Posted on 04/21/2011 2:43:04 PM PDT by Borges
Allan Bloom is the only one I have read of them (”The Closing of the American Mind”).
He’s in the LOA because he’s an important writer conceptually. He’s just a terrible stylist. It’s a shame.
He’s in the LOA because he’s an important writer conceptually. He’s just a terrible stylist. It’s a shame.
He’s in the LOA because he’s an important writer conceptually. He’s just a terrible stylist. It’s a shame.
He’s in the LOA because he’s an important writer conceptually. He’s just a terrible stylist. It’s a shame.
I think it must've been required reading for high school students in Kansas, back in the 60s, when I was in high school.
We moved a lot and it seemed like every time we moved, the English class at my new high school was just getting around to that book. I hated it and was pi**ed that I had to read it over and over again. The last time we moved, I think it was the third time I was forced to re-read it, I... LOVED IT! Something to be said for repetition, I guess.
I love Kipling. Must read more of him. :)
Everyone’s read Shakespeare, Dickens and Mark Twain.
That is proved by the fact that they appear on his list.
Stalky and Co.
Plain Tales from the Hills
..are a couple of my favorites.
‘alice walker isn’t a real poet’
bless your heart and brain
if you had thrown (crane handy?) Maya Angelou in there with her I would have nominated YOU for a Nobel Prize
I also read a translation of it and it made me laugh but it got monotonous sometimes.
I think genre fiction has replaced the so-called canon literature as far as avid readership. Maybe because there is still a masculine voice; much of the current "literary" fiction is this mushy or angry feminist garbage. These authors are great stylists, but so distorted they're irritating. I'm a woman, BTW, so my opinion has nothing to do with "dead white male" chauvinism.
No there’s plenty of bad stories in Dubliners. Start with An Encounter, as story that’s not only bad but gross. Ulyses only demands to be ignored completely, it’s a stupid book. Just because a book keeps getting published doesn’t mean anybody other than the literati reads it, the literati are just like any other group of super nerds, they keep finding a way to get new members in spite of their lack of sex and new members need new copies of those crappy books. And the literati have the added advantage of controlling school curricula, even if no human being ever again voluntarily reads a single word of Joyce he’s going to keep getting published for at least another 50 years because people will still be forced to read his pap.
I figured this out last night. The literati are the first wave of uber nerds. You’re trekkies. It explains everything really, especially explains why the literati so strenuously thumb their noses at SF/F, because all brands of uber nerds hate all the other brands. Just like the trekkies you obsess on stuff that 99% of the world doesn’t give a rip about, you look down on people that don’t give a rip about your obsession, you think your obsession makes you special, you think it really had a dramatic effect on society, you wear funny clothes, and you even periodically gather together in groups of like minded obsessors. And probably like most uber trekkies (and Jedis, and Ringers, and whatever the heck anime dorks are called) if the literati had gotten laid young enough it all could have been avoided.
I don’t think it was terrible style, I think it was not good for the masses style. But that’s not necessarily bad. Not everybody gets to be Madonna, some people gotta be different. The real shame is how little recognition he got when alive. Even in the SF community people really didn’t start to realize what they had in him until near the end. Just saw they’re remaking Total Recall, at least his kids are making money.
I’M TOO BUSY HITTING THE REFRESH BUTTON ON LATEST POSTS HERE AT FREEP TO BE WELL READ.
I’M NOT YELLING, MY ALL CAPS BUTTON IS STUCK.
I never bothered to pick it up, and don’t see a need to. Poetry is not in my wheel house, a novel revolving around a poem is not something that interests me. If I tried to read it I wouldn’t find it drop dead brilliant, I’d find it to be a book about a poem and the gross over analysis of a poem which I found so irritating in school.
This is part of what I mean when I say people’s tastes vary and that determines what they will and won’t like. If you don’t like poetry a meta-story about a poem is just not going to be something you like, could be the best book humanity has ever or will ever produce, if the topic isn’t to your liking there’s just no reason to pick it up. Gotta know who you are in this world. I’m a guy that find poetry boring and poetry analysis annoying, while I do like meta the meta needs to revolve around something I find at least vaguely interesting for me to care.
Then Chaucer and Rabelais are gross too. Bodily fiction like that has been around for eons. The Greeks had it too. Ulysses is probably the most tightly constructed work of literature since The Divine Comedy. There’s nothing stupid about it. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey using every stylistic mode that Western Culture has seen since Homer. It’s both an Epic on the head of a pin and a summation of Western Civilization since the Greeks.
People can be ignorant of it all they want but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still called Ignorance. Without Joyce, the history of 20th century lit is incoherent. Especially Anglophone Lit. He’s the Literary Einstein.
No ‘literati’ I know thumb their nose at SF. They thumb their nose at bad fiction. Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.G. Wells are very much taught at the school level.
‘Literati’ is just a snotty word for scholar. It’s like calling chemists or physcists ‘Sciencerati’; a facile reduction of an important field of study. Who do you think should make up school curricila for English classes? The local grocer? How about just reading the contents of the best seller list and leave it at that?
The ‘over-analysis’ of the poem itself is part of the joke.
His prose is square as square can be. Please quote a single PKD sentence that’s interesting from a construction or imagery standpoint. He did not use language in any remotely interesting way. You can summarize the content of a PKD novel and still pretty much capture the essence of it. He loses nothing in translation because there is nothing to lose.
Oh and btw...’Pale Fire’ is Science Fiction.
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