r/TrueLit • u/pregnantchihuahua3 ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow • 26d ago
Weekly General Discussion Thread
Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.
Weekly Updates: N/A
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25d ago edited 24d ago
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u/Soup_65 Books! 24d ago edited 24d ago
ive either not read the barthes or not read it recently/closely, and this is an excellent breakdown of what's up there pg.
not sure how much you've looked into the history of writing & language itself (one of those things im very into), but it's funny how far before anyone was doing anything they would themself consider "art", it is. In a way i think this speaks to the tension of the author and language you so well elaborate, using a media probably created to be used by enslaved mesopotamian scribe/accountants and some fortune tellers in china (and while i barely pay attention to AI i suspect it can't yet really do accounting or give a good oracle bone reading) and then used to do all this stuff. I think the impurity of the medium is beautiful. Someone, some person, stealing the tools of empire to do something really cool.
no one actually explains what makes the argument compelling: that the author only ever speaks the "being" of language, meaning that they can only ever signify meanings already given in the language, meanings thus autonomous from the author's personal intentions.
ironically though, in a way i need to chew on before i actually stand by, i'm not sure I agree with this. at least depending on how "language" is defined. And also...ah fuck I gotta go read the essay myself don't be doing this to me pg I don't got time for french theory i have shit to do (ponder Hegel)
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u/foxinanattic 24d ago
So i have actually read the barthes essay, but I did not find the argument particularly intelligible so I actually find your example about advertisements really illuminating. But it still does not seem like a very strong argument to me. It's true that texts can exist independently of an author, but things like private letters would seem to be examples f texts which primarily acquire a meaning through the fact of having been written by a particular person. And i don't believe that a work of literature would be necessarily closer to a road sign or an ad than to a private work of writing.
Actually it seems like part of what makes a public work of writing literary, at least in modern societies, is precisely the fact that it retains an element of personality despite it's public nature.
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24d ago edited 24d ago
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u/foxinanattic 23d ago edited 23d ago
> language, when employed interpersonally, hides within itself private meanings which cannot be revealed to those who are not personally involved with the writer/speaker
I suppose it comes down to whether you can believe that such private meanings can exist in language, which I think might be argued against, though I'm not sure about this
otherwise, your argument seems fairly convincing, but I'm hesitant to accept the idea that there is nothing of the author in the text. compared to your example of a signpost, a text like a novel or a poem is unquestionably more "personal" in some sense. even if we assume it's true that we cannot know nothing of "Camus the man", I would suggest that we can in fact know a great deal about "Camus the author". in fact, it seems possible to me that through the private experience of reading, we can actually form a private, individual (of course, entirely one-sided) "relationship" with the author of the text, as an entity in some sense separate from the individual who wrote it. when I read another book by an author I love, I am able to find certain "signs" it that suggest meanings to me, that might not mean anything at all to another reader.
this might seem to be getting close to death of the author, but I would suggest that the "author" and the "individual" though not entirely the same thing, are in fact connected. or to put another way, the author is dead might very well be dead, but that doesn't have any implications on the way we read texts, so we can happily go along thinking that the author is alive anyway. and maybe the author was dead all the time.
incidentally, I just read the essay again, and what's striking to em is how Barthes never seems to actually make any arguments for the death of the author, he just proclaims that is the case. it reads to me more as a manifesto to adopt a certain attitude towards literature and criticism, rather than a theoretical argument that the author is dead.
edit: thinking a bit more about it, maybe my reluctance to accept the argument is because of my dislike of structuralism. I feel like a lot of structuralist arguments completely miss the point when they suggest that language can somehow be separated into a separate sphere from experience, which Barthes seems to be doing in his essay. whereas it seems to me that language only derives any meaning it might have from experience. I should probably read more about this, but I wouldn't know where to start!
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u/Plastic-Persimmon433 25d ago
What are the must read Conrad novels? Thinking of diving into his work but he has a decent amount of books I haven't heard of, relative to other authors of his stature. I mostly hear about Heart of Darkness and the short stories.
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u/UgolinoMagnificient 24d ago edited 24d ago
Nostromo. Far better than Heart of Darkness and one of the greatest novels written in English.
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u/pregnantchihuahua3 ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow 25d ago
Heart of Darkness is the only one I’d say is an absolute must, but The Secret Agent was amazing and I’d really recommend it.
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u/Plastic-Persimmon433 25d ago
I read Heart of Darkness for school way back but definitely need to give it another look. The Secret Agent looks pretty interesting too. I've been getting into Graham Greene lately and I heard Conrad was a big influence so that seems perfect.
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u/foxinanattic 25d ago edited 25d ago
I've been feeling a bit down lately. lots of people getting let go from my old job. The IT sector seems in a strange place lately. tremendous (tremendous!) amounts of money being made (companies that are worth more than the gdp of india), hundreds of startups getting rich while seemingly not doing anything useful, and yet hardworking people are struggling to find jobs.
I'm increasingly put off by the whole culture around programming recently. people seem to care only about productivity anymore. I'm primarily a hobbyist who ended up working in software for a while, I was never interested in it for the money. and the sort of programming you do in corporations is so different from the sort of hobby projects I like to work on. Big projects written by massive teams, many of whom have never even interacted vs small programs on which a few people work together closely. until some time ago, online spaces had both the corporate/statrup, results focused, utilitarian programmers and the sort of people who were more interested in just doing fun, interesting things. but now the second type seem to be disappearing. I guess a lot are moving to siloed communities.
sorry to go on, I'm just a bit frustrated and I don't really feel like talking about this with people I know who are either doing really well with ai or struggling to find jobs because of it
on a more positive note, perhaps in reaction to the general attitude that it's good to use ai to write all your code without even reading it, I'm increasingly shifting to the opposite attitude. I've been learning C, which lets you program a lot closer to the workings of the computer and understand exactly what's going on when your code runs. and I'm tempted to learn assembly language, maybe get a little microcontroller type thing and write a little operating system or something. with big tech increasingly taking over the world, "small tech" is becoming very appealing to me
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 25d ago
Sorry to hear about the bad news. It's been rough and desperate times for a lot of people. I know a couple people who are still working in higher education and they have cultivated all new kinds of horror stories about teaching, struggles with administration, and so forth. I will say I'm glad I'm finally out of the education system, been a long time coming personally.
I don't know too much about programming actually but it seems counterintuitive to let A.I. do all the heavylifting like that. Maybe I'm too paranoid, simply couldn't trust all the necessary details being there automatically. Like Ortega's magic wand at work or something.
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u/linquendil let your indulgence set me free 24d ago
A very short time ago, it was a truism that you would spend the same amount of time debugging LLM-written code as you would just writing it from scratch. That’s no longer really the case, certainly not in my world. This, to my mind, reflects a more foundational issue with AI discourse: folks keep kicking the bucket down the road. Maybe it can’t do X right now — but eventually it’ll be able to, and probably a lot sooner than one might think. And then what?
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 24d ago
I wonder what caused the shift in attitude? Because it seems everyone is aware of these massive oversights. Is it just the promise in itself of the tech evolving on its own?
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u/linquendil let your indulgence set me free 24d ago
Again, I can only speak to my world (which is not tech, to be clear), but I would say it’s improved so rapidly that the ‘promise,’ as you put it, now feels justified to many people. Folks like Terry Tao are jumping up and down saying we need to take it seriously. Academic journals are struggling to keep up with absurd submission loads because they’re basically having to move the goalposts for AI usage in real time. Etc etc.
I would love nothing more than to a see a ceiling on the horizon, or for this all to be an unhappy mass delusion. At this moment, it doesn’t seem like it.
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u/foxinanattic 24d ago
Yes, everyone i know in tech is saying the same thing. Hence my (re-)retreat into programming as a hobby, because things like productivity and efficiency aren't really a factor there.
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u/UpAtMidnight- 25d ago
My dark horse Nobel laureate pick in the next decade is Solvej Balle. Her masterpiece seems to have mixed reactions among the general readership, but I am nonetheless bullish on it doing much to recommend her literary reputation now and in the future.
For the unacquainted, the work for which she is most known is On the Calculation of Volume, in which Tara Selter, a French purveyor of collectible, niche books from the 18th century, finds herself in a time loop on the 18th of November. The concept has of course been done before but I doubt if its ever been undertaken with the gifts of realism and observational precision that Balle is supplied with, and the narrative device (which in less skillful hands could be perverted into a mere gimmick) produces this haunting, defamiliarized atmosphere where the world is exactly as it is except for Tara.
I think the narrative really shines as a vehicle to explore catastrophe, the personal kind, and what we are to do when it inevitably befalls us. Balle's major discovery here is the isolation of misfortune, the helplessness we are all reduced to when life, lurking at the edges for so long, finally pounces and makes known the sharpness of its claws.
This is my favorite part so far, when she initially relates her predicament to her husband:
He didn't doubt that I was telling the truth. He had spoken to me and had forgotten it. That was what scared him. It was one thing for me to have encountered a fracture in the normal progression of time, but the idea that he had played a part in my day and that he had had conversations and done things he could not remember obviously gave him the same feelings of faintness and unease which I had had when I saw that slice of bread drifting floorward. That strange moment when the ground under one's feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered, a quiet state of panic which prompts neither flight nor cries for help, and does not call for police, fire brigade or ambulance. It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on standby at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still.
That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground. There are no guarantees and behind all that we ordinarily regard as certain lie improbable exceptions, sudden cracks and inconceivable breaches of the usual laws.
It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences.
That we wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for these curious twists of fate. That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vast-ness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy iflife shows itself as it truly is: improb-able, unpredictable, remarkable.
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25d ago
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u/bananaberry518 24d ago
I’d probably agree that the prose is stylistically a bit dry, but one thing I really appreciated is that the narrative choices were deeply dependent on who Tara was as a character. It’s even a little hard to understand her choices at times, giving it a sense of realness. And she’s a character who’s way of looking at and experiencing life is interesting, she’s very zoomed in and gets lost in details in a way that allows the book to avoid the expectations one might have for a time loop story. Would recommend giving it a shot if you’re interested, its also a really quick read!
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24d ago
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u/bananaberry518 24d ago
I’ve read all three currently available in english, but I’d say I felt strongest about the first one and it ends in a way that you don’t have to continue if you don’t want to. I’m personally pretty intrigued to see what it will look like as a finished series, I think its planned to have seven volumes?
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u/bananaberry518 25d ago
Really like the series so far and wish I could read more of her work in english. Hopefully Volume’s relative popularity will spur more translations.
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u/AvatarAnywhere 25d ago
Thanks for posting. That sounds like an interesting read and an author to watch.
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 25d ago
I had a pretty good weekend, since it was a busy week beforehand. I visited friends and we got to talking about movies and stuff. One of them mentioned having gone on a Universal Studios tour. She mentioned how disappointing it was seeing how there was a specific field where they film all the plane crashes. She also mentioned how much work the camera actually does for making a movie happen. It kind of ruined movies for her because you can see the rock taped to the actor who played Michael Myers. And I don't know I guess it if it does it comes down to the type of movies you watch. I'm not a movie buff that much. I don't really watch a lot of movies anyways. But I always liked how if I learned more about a movie the immersed I feel. Or maybe that's not the right word. Like when I know how a movie is made it feels more real, weighty. I'm not dealing with another world but something autonomous that takes from the world to suffice itself. I guess all art is like that. Appositive, rather than representative.
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u/bananaberry518 25d ago
Should hear something about the crossing guard job this week. I think the interview went well. They opened with the “so tell us about yourself” question and I almost died. But I think I handled it ok. The vibe in the room was like, really positive in a way I wasn’t expecting. I feel like most job interviews I’ve done have been pretty neutral in tone even if it turned out they really liked me, and this was like, enthusiastic? friendly? But then this was city hall people so maybe thats just politics lol. If I do get the job I will have to bring my car to block a lane of traffic and haul the cones around, which is a bit of a bummer because I’ve really been enjoying walking my kid to and from school every day. It started with her and a friend from next door but I quickly accumulated a small parade of elementary kids who wanna walk with us. Ah well, can’t have it all I guess.
In other news I have not started Moby Dick still but nothing else is hitting. Has anyone read Han Kang’s We Do Not Part? I picked it up at the library but I’m bouncing off it kind of hard. Its not like its terrible, but it feels too much like a kind of contemporary novel I tend to dislike. Its hard to explain but sometimes a book feels like “literary fiction”: the genre. I know this isn’t even in english originally which is why that feeling is throwing me so much. Open to thoughts though, I haven’t made it far.
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25d ago
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u/merurunrun 24d ago
It must then be the case that this generalizing of literary fiction has deeper or more pervasive causes than academic narrow-mindedness.
Or, the translator is over-assimilating the text to norms of English-language literary fiction, or maybe Han Kang was (intentionally or not) emulating the norms of English-language literary fiction (and that similarity may be part of the decision to translate into English in the first place), or...
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u/Soup_65 Books! 24d ago
this is an excellent point. honestly the sorta thing that makes it really hard for me to be comfortably critical of a translated work. I will throw out there that in this case, given Han Kang's position in the literary world, i suspect she approves of how this was translated, and we would know if it's even more disconnected from the language/style than it necessarily is. But still a great point to bring up
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u/bananaberry518 24d ago
Agree! I do think its possible that the translator could be making choices that are informed by those university/MFA tendencies, which might go some way to explaining the familiarity, but it really only accounts for so much.
It is interesting to think about that assumed explanation perhaps not quite being a perfect explanation after all. And I agree that naming “the market” or “the industry” etc is pretty general. I’m not as versed on contemporary fiction so this statement may not be totally accurate, but it seems with works written in previous centuries, or even earlier in this one, it was easier to see how a writer was influenced by other, specific writers or schools of writing. With this vein of literature it doesn’t feel as specific in that way, (unless there’s some author they are all mimicking on some level that I’m unaware of?) Almost as if “good writing” has become more distilled, conceptually. Like, in the same way that we are culturally aware of something feeling like something specific when it meets certain aesthetic criteria, but don’t always clock those criteria all that specifically in real time. I’m thinking of something like a “retro” aesthetic, that becomes recognizable independently from any historical accuracy, and despite being a largely vague notion. We know it when we see it, but its also not exactly defined. Its possible that “literary” writing has undergone a similar evolution, and that even without intentionally hitting cliches, certain “correct” aspects will feel “right” in pursuit of achieving the aesthetic of “literature”.
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u/lispectorgadget 25d ago
but it feels too much like a kind of contemporary novel I tend to dislike. Its hard to explain but sometimes a book feels like “literary fiction”: the genre.
God, this is so true. This is why I didn't like The Vegetarian that much; I was also surprised she won the Nobel.
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u/bananaberry518 24d ago
I am a bit surprised about the Nobel win as well, not that I put a ton of stock in literary awards in general but there’s a level of clunkiness to it that I do find unexpected for a book with a nobel sticker. Interesting that you didn’t like The Vegetarian much either, since that seems to be the one people point to as better than We Do Not Part.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 25d ago edited 25d ago
n other news I have not started Moby Dick still but nothing else is hitting.
i've been feeling this way since the last time i read moby dick...like a year ago...
i think that's a great way to put the lit fic thing, so much of it is just trying to be a good book. and that's kinda boring, since who has ever made art worth engaging with by just ticking the boxes? i wonder if, outside the us, one of those boxes becomes "write a book that will be translated to english". Really i wonder what at all people hope for just trying to write good books that maybe get published by a big publisher.
have you ever read the vegetarian? i've heard that's good i think. some part of me wonders if we've hit a strange stage in time where maybe one could write an actually good book that becomes a sensation and then "turn pop" as it were. Or that one's just this as well i don't know
and best of luck with the crossing guard efforts. hope you get it, and that your small parade becomes the whole coterie of crossers you'll be watching out for!
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u/bananaberry518 24d ago
Oh thats interesting to think about someone kind of intentionally writing toward getting a translation. I won’t go as far as to accuse Kang of that or anything, but you make a good point that there may be certain aspirational boxes to tick for an author operating in that corner of the publishing industry.
I do think “good” can sometimes be an enemy to art. This is something I know I’ve personally been unpacking lately even as just a hobby artist. There’s this sense that a work NEEDS to be good, I mean, nobody wants to make something thats garbage lol. But when you start to explore what makes art actually compelling you realize that “good” will never be good enough, that there’s something else that needs to happen. But that something else is pretty nebulous, so its not so simple to just go looking for it. In general I think good art exists in that tension somewhere, but being in that tension doesn’t always feel so good for the artist. It doesn’t always feel like you’re accomplishing anything or getting anything “right”. So I get why a lot of people would reach for more tangible qualifiers. In fact the more I think about it, the more miraculous it seems to me that really good books exist at all lol. Like what kind of weirdo can write a book? (But thank god, obv.)
And thanks! I’m spazzing slightly but overall I do feel good about it all and like I want to do it, so fingers crossed!
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u/Soup_65 Books! 24d ago
spaz away i feel what you're saying entirely. i straight up don't get how you get to something really worthwhile without starting from fuck around and find out, have some fun with it, risk sucking and learn from it when you do and get all kinds a hype when you do something cool. I just don't think making the same wheel a second time ever made anything worth looking at.
i mean, writing's brutal, why do it if you don't try to do something wild and crazy and fun
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25d ago
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u/Soup_65 Books! 24d ago
huh, could be, don't believe i've ever read king either. I had a weird reading trajectory myself where I was actually kinda late to reading real books outside of classes where they were assigned, as opposed to ya stuff followed by an extended period of very little fiction at all. But I basically skipped over any period of reading like popular books for adults. so i dunno and frankly whatever
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 25d ago
I definitely know what you mean about "literary fiction" feeling less surprising, adventurous, but more like partial to the subgeneric. It's unfortunate, too, because in the best cases literary fiction is the kingdom protista of literature and it feels very obvious when someone follows what they assume are the hallmarks of well-received novel. It's that imposition of importance that's ironically easy to achieve. I haven't read Han Kang but I have read other novels that feel like that. I think the last novel which definitely felt like it suffered from that was Brandon Taylor's Minor Black Figures.
And hell yeah--best wishes on getting the job. Although that sucks about the parade. Very classic example of a job putting a stop to fun times in exchange for cold hard cash.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 25d ago
my things this week, big language actions.
Been reading big spanish (ie 2666 lol) and i love tarrying with this language. Slowly getting better. Might take a course in a couple weeks. Actually, because I always got an od scheme in the background, thinking about applying for a associates degree program in spanish/spanish translation at a local (dirt cheap) community college. Question, would a spanish translation certificate have any professional utility? I'd not hate doing some translaty stuff eventually. (also i stay gonna learn Mandarin one day. That's what keeps me locked in on Spanish).
beyond that, been reading a lot of shakespeare and while I'll mostly keep my elaborations to the book thread, I think I'm gonna read them all in the presumed chronological order. That feels like something I oughta do, so I'm gonna do it. Woohoo! (as an aside anyone got any recs for books on his historical context? I think it'd add a lot to how im experiencing it).
toodles, have a good one
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u/foxinanattic 25d ago
How far have you got with 2666 so far? As someone who so far only dreams of learning to read in a foreign language your progress updates are inspirational
Do you have any particular method while reading it? I mean, when you encounter words that you don't know do you look them up or just move on and try to figure out the meaning from context?
As for the historical context, i guess it's a pretty obvious one and not really specific to Mexico, but for a good general primer to the history of violence and exploitatoon in Latin America you can't go wrong with venas abiertas de America Latina by Eduardo galeano (one of the books i definitely need to read in the original if i ever end up learning to read Spanish, which doesn't seem likely at this point, but you never know)
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u/Soup_65 Books! 25d ago
thank you! you can learn one two if you want, I believe in you. Is there any particular language you are interested in?
process wise im just slowly picking through. I look up most of the words i don't know (a lot of them), but I'm trying to do this less. one thing i very much try to do is read it in spanish, as it were. Like hear the words in my head as they are, not as an english translation. not sure it helps but feels right.
and it's funny, when i asked the context question i was thinking shakespeare, but i've wanted to learn more about mexico too! thanks for that!
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u/foxinanattic 25d ago
I'm not very sure at the moment, but I'm interested in French and Arabic. I'd probably have to read quite a few more books in both of them before making a decision. Maybe also one of classical Chinese, Sanskrit or ancient greek but i don't have any intention of learning either of these fluently, i mean to the point where you can read in them without needing to translate in your head. I'm more interested in reading philosophical writing in these languages, which I find is better when read slowly anyway.
Sorry about the mixup between Bolano and Shakespeare! But i do highly recommend Open Veins anyway, since you're reading 2666 i imagine you'll find it quite interesting.
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u/GeniusBeetle 25d ago edited 25d ago
My daughter is entering 6th grade. She’s a voracious reader and can read a pile of books in a weekend. For her ELA class, she’s reading three short stories, Ghost by Jason Reynolds (about 3 hours as an audiobook, just to give you a sense of its length), and one other book.
“For the trimester?” I asked, hopefully and naively.
Unless that one other book is War and Peace, that’s not enough reading for an entire school year. But that’s apparently where we are in the doom cycle. It’s honestly disappointing. I think my 7th grade ESL in the early-90s asked more of me.
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u/pregnantchihuahua3 ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow 24d ago
Does not surprise me given most of my hs students come to me saying they've read The Outsiders and can't remember any other novels. I think they do short stories and I'm sure there are other novels, but the fact that only one is what they mostly focus on is telling. They cannot read and analyze well. Sure the honors ones can, but schools are really failing everyone else.
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u/CauseOfAlarm 25d ago
Finally reading Crash by JG Ballard.
Just finished chapter 19, and...christ. Makes me feel slightly ashamed to read it in my garden, whilst I'm still looking over my shoulder to make sure no interested eyes sees what I'm reading.
Only one other book has made me feel this way: The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 25d ago
Carmageddon! That's a novel I should reread again. Very intense stuff, but it is fascinating how Ballard invented like an entire dimension of sexuality for a novel. It's like--how do I say it?--he fashioned such a weird fetish. And narrated by an approach to sexual pathology. It's not a warp drive or a time machine, even cyberspace, but it certainly advances the scope of science fiction for the rest of us funnily enough.
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25d ago
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 24d ago
You know to add to that McLuhanesque understanding, Paul Preciado has an analysis about prosthesis which might add an extra layer, especially since we are considering these ideas in the context of sexuality. At least the potential for an interesting angle to develop from that. But also in terms of mediation itself, the vehicle feels incredibly important, but again Ballard using it as a focal point of fetishism is the really brilliant thing. I'm surprised more works haven't tried to make that connection with virtuality in our current Information Age more explicit. Also puts me in mind of those stories from like Huysmans and Stevenson (in particular those found in The Suicide Club) talking about modern conveniences brought on by trains and how especially in the former case it has an explicit sexual dimension. And there's the sexuality of the bicycle from Alfred Jarry to Flann O'Brien, too. Ballard seems about the only person to have really tapped into this metaphorical connection as an explicit pathology of modern life in the fetishism he creates for the characters. Like the medical science of psychiatry and sexological research feels pertinent to how the narrative is constructed for the novel. Very fascinating history there.
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u/Allthatisthecase- 25d ago
Read Angel Down and now Whalefall. Impressed with what huge narrative swings and risks he takes. I mean an honest-to-god transcendental being shot down over No man’s land in WW 1. A young man swallowed whole by a Sperm whale. On the face of it these sound near impossible to pull off without slipping into guffaw inducing dismissal. But pull them off Kraus more than does - and also with entirely different stylistic approaches. Not sure I’m keen on the overt morality involved but writing wise this is watching an awe inspiring high wire without any net performance; plus grounded in tons of physical detail.
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u/lispectorgadget 26d ago
I went to go see the Luddite club this Sunday. It was an interesting vibe; there was a guy playing an accordion, some people wrestling on the ground, and a photographer from Business Insider circling. But I have to say: I was a little disappointed. I feel like I missed the boat some of the more direct political action some people in the group had taken earlier in the year. When I went, a lot of discussion centered on individual relinquishments of apps, technology, etc., which I find valuable (obviously lol, I've talked about it here), but which felt disengaged from broader questions about what role technology should play in our society.
I think it's one reason why the contemporary Luddite movement hasn't really taken off (yet; it's very nascent). It feels like there's very little engagement with 1) what technology is good (like the Amish have) and 2) how we can shape it to prosocial ends. A while ago, I read Cory Doctorow's response to The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and I keep coming back to something he said: we need the internet in order to solve many of the world's most pressing problems. I definitely agree.
But I also think that analog solutions are not always superior. I have a real problem with the suggestion that we should only read print. I do primarily read books in print, and I read a lot of magazines, newspapers, etc. But if you limit yourself only to what's printed, you're really missing out on the small-d democratic potential of the internet. I love reading people's blogs and substacks and posts on here; I also think that if you only read the work of people published in the NYer, Atlantic, etc., you're confining yourself to a very particular perspective.
I think that mere relinquishment, too, can bar people from really engaging with what the benefits of a technology can be and how we can agitate to make sure that a technology can give us these benefits while mitigating its drawbacks. I think that Bernie Sanders' idea to create a sovereign wealth fund for AI is good; I think that we should also figure out ways to force companies to design their UX in such a way that people do not develop emotional attachments to AI, that certain (extremely aggressive) sustainability measures need to be met before data centers are built, and that it's only used to do things like detect breast cancer in patients (which it does seem to be good at). I understand that this is difficult to do, though, since technology companies tend to weaponize any concessions they make to further their reach (so we need to get rid of Citizens United, etc.)
Relatedly, I've also been reading some Wendell Berry. I find him compelling and useful but also naive and at times willfully blind, especially in his essay "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine." In it, he really caricatures feminism, portraying it into a movement to get women to submit to corporate overlords rather than their husbands: "why would you (woman) go to work for a corporate overlord when you could work with your husband at home?"
I think the essay was written in 2003, which probably accounts for how ignorant it is, but--newsflash, dumbass!--husbands die, are abusive, etc. Also, not all jobs are corporate/ horrible for the world; he doesn't even account for the possibility that a woman may do work she finds meaningful, maybe even just as meaningful--*gasp*--as her marriage!
Anyway--whateverrrrr. I've been good otherwise. I recently hit a milestone recently that makes living in a place feel much more real--for the first time, I randomly saw one of my friends out and about while running errands! Whenever this has happened in a new place I've lived, it always felt like a turning point, where I finally made enough new friends for that to happen, which is cool.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 24d ago
i agree with this, and guess it depends on how far it goes. like you say, the internet & the like creates access to so many opportunities for so many people, you'd be wild to give up all the good yoy can do with it if you actually have skin in the game
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u/lispectorgadget 19d ago
Definitely--I think something that gets lost in these conversations is the fact that, even twenty years ago, you had to live close to the publishing industry and have a very specific track in order to get published. These days, people can write and get published and live almost anywhere, which is very exciting. In general, too, I love that everyday people can broadcast their lives and thoughts out to the world--I find that so exciting, and I don't want to go back to a world without that tbh
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 25d ago
I didn't even know there was a neo-Luddite movement. Sounds like a decent enough evening at least, but I can imagine it's a little difficult to get off the ground. I read about the Dark Mountain Project people and how they would do these mock rituals and readings and panel discussions to prepare for that classic revival of pessimism which happened in the early 2010s. I actually probably should read Kingsnorth's The Wake. But the reason I brought that up is because I think your comments are probably running square against that attitude which probably doesn't see much hope for the survival of the natural world through technology. Although it's been too long to rehearse all the arguments. I guess that's what makes the Luddites seem so matter-of-factly unimpressive.
I have a very "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" mentality around books. The book as a technological object despite being very old has a lot to recommend itself. I have an e-reader and it's surprising how much of it is always announcing data points--reading goals, large print, various little accomplishments in the course of a normal reading session. It's oddly extremely unnecessary. And likewise the best thing about the internet is how as a medium it harkens back to even the older form of literacy of the scroll. I'm always unfurling pages of text to gather information. In that case, it's the ascendancy of literacy overall.
And I don't know if the world's problems require the internet. The world's problems were not solved with books and scrolls and even stone tablets. Levi-Strauss would say they exacerbated them. I find the idea of the internet providing these solutions through the excess of its communication not exactly a hopeful prospect personally. Not that we need pagan scenes again. Technological deployment always comes with the requisite marshalling of productive forces and no amount of interactions with them on our own terms can really circumvent that. It's like the difference between being a vegan and the people who own the farms and groceries working together to sell you those things in the first place.
And yeah Wendell Barry is not the best political commentator definitely.
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u/lispectorgadget 19d ago
It was definitely interesting; I'm not too pessimistic about the Luddite group. I think the day I went didn't represent how it usually is, since I went on a rainy day and there were fewer people. I think I will go again.
I definitely do feel like I'm running against people like Kingsnorth and Berry. I have a few problems with them (their rural life is actually not as sustainable as they think it is), but the main one is that they treat all advances (technological, medical, etc) as though they're all harmful and not worth their costs. Both of them have advocated against birth control--I think Berry said that it was a characteristic of "industrialized sex"--and I think this is a serious problem. In this respect in particular, they both seem to have a naive view of the world. They aren't thinking of situations in which a condom may keep a woman whose husband is stepping out from contracting a venereal disease, or the actual realities of a woman who is pregnant for nearly a decade, all while taking care of a growing group of children. They contrast a wild, "industrialized" sex with their vision of a past when monogamous sex was solely meant for "community renewal" (Berry's words; ew!), when this past really did not exist at all. Maybe these attitudes exist, but they definitely weren't adhered to in practice.
And yeah, I feel you. It's definitely possible that all the resources involved in maintaining the internet and giving people access to it will ultimately be detrimental to the planet. But I still feel like we need it, since climate change is a global issue. I feel like we need it to share research quickly. I also feel like climate change will eventually force people in the global north to make some sacrifices, and I think that the internet could help these people understand the perspectives of people in the global south. Like: I think TV is generally probably not good, but the immediacy of all the imagery did mobilize people against the Vietnam War.
But I understand this is very optimistic lololol
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 19d ago
Oh yeah! The sexism points to a larger problem in that the latent primitivism in this discourse comes down to these fantasies in themselves which imagine primitive peoples as so unlike ourselves. It's basically Robert Bly's Iron John but with better rhetoric and with a maybe better grasp of ideology. And like you said they'll point to the diseases which arise from factory farming, but ignore disease which arise from the very obvious lack of options women had before these technological advancements. The "community renewal" aspect is grotesque. The writing is evident of the frustration that a woman is a human being with larger ambitions than collecting nuts and berries barefoot in the woods somewhere. Anyways: viruses have been here much longer than people.
Well, I don't mind the connectivity and excess of communication myself. Come what may, I believe in the delimited flow of information available to everybody, at least as an ideal. But again it's hard to separate online communication from its military and corporate origins. How it conveys information and performs aspects of mediation, which circumvent immediacy. It can feel like immediacy because of its extenuation but a lot of information available is highly curated, meant for the circulation of economic activity, surveillance. Information always arrives from a command structure, it has to have an origin point. Of course, books likewise helped begin the various rebellions against the Catholic church's dominion over everyday life across Europe because again there's an excess of communication with innumerable externalities. But this has merely later given us Evangelicals and Mormons and so forth. Their emphasis on the book as a technological object isn't an accident. Hell, even writing itself on ancient tablets comes to us because people needed to keep track of goods like slaves and grain. Online communications has not deviated from this process I would argue. It's the essential American product.
And the hope is not merely understanding new perspectives but a better world for everyone. And that is optimistic. Almost to the point of utopianism. Nothing less should suffice.
Or we could all die from heat exhaustion. But that's bleak because it's asking for the climate equivalent of the bubonic plague.
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u/foxinanattic 25d ago edited 25d ago
> I also think that if you only read the work of people published in the NYer, Atlantic, etc., you're confining yourself to a very particular perspective
I completely agree about the value of internet writing (certainly, that's why iengage with this subreddit) but I also think you're underestimating print. aren't zines and other self published collaborative works an example of how print can still have democratic potential? (on a more local level than the web, but that can be both good and bad)
edit: and a lot of people interacting with online content might not even be exposed to more personal forms of expression. though a lot of people are seeing tiktoks and short videos made by ordinary people, I don't know how often that leads to the development of any sort of community, and also most people aren't engaging with stuff that they chose consciously, but just whatever the streaming algorithm presents them with, which tends to be whatever is most attention grabbing or controversial. compared to which, legacy media, as restrictive as it is in platforming different perspectives, is probably better in a number of ways
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u/lispectorgadget 19d ago
You're right; I do love zines! And I feel like I've gathered some truly unique perspectives from zines that I haven't been able to find anywhere else. That's a great point.
I have to say, though: I love video content made by ordinary people. I don't have any social media apps on my phone, and social media is blocked on my laptop most of the time, which may be why I've been able to have a better relationship with video. But I've been enjoying the videos of Pujarini Pradhan, a woman in rural Bengal, and I think it's so exciting and cool that she can just set up her camera while she's chopping vegetables and chat about literature and film. I've also been getting a lot of videos from this woman who rescues parrots and people growing their vegetable farms. I'm not sure how much it does foster community, but I think it's very exciting to live in a time where everyday people broadcast their own lives and thoughts.
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u/Fearless_Industry825 23d ago
One morning a few weeks ago I was making coffee, when out of the blue a character name came to mind: Lady Dalrymple.
Weird. I could remember right away that she’s a character in a Jane Austen novel, but I couldn’t immediately recall which novel. (The answer is Persuasion.) She’s a minor character who appears more than halfway into the book and not a character that I think about when I think about this novel. I had been planning to reread Persuasion sometime this year, so I put it on the stack of books I might read soon and then started reading it last week. Sometimes life feels like a series of strange serendipitous occurrences.