[Toilet & Bowels]

 

[EVOLghost]

Originally Posted by EVOLghost

Oh shit yeah. Teh first chapter of oyasumi punpun(manga) is translated. Time to read it and be sad.

 

 

WELL THERE GOES MY SUNDAY.

[pony]

http://the-toast.net/2013/09/24/tell...urakami-novel/

3. You find it easy to have emotionless sex with strangers. If you were to describe the sex to a friend you would use the most abstract language possible, but you never do because you have no friends.

[vacuum noise]

David Ohle stuff

[pony]

starting The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner today. Got the paperback on saturday.. which I would've been able to afford the hardcover, it's so much prettier!

 

Yesterday, I had Inferno by Eileen Myles in the mailbox. finally! I think that has to be the most expensive paperback I ever purchased (but only cause of postage; I had to order it in the states). Hope I'll like i!

One last thing: I am SO going there when I am in NYC
http://www.housingworks.org/bookstor...medium=webpage

[pony]

do you guys think there is such a thing as national literature?
we talked about it in class yesterday and I am unsure about where i stand. i mean, i do think one could count e.g. the great american novels as national literature but then again, it still "belongs to the world". aren't all books like the same 7 stories with different names, places,... ?
and who writes the national lit of a country? someone who as born there, who lived there most of their life, a citizen of it?
maybe there is no such thing as a national literature. at least not in present day? mean everyone can go everywhere, travel is relatively cheap and easy and everyone is on the internet... isn't it weird to think of some lit works as national literature?

[pony]

i mean.. really. what is national lit?
to be nominated for a(n american) national book award in the states you have to be an american citizen and published by an american publisher.. but some people have a dual citizenship. where does the lit belong to then? both nations? the one the book was written in? the one the topic of the book fits best to? or do the authors decide themselves?
can one even match every work of literature with a nation?
can one see national literature as some kind of a ~genre~? stories from native peoples maybe or stories about important historical stuff.. but can't they be written by anyone? like, you don't have to be a native to write a story about native mythology or whatever

[Bytor Peltor]

Originally Posted by pony

...isn't it weird to think of some lit works as national literature?

Good questions......however, would you pose the same about musical groups (albums) and actors (movies)? I don't think many would take the time to ask if The Beatles were really a British band or if Lynyrd Skynyrd was truly an american band......doesn't, 'The White Album' and 'Second Helping' belong to the World?

[pony]

i don't know, first thing that comes to mind is that books are (ideally) translated in different languages and it isn't the norm that songs are translated by other musicians and then covered?

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by pony

do you guys think there is such a thing as national literature?

short answer: yes.
i might give a long answer later.

Originally Posted by pony

we talked about it in class yesterday and I am unsure about where i stand. i mean, i do think one could count e.g. the great american novels as national literature but then again, it still "belongs to the world". aren't all books like the same 7 stories with different names, places,... ?

i dont know about "the same 7 stories." you might be reading them wrong, ha ha-- i mean, through some reductionist lens rather than all their glorious detail.

and OF COURSE literature belongs to the world. that's a given. but i think where you read changes how you read. e.g., for me, as a kid growing up in latin america, tom sawyer and huck finn were adventure books-- stuff for kids, go in a cave, get on a raft, etc. but for 'mericans, these are foundational books deeply embedded in the national mythology. moby dick-- same thing. fucking americans and their moby dick. (okay, i haven't ready moby dick.)

anyway, as a latin american, knowing that we are not the center of the world, we devour everything from everywhere. but you notice, looking from outside, how certain "big" cultures tend to read themselves-- the french read the french and have their own shit going on. the british, same thing. americans, they read the british because that's their past, and then they read themselves. every now and then these people will discover some "exotic" foreign author and adopt them briefly. but it's a small digression in the self-propelled national debate that deals with their own questions and problems, trying to deal with their own questions and problems.

so there you have a national literature. because i can read goethe with great curiosity but to a german it will speak on a different level. when i read shakespeare i was like "wow, this fucker really knows how people think" but it didn't speak to me like the ancestor of my consciousness. it's not in my tradition. same thing with moby fucking dick-- everyone can read it, but protestants will get it on a different level i suppose. milton: for me, boring, for the english, something to do with cromwell, history, and the national literature. everyone gets something else.

Originally Posted by pony

and who writes the national lit of a country? someone who as born there, who lived there most of their life, a citizen of it?

it varies. in latin america the national literatures are a brew of precolumbian oral traditions and the writing of the first explorers and conquerors, who made more of a mark in the lands they invaded than in the lands they left. (e.g. bartolome de las casas is more widely read in latin amercian than in spain). then it was generally people who grew out of those cultures but you also had explorers… oh, take humboldt. is humboldt big in germany? no? he was fucking HUGE in latin america. massively important. he invented teh continent, in a way. anyway, i digress.

tldr: it's not where you come from, it's what you adopt as yours.

another example of national literature, in the usa: the fucking king james bible. it's some jewish collection of fairytales translated by renaissance brits, so it wasn't written here, but it became the book everyone had in early america and i'd argue is at the root of america's national literature.

Originally Posted by pony

maybe there is no such thing as a national literature. at least not in present day? mean everyone can go everywhere, travel is relatively cheap and easy and everyone is on the internet... isn't it weird to think of some lit works as national literature?

if you're talking about the disintegration of the nation state in the face of global late capitalist culture i'll say sure, maybe everyone has a macdonalds, but politics is still very much local and "national" centers of concern and their discourse will survive for a long time. plus there's language, where literature proper operates. so there's still a national culture, and there's still a national literature.

looking at contemporary american literature, for example, i am interested in very little-- i see a lot of first world problems and superficial wankery, and it puts me to sleep. i don't share their vapid concerns or their nihilistic cynicism or their sense of entitlement. had i grown up here, on the other hand, i'd be narcissistically praising "oh, that's just like my life!" "oh, i know people like that", and "oh, this shit is so deep" but no, they fucking bore me, the spoiled brats, for the most part. so i'm not part of the "national audience." i'm a migrant mutt and on the outside. i look at american literature from teh outside. and i actually like american outsiders--people who aren't a part of the national discourse but rather write about very small worlds that interest me. even the "us latino" shit, which is so full of stereotypes. so i'd rather read a dead russian, or a dead crazy german, or a mummified greek, or a dead horny french, or a dead gay gringo, or a dead racist spaniard, or a how-to book, at this point anyway. please don't ask me to read the stuff at bookstore windows.

question for you: is kafka the national literature of where? of austria? of the czechs? of german-speaking jews? of where?

[pony]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

question for you: is kafka the national literature of where? of austria? of the czechs? of german-speaking jews? of where?

dude, idk, idk! he is mine. everyone else can go suck it.

i like "it's not where you come from, it's what you adopt as yours."
but idk! can't really make my mind up for this one. on the one hand i think there is nat lit but then again i think there isn't. or "not necessarily" /it doesn't really matter?
my brainz = mashed potatoes rn

[pony]

there is nat lit but not all lit necessarily has to be put in a category?

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by pony

dude, idk, idk! he is mine. everyone else can go suck it.

there's a really really nice little book by deleuze and guattari on kafka and how he was writing in prague in german as a jew in the austrian empire and his very very much outsider role (because he didn't write in czech but rather the "foreign" language even though that's what he spoke).

but he owns the xxth century

Originally Posted by pony

i like "it's not where you come from, it's what you adopt as yours."
but idk! can't really make my mind up for this one. on the one hand i think there is nat lit but then again i think there isn't. or "not necessarily" /it doesn't really matter?
my brainz = mashed potatoes rn

i don't mean you personally but what nation-states adopt as the basis of their national discourse. because each nation has its problems, see. some more fun than others.

and if you think about literature as a mode of knowledge, different from the social sciences and the hard sciences, and if you think for example of narrative as mode of knowledge and understanding, then the national literature is the one that grapples with these national problems. doesn't have to be an epic. even lyrical writings will resonate with their times and places.

in latin american in the XX century, it was what sides to take in the capitalist/communist struggle, and n andean nations, it was how to blend andean and western culture. these days, they're just trying to be american.
for early 'merica, it was what to do with independence, and how to grow up and how to justify enslaving negros and killing indians (and some people were against it and that was good).
in the american south, for a long time, it was how to deal with defeat of the war.
in israel, it's the ptsd of the holocaust on the one hand and the constant war and occupation on the other hand
in france, i think these days they are very preoccupied with muslim culture.
in america, it's how to deal with emptiness and meaningless and decay. the minorities here are slightly more interesting because theirs are the problems of identity politics--"who am i, here" (e.g., jhumpa lahiri). for a while before it was vietnam and the 60s. don't know that the new wars have yielded fruit yet except for the spin doctors.
for germans of the past 50 years it seems to have been how to deal with the war and (i love fassbinder, he wasn't a writer but still) the economic changes, now i don't know what (turkish immigrants?)
there's also the whole european integration thing.

i really don't know, i'm rambling at this point, but see, here an example. when i saw the tin drum (i haven't read the book) it was a story about a little kid who refuses to grow up. but in the end he has to because even as a midget he can't avoid it. he gets tainted. roswitha dies (sorry, spoilers). but i can see other things i don't understand very well-- the whole polish/german identity thing, the political parties fingering the mom under the table, and these are german problems, german questions that an educated person can more or less grasp at the distance but you don't get them in your bones no matter how many books you've read. is the tin drum part of your "national literature"? certainly it's not mine. but i can enjoy it a whole lot on many levels because it has "universal" (lol) themes. but yeah, i shouldn't lol. if not universal at least themes that transcend national/european borders.

this is the funny thing-- the other day demonio and i briefly discussed the merits of my darling clementine (a john ford western). i saw one thing and he saw another-- for him it was the whole frontier thing conflated with shakespeare (the undiscovered country, which is, you know, death, but it's also star trek). and he is right, these are the foundational mythologies of the west, and he can see them, and i can see them, but i don't share them because the west wasn't mine to invade, plus i live with the injuns where the white conqueror isn't a hero but a murderer, whereas the people who invaded here 100 years ago very much believed in manifest destiny, and that still continues in some people, though for many that's not the case any more adn they are just quitting in droves.

now i'm not saying there is no such thing as universal/global stuff and that it will be more so the more globalized we are (i like william gibson because he's a good example of going in that direction a bit), and a kind of bauhaus/international style may yet develop again in some arts, but the post-modernity breaks back into the local as a wave of retreat, but then again, etc. still, you can read anything you want, as long as you like it and it speaks to you, but it will speak differently in certain different communities, as long as we have local communities. there's regional literatures. neighborhood literatures. but yes the internet gives space to non-geographically-bound communities. though they are not really binding though, as the internet doesn't necessarily give you (yet) the same life.

eh, i am rambling, i have ancient romans screaming on a big screen and i am too lazy to look for the remote and press mute and its 7am which means i have to go out into the sun and do some manual labor now. but yeah!

[tesla69]

Richard Stark - The Damsel

[Rob Instigator]

 

[evollove]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i don't mean you personally but what nation-states adopt as the basis of their national discourse. because each nation has its problems, see. some more fun than others.

"Despite the presence of eternal themes, literary works are cultural artifacts from a specific time and place. As such, some elements may have less impact for someone without any knowledge of the cultural that produced the work."

That what you sayin? If so, then yeah.

Originally Posted by pony

there is nat lit but not all lit necessarily has to be put in a category?

Necessary? No. But putting cultural works into various categories is incredibly useful in a number of ways for people who take this stuff seriously.

[Rob Instigator]

the only categories that really do not matter and are useless are "good" and "bad."

[!@#$%!]

lemme answer in the right order

Originally Posted by evollove

That what you sayin? If so, then yeah.

no. see here:

Originally Posted by evollove

literary works are cultural artifacts from a specific time and place.

yes, that much is obvious, but...

Originally Posted by evollove

"Despite the presence of eternal themes,

i spoke of universal and then denied it because it's too broad. don't know shit about eternal. but i see what you aim at and won't nitpick (yet), but not my word. i'll explain why later. more after this:

Originally Posted by evollove

As such, some elements may have less impact for someone without any knowledge of the cultural that produced the work."

no, too succinct and reductive. i rambled wildly because i covered more subjects.

first (this is small) i spoke of transcendence, not the metaphysical grandiose kind just the pedestrian one that says it goes beyond time and place, that outsiders can enjoy. neither everyone can enjoy nor everyone in all times can enjoy-- just some others. so neither universal nor eternal. i avoided that on purpose. but okay.

second, we do have a knowledge of other cultures, even if we don't live in them. so we get some of it.

third, what i was aiming at, is that communities (nation-states among them) adopt certain texts (not all of them, just some chosen ones) as their foundational ones, their touchstones, their cultural spines, not just because they're pretty, but because they grapple with the "problems" (issues, whatever) of the community in its time and place. and while others from outside can read and enjoy, those inside will derive their identity from them and shape the national discourse around it in a way the others don't. which is why italians are always remaking the divine comedy and americans are trying to remake moby dick.

not for nothing j. jonah jameson, i mean jimmy jimerino "kinch the knifeblade" joyce set out to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. he was saying: here be the foundational text for the future irish. and he stole from the greeks! and he put a christ killer as the main character! is that brilliant or what. but the greeks knew nothing of his dead king parnell. neither did i, actually-- i mean i read about him but it's not in my bones. i have no dead king. his english students in paris say that he'd talk all the time about politricks-- he was obsessed with that.

 

decades later, josé lezama lima would borrow the embedding of each moment with myth from joyce and create something completely different and baroque in his own cuba. and no parnell. but plenty of aristotle.

okay. i hope that clarifies the difference. there is more but i'm also texting furiously at the same time and it's a bit frazzling.

[MellySingsDoom]

 

Am currently a good way through this Sabbaff biography. It mainly deals with the recordings and tours, but also has some war stories too. Two things that made me grimace: Ozzy attempting to mutilate a cat as an adolescent; and Sabbaff playing Sun City during the Apartheid-era 80's. Ozzy comes out as an overall loveable loon, Iommi is calm yet controlled and focused, Geezer is funny and sound, and Ward is sweet and thoughtful. My verdict: worth a read if you like yer Sabbaff.

[Sonic Youth 37]