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!@#$%! · 12.27.2014, 02:01 PM

yes, it's the opposite-- i had massive reading lists for my comprehensive exams. fortunately my department was slightly backwards and the faculty was populated by poets & novelists & original thinkers, but the rest were silly eggheads i tried to avoid whenever possible. actually i shouldn't say eggheads--they were posers, quoting fashionable critics they didn't even understand, always rushing to publish or perish, true products of the MLA and the American academic system (what a horror). But regardless, it was thousands of pages of reading due every week, plus the research, plus the philosophy, plus plus plus. indigestion.

so i quit reading for years and devoured movies instead. last i was there was 2004.

funny enough though, maybe thanks to this discussion, i went to my storage and uncrated books which i'm now sorting on shelves. maybe i am recovering from all that PTSD. i got my stendhals back. i dug out my quijote. i fished out some balzac novels. i think i'm going to reread the quijote, such a funny book.

and those online sumerian texts are pretty cool-- the correspondence is some of the most surprising. reads like office emails between some branch manager the corporate office.

but anyway, that article you so hated-- i didn't embrace the whole thing and every point he makes. but his thing about communities of readers/writers resonated with me and provoked some other thoughts. again it's not that i agree with the thing about blurbs, etc-- it's just that the idea unstucked my head.

i'd bring it to the old discussion of the universality of art. things that can reach everyone. for example, i am not an old russian member of the nobility but i can enjoy tolstoy. i am not a dead bronze-age grek but i enjoy the illiad and the odissey (parts of them anyway, some of the lists in the illiad can be zzzzzzzz). i am not an israelite from 2500 years ago and i am antirreligious person but the book of job is a total mindfuck. and then there's shit written yesterday that does nothing for me.

some old-fashioned postmoderns might say that these books are considered great because the empire imposes them upon us blah blah. but that is some bullshit.

so i suppose that my "problem" (it's not a problem really) reading the vast expanse of modern american fiction has more to do with the fact that it's still unsorted-- it's a local conversation, in the local code, with local assumptions, and some may be the next odisseys and the next brothers karamazov, but most will be a flash in the pan soon rendered irrelevant. so when confronted with the large mass of modern publishing it's hard to sort things. not that i don't enjoy the occasional flash in the pan-- some are quite good. but one has to connect with them.

by the way, speaking of minorities or whatever-- i find this "minority" genre to be highly annoying. the only "minority" writer i have ever liked so far is jhumpa lahiri. the latinos (i'm supposed to "relate" to them i guess) are thoroughly eclipsed by their counterparts south of the border. okay maybe except francisco goldman-- "the long night of the white chickens" was a beautiful novel. but see, he doesn't write "look at me vato, i'm such a latino, tacos, abuelitas"-- he just writes a novel about some shit going down in boston & guatemala. so i don't think about him that way.

i don't know really-- i'm tired and bitter and ungenerous. don't blame the authors for my shortcomings. at the same time, i'm not saying my crippled perspective in not valid-- it's valid to me anyway-- but it's definitely crippled and damaged and overly demanding.

anyway, here's to mental rehabilitation. i might read regularly again some day and grow kinder in my old age.

12.27.2014, 02:01 PM	#3694
!@#$%! invito al cielo Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: mars attacks Posts: 42,731	yes, it's the opposite-- i had massive reading lists for my comprehensive exams. fortunately my department was slightly backwards and the faculty was populated by poets & novelists & original thinkers, but the rest were silly eggheads i tried to avoid whenever possible. actually i shouldn't say eggheads--they were posers, quoting fashionable critics they didn't even understand, always rushing to publish or perish, true products of the MLA and the American academic system (what a horror). But regardless, it was thousands of pages of reading due every week, plus the research, plus the philosophy, plus plus plus. indigestion. so i quit reading for years and devoured movies instead. last i was there was 2004. funny enough though, maybe thanks to this discussion, i went to my storage and uncrated books which i'm now sorting on shelves. maybe i am recovering from all that PTSD. i got my stendhals back. i dug out my quijote. i fished out some balzac novels. i think i'm going to reread the quijote, such a funny book. and those online sumerian texts are pretty cool-- the correspondence is some of the most surprising. reads like office emails between some branch manager the corporate office. but anyway, that article you so hated-- i didn't embrace the whole thing and every point he makes. but his thing about communities of readers/writers resonated with me and provoked some other thoughts. again it's not that i agree with the thing about blurbs, etc-- it's just that the idea unstucked my head. i'd bring it to the old discussion of the universality of art. things that can reach everyone. for example, i am not an old russian member of the nobility but i can enjoy tolstoy. i am not a dead bronze-age grek but i enjoy the illiad and the odissey (parts of them anyway, some of the lists in the illiad can be zzzzzzzz). i am not an israelite from 2500 years ago and i am antirreligious person but the book of job is a total mindfuck. and then there's shit written yesterday that does nothing for me. some old-fashioned postmoderns might say that these books are considered great because the empire imposes them upon us blah blah. but that is some bullshit. so i suppose that my "problem" (it's not a problem really) reading the vast expanse of modern american fiction has more to do with the fact that it's still unsorted-- it's a local conversation, in the local code, with local assumptions, and some may be the next odisseys and the next brothers karamazov, but most will be a flash in the pan soon rendered irrelevant. so when confronted with the large mass of modern publishing it's hard to sort things. not that i don't enjoy the occasional flash in the pan-- some are quite good. but one has to connect with them. by the way, speaking of minorities or whatever-- i find this "minority" genre to be highly annoying. the only "minority" writer i have ever liked so far is jhumpa lahiri. the latinos (i'm supposed to "relate" to them i guess) are thoroughly eclipsed by their counterparts south of the border. okay maybe except francisco goldman-- "the long night of the white chickens" was a beautiful novel. but see, he doesn't write "look at me vato, i'm such a latino, tacos, abuelitas"-- he just writes a novel about some shit going down in boston & guatemala. so i don't think about him that way. i don't know really-- i'm tired and bitter and ungenerous. don't blame the authors for my shortcomings. at the same time, i'm not saying my crippled perspective in not valid-- it's valid to me anyway-- but it's definitely crippled and damaged and overly demanding. anyway, here's to mental rehabilitation. i might read regularly again some day and grow kinder in my old age.
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