Books with life-changing qualities

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Im too much of a philistine for finnegans wake. i have to pretend to be a philologist. I'd rather read the interpretation of dreams instead.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
it's as much fun to read about as it is to read.

Im sure it is but i have a residual hatred left over from my a-levels when all the culturally middle class students would namecheck the cannon like they'd learnt it since age fucking 3.

i think ill read it in my 50s.
 

luka

Well-known member
Im sure it is but i have a residual hatred left over from my a-levels when all the culturally middle class students would namecheck the cannon like they'd learnt it since age fucking 3.

i think ill read it in my 50s.

yes, it's disgusting i know. but the nice thing about the wake is it's not cannon cos no one has read it.
 

luka

Well-known member
im too tired to do this question justice. but i like it.

it goes quite deep i think. i'd be interested in how other people would answer the question too/
 

luka

Well-known member
it's wrong to think of it in terms just of ideas.
thats one way in which people commonly misunderstand
poetry. people understand with music
that the medium is the message and that the form is the
content but with poetry they still expect to extract some kind
of kernel of information. a message or moral that can be distilled
down to and then the rest becomes redundant and can be discarded0-

so there's ideas but there's also implicit values for instance
a way of approach towards world, orientation, say intensity
or in terms of expectations-what degree of emotional intensity can you expect from life
how much can you expect to wring our of it. how inert or alive is this world, and can we
expect it to respond to us

and there's a whole way to resist being boring and miserable embedded in poetry
it's not the only place you can find it and not everybody needs it
but it's there.
 

luka

Well-known member
basic often unconscious assumptions underlie the way we experience reality
they set the parameters of what burroughs calls the constant scanning pattern
so once you tweak the underlying assumptions the pattern is forced to recompose itself
and reality changes.

so at 16
"I am midwife to the birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it"
that to me was a judo move

or all sorts of Blake's formulations

but again the most important thing to stress is gestalt, just as with music, it's
infinitely more complex and information rich than literalists are able to give
it credit for
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Its hard to pinpoint with exactitude the books and the changes, but even though I forget most of what I read, I figure it's all in there somewhere, working away at my sense of identity and the world. For example I know that James Joyce had a big influence on me when I was 18, despite me being too young to understand his work, and now recalling hardly any of what I read. I feel other authors, like Chekhov, Tolstoy, Flaubert and Kafka, influenced my world view - but maybe they accorded with it? (Or parts of their work did.) Some of these writers, as great as they are, have exercised a poisonous influence on me, and probably due to misreading, or taking too seriously. I'm gullible in life and in literature.

Most recently, I felt that reading Paradise Lost has a great effect on the way I think about literafure, art and life itself. Yeats ties into this change, which Luka has also helped create. An interest in symbolism, in spirituality, in the imagination and so on. I was an atheist last year. I still don't believe in God, but I have changed my mind about religion. My mind isn't made up at all but it has been unmoored from a materialist viewpoint I have found (unconsciously) unsatisfying.
 

luka

Well-known member
YES! CORPSEYS BACK!!!!! thank fuck
i was getting worried.
everythings right with the world again now. i cant operate correctly without the corpse
part of my personality.
 

luka

Well-known member
woops! the lad i work with had a very violent reaction this thread. he said i like books
as much the next man, but have any of them really changed my life? my life is shit
what the fuck have books done for me?

it really rubbed him up the wrong way. i think he's wrong though.
 

luka

Well-known member
"the pot noodle i had for me dinner has 'changed me' if you want to be stupid about it" he said

he's one of those people that's just northern and cant help themselves. negative all the time!
 

luka

Well-known member
the only book i can say that's really changed me is miracle salads. it's like pot noodle but made of words

lol i havent even given you one yet i dont think. i'll put a few in my bag now so i dont forget to pack them
tomorrow.
 
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