i love this book and in fact most of foucault's. "his" panopticon idea is very influential. after reading this book, i notice it's quoted quite a lot in popular culture.Quoting Melville (view post)
i love this book and in fact most of foucault's. "his" panopticon idea is very influential. after reading this book, i notice it's quoted quite a lot in popular culture.
"Over analysis is like the oil of the Match-Cut machine." KK2.0
Against the Day is good. REAL good. Though it's a bit disheartening to get through a "tough" 350 pages and know you still have over 700 left. Actually, this is one of the more linear, accessible Pynchon narratives I've read. And I guess I've read them all.
Now reading: The Master Switch by Tim Wu
I have not. I've tended to stay away from theory-stuff like that (the lit theory class I just finished taking was excruciating for me) though I've lately started to become more interested in philosophy, so maybe I'll check it out. Honestly, when you said Foucault and mentioned my paranoid views, I immediately thought you were talking about Umberto Eco, whose Foucault's Pendulum I've often thought of reading.
The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.
That's it. I'm reading this one next.
Finished Snuff, moved on to Company Man.
Snuff in company? Man.
Pretty much. Need to bathe in bleach after that book.
halfway through ulysses. yes, i enjoy it, although since i look at the book as a challenge, my feeling is more akin to "hey, this is not so bad. i think i can do it!" than "gosh, i can't put this thing down."
i'm going to be quite proud when i finish it.
so please tell me, pynchon's is not that harder than joyce's. i know, they are. i just hope they're more similar. ulysses doesn't hit my limit just yet.
"Over analysis is like the oil of the Match-Cut machine." KK2.0
it isn't that much harder. though I would skip pynchon and go right for Infinite Jest.
The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.
This is a terrible idea.it isn't that much harder. though I would skip pynchon and go right for Infinite Jest.
Read Artifices and The Aleph by Borges. lovejuice suggested in the ISOYFDT that he's postmodern-y. I think that's fairly true. His ideas seem to permeate pretty much all of the postmodern fiction I've read. These were both real good, although I wish he wrote a little more about women. His settings and characters are so diverse, but they're almost all male.
Also read The Quiet American by Graham Greene. It was decent. A very concise and perhaps simplistic examination of colonial tendencies. I say simplistic because Alden Pyle is such a fucking idiot, and pretty one-dimensional. I also tire of the cynical-reporter-protagonist-who-occasionally-says-profound-truths as a character type. It's very common. Not as common as the cynical private eye, but still pretty ubiquitous.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
These folks would seem to disagree:
http://infinitesummer.org/
The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.
Eh. Pyle is an idiot insofar as he gets caught up in his own ideals and can't see common sense anymore, but that's true of many people. I didn't find his idiocy unrealistic. It's just misguided passion to do what he believes is the right thing.
Also, I think you're judging the novel with 2009 in mind when talking about how tired you are of the cynical journalist with profound moments. I'm not sure how cliche that was when The Quiet American was written, but people latch on to success and imitation is, of course, the sincerest form of flattery. I don't think you can blame Greene for others aping his work (and yes, I'm aware that he wasn't the first to develop a character like Thomas Fowler, but his novel helped push that character type further into cliched territory).
I thought the book was incredible, and still incredibly relevant, which surprised me the most. The entire time I was reading I couldn't help but think that Pyle could, and probably does, exist today, and was somewhere with us in the Middle East these last eight years.
I see what you're saying, but I find the "innocence" of his character, as Greene puts it, too all pervasive. He was very much a type to me. Loves his mom, respects his dad, believes in the books he reads. I didn't find much depth in him.
I don't think that's much of an excuse. The problem is, again, that the character feels less like a human than a literary type. There's not much for me to distinguish him from others like him. I've read a lot of old books that don't feel cliched at all.
Agree that it's still very relevant. I was actually thinking of Michael Ignatieff (who is the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party) while reading it. Very smart guy who, while running some committee or something at Harvard, came out in support of the Iraq War because of some of the exact same reasons Pyle did.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
Philip Roth was was taking Nixon down a peg before Watergate; before Agnew resigned; in short, before taking Nixon down a peg was cool. Our Gang is short, bitter, bizarre, and oh-so-funny.
Also taking my time with books of essays by Alfred Kazin, Gary Indiana, and Gore Vidal.
If depth is the problem, I think that was intentional. Our perspective is purely that of Fowler, who doesn't like Pyle, and shows us only what he sees in him. I think he makes him more buffoonish as a way of knocking him down, out of jealousy and spite. I don't think Pyle was really that shallow, as some of his devious behavior suggested in the second half. Fowler just didn't want to give him any more credit than necessary.
I've been thinking of reading some Roth lately. Have you read other books by him? If so, how does it compare?
Anyone else read anything by him?
Also, Don DeLillo. I keep seeing his name places, but whenever I read a quote by him it doesn't seem that interesting.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
But what I'm saying is that they're both kind of shallow characters.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
Ah. Well, in that case I guess we just disagree. I thought Fowler was well fleshed out.
I like American Pastoral (which I know either KFan or Raiders loathes), Portnoy's Complaint, and The Plot Against America. Other good ones range from witty adolescent realism (Goodbye, Columbus and Indignation to quite interesting meldings of fact and fiction (Operation Shylock and Zuckerman Unbound). I'd start with Portnoy, it's fairly representative, well-regarded, and funny.
As for DeLillo, the conventional starting point is White Noise, which I love, but Libra and Mao II are just as good. Underworld is best to be tackled later.
I wasn't very high on White Noise at all.
As for Roth, I have only read The Plot Against America, which seemed like a pretty pointless exercise.
Now reading: The Master Switch by Tim Wu
It's I that hates American Pastoral. It's not insultingly bad, it's just totally pointless. I guess I don't hate it so much as hate that it's so widely praised. It's the only Roth I've read. I've also read White Noise by Delillo, which was solid, but also kind of forgettable. I don't really remember much about it at all.
Me - 1
Roth writes pointless novels - 2
Approaching it as a challenge doesn't seem like a good way to go. Just enjoy the characters, humor, dazzling wordplay and variations in style, and scope of it all. It kind of reminds me of Citizen Kane: it's a very fun, lively book, but people sometimes seem to let its reputation get in the way of that.
Though some of its chapters are admittedly really tough to unravel. I never did finish Gravity's Rainbow—I inexplicably lost interest right after finishing the first section and figured I should wait til I regained interest to read the rest—but from what I've read, it's never as tough as the most impenetrable sections of Ulysses. However, Ulysses is probably easier to read overall, because its frequent changes in style prevent it from ever feeling monotonous (to me, at least).
I'd skip DeLillo. I've only read White Noise, but it didn't inspire me to read anything else by him: while its portrayal of self-aware postmodernity is occasionally amusing, I didn't think it was all that interesting. Though you seem to be reading books at a lovejuician rate, so I guess you may as well give it a shot, given its reputation.
I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?
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