luka
Well-known member
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show...internal-papers-of-the-secret-society-of-ac-p
couldnt resist buying this today. im about 50 pages in.
couldnt resist buying this today. im about 50 pages in.
what are you reading now?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I finished The Turn Of The Screw the other day after doing my usual thing of mislaying the book I'm reading for several weeks. Anyway, it's... good. As I said before, a really effective and creepy story where the tension is ratcheted up with expert slowness - the title makes more sense the more you read it. But one thing I found a slight letdown was that the story carries with it the reputation of being a masterful work of psychological, as opposed to 'merely' supernatural, horror. Basically I had the idea as I started it that [SPOILERS] it was meant to be highly ambiguous as to whether the ghosts had any objective reality or were just the figment of the narrator's imagination. This is thwarted by the fact that she's seen both ghosts before she learns that her predecessor Miss Jessel is dead, and before learning that any such person as Peter Quint ever existed. Her description of the appearance of both figures is then corroborated in every detailed by the housekeeper, who is apparently doesn't have a trace of imagination or mischief in her and has no reason to mislead the narrator. There's no reason she'd have seen a picture of either of the dead people, so the only possible conclusion is that she really has seen their ghosts. It has the same effect on any ambiguity that might have been intended as the tiny origami unicorn left by Gaff in Deckard's apartment in some editions of Blade Runner has on the question of whether Deckard is a Replicant.
Reading up on critical opinions of the story, it's apparently suggested that contemporary readers would have understood the implication that Quint and Jessel were molesting the two children, which certainly adds another level of horror to the story (which in a sense is necessary, because it's hard to imagine what, even to Victorian readers, was otherwise quite so horrific about the two people in life - and so dangerous to the children - beyond the simple fact that they were having an affair and may have persuaded the children not to expose them). The only other horror story I can think of that features a theme of child abuse is Ligotti's 'Conversations in a Dead Language'. I suppose child molestors are the bogeymen of our time and for most authors the idea is horrific enough in itself to make any additional supernatural horror redundant.
More comically, it's apparently been suggested that the narrator spontaneously invents the ghosts because of the strain of 'sexual repression'. Now I'm no psychiatrist but I'm going out on a limb here and saying I don't think anyone who wasn't already mad ever hallucinated ghosts for want of a shag.
Regarding the stupid sentences, I've since read most of the rest of this volume of HJ stories and while none of them are exactly shining examples of good writing, TTotS stands out as being particularly bad.
Reading up on critical opinions of the story, it's apparently suggested that contemporary readers would have understood the implication that Quint and Jessel were molesting the two children, which certainly adds another level of horror to the story (which in a sense is necessary, because it's hard to imagine what, even to Victorian readers, was otherwise quite so horrific about the two people in life - and so dangerous to the children - beyond the simple fact that they were having an affair and may have persuaded the children not to expose them). The only other horror story I can think of that features a theme of child abuse is Ligotti's 'Conversations in a Dead Language'. I suppose child molestors are the bogeymen of our time and for most authors the idea is horrific enough in itself to make any additional supernatural horror redundant.
More comically, it's apparently been suggested that the narrator spontaneously invents the ghosts because of the strain of 'sexual repression'. Now I'm no psychiatrist but I'm going out on a limb here and saying I don't think anyone who wasn't already mad ever hallucinated ghosts for want of a shag.
Regarding the stupid sentences, I've since read most of the rest of this volume of HJ stories and while none of them are exactly shining examples of good writing, TTotS stands out as being particularly bad.
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luka
Well-known member
i read that in about an hour after you first mentioned you were reading it. i dont know why it took you 6 months to plough through it, misplaced book or not.
there is no way in the world it can be described as badly written. an opinion made even more extraordinary
by the fact you'll happily read and reread lovecraft, a writer who is objectively, comically incompetent.
there is no way in the world it can be described as badly written. an opinion made even more extraordinary
by the fact you'll happily read and reread lovecraft, a writer who is objectively, comically incompetent.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Lol, it was earlier this month you cheeky jebber. And I maintain HJ's sentences are often horribly constructed and needlessly Latinate, to the point where they sometimes sound like Yoda-English. I'm hardly the first person to have observed this - apparently H. G. Wells described James's style to a hippopotamus laboriously trying to pick up a pea that had rolled into the corner of its cage, which I think is brilliant.
HPL is all squamous this, rugose that and Cyclopean the other, but it doesn't usually give you a headache to identify the object and subject of each clause.
HPL is all squamous this, rugose that and Cyclopean the other, but it doesn't usually give you a headache to identify the object and subject of each clause.
luka
Well-known member
and given James was the most celebrated prose stylist of his era it's hardly contrarianism to say a turn of the screw isn't, in fact, badly written, albeit he has his eccentricities, not all of which have aged terribly well.
it's just style. not everyone has to write like ernest hemmingway or, god forbid, george orwell.
it's just style. not everyone has to write like ernest hemmingway or, god forbid, george orwell.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Donne's easy enough to get your head around, if I remember rightly - I mean, I studied him at school, which says something in itself.
I don't object to complex prose at all. What I object to is needlessly complex prose, and sentences that sound ugly and unnatural because of some bizarre fetish for trying to force a Germanic language to work like Latin. (Though this is a charge that can be levied against Milton, too, but he has the mitigating factors of writing 250 years earlier and writing an epic spiritual poem about that fall of man rather than short stories set in contemporary England.)
And in TTotS in particular, James frequently misuses 'literally' like any common or garden 21st-century imbecile.
I don't object to complex prose at all. What I object to is needlessly complex prose, and sentences that sound ugly and unnatural because of some bizarre fetish for trying to force a Germanic language to work like Latin. (Though this is a charge that can be levied against Milton, too, but he has the mitigating factors of writing 250 years earlier and writing an epic spiritual poem about that fall of man rather than short stories set in contemporary England.)
And in TTotS in particular, James frequently misuses 'literally' like any common or garden 21st-century imbecile.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
But that's precisely it! James's sentences are often the exact opposite of fun. They're like wading through treacle. Now Pynchon, or DFW, or Jonathan Meades - they play with language in a way that I like.
It's probably just an unbridgeable taste gap. Never mind.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I didn't say "easy", I said I could generally get an idea of what he was on about. Unlike this:
"This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming work."
Which, however you slice it, is an objectively hideous sentence. I mean, yes it's a question of 'taste' as I said, up to a point, but a sentence that baroque is just plain bad. It'd be one thing if he were talking about post-structuralism or quantum field theory, but in a novel(la) it's unforgivable. Admittedly that's probably the worst one I could find, but there are plenty of others that aren't far off.
I daresay some people might have the inclination to sit down and work it out like a cryptic crossword clue, but then so what? I could write a story peppered with differential equations that would be meaningless to you, and then go "hahaha thicky luka can't understand my story, what a dimwit!".
And is Donne really harder than Eliot or Jones? Harder than Joyce?
"This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming work."
Which, however you slice it, is an objectively hideous sentence. I mean, yes it's a question of 'taste' as I said, up to a point, but a sentence that baroque is just plain bad. It'd be one thing if he were talking about post-structuralism or quantum field theory, but in a novel(la) it's unforgivable. Admittedly that's probably the worst one I could find, but there are plenty of others that aren't far off.
I daresay some people might have the inclination to sit down and work it out like a cryptic crossword clue, but then so what? I could write a story peppered with differential equations that would be meaningless to you, and then go "hahaha thicky luka can't understand my story, what a dimwit!".
And is Donne really harder than Eliot or Jones? Harder than Joyce?
luka
Well-known member
assuming you're being serious and want to learn something about literature then the answer is, yes, much, much harder than any of the above if you exclude The Wake. (and besides which Joyce is not a major poet)
The difficulty with Jones is solely a matter of vocabulary. Once you know what the individual words mean the sentences become clear. the constructions are not difficult in themselves.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=97&issue=4&page=5
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
http://jonreeve.com/2017/06/henry-james-sentence/
This is far too detailed for me to read at work but it looks quite interesting (perhaps only if you're a grammarian or linguistics professor).
I've not read enough James to comment on his style beyond observing that - as with certain other writers, Shakespeare immediately springing to mind - it's difficult to get on-board with but once you're on-board you struggle less and appreciate more. This is also definitely the case with Milton.
The way James wrote - was it designed to confuse, insofar as drawing out ambiguities, or was it designed to clarify, by making every nuance perceptible?
Did you read 'The Aspern Papers', Tea?
This is far too detailed for me to read at work but it looks quite interesting (perhaps only if you're a grammarian or linguistics professor).
I've not read enough James to comment on his style beyond observing that - as with certain other writers, Shakespeare immediately springing to mind - it's difficult to get on-board with but once you're on-board you struggle less and appreciate more. This is also definitely the case with Milton.
The way James wrote - was it designed to confuse, insofar as drawing out ambiguities, or was it designed to clarify, by making every nuance perceptible?
Did you read 'The Aspern Papers', Tea?
craner
Beast of Burden
Late James obviously bled into the stylistic prose innovations of, say, Woolf and Joyce. Joyce takes the best, Woolf the worst. It's hard to read Woolf's more extreme experiments (particularly, The Waves) without laughing, but still...
that's what it is. He's a proto-Modernist, like Proust and Baudelaire, and deserves respect for pushing things.
that's what it is. He's a proto-Modernist, like Proust and Baudelaire, and deserves respect for pushing things.