Posts tagged literature
A few of you have been asking for this for some time now, so it is with no further ado that we present the complete bookshelf of Lisa Simpson, to be updated as her book club grows.
BOOKS
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
The Adventures of Tin Tin, Hergé
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton…
reading list part deux
Anonymous asked: If you're gonna reblog uninformed posts about Jonathan Franzen and post shit about him on yr tumblr at least inform yourself or read more of his literature and don't be a mindless tumblr zombie affirming various popular claims without any real perspective or basis. I bet 99% of the tumblr hype hating on Franzen and talking about DFW have barely finished anything substantial written by them, or know anything about their LITERARY significance.
fair enough! kind of. I mean I can see why you’re cranky, I am generally for people reading stuff before they dismiss it out of hand based on reputation. except I specifically stated I was talking about Franzen as a celebrity/human — which he is. If I was commenting on his fiction you might have a point. It might be good! lots of jackasses write great stuff. franzen is just not at the top of my to-read list and I’m ok with that. also I am pretty thoroughly versed in david foster wallace, lololololol.
look, writers have significance other than their work. like, to me it’s relevant information that tolstoy was emotionally abusive to his wife, or that thoreau’s shack in the woods was actually pretty much in his backyard and his wife brought him a hot lunch most days, or that george orwell fought with one of the anarchist groups in the spanish civil war, or that samuel beckett was in the French Resistance to nazi occupation. it doesn’t have to affect how you view their work — it’s ok to enjoy stuff by assholes or hate stuff by great people. but their books are not the only impact they have in the world and it’s ok to talk about their other impacts. I would even say it’s necessary!
why is this anonymous? I can’t believe my first real anonymous tumblr hate mail is about jonathan franzen of all things.
According to something he says in the story about Super Bowl XLV, Franzen was on Robinson Crusoe Island on February 3, 2011. Which means he was there less than a year after Robinson Crusoe Island was all but destroyed by the tsunami which followed massive Chilean earthquake of 2010…Sixteen people died; the entire economy of the island was wiped out. If you’re interested in helping, or finding out more, there are good resources here.
It’s into the aftermath of this disaster that Franzen wanders, thinking in his Important Novelist way about how selfish David Foster Wallace turns out to have been. He reaches the island, and he sees the damage wrought — by blackberries. He sees the islanders trying to recover some semblance of their former lives, and sneers at the “sad travesty” of their ritual. He moans about how “nondescript” his food is and how “skeletal” the cattle are, while somehow failing to notice that the reason is that the islanders, recovering from a terrible natural disaster, have nothing left.
Franzen attacks Wallace in this essay, criticizing “the extremes of his own narcissism” and his self-deception. Ha! The extremes of narcissism and self-deception needed to visit Robinson Crusoe Island 11 months after the tsunami and not even notice what had happened make Wallace look like an amateur in such fields. (And if Franzen did notice, but decided to ignore it, that’s even worse.)
oh geez
…not all that long ago, it seemed to me obvious that dystopian speculative fiction was one of the genres if not the genre best adapted to a left political stance. The drawing out of the inevitable ramifications of all this, the dramatic revelation of the crisis whose traces were already starting to streak the screen of things-as-they-are, the warning that the relatively bearable everyday was already pregnant with something much, much worse – these seemed to be close to the best one could do with narrative art today.
I even started writing some myself, a project that I’m constantly tempted to return to…. But honestly it’s feeling increasingly wrong-footed, if one would be even a mildly political narrative writer, to head in this direction given the way things are now.
Given that the fact is that the world over austerity measures, privatizations and rationalizations, and other efforts to starve out what vestiges of the welfare state remain are being sold to the public under the very brand of inevitable and interminable crisis. …The generalization of this atmosphere of imminent catastrophe – through films and books, news reports and editorials, the web, whatever – has served as a distributed and as if automatic PR machine better than any the right could have paid for in service of its quest to cut away the remainders of soft socialism.
” don’t need a weatherman//ads without products
materialworld answered your question: When You Cancel Your Magazine Subscription on Your Kindle, Your Back Issues Disappear Too
‘buy = rent’ in cultural capital monopoly services is a different argument from the ‘nostalgia + tactile = superior cultural experience’ one
yes, absolutely, but I think the nostalgia/tactile thing is the most common objection to e-books and is worth specifically addressing if you are wary of e-books and also reject alarmist anti-new-technology sentiments as kind of creepy and regressive. I get pretty sick of that weird romanticising-the-past hippy stuff, you know? like if people have grounded concerns about new tech — like the digital dark age or something — that’s one thing, but often it’s just a case of anxiety over technological/media/whatever change masking anxiety about social change.
plus I really really want people talking about new reading technology to talk about capitalism and mostly we aren’t. capitalism: the real c-word
god, now I really wanna watch that buffy episode where giles and jenny have this argument
Where I pick an actor and watch everything they’ve been in, preferably in order although some interesting stuff might happen if I watched it out of order or in reverse order. If they had been in a long TV series I would only watch the episodes they were in, not the whole thing.
It would create a really interesting counternarrative where that person is the “protagonist” of my meta-project, whether or not they’re the protagonist of a given work.
I will always love Kafka, and I don’t give a shit how emo that makes me. some years ago, The Trial was the first book I managed to read after months of being too depressed to read anything much longer than a newspaper article. at that point I always felt like I had been awake for about forty hours, like I had the flu, something like that. I fell asleep in class, I forgot the ends of my sentences, I was vacant. It was my first experience with mental illness and I was terrified. I mean, I have no memory of learning to read, it’s been like speech to me, I even think in text half the time. I thought I had lost everything that made me myself. but with Kafka nothing made sense and that was ok, in fact it was the point. all I had to do was get into a sort of lethargic rhythm, I could do that. a lot of people say The Trial is depressing, but reading it for the first time outside the doctor’s office, I felt the best I’d felt about the myself and the world in a very long time.
