what are you reading now?
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
Yeah that's pretty much what I did with most of them, you'd get those York Notes books and they would get you through no problem.
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DLaurent
Well-known member
One of my favourites is Isle of Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. I mentioned it elsewhere and was told it was curriculum in the states. We read Shakespeare, Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies for GCSE, but were allowed to choose our own book for part of the study. I chose Matilda and my teacher ridiculed me saying it was too simple.
version
Well-known member
Keep going.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I can't conceive of reading Ulysses without annotated notes, unless you just give up on understanding huge chunks of it which I suppose is a valid way of reading it, certainly most of the people who read it before the scholars decoded it must have spent lengthy stretches quite bemused and irritated
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I quite enjoyed the library bit as I recall but I did have the notes to guide me through the strait between scylla / Charybdis
What I remember is the contrast between Aristotle and Plato - and Stephen representing Aristotle by clutching to the rock of actuals, of biography, vs. the airy abstractions (and mystic bard worship) of the theosophists
But also you are to understand that Stephen is bullshitting a lot of the time
Anyway, isn't wandering rocks after that? That's one of the best bits
What I remember is the contrast between Aristotle and Plato - and Stephen representing Aristotle by clutching to the rock of actuals, of biography, vs. the airy abstractions (and mystic bard worship) of the theosophists
But also you are to understand that Stephen is bullshitting a lot of the time
Anyway, isn't wandering rocks after that? That's one of the best bits
IdleRich
IdleRich
Tried? What went wrong?
I've read some really random stuff lately. I found The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen on the shelf and I enjoyed it a lot, a strangely detached yet affecting story of a normal/dysfunctional family with some properly funny bits.
version
Well-known member
A book about people who hurt themselves for art and entertainment, runs from Buster Keaton to Jackass. Good read, tbh. Some of the stuff described is alarming to say the least, like a woman who protested against the Vietnam war by climbing up and a down ladder made of knives until her hands and feet were destroyed, and a bloke who spent five days in a school locker. There's also an S&M performance sort of guy who grew up in a religious family that believed his cousin would be the messiah and his aunt would get to marry Elvis as a reward for birthing him... He turned out to be gay and they disowned him so he found his way into a completely different world and puts needles through his scalp and whatnot.
One of the main threads is the difference when men and women do this sort of thing, that with men it's assumed to be a macho thing, competing with themselves or other men, a show of strength, whereas with women it's always linked back to men, e.g. a woman destroying her own body is a political statement on what society values her for and a rejection of that. There's also a trans artist covered who records her procedures and has them projected onto a screen during her performances.
It's one of Repeater's books and it's called Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment. The title's from an answer machine message Hunter Thompson left Johnny Knoxville:
One of the main threads is the difference when men and women do this sort of thing, that with men it's assumed to be a macho thing, competing with themselves or other men, a show of strength, whereas with women it's always linked back to men, e.g. a woman destroying her own body is a political statement on what society values her for and a rejection of that. There's also a trans artist covered who records her procedures and has them projected onto a screen during her performances.
It's one of Repeater's books and it's called Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment. The title's from an answer machine message Hunter Thompson left Johnny Knoxville:
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Been reading Dryden's translations of Lucretius
And yes I know how that sounds
Great stuff though
www.bartleby.com
And yes I know how that sounds
Great stuff though
The Latter Part of the Third Book of Lucretius; against the Fear of Death - Collection at Bartleby.com
The Latter Part of the Third Book of Lucretius; against the Fear of Death WHAT has this Bugbear Death to frighten Man,If Souls can die, as well as Bodies can?For, as before our Birth we felt no Pain,When Punique arms infested
www.bartleby.com
Been reading Dryden's translations of Lucretius
And yes I know how that sounds
Great stuff though
The Latter Part of the Third Book of Lucretius; against the Fear of Death - Collection at Bartleby.com
The Latter Part of the Third Book of Lucretius; against the Fear of Death WHAT has this Bugbear Death to frighten Man,If Souls can die, as well as Bodies can?For, as before our Birth we felt no Pain,When Punique arms infested
Very impressive Jack
kid charlemagne
Well-known member
version
Well-known member
Owen Hatherley's in the latest LRB reviewing a new Adorno translation, much to Craner's delight.
www.lrb.co.uk
This made me laugh:
In 1935, Adorno pronounced anathema not on Hollywood cinema or atonal music, but on whatever might try to combine the two and thereby dilute the force and extremism of both. Just before he died, cinemas in Frankfurt will have been screening Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Atmosphères plays against a black screen at the film’s opening, before the cosmic monolith appears to a group of hominids at the ‘Dawn of Man’. Kubrick uses the recording as a short cut to express the ineffable, the impossible to understand, the mystical, the eternal. In its middlebrow pomposity, its massively expensive technological flash, and its aspirations to profundity, Kubrick’s film represented everything Adorno most hated.
Owen Hatherley · Wild Resistance: Adorno's Aesthetics
Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Ben Watson writes, ‘because he believed in...
www.lrb.co.uk
This made me laugh:
In 1935, Adorno pronounced anathema not on Hollywood cinema or atonal music, but on whatever might try to combine the two and thereby dilute the force and extremism of both. Just before he died, cinemas in Frankfurt will have been screening Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Atmosphères plays against a black screen at the film’s opening, before the cosmic monolith appears to a group of hominids at the ‘Dawn of Man’. Kubrick uses the recording as a short cut to express the ineffable, the impossible to understand, the mystical, the eternal. In its middlebrow pomposity, its massively expensive technological flash, and its aspirations to profundity, Kubrick’s film represented everything Adorno most hated.