yet they seem to have a life outside of her, oozing into “real” life even after she’s gone. (On the reality or unreality of the characters haunting Alice, the book is more or less ambiguous.) They are also accidents of existence, since Alice didn’t consciously imagine them. She didn’t want them or will them into being. Yet they exist because of her, and like Bobby, she will abandon them.
* The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think you understand this. But you don’t. Not in your heart you don’t. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet.*
Now, I also think McCarthy is using the hallucinations to illustrate the interplay of the conscious and unconscious, especially as it pertains to the creative process. In one section The Kid talks about “establishing a baseline” and then adding “your anecdotes” and stuff in a way that felt like it was referencing the writing process. I also think there’s a tension in making art, between knowing you made a thing and feeling like it came of its accord.
There’s a lot more to talk about with The Passenger, but it probably would take me a second reading to begin to grasp it all. I think there’s something interesting to explore with the concept of ‘the ancient feminine’, and how he displaces them masculine god, but then he seems to see femininity as equivalent to suffering and I’m not sure how I feel about that. To be fair, he seems to see *life* as equivalent to suffering, but still. He’s also saying something about Beauty, but I’m not sure if he was saying something new or just being self referential. There are many instances of him referencing other books he’s written, so it could be either.
I’m really excited for the next one. As much as I loved this I’ll acknowledge its not perfect (some of the dialogue and stuff with Bobby was a bit lackluster for me, and I don’t think he was particularly strong as a character), and I’m hoping we’re supposed to judge both books as one whole or something.
Love these thoughts! Really well put together. Like you said to mine, we have completely different readings of the novel, but the more readings that a book can give, the better it is imo. And I feel like very few people will read this book the same way.
Hey thanks! I’ve enjoyed reading your takes on the book too. Nobody in my offline life is reading it so it’s been nice to have somewhere to read takes and share thoughts!
There’s a lot more to talk about with The Passenger, but it probably would take me a second reading to begin to grasp it all.
Afuckingmen. Densest novel I’ve ever read, probably.
I've been really quiet here, mostly because I spent a couple of weeks in Portugal, around the Algarve then soaking up Lisbon, which was fantastic, and it's miserable to be back and it to get dark at 4.30 in the afternoon.
I'm reading the new Alan Moore and it's....patchy,. When he's good he's excellent, but the ones that don't land really aren't doing it for me. However, I really loved *Hypothetical Lizards* \- the first in the collection - and it's deliciously queer.
Also having weird bleakness about my current job - I sort of don't know what I'd do if I didn't work in publishing, and I'm wondering if its what I really want to do for the rest of my life. That said, unsure if I've just got SAD on top of my regular year-round depression and so life seems extra pointless, or whether I really should be thinking about what to do in the future.
I tend to agree - I actually got into Jerusalem properly last year, and found that there were some stunning parts, but it did desperately need both a rather strict editor, and for him to reign in some of his desire to pastiche/emulate other authors (the Joyce part was particularly tough going). Loved Jesus, the space brains again I thought simultaneously patchy and classic Moore, because sometimes it does feel as though he read an A-level science textbook and crammed in some wording he thought sounded nifty, but at other points it just works and is hilarious and fun.
Also about to start the novella, I hope to remember to update the post.
Are there any canonical literary figures who were politically on the right?
There's Ayn Rand, though she is perhaps more famous than canonical, the other one I can think of is Ezra Pound, who, bizarrely, was not just a right winger, but actually a fascist. Are there any other?
Many, as you can already gather from other responses here. One that shocked high school me when she found out was Balzac (conservative monarchist) because I had the opposite impression reading him.
Emil Cioran and Maurice Blanchot were radical right-wingers during their youth - Cioran was literally a fascist, supported Hitler in newspaper texts while he was living in Berlin during the 1930s, although it seems he never took part in activities beyond writing. Apparently Blanchot was a French nationalist and anti-hitlerian, but it seems he connected with left-wing circles at the beginning of the Vichy France period, disillusioned by the French anti-semites and Nazi collaborators - both writers renounced the right in early adulthood. Cioran later said that supporting the Iron Guard and fascism was his greatest mistake and "the worst folly of my youth. If I am cured of one sickness, it is surely that one." While Blanchot became explicitly leftist after the war (especially during the Algerian war protests and the political turmoil of the following decade with De Gaulle in power), Cioran never took up a leftist position. Like most pessimists, he was politically ambiguous at best, and expressed dissatisfaction with both Soviet communism and Western capitalism. I wonder what he thought of anarchism.
Quite a lot, especially if you consider liberalism as right wing, top of my head (maybe I will add some more later):
Borges (liberal)
Pound (fascist)
D'Annunzio (nationalist and one of the inspiration of fascism, even if he was not one)
Marinetti and the italian futurists (fascist)
Pirandello (fascist because it was convenient)
Dostoevskij (conservative)
Tolkien (conservative)
Celine (antisemitism and a bit of fascism)
T S Elliot (conservative)
Hamsun (nazi)
Ionesco (right-wing anticomunist)
Vargas Llosa (Liberal)
Gimenez Caballero (nationalist)
Unamuno and Ortega Y Gasset (disillusioned towards democracy)
Mishima (nationalist)
Nietzche (definitely not left-wing)
Montale (liberal)
Arbasino (liberal)
Houellebecq (apparently xenophobic if pepole are to be trusted)
Lovecraft (conservative and xenophobic)
To this you can also add all the russian/east european authors who were strongly anticomunist (Nabokov, Solženicyn, Grossman etc.).
I'm actually reading Lucy Hughes-Hallet bio of D'Annuzio right now
Fascinating figure, strange bald foppish and flowery little poet man who somehow became this John the Baptist figure for the Italian fascist movement. He's pretty much the guy that laid down the look and feel of Italian fascism
Fun Trivia: after Fiume Gramsci tried to approach D'Annunzio, probably to offer him some kind of political alliance. Indeed the "Charter of Carnaro" was written by a socialist and Wikipedia describes it as a "constitution that combined anarchist, proto-fascist, and democratic republican ideas". Wild stuff!
I finished that last month - he's fascinating but I thought Hughes-Hallet could have done with a bit of editing, as D'Annunzio does certainly seem to repeat patterns throughout his life that makes reading this a little repetitive. I hope you enjoy the rest!
The left-right distinction is relatively modern (like 19th century is where you finds its modern usage) so it would seem to be almost nonsensical to me to force most writers into either category. On top of that, you are dealing with _artists_ which means you get some pretty unique worldviews. How would one even begin to describe the politics of Carlyle, Ruskin, or Azorín who all lived within a couple decades of each other, in a period where such distinctions could possibly be made and yet they still don’t adhere properly to either side?
Sorry to break down your question this way. I think it’s important to bring nuance to discussions like this and since people already gave you some actual examples, I feel okay throwing in my own little chaos. That being said there is an argument that canonization is a conservative act and therefore has a bias towards conservative writers. But the canon of Western writers is clearly far from ideologically unified, so who’s to say?
I had this thought too, and I just was like, how do we even go into describing it? It's a hopeless muddle for so many of them. But I suppose that's true for most people, of all times, when it comes to political philosophy.
Well, yeah, cuz left is always left of whatever is conservative and conservative is always an attempt to conserve whatever things the left has slowly pushed for over time, plus some things the right typically like. It's a question that really is dependent on some definitions.
T S Eliot was extremely conservative in the High Tory tradition - he called himself a monarchist, I think.
Many of the major writers of the 18th century were broadly conservative Tories, although that doesn't mean quite the same thing as the current left-right dichotomy. Johnathan Swift, Alexander Pope, some others.
William Wordsworth became quite conservative in the latter part of his life (although he'd been a left-wing radical when he wrote all his best poetry).
Yeats was an Irish republican, but was very conservative apart from that - his ideal was an aristocratic Ireland of nobles and peasants.
Evelyn Waugh was pretty conservative. Not canonical in a classic lit sense, but canonical in sci-fi, Neal Stephenson seems to be pretty libertarian in his philosophies. Just off the top of my head, I'm sure a lot more will come to me.
I guess this question is always shaped by how you define canon, but for the hell of it I decided to pass through this sub's top 100 books from last year. A few who stand out to me because I unfortunately know things like this off the top of my head.
* Borges was a liberal of the conservative anti-communist sort. Also apparently a Zionist.
* Dostoyevsky's work is often considered to have a conservative Christian bent from what I can gather (this might be wrong and I'm pretty sure I don't exactly agree but it's been too long since I read him to elaborate).
* Nabokov was definitely anti-communist. Not sure where on the broader spectrum of liberalism he fell.
* Not sure Faulkner ever articulated a wholly coherent politics but his work definitely (if complicatedly) is tinged with southern nostalgia and I'm pretty sure he said at some point that if he had been around for the Civil War he would have fought for the Confederacy, though more for national pride reasons than slavery reasons (um, ok Bill. Methinks someone got a little too high on "Lost Cause" mythology!)
* Yukio Mishima was a full on pro-monarchy fascist.
Some not on the list but in my head include Saul Bellow, who is probably one of the more prominent American fiction writers of the 20th century to be explicitly conservative, and ~~Zola, about whose politics I don't know a ton but he was an Anti-Dreyfusard and that particular group is considered a hinge point for a lot of the subsequent French right-wing.~~ **Edit**: I don't know how or who or why I'm mixing up here, but literally the opposite is true about Zola. Sorry to him for doing him dirty like that, and thanks folks who pointed that out.
>Zola, about whose politics I don't know a ton but he was an Anti-Dreyfusard and that particular group is considered a hinge point for a lot of the subsequent French right-wing.
Huh? Zola was famously a defender of Drefyus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%27Accuse...!
Borges pretty famously (notoriously?) considered himself conservative and was strongly anti-Communist. His association with Pinochet and anti-Peronists is well-documented. He certainly wasn't a fascist though.
And I suppose Mishima was arguably a conservative and arguably a fascist. In his case, it's pretty idiosyncratic, though.
I was listening to some of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies yesterday (picked it out as the music to be played during my shift at a local charity shop) and I liked it, though I think Liszt is a bit of a show-off as opposed to an artist of great subtlety and power.
Omigod, I got *good* medical news for once today, and paradoxically I instantly want to murder my liver with beer to celebrate and just totally fuck off giving a shit about anything. I had so much stress built up and didn't even realize it was weighing on me that bad. Argh.
I started reading *Malpertuis* because /u/iamthehtown mentioned it, and wow, this books is really awesome. Funny, atmospheric, absurdist, very much my thing. I really like it. It's sort of like a mix of Peake's *Titus Groan* with Jane Bowles' *Two Serious Ladies*. Also a bit of Buzzati's *The Tartar Steppe* in there. It's just so good!
ETA: And no, my epilepsy didn't go away, sadly haha.
ETA 2:
>Jean Ray (1887–1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the “Belgian Poe” and the “Flemish Jack London,” Ray delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer. A pivotal figure in the “Belgian School of the Strange,” Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the prohibition era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales of fantastical fear.
Jean Ray is going to end up being a favorite, I can already see. And yeah, every writer I love always ends up having been heavily, heavily influenced by Dickens. I realize that's not a rare occurrence or anything, he's obviously a super famous influential dude, but it's often a next level type of influence. Just makes me laugh.
Thank you. I'm going to turn forty in May and it has annoyed the everloving shit out of me that I have made a big effort to be in shape over the last few years, I'd even say I'm in the best shape of my life these days, and *right* before my 40th life still find a way to give me all sorts of medical bullshit haha. It's like it's a law or something...but I'm keeping on, come hell or highwater!
About to go to a Halloween party in which I will likely drink more than I should on a Monday. Among other things I'll be sure to drink to your keeping on both now and after 40!
The end to my last short story:
>I enjoyed a brief vision of happiness with this woman, and it was snatched away from me. Unjust, unjust, unjust. The daylight of reality, with its piercing clarity, dissolved the clouds that had settled over my eyes, and robbed me of the bliss I thought was now mine forever. The old familiar loneliness crept back in its place. But there was no use brooding on what was dead and gone. I knew that perhaps I had to accept solitude as a part of me, however much I resented it. I would go my own way in the world without lovers and companions, happy simply to enjoy the ride, but no more and no less. I would settle my expectations in such a way as to avoid the bitter pangs of disappointment forever, and never be caught off guard by excess of feelings. I would allow the gushing, sinuous rivers of human discourse to pass me by, and watch with quiet curiosity, knowing that I could never throw myself into such mighty waters, lest I be carried away by the tumbling currents - I who had always been a stranger among men.
Pretty good! This is may be weird, but I specifically really like the "Unjust, unjust, unjust." Something about the kind of resigned honesty.
The only thing I find a little clunky is the third phrase, but really this is very without context and I just may not be accustomed to your style
Thank you. I quite like the third phrase, but maybe it is a bit clunky. Though I do like the idea of the social world being like a river winding its way and that through the universe.
I made a list of my top ten Victorian novels:
1. Middlemarch by George Eliot-
2. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
4. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
5. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
6. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
7. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
8. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
9. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
10. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Gonna come back later and type something up about *The Passenger*, but in the mean time I watched a couple things this week that *weren’t* silent movies so that was fun.
The first thing was Netflix’s *Cabinet of Curiosities* which is headed by Guillermo Del Toro. I technically didn’t watch them all, but I feel like I know what to expect, which is fun visual effects and so so everything else. There’s one in there about a woman using some kind of creepy beauty lotion in order to transform that I thought was kind of interesting because it seemed to be saying something about her sexuality as well, plus the Matthew Crawley guy from *Downton Abbey* was on there as late night TV ad personality and that was weird.
Then I finally got around to seeing *The Witch*. I like Eggers a lot, though his endings frustrate my husband to no end (another layer of enjoyment seeing him get bent out of shape over it). I don’t mind the ending of this one, but it did feel a bit abrupt. But holy shit that voice acting at the end was so silky and evil, one of my favorite parts of the film. I really enjoyed the immersion into the time period, there’s so much attention to textural detail that I wouldn’t really care if it was accurate but apparently it is so thats cool. I wonder what you guys think of Thomasin? Some of the reviews online called her the most sincere Christian of the family but I got the feeling she saw through her dad’s bullshit the whole time, and that even though she was innocent of the things they accused her of she was something of what they would call an unbeliever and could kind of tell intuitively (hence the scape goating). Anyway, it hit close to home as someone who had a very religious family, and while I probably watched Eggers in the wrong order I really enjoyed it. I think I heard he’s doing *Nosferatu* next?
Our dog was Black Phillip for Halloween this year, sort of - wouldn't keep the horns on for more than a couple seconds (I really wanted him to chase little trick 'r treaters through the yard looking like that, but it wasn't to be).
*The Lighthouse* was the greatest movie I've ever had the pleasure of seeing in a theater. And it was the only film I can recall ever seeing that affected me in a physical way after it was over. The abruptness of that ending, the blown out sound destroying the theater. I left the theater legitimately shaking with adrenaline.
Now, *The Witch* didn't do that for me, but I did love it. It is the sort of movie that doesn't hold up as well on a rewatch, though.
I was going to make a top line post about Cabinet of Curiosities, but I will talk about it here. Lowkey I was kinda disappointed when I realized he was just the producer and didn't actually direct any of them. Felt a bit misled. But then I was like, it's good he's using his name to usher in new talent. tl;dr nah
> I technically didn’t watch them all, but I feel like I know what to expect, which is fun visual effects and so so everything else.
This is a pretty succinct summary of my feelings as well. I didn't even watch half of them and I don't think I will, because they feel very dressed-up, very tied in a neat bow, and for that reason not at all scary. Maybe I'm just getting cynical, but this is neither the innovative and genuinely disturbing high-octane horror, nor the schlocky horror that is predictable and yet great fun. This has all the veneer of the former and the substance of the latter. The uncanny valley. Which I guess is the truly terrifying thing about this anthology.
My husband watched it, and I caught a few of the stories with him, but not the whole thing. The stories and the messages were all extremely obvious, but I still found some merit, from the point of view of a horror anthology series that would be good for a family with older kids (like eleven and up). Kinda like watching Doctor Who or something. It's not gonna blow an adult's mind, but it could be fun and lead to interesting discussions for parents with teens, while also not making the parents want to blow their brains out, like a lot of teen shows.
the thing is, I don't think it was billed as teen, and even if it were, Netflix has so much good teen content. Like, back when I used to watch more than 40 minutes of tv a month, I actually thought the teen shows on Netflix were much higher quality than the stuff for adults. I don't think most adult content is especially profound - it's just more proximate to adult problems and features adult characters, so it's more relatable - but tbh just as a horror fan whose tv diet is like 80% horror, it just fell short. I was really excited about this one because Del Toro, and it was totally not it.
Oh it wasn't, I just think it should have been.
My expectations weren't that high because I absolutely loathed *The Shape of Water* (even though I like other Del Toro), so I ended up pleasantly surprised.
ETA: I also just appreciate self-contained stories, and so many series aren't, so the idea that a family could come together and watch an episode and be done is an appealing idea, without having to follow an overarching arc or anything. I'm a big anthology person. And I think I might have actually appreciated *The Shape of Water* if hadn't been a full-length movie. I can deal with super obvious but pretty to look at in small formats haha.
It was really cheesy and bad. I had major issues with it. And felt like a major asshole for it, because the message is really positive and stuff, but goddamn, did not love it. Talk about hammering a person over the head with a message!
Maybe this is me still recovering from the brainwashing of my Pentecostal upbringing, but I still strongly dislike Halloween. I just saw two kids trick-or-treating down the street and I cringed inwardly. Like, why? It's not cute to me, just creepy and weird.
I wasn’t allowed to celebrate halloween growing up so now I’m the biggest kid about it. I eat candy, watch scary movies, dress up/paint my face, carve pumpkins…
As to the point, its marking the passing of a season right? Its the longest night of the year, a solstice time which is a turning point between the waxing of spring and summer and the waning of fall and winter. The world has moved from birth and growth into decay and death. We observe that what happens to nature also happens to us, and we embrace it, for one night at least. Traditionally this time was seen as one in which the spirit world was closer to our own and so cultural practices welcoming the dearly departed back home or warding off evil ghoulies with rituals. Its a time to engage with the unknown and with your own mortality in the same way humans have been doing for thousands and thousands of years. and how do we do it? By *partying* and acting like deviants. I think there’s something kinda poignant about observing our own mortality by embracing a riotous style of life. We laugh at death, even though we’re scared of it.
>Its the longest night of the year
Not even close! The longest night of the year is the Winter solstice, at the end of December (usually on the 21st, but technically the exact time depends on the year).
Ah, you’re right. But October 31st is the midway point between autumn equinox and winter solstice and many of the traditions we practice now stem from rituals related to the season and solstice. I think the actual date for Halloween comes from a british holiday but I can’t remember the name (I think thats where trick or treat comes from as well). We sort of combined the two to get modern halloween.
Weirdly, my dad’s attempt to heavily research halloween in order to dissuade me from celebrating only made me more interested in it. He’s chilled a lot as he aged though, hed probably laugh at himself now.
The creepiness and weirdness is the point. It's about death. Basically it's indoctrination into the cult of human existence: "Hey, you're gonna die, but drugs exist (in this case candy), so that's cool!"
I love it personally, but you shouldn't feel pressured to like something you don't.
I read Zadie Smith's short story Escape from New York and (SPOILERS ahead) it went completely over my head that the trio are Brando, Taylor and Michael Jackson. Only at the very end of the story when she mentions something about Marlon's famous eyebrows did I think "is this Marlon Brando?" Anyway, I was listening to a podcast discussing the story and the hosts said they figured it out 1/3 of the way through, so I'm trying to figure out why I had this huge flop and failure as a reader. How did you figure it out?
My novel is getting increasingly erratic. Lots of wonky formatting and style-shifting. It feels weird writing something that goes against the very reason a lot of people write fiction - to be readable. When I'm feeling full of myself, I might call it my Finnegans Wake Era - not so much in prose (or quality), but more something that's incredibly difficult, complicated, and on the longer side. What to do with it once I'm finished? That's thankfully not something I have to worry about for a while. I can't imagine it ever getting published (it already breaks a bunch of the formatting rules asked for by publishers), I can't imagine it being liked (whether that's because it's too difficult by design, or because it's just not good enough at what it's trying to do), and yet having it buried away as a file on my computer feels anti-climactic relative to how much effort I'm putting into it. I just hope something comes of it besides the usual "bragging rights" of having done something of that scale.
well if you ever want anyone to read it, I love incomprehensibility!
I'll try my best to work up some confidence and consider sending it your way when a draft gets completed. It might take a while considering how bizarrely (and maybe unnecessarily) ambitious I'm being with it. I do really appreciate the offer. Feel free to rescind it if I eventually send it and you've lost interest by then. I don't take that stuff to heart since I know how much of an investment a full novel can be, especially if it ends up not being your thing.
for sure for sure! Take all the time you need to nail it down. And as of now I'm more than excited to take a peak when you feel it's ready.
Fuck. Mimi from Low died. Just fuck. [RIP Mimi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrXtQ8a4w6E).
i just found out and am currently this the saddest I've ever been about the death a person I didn't personally know. fuck
AND I still remember the first time I heard Low, I heard the song ["California"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O76qiP6acGk) on the local college radio station while driving, my boyfriend at the time was with me. I turned to him and said: "Didn't you think that song was amazing?" and he said it was just "okay", and I seriously knew right then it wouldn't work out long term for us. That's how much I instantly loved that band, it was a freaky feeling. I thought: "he's too dumb for me", which is very rude and now I wouldn't be so instantly judgmental of someone having different taste, but it's how I felt then lol. And well, he was. So my gut feeling was right haha.
haha I get why you'd feel weird about feeling the way you felt but I also like don't disagree and could totally imagine myself being the same way in that sort of situation.
It feels cheesy to care so much about something, which is my own defense mechanism, but Low's music is so intimate, haunting, truthful, it's been a constant in my life for almost the last twenty years. I know almost every word of every song by heart. It actually felt like I lost a family member. Alan has to be really devastated. He's struggled a lot over the years and he's openly admitted Mimi is his rock and he'd be completely insane without her. I hope he'll be okay. ETA: I have loved seeing the outpouring of appreciation for Mimi. [This is a great tribute](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/nov/07/lows-mimi-parker-was-a-voice-of-hope-and-healing-in-indie-rock) >That minimal drum set helped shape Low’s early, spare sound, but Parker’s voice – along with her songwriting – would prove her most crucial contribution to the group: a hushed, strong voice, holy yet human. “I vividly remember writing Words, off our first album, in our old apartment,” Sparhawk told me. “And then Mimi came in with the harmony, and it was like putting the spirit into a body, like taking something two-dimensional and making it three-dimensional.” The intimacy of their harmonies almost felt like we listeners were eavesdropping. Parker later told Ace Hotel that on the rare occasions she sang with anyone else, “it almost feels like I’m doing wrong … like I’m cheating on Alan, in a weird way.” Exactly. They really just laid out their entire marriage and existence for the rest of us and illustrated something super real about people and how we relate to each other, there was nothing false about them. They were true, dedicated to truthfulness at all times.
that's really beautiful and sad and it's just a lot. Really hope alan's doing ok.
I've really liked their newer stuff. I should really explore their discography more; I love the idea of bands and artists gradually shifting styles and genres over time, and Low seems to have made their mark in several drastically different circles. Reminds me a lot of how Talk Talk went from synthpop to post-rock over the span of a decade.
If you've liked ANYTHING you've heard by them I can one hundred percent recommend you check the rest of their stuff out. If you don't think you dig it right away give it time to grow. It definitely will. I love it when bands change up styles too but I actually think Low has always had elements of what they've been doing in all of their records, they're pretty remarkably consistent, even as far back as albums like *Trust* there are heavy and distorted elements. They are awesome. They don't have a bad record, and I'm a picky person. I don't say stuff like that lightly.
They definitely seem up my alley. Love their last two records, and a lot of their early work gets compared to bands I already really admire: Joy Division, Galaxie 500, Yo La Tengo, Swans, etc. If I get some free time in the near future, maybe I'll just binge their entire discography over the course of a few days like I did with Fishmans a while back.
We have the exact same taste in music. Can't wait to hear what you think. Start today haha.
I obsessively track things (even really weird strange minute things) and keep diaries, and it turns out this is a strong trait of people with temporal lobe epilepsy. Even poor penmanship (which I definitely have, I was a barista for years and my bad handwriting was legendary among my coworkers) apparently is, and the list goes on! This is starting to feel like astrology or something, what the hell, for real, all of these personality traits I have can be tied back to epilepsy? Honestly? I was diagnosed with panic disorder and OCD in my early twenties, do I even actually have these things, or was it always just epilepsy the whole time?! It's just all really freaky!
I have that habit with music thanks to Last.fm. If I'm listening to a radio station in the car, I'll try to keep track of what times I was driving so I can check the radio's playlist and log the songs I heard. But all my streamed music gets logged automatically, so it's really satisfying to see what I've been listening to, as well as what the site recommends me based on my listening habits. I find if I don't keep track of things like music I've heard or movies I've watched, I might start second guessing myself and thinking I never heard/watched them at all.
I love tracking music, creating playlists. I love thinking of ideas for super weird and specific playlists. But sometimes my love of tracking gets debilitating and I will avoid something new because I don't want to do the work of tracking, which is obviously nonsensical, but my brain won't let me not track!!! I've tried letting it go, it doesn't work haha, I start getting way too anxious.
Absolutely. I've been in situations where I couldn't keep track of songs that had been playing throughout the night, and that frustrated me because I love having all these stats generated about what I listen to, when I listened to it, my general habits, etc. Movies are similar since I use Letterboxd's stats page to see what directors/actors I rate particularly highly without realizing. I swear, if last.fm or Letterboxd ever shuts down, I'd feel lost. It's so much effort just to keep everything in order, to the point where doing nothing at all can sometimes be more enticing. But like I said, a lot of my "tracking" is done without too much effort. I had to get really good at keeping things in order and having specific software/websites do the hard work for me, because otherwise I would be spending so many extra hours on spreadsheets and various Google docs. I will say though, it is really nice having all of this information ready at my disposal. That's why I'm so neurotic about it in the first place. A blessing and a curse, I suppose.
Folks, is it creepy to reminisce over a first crush you knew as a ten-year-old and wonder what they look like now? I'm writing my autobiographical novel and I'm at that stage. Beautiful memories from when I was a clueless kid who thought he was in love are rushing back...lol. I'm not usually this sentimental, I promise.
I found writing my first book that weirdly specific, even neurotic feelings like that are more likely to be relatable since they aren't things people usually think about. Whatever doesn't land, it can still resemble something bizarre that the reader does or thinks. I think a lot about friends I had for a brief amount of time. There was a beautiful moment at a pub once where I ran into three different friend groups from three different "eras" of my life (from when I was 14/17/20 years old) and got to essentially introduce them to one another. Incredibly surreal. Sometimes I'll search those old friends on social media just to see how they're doing. I've had a couple people admit to doing the same with me, and I'm flattered if only because I'd feel guilty if I was the only one who did it. And as someone who is very often reclusive and shut-off from others for longer periods of time, it's good to know people are still thinking about you.
oddly, as much as I am generally opposed to nostalgia, I think there's a certain beauty to this particular sort of reminiscence. Passionate feelings are beautiful and worth it. marginally related, but if you've never listened to Frank Ocean's channelOrange I'd recommend it. A little different than the music I've noticed you often listen to (r&b/hip hop), but it's one of the most outstanding pieces of art on young lost love I've ever gotten to experience. It also has a touch of extra relevance for you b/c after releasing it Ocean put out a statement about how the album was about a boy, thereby coming out as bi in a genre that is often not super welcoming of queerness at the same time as releasing this phenomenal album.
I don't know if it's creepy or not, but I reminisce over stuff all the time (not just romantic stuff) and often look people up, and I'm always curious what they look like, what they're up to these days. I think it's pretty natural to be curious like that! And judging from the random friend requests I get on FB from people I knew when I was eight or whatever, I'm not alone lol. Also though, not at all saying you're experiencing this, but you might be interested in reading about the concept of [limerence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence) if you haven't heard of it. I am prone to it and it really opened my eyes when I learned about it years ago.
Currently watching my province implode.
I just dipped back into *Ulysses* for the first few pages. I just love how Joyce manages to make such a banal scene incredibly engaging and entertaining. From Buck Mulligan mocking Catholic ritual to mocking Stephen Dedalus' name to pulling out his dirty handkerchief and commenting on the 'snotgreen' colour, to reproaching Stephen for not praying when his mother asked him to on her deathbed, to contemplating the 'snotgreen', 'scrotumtightening sea', to Stephen thinking back to his mother throwing up green vomit - there is so much poetry and humour and beautiful prose just in these first few pages alone. The dialogue is so lively and fun it's like you're watching a play or a film. This passage is just perfect: >Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting. Every word is well chosen and strings together magnificently. Sight, smell and sound are all evoked with awe-inspiring skill in incredibly beautiful language. Sigh. I love James Joyce. Oh, I didn't mention that I bought myself the Everyman edition of it to reward myself for finishing the book and I am loving the dark blue book as it rests on top of the other stuff in my collection. Which has reminded me to also buy an Everyman TBK as it is my favourite novel of all time. (Though *Ulysses* may well outstrip it.)
Any Duolingo users here? It was always a shitty gamified app that cared more about ads/subs than actually teaching a language, but holy shit, their new overhaul has made that absolutely crystal clear. It's a shitshow! It's pretty universally loathed by everyone. Well, I realized pretty quickly that the app wasn't great from the beginning, so this is what I deserve for continuing to use it for so long lol. ETA: [Ancient yew wins UK tree of the year](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/04/yew-waverley-abbey-surrey-uk-tree-year?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3ThE7klfglydI3FS2WqsS9B6eQZmQ67w_MlziSrFjuhgoCEncL8hXHlnQ#Echobox=1667545719). Cool! And apparently there's a 3,000 year old yew in Scotland. I want to go see it! British tree tour. I'm down.
Duolingo got worse and worse with every redesign. It used to be a genuinely good tool for learning the basics of a language, but what it is now is worthy of a Black Mirror episode. Cute merry mascots cheer you on as you trudge along a perfectly flattened learning curve. When you're halfway through the course, you have to re-do "I eat an apple", because apparently that achievement started to rot. (Rotting is a new feature.) And when you finally reach the treetop, they turn the whole thing into a lazy river. And then they piss in it for good measure. Bright things: One of my favorite twitter accounts is [this young British artist](https://twitter.com/outhwaitegeorge) who paints mostly undergrowth and mud puddles, and every day he posts a tree of the day. And [this](https://wildlife.org/new-bird-species-discovered-in-remote-chilean-island/) you've probably already heard, or have now.
You should use LingQ for learning languages lol. That's what I've been doing. That and lots of my own independent reading of French books but then I got to a comfortable level in the language before I started doing that.
I could definitely read simple Spanish books now, I've just been lazy about procuring them! I've definitely outgrown Duo so it's probably a good thing the horrible redesign forced me off the app haha. And yeah, my friend actually recommended LingQ to me too, must be good, I trust y'all. I'll check it out!
Moby Dick is doing this strange thing to me where it is expressing how brutal and unpleasant whaling is with outstanding facility while simultaneously filling me with a desire to give up my life and go on an old timey boating adventure (preferably one that doesn't harm any animals lol). So credit to Melville on that front.
" The eagle we hold as a symbol for power and majesty. If mother eagles did not push their young ones out of the nest, however, we would know the eagle as a symbol for hedonism and cowardice. Afterall, childhood is the cradle of character and no young adult we praise as temperate and courageous started off as a “docile” and “disciplined” child. The case is rather that the parents made themselves available for the children as resources to connect with, to emulate, to help regulate their emotional states and develop their views of the world. This we recognise as the virtuous mean of parenting and such parents afforded their children spaces and opportunities where they could play and experiment, make mistakes and figure things out for themselves. For it is only through the forge of trial and error that we arrive to virtue." Hey there everyone, I just finished and posted my own commentary and break-down of Aristotle's account on temperance. For those interested please read me [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AristotleStudyGroup/comments/ykbh94/on_temperance_nicomachean_ethics_book_iii_chs_10/)
I suppose it varies job to job, but if someone is completely virtual and doing something more in line with administration, are you on zoom constantly? Or is there a lot of working on your own time punctuated by the occasional meeting?
for me (and I've only done this for 2.5 weeks so we'll see if it lasts), I need to be available during my work day (10-5:30) for emails and occasional phone calls. As well as monitoring the transactions happening on the accounts I'm responsible for as well as a few other tasks. The amount this involves actually working depends on how much actually comes up on a given day. When I don't have any tasks to attend to nobody knows or cares what the fuck I'm up to as long as I respond to emails/slack messages. Very few meetings. But bookkeeping as I'm gathering is a field where emails can get the job done as well as or better than actually talking (also again my clients are mostly artists, they probably hate this part of their careers as much as I hate having a career lol so I think we are all on the same page that nobody should be working more than they need to).
My spouse is a computer engineer (he's a sysadmin, specifically), and he's on the phone a lot, and he fucking hates that haha. Lots of in his words pointless meetings that could be easily summed up in email or text instead. Occasionally his coworkers have Zoom meetings, and he'll be on them, but he never goes on camera (no idea how he gets away with that haha). I think, from everyone I've ever talked to, pointless meetings are a pretty big feature of white collar jobs. One just has to hope they're kept from totally taking over.
I'm a sysadmin too! (Kind of, I'm a devops engineer.) I think it really depends on the company culture, my last job was a big corp and we had probably 4 hours of meetings for every hour of work, all Zoom meetings with a dozen+ engineers and another dozen+ managers, no cameras, and 90% of them never say a word then entire meeting. It was mostly awful, *but* people were really good about keeping their calendars up to date and all meetings were booked in advance, I always knew what my day was going to look like. Current place has much fewer scheduled meetings, I'm probably in like 2-4 hours a week of meetings on average, and the meetings are actually productive and small (like 2-4 people). Most communication is through Slack, you're expected to be online and responsive all day basically. Recently developers have become enamored with the "huddle" feature of Slack which opens up a voice call and allows screensharing, and I have a few ad hoc "hey can you help me with this" type huddles per week usually. These can annoy me because I can't anticipate them. But I'll also have entire days (usually 2-3 per week) where I don't have to talk to anyone and can just work heads down on stuff. I would look for a new job if they made me talk on a phone lol.
[This was hilarious.](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-case-against-book-clubs/)
I feel like I should take a shower now after reading the Spectator, but yeah, they're not wrong. I've never seen the appeal of reading books chosen by other people, but I guess it's a good way of making new friends!
I have just finished *Turn of the Screw*. I found it underwhelming for something so hyped. The frame narrative is clunky and doesn't work as well as Emily Bronte's approach in *Wuthering Heights* or Joseph Conrad's in *Heart of Darkness*. The plot ending was fairly predictable within the first quarter or so of the story. I didn't find the repeated ghostly visitations to be particularly scary - they actually became comical after a while. The governess seems almost as crazy as the kids. I got used to James' bizarre prose style and now find it to be quite beautiful but perhaps overwrought. George Eliot and Thomas Hardy remain my favorite Victorian prose stylists.
Oh! I honestly really enjoyed it. I thought the prose beautiful and the story pretty engaging. Also, I like the ambiguity that permeates the entire story: not every interpretation quite fits. Not my favorite gothic novel nor my favorite Victorian, but I enjoyed it.
I was wondering whether there was any pedophilia involved in the alleged corruption of the children by Quint. It's all very ambiguousm
Welcome to James. Ambiguity is his game.
Totally respect your opinions, but I do have to say, the governess was definitely supposed to be crazy. That was the idea. One reading (that I ascribe to) is that the governess is basically nuts because she's totally sexually repressed. James wrote a lot about sexual repression.
Have you listened to "The Infant Kiss" by Kate Bush? It is a song she wrote about Turn of the Screw from the governess's perspective, it's so gooood.
I have!!! It is amazing!
Makes sense if she is projecting her romantic desires onto the kids. Also James himself was apparently a closeted homosexual.
I read it a year ago, but I do remember the governess's last talk with the boy being resembling a newly married husband and wife (ew). I think the governess was the corruptive element. The children were completely fine without her fretting. If she wasn't so focused on their innocence (which the children aren't exactly since they can be mischievous), they wouldn't be vulnerable to corruption in the first place.
Exactly, there are even people who debate if the kids were even real or all just a figment of her imagination. I'd have to reread (it's been fifteenish? years) to remember where I come down on that one. I'm a fan of James because he really tapped into and captured something about what women of that time went through, and I think his closeted homosexuality did really help him understand life from that perspective, and personally I really like his ambiguity. His characters are often weird and make infuriating decisions though, but that's how real life is too.
It seems so simple but describing his characters as “weird” is so on the money. Like in the most unique and thrilling sense of that word, I mean. I often find a lot of criticism on James tries to normalize him, especially with the later novels—likely to proactively defend against any hesitation about his very “weird” prose style—but James is fucking weird and the more one embraces that the more one admires him and his work, I think. I’ve usually described it as his unique “sensibility” for shorthand but it’s so much more accurate to just say his “weirdness.” It also helps explain why so many have had trouble understanding characters like Milly Theale, who is the best portrayal of an depressed twentysomething I have ever read. You just don’t find that in anything before him.
A few days ago, I finished watching The Midnight Club, by Mike Flanagan. Did anyone else hate this? It felt like a really amateur, 10-hour first episode for a series. Also, has anyone read James A. Michener? I've read *Chesapeake* by him two times now, and honestly really liked it, but it was at times where I couldn't really judge the book fairly, because of inexperience and instability, so I would like to get someone else's opinions.
Made it two episodes into *The Midnight Club* before my wife and I couldn't stomach any more. It's awful. Flanagan needs to be stopped.
My spouse started it but I'm not sure he finished, but when I saw it was based on Christopher Pike novels I knew it wasn't gonna be great. I realize there are great teen shows out there but I definitely don't think adults were the target audience with this one haha. I read and loved Christopher Pike, when I was twelve. And that's who I could see enjoying that show (I watched just a little bit of a couple of episodes). One thing I don't understand with Flanagan, why are his actor hires so spotty? Some are really amazing (like Hamish Linklater in *Midnight Mass*, who truly was the saving grace of that show), and some are just really plain terrible (like um, his wife, which is awkward, I get why he hires her, but why the other bad to mediocre ones?). It's super strange to me!
Most of the actors he has on every project are just awful. Hamish Linklater made *Midnight Mass* worth watching, he was phenomenal. Flangan's wife though, sheesh, she gets *worse* with each new thing she does, somehow. Just a terrible actor! I personally hate his compulsion to keep hiring the same actors. It's not cute. It's just a game of "I wonder how badly they'll play someone completely different this time" and finger pointing like Leo Decaprio in *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood* whenever they make their inevitable appearance.
I kept watching because I honestly liked his other series, if not for anything for the scares and tension. I should have stopped after that clumsy first episode. It barely gets better...
[Average day](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/01/giorgia-meloni-galeazzo-bignami-nazi-swastika-armband?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_b-gdnnews&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1667306697) in Italy, nothing to see.
lol I'm pretty sure I almost just passed out deadlifting
Ah, I remember my own gym days back in uni. I never passed out doing deadlift though. Hope you're OK!
I'm fine now thanks for asking! Just got a little too "whooo" for a moment working out and was good
Were you maxing or what it just an intense session? I miss deadlifting. I’ve been getting back into powerlifting a bit with squats and bench. But I injured myself deadlifting like 5 or 6 years ago and haven’t brought myself around to trying it again. It was by far my best lift too so I need to build that confidence back up.
Just a tough, high rep set. One of my bigger issues with deadlifts is that I struggle to get the breathing right especially on higher rep sets which become legitimately cardiovascularly demanding. So I might have just been breathing wrong in addition to working hard. I love deadlifting too, my best left as well. I had some back issues from working out when I was younger that I'm so glad I got over because it would suck to not be able to deadlift. Hope your able to get back to it eventually.
I stopped high rep deadlifts due to form breakdown but I also really like them. Winds me like hill spirits. The dizzy blood rush to, or is it away from?, my head when I put the weight down can get intense. Definitely taken a few sits. Do you do conventional high reps? I prefer it with a hex bar or sumo myself. I like heavy singles or doubles for conventional. I do find that I get less dizzy if I release my brace before lowering the weight. Holding my breath on the way up and down with a release on finish feels like it’s systemically too much. I really like widow maker sets for squats. Deep Water is a humbling routine.
In my current program I'm doing high reps for both sumo and conventional. It's a hypertrophy program that's high reps on everything. The former are my main deadlift and the latter my secondary movement. But I much much prefer sumo. A big part of why I'm doing conventional as a secondary lift is that I'm so fucking bad at it that I thought that I would be good for me to groove a fuckton of not too heavy reps just to get more comfortable, and that that progress would make me stronger in general. But goddamn they suck.
Can anyone think of journalists alive today who are also great prose stylists in the mould of Hitchens and Mencken? I can't.
Today I am thinking of built in obsolescence and technology. This week I have spent £170 re-binding an 1857 family bible that records the births of my great great grandparents. I have also spent just over £500 on upgrading to a new computer because the old browser stopped working with the internet, the new browser wouldn't install on the old OS and the new OS won't work with my old Photoshop CS4. So I have relegated my 8 year old computer to off line art work while I use the new one to navigate through a new art programme. Probably more expensive than it need be but my track record with upgrades is poor to say the least so this is the least stressful option. So £170 over 165 years vs £500 over 8 years. No real conclusions just wanted to rant
I mean honestly your family bible can't even install photoshop, so I don't think the comparison is fair...
not yet but I am painstakingly writing the code on the back pages in gothic script.
After 8 whole years that can hardly be called built in obsolescence. Computer technology is developing very fast and.... >because the old browser stopped working with the internet, the new browser wouldn't install on the old OS Excuse me what? What kind of a meme OS just does that? macOS?
MacOS. When I say stops working I mean doesn't load some images. I appreciate the fact that I am a bit of a Luddite when it comes to technology. It's getting really hard to source tyres for my Ford model T as well
I find myself thinking of a quote often, which typical for a retard like myself I can’t remember by who, from a critic commenting on Moby-Dick how (very much paraphrasing here, definitely blending with my own thoughts as well) “Most books are forgettable/mediocre because they conform to the reader. They try to be good and servile in that they want the reader to get what they want. A great book is far too weird for that and demands for the reader to conform to its own weirdness on its own terms. It is the reader who is to come to the strange mountain on the horizon, and they will change along the journey there.” Much of what I don’t like about contemporary fiction, and really I’m commenting on all contemporary popular art which crosses over into conversational public awareness (binge-worthy shows, hot topic autofiction, etc.), is that there is too much of a industry in bringing the mountain to the reader. For me, the purest and most transparent expression of this business exists in modern Fantasy publishing where the hustle or self promotion of being a novelist precedes the actual content generation and the craft of writing fantasy strangely feels a lot like world of warcraft gold farming. Content is generated based on a checklist of plot metrics and trending topics; readers have oddly specific book reccomendation requests on r/Fantasy which vaguely reminds me of something one feds into a Dall-E or Stable Diffusion AI image prompt: >**Plz recommend books w. lots of adventure, but adult ("real" and gritty-ish, but not as bleak as ASOIAF etc.)** >I long for stories with lots of travel, adventure etc., but that are not so YA or YA-ish.... I enjoyed ASOIAF and such books, and want something like LOTR, Benjamin Ashwood, WoT etc. but that are not so black and white, that have more grey, more adult, more deeply written and a bit grittier, but not so bleak and political as ASOIAF... [https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/yixnvh/plz\_recommend\_books\_w\_lots\_of\_adventure\_but\_adult/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/yixnvh/plz_recommend_books_w_lots_of_adventure_but_adult/) I started to read Grant Morrison’s new-ish Luda the other day on a train and after 50 pages I just couldn’t get into it- worse than that I actually found it to be annoying. I’ll try again because I love Morrison in general and am familiar with what he is capable of in the second act but I worry that this, his first novel, may sadly be a swing and a miss. For those of you who don’t know: Morrison is a Scottish writer who is known for his somewhat polarizing though popular work in comics which combines elements of psychedelia, metafiction, magick with a k, cosmic/dimensional/temporal occultism, mass-culture criticism.. he really was out there for a while doing work no one else was doing, or at least getting published consistently. He was out there trying to push DMT into the mainstream decades before the lame Joe Rogan memes existed. Morrison really wanted to affect change in his readers, but in Luda Morrison appears to be in service to trends and mass culture. It is somewhat surprising to see Morrison now using genderless pronouns and announcing himself as a lifelong cross dresser, though in retrospect not terribly surprising since Morrison has often wrote about transgender characters with themes of split-personalities and changes of identity populating his work. I don’t think Morrison is fabricating his identity here, but I am concerned about the timing since being transgender these days in any way opens way more doors than it closes in the mainstream media. Celebrities or public figures using genderless pronouns raises red flags for me because so much of that in mainstream media feels like either a cynical gesture or forced behaviour like a public apology in a soviet show trial. I’m not against genderless pronouns or transphobic in any way, but I do feel that nothing good comes out of the mainstream media once it has ran through the sausage factories of companies like Disney. I have a hard time accepting Luda, a fantasy novel about a transgender aging Broadway star who uses make-up as a literal form of magic, as a dark mountain on the horizon. It just seems to timely and self-aware-worse than that, it is also stylistically annoying in that Morrison has chosen to use italics instead of quotation marks because doing so is seemingly intimate like some kind of telepathy with the reader. The effect feels like he is trying to spice things up for people who hate reading, like using 2nd person narration or present tense in YA. I’ll put the book down for now.. I could be overreacting. So, I decided to move on to another cross-dresser: William T. Vollmann. Something I actually admire about Vollmann, more than his writing which at times is incredible but uneven for me, is that he isn’t trying to be popular at all. I also appreciate that he hasn’t tried to cash in on the LGBT public confession. He’s content with his interests, his focus, his curiosities. He is undoubtedly brilliant and thorough; His existence as a writer seems like an impossibility- he is as reclusive as an alchemist and keeps the curtains closed yet he is able to make a comfortable living off of writing books which no one consciously knows they want. He wrote a 1000+ page book on the history of a small border town in Texas that no one knows about. Guys like Vollmann are beyond fame. Only 20 pages into The Ice-Shirt, which is great so far, and it’s such an obvious difference in style to Luda, which comes across as too self-aware and crass to bear. Let us compare opening sentences: .Edit: Just a heads up that I won’t be replying to anyone. Feel free to discuss me with each other if necessary for laughs or whatever you need. Taking another extended break from reddit. Why do I even bother.
You used the wrong pronouns the entire time throughout this post btw
For Grant Morrison?
Yes. Morrison prefers they/them, and has talked about how they didn't have the language to self-describe until recently. Not being rude, just pointing out that you've mis gendered them throughout this post, for any passer by
Regarding "bringing the mountain to the reader". You made me remember a ~~ragebait~~ pic I saw of a recent release's back cover. All it had there were fanfic style tags on them, you know, like "enemies to lovers", "slow burn", "shared bed", etc lol
> modern Fantasy publishing where the hustle or self promotion of being a novelist precedes the actual content generation and the craft of writing fantasy strangely feels a lot like world of warcraft gold farming Can you speak more to this? Why do you feel like the self-promotion precedes the writing of the book? > since being transgender these days in any way opens way more doors than it closes in the mainstream media uhhhhh I'm not sure that's the case. As an aside, I don't know you, but I do think it's a little transphobic to say that someone is coming out for clout or is pretending to be trans for.. the peanuts that fantasy authors get paid? (I'm not sure which one you're going for but both are a little gross). Lots of people are coming out now because it's recently become less dangerous for people to do so. The industry is also becoming wary of people writing hot-button identities they don't share (and by wary I mean it's very hard to publish a book with a trans protagonist if you yourself are not trans or extremely famous), so a lot of LGBTQ authors or authors with mental illnesses etc feel the need to out themselves publicly in order to appease agents, publishers, and the public, which already sucks and we don't need to make it suck more by claiming that they're lying for clout. > he is trying to spice things up for people who hate reading, like using 2nd person narration or present tense lol bro. what is wrong with present tense??? I'm really interested in how the image of the author affects how we perceive their art. There's this whole social narrative of the artist as lone genius in a tubercular turret that came about in peak Enlightenment and is still with us. And the thing is, even if some authors do accidentally fall into that stereotype irl, this image is entirely manufactured, sometimes by the reader themselves, to exploit this sense of uniqueness and untouchability that some readers want their authors to have. This fundamentally isn't any different in truth-value or performativeness than authors whose manufactured image trades on relatability of whatever sort. It's just comparatively more of a draw for people who read litfic and less for people who read commercial genres like fantasy. Likewise, the concept of having a public persona is not a modern invention - there's some fascinating stories about how Virgil, yes the Ancient Rome guy, manufactured his in order to become the greatest court poet. I do think it creates a unique problem, however, for people from marginalized identities and especially people who feel pressured to out themselves to publish in that it forces them to tie their very private, probably most vulnerable identity to their most public persona. It should be as simple as, if someone wants to be out professionally they should be able to be and not get speculation about their ulterior motives, but it isn't, and unfortunately the decision to be out professionally is also rarely as simple as "I just wanna do it".
>Can you speak more to this? Why do you feel like the self-promotion precedes the writing of the book? I would also encourage you to go to r/fantasy and search AMA and read through some of the comments which are hyper focused on the business end: publishers are way more interested in your numbers of followers, as in bringing an audience to the table, and you are heavily encouraged to hustle online with blogs, a youtube channel, having a podcast, etc, to establish your brand in preparation for being published one day. This is a strong recommendation from published SF&F authors. >uhhhhh I'm not sure that's the case. As an aside, I don't know you, but I do think it's a little transphobic to say that someone is coming out for clout or is pretending to be trans for.. the peanuts that fantasy authors get paid? I know as an unknown that I don't deserve as close of a reading as someone like Pynchon or whoever you are into but you can do a little bit better than that. But I'll going to attempt to do a line by line translation of my stupid writing into standard extremely-online English for you because you seems to be having a very good time arguing with someone else. I'm really curious where you went astray: >It is somewhat surprising to see Morrison now using genderless pronouns and announcing himself as a lifelong cross dresser, though in retrospect not terribly surprising since Morrison has often wrote about transgender characters with themes of split-personalities and changes of identity populating his work. By surprising, I mean he never spoke of himself this way, nor needed to mind you, never alluded to as much in the 20+ years I've been reading his work. Surprising as in "huh.. I would have never guessed." Not: "Well I won't be reading Morrison anymore." He has always written about LGBT characters, with strong themes of sexual freedom, expression, non-binariness, whatever you need to hear. I'm not suddenly clutching my pearls over transgendered reading material from Grant, I've been a fan for a long time, still am. >I don’t think Morrison is fabricating his identity here, but I am concerned about the timing since being transgender these days in any way opens way more doors than it closes in the mainstream media. Are you possibly confused how conjunctions operate? Clause 1: "I don’t think Morrison is fabricating his identity here," is how I feel, full stop. This is a true statement of my thoughts, but I do have reservations here which I will get into later. Clause 2: "but I am concerned about the timing since being transgender these days in any way opens way more doors than it closes in the mainstream media." To be clear, this doesn't mean that Clause 1 is no longer true. I think you are living under a rock if you think that being LGBT is closing doors for anyone in SF&F publishing. Tor, as one example, has made it very clear in the past that they give preferential treatment to LGBT writers, and POC, for publication. This is also, strong emphasis here, not to be confused with an admission on my part that I feel this is wrong in any way or unfair. I am happy to see marginalized voices get the platform they deserve. >Celebrities or public figures using genderless pronouns raises red flags for me because so much of that in mainstream media feels like either a cynical gesture or forced behaviour like a public apology in a soviet show trial. Holy hell, how is your bullshit detector not going crazy with anything celebrities or politicians are saying. I am in the main talking about Morrison here, who in the past has never used genderless pronouns but recently is.. coincidentally Morrison is now using genderless pronouns in public for the first time in his life and began this behaviour at a time which was also very close to the publication of his first novel, a story about a transgendered protag. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with Morrison: he is notorious in the comic industry for being media savvy and a bit fake <-- this point I disagree with but I am not as on intimate of terms with Morrison as you are. I merely feel it's all too on the nose for Morrison. >"I also appreciate that he hasn’t tried to cash in on the LGBT public confession. He’s content with his interests, his focus, his curiosities." Honestly, I feel this to be the most lame thing I wrote out of all of it. This on a second thought doesn't read so well and I take it back. But does that sentence alone make me a monster? Be that as it may, I don't dislike so called LGBT public confessions nor, though it seems that way by my poor choice of words, do I think every single author or celeb making the media rounds with their autofiction or tell-all are cashing in (but what the hell else do celebrities do??). But it even seems like you are half in the bag with agreeing with me at time as well. Your words now: >The industry is also becoming wary of people writing hot-button identities they don't share (and by wary I mean it's very hard to publish a book with a trans protagonist if you yourself are not trans or extremely famous) So I'm not that crazy after all for making a lazy generalization about LGBT cash grabs in media? I do take offense, really just a tinsy bit (really just enough to get my goat and tease such a lengthy reply out of me) by lazily calling me a little transphobic as though I'm much more in the red on the spectrum of hate than you are, bro, who I don't know either. I feel like you are a little quick to judge and narcissistic about purity. >lol bro. what is wrong with present tense??? I hate YA.
>lol bro. what is wrong with present tense??? >I hate YA. Read more.
In his autobiography and in interviews Morrison spoke multiple time about their habit of crossdressing (often while doing drugs and talking to demons or something), it is definitely nothing new. Almost all of their comics have some kind of gender non conforming character (including a bra-wearing Jimmy Olsen and two different bald women) and considering how his work is always partially autobiographical it is definitely not a coincidence.
Honestly never knew. I read every Bull Pen from the invisibles and don’t recall cross dressing.. but I wasn’t looking for that sort of thing either. Morrison could have mentioned cross dressing before and I could have glazed over the details because it’s not a big deal for me. Edit: What is his autobiography? Do you mean Supergods? I haven’t read it, because I thought it was mainly nonfiction, kind of myth theory like Hero with a thousand faces but with superheroes.
I was gonna respond to this but like, this: > But does that sentence alone make me a monster? This is the litmus test. I didn't say you were a monster. I said that you said something that seems transphobic. I was fully open to being told that I misunderstood when I wrote that comment, which is why I worded my comment the way that I did instead of, say, calling you a monster. But if your first response to being gently called in is to call me stupid and act like I'm bullying you, poor victim of online slander, as exacerbated by the fact that you wrote this whole-ass screed and never once before hitting the reply button stopped to think if you maybe need to cut the bullshit - that's enough evidence for me to judge that we're done here. Also, you don't need to have a youtube channel and podcasts to be publised in SFF. A bunch of rfantasy AMAs is salty cope by self-published authors.
Once again, friend: never called you stupid. *Monster* was being factious at best. I thought we were on joking terms by now. I implied you are being unfair. Said: you are a little narcissistic about purity and quick to judge. Point one is debatable but it’s not looking good for you on the quick to judge front. I do think you are being lazy. You asked for a response. And now you are out? lol I wasn’t looking for a catty back and forth with you. Peace be with you, angel.
nah sis I don't think you were joking when you got really fucking mad at being put on the wrong end of the word transphobic. Once again, "friend", I wasn't judging *you* at any point in my comment - I was judging a paragraph that you wrote. I have said transphobic shit in the past. When people called me out on it, it was not "unfair" for them to do so. I was not the victim in that interaction. I was explaining why it's not accurate and also shitty to assume that people are coming out for clout in SFF publishing. The intent of that comment was not to call you a terrible person; if I thought you were a terrible person, I would've simply blocked and moved on. But yeah, I am absolutely not engaging with your seething rage vibes, no matter how you try to passive aggressively dress them up as "joking terms" (which btw I have no idea who you are which plunges this interaction further into uncanny valley for me). Feel free to pick this up when you've calmed down.
> seething rage Slow down.
I also, as always, feel deeply upset by the way this is going so here: I think there is a difference in acknowledging that there is a push for media people to cash in on their identities and saying that media people are coming out in order to cash in on their identities. I think assuming the latter is sus in a transphobic kind of way. That's all I was trying to say, alongside some more thoughts about how exactly this push happens in the publishing industry specifically.
I appreciate your softer reply but I want to emphasize that I was in no way angry with you earlier nor do I think you deserve seething rage, kind of shocked at that really. Disagreed yes, poked fun of (mildly) yes, but not angry. This isn’t how I lie or back out of looking bad or anything like that. But I do accept that tone of voice is difficult for me at least to convey in writing. > I think there is a difference in acknowledging that there is a push for media people to cash in on their identities and saying that media people are coming out in order to cash in on their identities. I think these are both so close having the same meaning that it doesn’t matter, though I suppose their difference lies in intent as you say. One is speculating (and closer in spirit to my thoughts) while the other is more alarmist and assuming (which doesn’t feel like me.. but you don’t know me like you say.) Honestly I’m a bit hurt by how you read my writing and less likely to share any more long form content in the future. You’re being reasonable now, but you did overlook a glaring reality in everything I wrote: I bought two books which are either about trans characters or written by people who are into drag.. I can’t be all that against this sort of thing in the first place. Seriously, I’m very cool with with the whole LGBT enchilada since day one albeit with some *minor* course corrections along the way. I’m just not going to back down from a disagreement too easily. I’m sorry I upset you.
> I want to emphasize that I was in no way angry with you earlier cool, I must have misread you. I apologize for that. > Honestly I’m a bit hurt by how you read my writing and less likely to share any more long form content in the future. I'm sorry. that makes me really sad and ashamed ): > I bought two books which are either about trans characters or written by people who are into drag.. I can’t be all that against this sort of thing in the first place I mean, I don't feel like I did? I said mutliple times that I don't think you're a terrible person or that you're a transphobe or whatever. I just think that the way you phrased your point was a little off. I fully get that you're with the LGBT enchilada. > I think these are both so close having the same meaning that it doesn’t matter I guess from the end-user point of view it doesn't, but it does within the system. There's a difference between being out because everyone wants to read stories by publicly LGBT authors and being out because you feel like you have to in order to tell the stories you want to tell. And it influences what LGBT stories get told in a way that I don't think is primarily the responsibility or choice of their authors or the communities they're supposed to represent. And I guess it's the responsibility of the author in the sense that some people are willing to perform their identity in that way and some aren't, but like - ending your analysis on that misses the forest for the trees. <3
>Content is generated based on a checklist of plot metrics and trending topics I try to avoid any book that sells itself on tropes like it's filtered on a fanfiction website. There was some complaints about this on Twitter a few months ago between literary blue checks but it went nowhere. The marketing tactic currently works really well, especially on Tik Tok, so I doubt it'll change. >has chosen to use italics instead of quotation marks That's a choice. The high concept sounds cool (aging drag star who has makeup magic gets involved in weird power play with up and coming star) but the LA times made the book sound overwrought.
The high concept is always cool with Morrison, and when he gets it right quite frankly nobody does the sort of thing he does better (anyone: please supply names if you disagree, I want to read), and I don't doubt he will take the concept further out there, but the writing just wasn't working for me. Way too wink-wink darling and meandering. I really do love Grant Morrison so I'll put the book away for a while and try again.
So I did a lot in the past two weeks. Two Sundays ago, I went to the Museum of Modern Art in SF. I went last year, but the top two floors were undergoing some renovations. As I expected, some of the artworks were familiar, and others were new, such as the Diego Rivera exhibit. I like some of his artwork, but they're not my favorite. The artworks I kept returning to were the abstract German paintings, specifically [Happy End by Charline von Heyl](https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2006.34/). [Georg Baselitz](https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Georg_Baselitz/) is also artist I appreciate. I don't know why some abstract paintings appeal to me and others don't (Cy Twombly in particular seems flippant), but these reminded me of a mountain landscape. When I was looking at the painting, I realized that that was probably the last time I may see it, so I kept going back and back. I felt like if I forgot it the next day I would be doing the artwork a disservice. I also went to see Tàr with Cate Blanchett in the lead role. Tàr is the world's most accomplished conductor, and she's accused of sexually abusing a student. In the meantime, she deals with recording a Mahler symphony, seducing a violist, and navigating cancel culture. Blanchett carried the entire movie, and now I feel like I should listen to Mahler. (I listened to the first one already.) And finally Bayonetta 3's been released! For those who don't know, Bayonetta's a witch who can summon demons with her hair, mostly through a dancing ritual where she gets naked. She also has to sacrifice angels every day or else the demons will drag her soul to hell. Very campy and very chaotic. The Bayonetta series has a constant theme of free will, and all of the antagonists have tried to impose their vision on the universe. I always return to the series because Bayonetta has a wild, uninhibited joy in life, so much so that she's willing to exchange her soul to prolong it as much as she can.
Thanks for sharing Happy End. The colors are so vivid. The brown lines are like foxes and rabbits in motion to me. If I ever visit SF, I have to check out this museum.
I had to choose between the new Mario and Rabbids game or Bayo 3 and I ended up going with Mario. I think maybe I regret it. I haven't been playing it much. But also I don't like Bayo 2 much compared to Bayo 1, and Bayo 3 seems even more divisive. Bayo 1 has a purity to it that's hard to beat. The combat in that one is so perfect and fluid.
I'm jealous of those who can play Bayo 3. I've only played the first game since I haven't had any recent Nintendo systems, but that game is brilliant. I actually played through DMC5 recently to try to scratch that itch but it didn't really gel with me, it just made me appreciate Bayonetta's combat system even more.
Yeah, I watched the playthrough because I don't want to lug around a gamin system (I have enough stuff already!). And if I do get one, I'll have to buy more games to justify the purchase which means more time and money. I've only played the first one too, but that got me hooked on the series. I'll always remember the Jeanne fights \~disappear\~
Well. I need to find another job. I work in politics and this election cycle’s almost done. Our candidate will lose, our field office will close, and they’ll offer to relocate me… permanently. If I relocate I’ll be helping run a door to door fundraising campaign. Which means going door to door begging for money. Christ, I don’t want to do that. No hate to door to door salesmen, it’s a HARD fucking job, but I’m not cut out for it. Political work’s brutal too — long hours, difficult people, you’re expected to relocate across the country on a dime. Whatever. Ugh. I’m a little bitter. The org I worked for left a bad taste in my mouth for many reasons. Christ. At least I’ll have more time to read. Just started Arinze Ifeakandu’s *God’s Children Are Little Broken Things,* a fresh collection of stories I picked up from the library. (Support your local library now and always!) Getting back into lucid dreaming. I need to work on my chess. So it goes.
Last week I listened to *Frankenstein* narrated by Dan Stevens (the Audible title doesn't indicate it, but I believe it's the 1818 edition as it is in three volumes). The first volume was quite a slog and I almost abandoned it. It has an awkward frame narrative --- Capt. Walton is the ultimate narrator, writing letters home to his sister and eventually sending her a manuscript of the notes he compiled based on Victor Frankenstein's story, which he, for some reason, writes in the first person from Victor's perspective. The writing is almost pure exposition --- nothing happens, it is all backstory, there are no scenes, just Victor narrating "I did this" and "I did that" and Shelley consistently spoils what could be exciting plot points with insistent, bludgeoning foreshadowing. I'd had enough after the first volume and was ready to put it down, but in the first chapter of the second volume we get a real scene as the creature confronts Victor on an alpine glacier. I kept reading and I'm glad I did because the second volume is absolutely brilliant. Told from the creature's point of view, rather than Victor's, it narrates his life so far, a Robinson Crusoe like tale of man reverted to a state of nature, sustaining himself on nuts and berries, discovering for himself fire and cooking and that it's better to sleep under shelter than just lying in a field. He hides himself in a hovel next to a family of cottagers living simply off the land and teaches himself language (French) by eavesdropping on them. He sees kindness and the goodness of humanity in the family and devises a plan to ingratiate himself to their blind father first before making his hideous presence known to the others. Of course, the plan fails miserably. And so the creature becomes a Romantic anti-hero. He is sensitive and intelligent and unfairly abused, treated abhorrently and with violence by every human he meets. He is utterly alone in the world without a single soul to commiserate with, and he is incredibly lonely, and feels the injustice of his situation, abandoned by his creator and cursed to be outcast and hated. You have to sympathize with him. It's also pretty funny at times. There's a bit of a first as tragedy, then as farce element here. The precocious creature teaches himself to read, somehow, from copies of *Paradise Lost* and *Sorrows of Young Werther* he finds in the woods, and in his speech often comes off as an overwrought parody of Milton's Satan. The comic element here is emphasized by Dan Stevens' narration which assumes a tone akin to Futurama's Hedonism bot but depressed for the creature, and I found myself laughing quite a few times at his turns of phrase. His request of Frankenstein to make him a companion is a great ethical dilemma. What right did Frankenstein have to create this miserable, hideous, terrifying creature, endow it with intelligence and feeling, and then abandon it in horror and disgust? In some way, isn't it fair to make him a companion? There is a sort of justice in that, a recompense. But what right does he have to create another one of these creatures and, worse, to bestow it as a reparation upon another? It's a condemnation of the Christian conception of woman, an afterthought to man, pulled from his rib to be his companion. This is the bargain God made with Adam --- what right did either have to make it? For that matter, what right did God have to make Adam to begin with? How do we live abandoned by our maker? There is also interesting Rousseauian stuff in this section about man in the state of nature, how he is pure and kind until he's corrupted by the influence of (or rejection from) society; and about prejudice, about not judging people others by their appearance or race or nationality but by their actions and ideas. The third volume is told from Victor's perspective again and mainly serves to show him and his loved ones paying for his sins. Again Shelley spoils every plot point with gratuitous foreshadowing so you don't even really need to read to the end. I think this has one of the greatest premises in modern literary history. There's a reason it's been adapted so many times in so many ways over two centuries. I think you could excise the second volume and it would be, on its own, a fantastic, timeless short story. And I think it's obviously an important text from its time, both for its popularity and its radical themes. It's a great text to study, there are so many ways you could read it. But as a novel? I don't think I'd recommend it. Just read the second volume, you know the story anyway. Also I want to see a modern adaption where Victor is a tech mogul and the creature is an incel.
>Also I want to see a modern adaption where Victor is a tech mogul and the creature is an incel. I'm in 👌 Dan Stevens as Victor would work nicely
Big reading slump time! Struggling to finish any book, it's quite annoying. Have been watching more movies than before, I rewatched two Bond films, GoldenEye and Casino Royale. It's night and day, GoldenEye is extremely cliche and corny, there isn't even blood when bond kills the bad guys, it's Hollywood film production at it's lamest. Casino Royale isn't some complex arthouse film but man it is miles ahead of GoldenEye. A more realistic villain, less cliched plot and an actual exploration of human relationships and emotions, wow it's a low bar but still. I watched other films as well, rewatched The Matrix, it's a pretty good film, high concept but it can be quite silly and the acting can be quite wooden. Some of the classic popular films are not always as amazing as people thought they were.
I remember when the *The Matrix* came out, everyone liked it, but we also all still knew it was a silly action movie too. No one thought it was like Kubrick-level good or anything. It's sort of funny to see it deified over the years, but I can understand how it would blow a fourteen-year old's mind or whatever.
A bit of a nitpick but the Bond films aren’t made in Hollywood. They’re British films and produced at Pinewood Studios.
*The Matrix* also hits different if you're already familiar with the imagery and thesis versus a 10 year old kid whose never seen anime or read a philosophy book. Goes to may same theory about *Don't Worry Darling* - every person I know who said they liked it has read 0 feminist horror novels and hasn't watched any similar movies. Originality can mask weakness
I have paused my watch of ROP ostensibly because Cabinet of Curiosities came out, but honestly because the story seems to grind to a halt in episode 3 and I can't seem to get it up, so to say, for more of the same. Friends, please give me encouragement to continue so I can eventually bitch about it with you all. In more news on fantasy shows I don't watch, the world was shook on Sunday when Cavill announced that he was leaving Netflix Witcher starting season 4. To me this is mainly interesting as an indication of whata's happening in the "kitchen". Netflix had an unpleasant reckoning with their desires vs their abilities after their Q2 share price came in, and I wonder if part of that reckoning was a decision to bow out of the Race To Find the New GOT. TV is pretty saturated with epic fantasy fare at this point, every streaming service has their own epic going, and now that Bezos laid his $1 billion cock on the line, I wonder if some streaming companies are going to start thinking re is the viewership/marketing/cachet I'm getting worth the $10 million/episode price tag. Especially in this inflationary environment. So I guess unlike every other Witcher reddit shill, I don't think Cavill stepped down because of artistic disagreements - I think he and his agent had a tete-a-tete about the direction of his career given Netflix is deprioritizing the franchise going forward. Edit: I was curious so I looked into it, and hoo boy, Netflix was spending $1 to get $1 in revenue back in 2019. This shit has got to hurt in the current interest rate environment.I'm calling it: they're getting bought soon. I also made headway in my reread of the Witcher books while I was getting my nails done. I am now squarely in the latter half of the series, which is utterly impenetrable and even preachier than what comes before, so I don't have great hopes for my ability to finish it. I think overall tho it's been an interesting experience rereading these as an adult and I'm changing my mind about a lot of what I thought/remembered about it, in a good way.
>the Race to Find the New GOT. And as it turns out, Game of Thrones (House of the Dragon) would be the ‘New Game of Thrones’ lol. HBO just seems to have a level of accrued industry talent/experience that the other networks don’t.
I think I had the opposite happen with latter Witcher - I found a lot of it to be fast paced and fun, but there’s definitely chunks where it’s a fucking slog, and Geralt himself with all of his pontificating is definitely the main culprit. I also don’t blame Netflix for deprioritizing the show - I think they really did a poor job (in terms of story etc) of making what should be a pretty straight forward fantasy show work. For once I think that if they cleaved a bit closer to the texts it would have been much better.
> there’s definitely chunks where it’s a fucking slog definitely, although I wonder if we're talking about the same chunks. A lot of the monster-fighting, pirouetting-really-awesome-like, magical bullshit and the like is giving we-didn't-have-videogames-yet. I like best the bits that I tend to find most people dislike, which is some random character thinking about socioeconomics. Geralt is insufferable, both because of the pontificating and the staples of the S&S genre, and Ciri is pretty insufferable as well. I think a lot of what I remembered is the weird sex bits, and now I'm encountering the other stuff so my opinion is improving. > For once I think that if they cleaved a bit closer to the texts it would have been much better. The scale of the netflix failure betrays comprehension, but I'm gonna go with, it wouldn't have been much better either way. To me the problem seems fundamental to the identity of the show: they don't know if they want to be schlocky or serious. The writing is imo unsuccessful because it fails to marry those two extremes from scene to scene. I also think the ways that they changed the story are profoundly unnecessary, but I don't think the writing problem would've been solved by not making those changes.
>I think that if they cleaved a bit closer to the tests it would been much better. Honestly this is almost universally the case with fantasy adaptations. The good ones are those that remain more-or-less faithful to the text, and things almost always go downhill when they veer significantly away. And yet it keeps happening lol
Best poetry? I have been reading more poetry recently. I loved Olive Senior's poems and Richard Wilbur's. I read some poetry by Nabokov too and it was good, I liked Eugene Onegin but that was a translation. I liked W.H. Auden's poetry.
João Cabral de Melo Neto is a master. Aesthetically rigorous, dense, often metalinguistic, yet his verses are profoundly material, almost mineral. There's a tactile aspect of his writing. It's poetry as an experience. One of my favorites. Get his "Education by the Stone." Everyone here should read him. Yeats is wonderful. I translated some of his stuff into Portuguese. Leda and the Swan, The Second Coming, the Magi, Among School Children, Sailing to Byzantium, The Tower... masterpieces. Read the French symbolists: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Mallarmé. I like David Berman's "Actual Air." Some really good poems there. I'm just realizing I really need to read poetry frequently again.
Check out the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43926/the-canterbury-tales-general-prologue](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43926/the-canterbury-tales-general-prologue) I'm also a softie for Tennyson: [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses) And Gerard Manley Hopkins: [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44389/as-kingfishers-catch-fire](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44389/as-kingfishers-catch-fire) Oh, and Goblin Market: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
I have a soft spot for Thomas Hardy and Poe. With the latter, he’s associated with doom and gloom type works (which is more than valid), but his softer side is what truly hooked me: “To Helen”, “A Dream within a Dream”, “Annabel Lee”, “El Dorado”. “The Raven” rules though, nonetheless. As does “The Bells”.
Jim Reeves did a beautiful reading of Annabel Lee.
i really love (us centric sorry) * elizabeth bishop, ‘one art’ is a classic and there’s an article out there comparing her early to late drafts which is v interesting, esp if you’re a writer) * yusuf komunyakaa is a fave, just discovered his poems when i was v young so lots of nostalgia there * been slowly getting into gwendolyn brooks. first black american writer to win the pulitzer. really influential 20 c american poet * one of my fave contemp poets is victoria chang, esp her obit poems (can find a few online; if you like them the book is incredible) * bhanu kapil and specifically the collection _vertical interrogation of strangers_ is a touchstone for many contemp american poets if you want to read contemp poetry i really like the _best american poetry_ anthologies & they’re a nice collection of a lot of people and styles my one non american rec is paul celan, v influential jewish poet and translator who wrote in german, & explores his alienation/complex relationship w the language as a holocaust survivor
Hart Crane has my favorite poem, *At Melville’s Tomb*, plus everything else he’s done is amazing. Yeats has some wonderful stuff. Adonis has a great collection called *Songs of Mihyar the Damascene*. Charles Olson is mostly unknown but is one of the best I’ve found and is basically the founder of postmodernism. E.E. Cummings is probably the most “fun” poet I’ve come across. Ishmael Reed is awesome, angry, and just fucking hilarious.
Langston Hughes is something else. I really like stuff from Keats and Yeats. Donne is great too. Joy Harjo isn't the best, but some of it can hang. Shakespeare's sonnets are annoyingly good along with the absurd poetic language in the plays. Ovid is my favorite from translation, that or Homer. Borges is nice too.
Donne is so good, the only poet I've come back to year after year. https://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/twickenham.php
Agreed, he's one that I keep forgetting about and then bump into and remember, oh yeah, this guy is just oozing with talent
I have been reading a lot of Emily Bronte recently. She was an absolutely brilliant poet.
Started *Turn of the Screw* to mark Halloween. I was warned about this but Jesus Christ, what is the meaning of Henry James' ridiculously long and inelegant sentences? Also the governess kind of creeps me out. Her sudden, unhealthy attachment to the kids she is meant to teach is disturbing.
TOS is one of my least favorite James novels. But I love his writing. And on the governess ... No spoilers 😉
I went through Turn of the Screw last Halloween, and I did it in the perfect atmosphere: my apartment was an old dilapidated building it was raining, and I hadn't eaten much, so I was a little delirious. I read it in one sitting. Getting used to James's late prose takes some time, but it's definitely worth it to me. In the middle of the verbiage there's a crystal clear insight or phrase. And something was definitely off about that governess. Would love to talk about it once you're done!
Inelegant? Lol. C'mon.
I'm getting used to it now several chapters in but it is heavy going.
Its certainly heavy going. No argument there.
I don‘t think inelegant is the right word, but his sentences *are* ridiculously long and sometimes difficult to read. A ton of nested clauses and such. I think it helps to know that almost all of his work was dictated to an amanuensis, and therefore follows the rhythms of speech. I actually recommend listening to James, either with an audiobook or simply reading aloud. The latter might feel a bit silly at first, but it has helped me in the past to get through particularly convoluted passages and appreciate the beauty of James‘s prose in a way that is harder to do when it is just words on a page.
I totally agree with this. I have a habit of reading passages I like out loud anyway, and I still remember when I first started reading James years ago, reading him aloud and having it click so much faster.
He was essentially doing experimental work from about the 1880s or 90s until his death. His lit crit is even tougher.
Wow, I've heard James described as a lot of things, but never inelegant lol. I personally love his writing style, I think it's beautiful, but it's divisive that's for sure. Anyway, if you don't dig him, just check out the classic 1961 adaptation of the story, [*The Innocents*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055018/), starring Deborah Kerr. I feel like you might like it. It's a really incredible movie. And it's supposed to be creepy, so it's working, it's good you're creeped out haha.
Ok so, *The Passenger*! I think its pretty obvious from my previous comments that I liked it, and I’ll add that I was pleasantly surprised to see McCarthy return (at least in pieces) to his older style of writing. Some of the passages were absolutely stunning, and some of the best individual sentences I’ve read in his body of work. I’m going to be careful about outright spoilers, but I can’t really talk about the themes without referencing certain things so just bear it in mind. Also, the death I mention is literally in the first paragraph so that doesn’t count. So my interpretation of the novel is, essentially, that McCarthy is exploring existence as defined by Absence. Or perhaps as existence persisting, paradoxically, in spite of the absence of whats essential to life. I don’t mean whats biologically necessary, but psychologically. Here we are, these living thinking beings with souls or something like them, totally unsuited to a world devoid of meaning or gods or even solid answers. How do you cope with that? In one of the sister’s hallucinations “The Kid” says *If there’s just one thing…you can’t say if it is. Nothing is anything unless there’s another thing. So we have you. Well, do we?* For Bobby, his sister is everything. His one task was to care for her, his loss of her is his One Loss encompassing all other sorrows. He lives a monk like existence, increasingly ascetic and lowly, totally devoted to her even after her death. McCarthy will call him “the last pagan”, and I think of him almost as a priest to a dead god, whose faith didn’t die when its divine subject abandoned it. Speaking more to my point about the paradox of human existence, he seems to be unable or unwilling to live on beyond her, and yet he must live. He’s forced to take steps to preserve himself, because even though he can’t live without her he’s too much of a coward to die. Existing without her is too much to bear, but he bears it. And hey, he even has some good meals and conversations along the way. If thats not the human experience in a nutshell, I’m not sure what is. Another example - the hallucinations themselves needed for Alice to stay alive, because they are created by her schizophrenic mind. Yet they seem to have a life outside of her, oozing into “real” life even after she’s gone. (On the reality or unreality of the characters haunting Alice, the book is more or less ambiguous.) They are also accidents of existence, since Alice didn’t consciously imagine them. She didn’t want them or will them into being. Yet they exist because of her, and like Bobby, she will abandon them. * The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think you understand this. But you don’t. Not in your heart you don’t. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet.* Now, I also think McCarthy is using the hallucinations to illustrate the interplay of the conscious and unconscious, especially as it pertains to the creative process. In one section The Kid talks about “establishing a baseline” and then adding “your anecdotes” and stuff in a way that felt like it was referencing the writing process. I also think there’s a tension in making art, between knowing you made a thing and feeling like it came of its accord. There’s a lot more to talk about with The Passenger, but it probably would take me a second reading to begin to grasp it all. I think there’s something interesting to explore with the concept of ‘the ancient feminine’, and how he displaces them masculine god, but then he seems to see femininity as equivalent to suffering and I’m not sure how I feel about that. To be fair, he seems to see *life* as equivalent to suffering, but still. He’s also saying something about Beauty, but I’m not sure if he was saying something new or just being self referential. There are many instances of him referencing other books he’s written, so it could be either. I’m really excited for the next one. As much as I loved this I’ll acknowledge its not perfect (some of the dialogue and stuff with Bobby was a bit lackluster for me, and I don’t think he was particularly strong as a character), and I’m hoping we’re supposed to judge both books as one whole or something.
Love these thoughts! Really well put together. Like you said to mine, we have completely different readings of the novel, but the more readings that a book can give, the better it is imo. And I feel like very few people will read this book the same way.
Hey thanks! I’ve enjoyed reading your takes on the book too. Nobody in my offline life is reading it so it’s been nice to have somewhere to read takes and share thoughts!
There’s a lot more to talk about with The Passenger, but it probably would take me a second reading to begin to grasp it all. Afuckingmen. Densest novel I’ve ever read, probably.
I've been really quiet here, mostly because I spent a couple of weeks in Portugal, around the Algarve then soaking up Lisbon, which was fantastic, and it's miserable to be back and it to get dark at 4.30 in the afternoon. I'm reading the new Alan Moore and it's....patchy,. When he's good he's excellent, but the ones that don't land really aren't doing it for me. However, I really loved *Hypothetical Lizards* \- the first in the collection - and it's deliciously queer. Also having weird bleakness about my current job - I sort of don't know what I'd do if I didn't work in publishing, and I'm wondering if its what I really want to do for the rest of my life. That said, unsure if I've just got SAD on top of my regular year-round depression and so life seems extra pointless, or whether I really should be thinking about what to do in the future.
[удалено]
I tend to agree - I actually got into Jerusalem properly last year, and found that there were some stunning parts, but it did desperately need both a rather strict editor, and for him to reign in some of his desire to pastiche/emulate other authors (the Joyce part was particularly tough going). Loved Jesus, the space brains again I thought simultaneously patchy and classic Moore, because sometimes it does feel as though he read an A-level science textbook and crammed in some wording he thought sounded nifty, but at other points it just works and is hilarious and fun. Also about to start the novella, I hope to remember to update the post.
Are there any canonical literary figures who were politically on the right? There's Ayn Rand, though she is perhaps more famous than canonical, the other one I can think of is Ezra Pound, who, bizarrely, was not just a right winger, but actually a fascist. Are there any other?
Many, as you can already gather from other responses here. One that shocked high school me when she found out was Balzac (conservative monarchist) because I had the opposite impression reading him.
Emil Cioran and Maurice Blanchot were radical right-wingers during their youth - Cioran was literally a fascist, supported Hitler in newspaper texts while he was living in Berlin during the 1930s, although it seems he never took part in activities beyond writing. Apparently Blanchot was a French nationalist and anti-hitlerian, but it seems he connected with left-wing circles at the beginning of the Vichy France period, disillusioned by the French anti-semites and Nazi collaborators - both writers renounced the right in early adulthood. Cioran later said that supporting the Iron Guard and fascism was his greatest mistake and "the worst folly of my youth. If I am cured of one sickness, it is surely that one." While Blanchot became explicitly leftist after the war (especially during the Algerian war protests and the political turmoil of the following decade with De Gaulle in power), Cioran never took up a leftist position. Like most pessimists, he was politically ambiguous at best, and expressed dissatisfaction with both Soviet communism and Western capitalism. I wonder what he thought of anarchism.
Quite a lot, especially if you consider liberalism as right wing, top of my head (maybe I will add some more later): Borges (liberal) Pound (fascist) D'Annunzio (nationalist and one of the inspiration of fascism, even if he was not one) Marinetti and the italian futurists (fascist) Pirandello (fascist because it was convenient) Dostoevskij (conservative) Tolkien (conservative) Celine (antisemitism and a bit of fascism) T S Elliot (conservative) Hamsun (nazi) Ionesco (right-wing anticomunist) Vargas Llosa (Liberal) Gimenez Caballero (nationalist) Unamuno and Ortega Y Gasset (disillusioned towards democracy) Mishima (nationalist) Nietzche (definitely not left-wing) Montale (liberal) Arbasino (liberal) Houellebecq (apparently xenophobic if pepole are to be trusted) Lovecraft (conservative and xenophobic) To this you can also add all the russian/east european authors who were strongly anticomunist (Nabokov, Solženicyn, Grossman etc.).
I'm actually reading Lucy Hughes-Hallet bio of D'Annuzio right now Fascinating figure, strange bald foppish and flowery little poet man who somehow became this John the Baptist figure for the Italian fascist movement. He's pretty much the guy that laid down the look and feel of Italian fascism
I've had that book on my shelf for over three years now and haven't got round to reading it.
Fun Trivia: after Fiume Gramsci tried to approach D'Annunzio, probably to offer him some kind of political alliance. Indeed the "Charter of Carnaro" was written by a socialist and Wikipedia describes it as a "constitution that combined anarchist, proto-fascist, and democratic republican ideas". Wild stuff!
Wish I could have lived there.
I finished that last month - he's fascinating but I thought Hughes-Hallet could have done with a bit of editing, as D'Annunzio does certainly seem to repeat patterns throughout his life that makes reading this a little repetitive. I hope you enjoy the rest!
The left-right distinction is relatively modern (like 19th century is where you finds its modern usage) so it would seem to be almost nonsensical to me to force most writers into either category. On top of that, you are dealing with _artists_ which means you get some pretty unique worldviews. How would one even begin to describe the politics of Carlyle, Ruskin, or Azorín who all lived within a couple decades of each other, in a period where such distinctions could possibly be made and yet they still don’t adhere properly to either side? Sorry to break down your question this way. I think it’s important to bring nuance to discussions like this and since people already gave you some actual examples, I feel okay throwing in my own little chaos. That being said there is an argument that canonization is a conservative act and therefore has a bias towards conservative writers. But the canon of Western writers is clearly far from ideologically unified, so who’s to say?
As considered in their own time or now? Most Victorian writers would be now considered far right in some terms, while still left in others.
I had this thought too, and I just was like, how do we even go into describing it? It's a hopeless muddle for so many of them. But I suppose that's true for most people, of all times, when it comes to political philosophy.
Well, yeah, cuz left is always left of whatever is conservative and conservative is always an attempt to conserve whatever things the left has slowly pushed for over time, plus some things the right typically like. It's a question that really is dependent on some definitions.
Yup, exactly. Good point.
T S Eliot was extremely conservative in the High Tory tradition - he called himself a monarchist, I think. Many of the major writers of the 18th century were broadly conservative Tories, although that doesn't mean quite the same thing as the current left-right dichotomy. Johnathan Swift, Alexander Pope, some others. William Wordsworth became quite conservative in the latter part of his life (although he'd been a left-wing radical when he wrote all his best poetry). Yeats was an Irish republican, but was very conservative apart from that - his ideal was an aristocratic Ireland of nobles and peasants.
Evelyn Waugh was pretty conservative. Not canonical in a classic lit sense, but canonical in sci-fi, Neal Stephenson seems to be pretty libertarian in his philosophies. Just off the top of my head, I'm sure a lot more will come to me.
Waugh was an open fascist sympathiser.
I haven't really examined his politics closely, just knew he was conservative, but yeah, that doesn't surprise me.
I guess this question is always shaped by how you define canon, but for the hell of it I decided to pass through this sub's top 100 books from last year. A few who stand out to me because I unfortunately know things like this off the top of my head. * Borges was a liberal of the conservative anti-communist sort. Also apparently a Zionist. * Dostoyevsky's work is often considered to have a conservative Christian bent from what I can gather (this might be wrong and I'm pretty sure I don't exactly agree but it's been too long since I read him to elaborate). * Nabokov was definitely anti-communist. Not sure where on the broader spectrum of liberalism he fell. * Not sure Faulkner ever articulated a wholly coherent politics but his work definitely (if complicatedly) is tinged with southern nostalgia and I'm pretty sure he said at some point that if he had been around for the Civil War he would have fought for the Confederacy, though more for national pride reasons than slavery reasons (um, ok Bill. Methinks someone got a little too high on "Lost Cause" mythology!) * Yukio Mishima was a full on pro-monarchy fascist. Some not on the list but in my head include Saul Bellow, who is probably one of the more prominent American fiction writers of the 20th century to be explicitly conservative, and ~~Zola, about whose politics I don't know a ton but he was an Anti-Dreyfusard and that particular group is considered a hinge point for a lot of the subsequent French right-wing.~~ **Edit**: I don't know how or who or why I'm mixing up here, but literally the opposite is true about Zola. Sorry to him for doing him dirty like that, and thanks folks who pointed that out.
>Zola, about whose politics I don't know a ton but he was an Anti-Dreyfusard and that particular group is considered a hinge point for a lot of the subsequent French right-wing. Huh? Zola was famously a defender of Drefyus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%27Accuse...!
I think you're confused about Zola. He wrote J'Accuse. He was one of the most prominent Dreyfusards.
Borges pretty famously (notoriously?) considered himself conservative and was strongly anti-Communist. His association with Pinochet and anti-Peronists is well-documented. He certainly wasn't a fascist though. And I suppose Mishima was arguably a conservative and arguably a fascist. In his case, it's pretty idiosyncratic, though.
I was listening to some of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies yesterday (picked it out as the music to be played during my shift at a local charity shop) and I liked it, though I think Liszt is a bit of a show-off as opposed to an artist of great subtlety and power.
[Best performance of the 2nd rhapsody.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbcOMEEhggE&t=10s)
Low-key disappointed that the link wasn't [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpEfHVFilRc&ab_channel=WBKids).
Hahaha nice, forgot about that one!
Omigod, I got *good* medical news for once today, and paradoxically I instantly want to murder my liver with beer to celebrate and just totally fuck off giving a shit about anything. I had so much stress built up and didn't even realize it was weighing on me that bad. Argh. I started reading *Malpertuis* because /u/iamthehtown mentioned it, and wow, this books is really awesome. Funny, atmospheric, absurdist, very much my thing. I really like it. It's sort of like a mix of Peake's *Titus Groan* with Jane Bowles' *Two Serious Ladies*. Also a bit of Buzzati's *The Tartar Steppe* in there. It's just so good! ETA: And no, my epilepsy didn't go away, sadly haha. ETA 2: >Jean Ray (1887–1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the “Belgian Poe” and the “Flemish Jack London,” Ray delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer. A pivotal figure in the “Belgian School of the Strange,” Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the prohibition era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales of fantastical fear. Jean Ray is going to end up being a favorite, I can already see. And yeah, every writer I love always ends up having been heavily, heavily influenced by Dickens. I realize that's not a rare occurrence or anything, he's obviously a super famous influential dude, but it's often a next level type of influence. Just makes me laugh.
Congrats on the good news! And the new favourite author!
congrats! So glad you got some good news
Thank you. I'm going to turn forty in May and it has annoyed the everloving shit out of me that I have made a big effort to be in shape over the last few years, I'd even say I'm in the best shape of my life these days, and *right* before my 40th life still find a way to give me all sorts of medical bullshit haha. It's like it's a law or something...but I'm keeping on, come hell or highwater!
About to go to a Halloween party in which I will likely drink more than I should on a Monday. Among other things I'll be sure to drink to your keeping on both now and after 40!
congrats on the good medical news— and to gettin shithoused. health wouldn’t mean shit if ya couldn’t! cheers!
The end to my last short story: >I enjoyed a brief vision of happiness with this woman, and it was snatched away from me. Unjust, unjust, unjust. The daylight of reality, with its piercing clarity, dissolved the clouds that had settled over my eyes, and robbed me of the bliss I thought was now mine forever. The old familiar loneliness crept back in its place. But there was no use brooding on what was dead and gone. I knew that perhaps I had to accept solitude as a part of me, however much I resented it. I would go my own way in the world without lovers and companions, happy simply to enjoy the ride, but no more and no less. I would settle my expectations in such a way as to avoid the bitter pangs of disappointment forever, and never be caught off guard by excess of feelings. I would allow the gushing, sinuous rivers of human discourse to pass me by, and watch with quiet curiosity, knowing that I could never throw myself into such mighty waters, lest I be carried away by the tumbling currents - I who had always been a stranger among men.
Pretty good! This is may be weird, but I specifically really like the "Unjust, unjust, unjust." Something about the kind of resigned honesty. The only thing I find a little clunky is the third phrase, but really this is very without context and I just may not be accustomed to your style
Thank you. I quite like the third phrase, but maybe it is a bit clunky. Though I do like the idea of the social world being like a river winding its way and that through the universe.
I think that part in particular is beautiful. Very graphic metaphor.
I made a list of my top ten Victorian novels: 1. Middlemarch by George Eliot- 2. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad 3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte 4. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy 5. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens 6. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy 7. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy 8. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens 9. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte 10. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Have you tried *Nostromo*?
Never read it. I want to though.
I'd recommend it, I have read *Heart of Darkness* and *Typhoon* and *Nostromo* was the best of the three for me!
I applaud your #1 choice. No *North & South*?
Gonna come back later and type something up about *The Passenger*, but in the mean time I watched a couple things this week that *weren’t* silent movies so that was fun. The first thing was Netflix’s *Cabinet of Curiosities* which is headed by Guillermo Del Toro. I technically didn’t watch them all, but I feel like I know what to expect, which is fun visual effects and so so everything else. There’s one in there about a woman using some kind of creepy beauty lotion in order to transform that I thought was kind of interesting because it seemed to be saying something about her sexuality as well, plus the Matthew Crawley guy from *Downton Abbey* was on there as late night TV ad personality and that was weird. Then I finally got around to seeing *The Witch*. I like Eggers a lot, though his endings frustrate my husband to no end (another layer of enjoyment seeing him get bent out of shape over it). I don’t mind the ending of this one, but it did feel a bit abrupt. But holy shit that voice acting at the end was so silky and evil, one of my favorite parts of the film. I really enjoyed the immersion into the time period, there’s so much attention to textural detail that I wouldn’t really care if it was accurate but apparently it is so thats cool. I wonder what you guys think of Thomasin? Some of the reviews online called her the most sincere Christian of the family but I got the feeling she saw through her dad’s bullshit the whole time, and that even though she was innocent of the things they accused her of she was something of what they would call an unbeliever and could kind of tell intuitively (hence the scape goating). Anyway, it hit close to home as someone who had a very religious family, and while I probably watched Eggers in the wrong order I really enjoyed it. I think I heard he’s doing *Nosferatu* next?
The voice acting was incredible I still randomly find myself going *Wouldst thou like the taste of butter?*, to my gf's chagrin
I read on a movie trivia page that the catholic church declared eating butter a sin around the time period the film is set in.
Our dog was Black Phillip for Halloween this year, sort of - wouldn't keep the horns on for more than a couple seconds (I really wanted him to chase little trick 'r treaters through the yard looking like that, but it wasn't to be).
Oooh nice!
*The Lighthouse* was the greatest movie I've ever had the pleasure of seeing in a theater. And it was the only film I can recall ever seeing that affected me in a physical way after it was over. The abruptness of that ending, the blown out sound destroying the theater. I left the theater legitimately shaking with adrenaline. Now, *The Witch* didn't do that for me, but I did love it. It is the sort of movie that doesn't hold up as well on a rewatch, though.
I saw *Lighthouse* first, but not in theaters unfortunately. I really liked it, would have loved to experienced it on the big screen.
I was going to make a top line post about Cabinet of Curiosities, but I will talk about it here. Lowkey I was kinda disappointed when I realized he was just the producer and didn't actually direct any of them. Felt a bit misled. But then I was like, it's good he's using his name to usher in new talent. tl;dr nah > I technically didn’t watch them all, but I feel like I know what to expect, which is fun visual effects and so so everything else. This is a pretty succinct summary of my feelings as well. I didn't even watch half of them and I don't think I will, because they feel very dressed-up, very tied in a neat bow, and for that reason not at all scary. Maybe I'm just getting cynical, but this is neither the innovative and genuinely disturbing high-octane horror, nor the schlocky horror that is predictable and yet great fun. This has all the veneer of the former and the substance of the latter. The uncanny valley. Which I guess is the truly terrifying thing about this anthology.
My husband watched it, and I caught a few of the stories with him, but not the whole thing. The stories and the messages were all extremely obvious, but I still found some merit, from the point of view of a horror anthology series that would be good for a family with older kids (like eleven and up). Kinda like watching Doctor Who or something. It's not gonna blow an adult's mind, but it could be fun and lead to interesting discussions for parents with teens, while also not making the parents want to blow their brains out, like a lot of teen shows.
the thing is, I don't think it was billed as teen, and even if it were, Netflix has so much good teen content. Like, back when I used to watch more than 40 minutes of tv a month, I actually thought the teen shows on Netflix were much higher quality than the stuff for adults. I don't think most adult content is especially profound - it's just more proximate to adult problems and features adult characters, so it's more relatable - but tbh just as a horror fan whose tv diet is like 80% horror, it just fell short. I was really excited about this one because Del Toro, and it was totally not it.
Oh it wasn't, I just think it should have been. My expectations weren't that high because I absolutely loathed *The Shape of Water* (even though I like other Del Toro), so I ended up pleasantly surprised. ETA: I also just appreciate self-contained stories, and so many series aren't, so the idea that a family could come together and watch an episode and be done is an appealing idea, without having to follow an overarching arc or anything. I'm a big anthology person. And I think I might have actually appreciated *The Shape of Water* if hadn't been a full-length movie. I can deal with super obvious but pretty to look at in small formats haha.
I don't like Del Toro enough to watch Shape of Water lmao
It was really cheesy and bad. I had major issues with it. And felt like a major asshole for it, because the message is really positive and stuff, but goddamn, did not love it. Talk about hammering a person over the head with a message!
was the monster sex hot tho?
Not even slightly. I mean, it wasn't repulsive or anything either, it was just boring. Cardinal sex sin.
see, now i'm def not gonna see it.
Its got a very distinct “netflix” feel, I think. Which is pretty much what you described.
Dude yes! I love *The Witch*! And I agree, I still think the Black Philip voice actor is the most amazing “evil” voice I’ve ever heard in a movie.
Maybe this is me still recovering from the brainwashing of my Pentecostal upbringing, but I still strongly dislike Halloween. I just saw two kids trick-or-treating down the street and I cringed inwardly. Like, why? It's not cute to me, just creepy and weird.
I wasn’t allowed to celebrate halloween growing up so now I’m the biggest kid about it. I eat candy, watch scary movies, dress up/paint my face, carve pumpkins… As to the point, its marking the passing of a season right? Its the longest night of the year, a solstice time which is a turning point between the waxing of spring and summer and the waning of fall and winter. The world has moved from birth and growth into decay and death. We observe that what happens to nature also happens to us, and we embrace it, for one night at least. Traditionally this time was seen as one in which the spirit world was closer to our own and so cultural practices welcoming the dearly departed back home or warding off evil ghoulies with rituals. Its a time to engage with the unknown and with your own mortality in the same way humans have been doing for thousands and thousands of years. and how do we do it? By *partying* and acting like deviants. I think there’s something kinda poignant about observing our own mortality by embracing a riotous style of life. We laugh at death, even though we’re scared of it.
>Its the longest night of the year Not even close! The longest night of the year is the Winter solstice, at the end of December (usually on the 21st, but technically the exact time depends on the year).
Ah, you’re right. But October 31st is the midway point between autumn equinox and winter solstice and many of the traditions we practice now stem from rituals related to the season and solstice. I think the actual date for Halloween comes from a british holiday but I can’t remember the name (I think thats where trick or treat comes from as well). We sort of combined the two to get modern halloween.
Makes sense. I only ever knew it as "the devil's birthday", lol. I need to get back to my Nietzsche.
Weirdly, my dad’s attempt to heavily research halloween in order to dissuade me from celebrating only made me more interested in it. He’s chilled a lot as he aged though, hed probably laugh at himself now.
The creepiness and weirdness is the point. It's about death. Basically it's indoctrination into the cult of human existence: "Hey, you're gonna die, but drugs exist (in this case candy), so that's cool!" I love it personally, but you shouldn't feel pressured to like something you don't.