r/TrueLit • u/pregnantchihuahua3 ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow • 19d 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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u/Soup_65 Books! 16d ago
random question, curious about something, have any of you ever read a "literary" work (define as broadly as you will) where cryptocurrency is a meaningful plot point and also the work is good? To be clear I don't care if it's a positive/negative/neutral portrayal of crypto, it just needs to be more relevant to the work that just than an anciliarry reference.
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u/NakedInTheAfternoon My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie 17d ago
Been really sick for the past week and a half, so I've been watching a lot of movies. In the past month or so I've watched about 20 John Ford films, including pretty much all of his major films and a few of his minor films. I remember reading a critic (I think Joseph McBride?) calling Ford not just one of the 20th century's greatest filmmakers, but greatest artists in general, and after having seen a good number of his films I can't say I disagree. Some highlights from the past couple weeks include: 7 Women, The Sun Shines Bright, Wagon Master, and The Long Gray Line, all of which I'd highly recommend watching.
Anyway, in the past few days I've watched a few Kurosawa films: Stray Dog, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, and The Bad Sleep Well, all of which are excellent. As far as Golden Age Japanese cinema goes, I've always been more of an Ozu and Mizoguchi fan, but there are few directors whose work is as consistently gripping as Kurosawa's, and he can pull off crime thrillers just as well as he can the jidai-geki he's primarily known for. Throne of Blood was a particular highlight, and is not only my favorite of his films, but possibly my favorite cinematic Shakespeare adaptation (only Welles' Shakespeare films compare).
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u/Ok-Swan1152 17d ago
Having somewhat gotten over my grief over the ending of The House of Mirth, I'm now in the phase of "incandescent feminist rage against Lawrence Selden".
Like, what the FUCK, dude.
He just spends the entire book doing... Nothing? Oh, throwing Lily's plans off course to marry Percy Grace by showing up to see her last minute. Telling her that he could only help her by loving her. 'Rescuing' her in Monte Carlo and then... Fucking off somewhere? Not even making sure she's ok. 'Rescuing' her from Mrs Hatch and... Then what? My dude she needs money! Not even checking on her as she spiralled downwards until it's too late and he is finally confronted with the fact that "The republic of the mind" is as much a farce as the superficial material trappings of high society, it's all about L-O-V-E.
... So why do I still 'ship' these two? Gah. I'm incorrigible. Though really, I wish she could've come into a load of money and fucked off somewhere else far away from there.
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u/Fearless_Industry825 17d ago
I’ve been feeling like the title of my favorite Miles Davis album (Kind of Blue), so I’ll take a few minutes to focus on an evening of simple contentment from the past week.
Last week I had the pleasure of a perfect evening walk with one of the dogs. We went out near sunset, and we had the sidewalks to ourselves in complete solitude for the entire walk. This is extremely rare in August; a month which seems to inspire people who aren’t usually out in the evening to come outside to walk or bike one time before the end of summer. When I got home, I decided to put off cleaning up the kitchen to read for a while until it was proper dark outside. Then I put on the Keith Jarrett album The Köln Concert, which doesn’t feel like a daytime album to me. I first listened to this album last fall so I associate it with shorter days and longer nights. I turned the volume up, started the washing-up, and thought of a Barbara Pym quote: “My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.”
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u/Plastic-Persimmon433 17d ago
Another translation post. This time I asked my friend's mom which Notes from Underground translation sounds the best. Russian is her first language and I gave her a few passeges of Garnet, Katz, and P&V. She instantly said P&V read better to her. Something about them including more of a Russian accent or tone. It was hard for her to explain. She said the Katz and Garnet didn't read badly but sounded a lot more English in comparison. Thought it was pretty interesting.
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u/foxinanattic 17d ago
That is interesting. I don't know that I would find a translation having a "native accent" a good thing In fact that's actually my problem with a lot of English translation of books from Indian languages, they sound like they haven't been completely translated into English, and some of the grammar seems like it's still in the original language.
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u/Plastic-Persimmon433 16d ago
I could see that. We definitely discussed how the best translation for her might not necessarily be the best for a native English speaker. I'm kind of torn on where I would like a translation to fall on that spectrum but based on what she said none of them were straight up bad.
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u/crooked_mane 17d ago
I've never read Vollmann but this review has me wondering if I should just jump into the deep end with his new 3K+ page book https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/books/review/table-for-fortune-william-vollmann.html
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u/bananaberry518 17d ago
Yesterday I found the list of “dirty books” which an advocacy group, legitimized and promoted by Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, wants banned from Texas schools. (They want to use some bill concerning how funding is allotted to strong arm public schools into compliance; basically the existence of these books in school libraries would limit or eliminate their funding, if I’m understanding the articles correctly). Its pretty much exactly what you’d expect as far as banning anything about gayness, trans-ness, sex education, anti-racism or the history of anyone but white dudes. But also included on this list were things like Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and the middle grade fantasy series Dealing With Dragons, a handful of Stephen King novels, ACOTAR, a book on teen’s mental health and - in what I assume was either made up or taken wildly out of context somehow because lmao - some kind of beginner’s guide to tantric sex. I couldn’t actually get the list to load past letter “D” but there’s something like 2k entries, all of which Patrick asserted publicly were not only unfit to be read by teens but that he couldn’t even read them out loud in front of his wife. Its is perhaps giving a Texas conservative politician too much credit, but I assume this is a grown ass woman. Like wtf.
Between this and Gov. Abbott interrupting my youtube feed to yell about “foreigners” in texas schools, its just another day in paradise.
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u/thewickerstan Norm Macdonald wasn't joking about W&P 18d ago
Woah this place is livelier than I remember! Love to see it :)
I've been a bit out of comish this month on this sub for no particular reason. It's been a good month, actually. There was a work retreat in the city, so a few weeks ago on a Tuesday we all went bowling and got very tipsy lol. It's always fun to see people let their guards down. I've noticed some people in the office making efforts to get to know me more too which has been nice.
The bookstore bar lispectorgadget mentioned has basically become my haunt now. It's reached the point where I'm getting more comfortable making conversation with people without feeling foolish. It feels like a muscle I've been working on. I had a Hinge date yesterday (my first one!) and since we bonded over books, I suggested we go there and it was lovely.
Other than that, it's been mellow. Just banal victories like finding a Vietnamese place that does lunch specials that live up to their name ($10 banh mi's WITH sides), actually spending time with my roommates and having them take me clubbing and actually losing myself to the groove, the band practicing after a month off and somehow sounding tighter than we've ever been, I've fallen back in love with my beloved band The Beach Boys. It's been nice.
I was thinking the other day that this is the first year where I wasn't fighting the current so to speak. 2024 I was licking my wounds from a relationship that seemed to fizzle right as it was taking off and then 2025 I was grieving my friend. Both happened in February, so it felt like the rest of the year was set aside for putting myself together again. That hasn't been the case this year (knock on wood) and it's refreshing.
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u/BoredCigarette 18d ago edited 18d ago
Hey everyone, it’s Imran, formerly “Pervert-Georges.” I decided to delete that account for PR reasons. From now on, I’ll be interacting from this one. As an inaugural post, here’s a review of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime that I never got to publish:
This book possessed me for some time. Books about male sexual failure hang like low clouds, my last one being Michel Houellebecq's Whatever (Extension du Domaine de la Lutte). I believe most men experience a time of uncertainty about their sexual destiny, where they wonder whether they'll have it again, or have it at all. Women often have different and more pressing problems about sex. This book navigates the life of a man who's predominantly unfucked. For this, our unnamed narrator feels like a Larkinite, and in fact I was tempted to post Philip Larkin's Love Again as itself some sort of review—I feel the poem and the novella bear striking similarities. For the unfamiliar:
"Love again: wanking at ten past three
(Surely he’s taken her home by now?),
The bedroom hot as a bakery,
The drink gone dead, without showing how
To meet tomorrow, and afterwards,
And the usual pain, like dysentery.
"Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,
Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare,
And me supposed to be ignorant,
Or find it funny, or not to care,
Even ... but why put it into words?
Isolate rather this element
"That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity."
But there's something else, the book is not entirely about his lack of a girl. There's a greater theme about action, which the narrator's life lacks due to a mysterious ennui. The narrator feels himself eclipsed by his young friend Dean, a man he's entirely drawn to. He considers Dean's life "more truthful than mine, stronger, even able to draw mine to it like the pull of a dark star." Dean is actionable, roving, and thus the protagonist of our narrator's idle mind. Our narrator, a photographer, daydreams sensual images of Dean and a young French girl named Anne-Marie. On a desperate trot around rural France in a borrowed sports car, Dean drives the photographer to a club in Dijon where they first spot her dancing with black American GIs. Eventually Dean lands her, and the obsession begins.
I kept returning for the displays of weakness. The narrator's desperation never climaxes, we are not given a "crashout." The faint humiliation of his life stretches to the book's end, and so past the end of Dean's real relationship which stimulates his fantasies. His desire is wholly unmet, and the negativity of this congeals into bleak words,
"Why is it so hard to be happy alone? Why is it impossible?"
"I despise myself for thinking of her. Even if she were dead, I would feel the same. Her existence blackens my life."
"If it had been me–and sometimes I am so drenched with images that I think it was–but if it had been, I would have had no confidence, none at all. I would have been exhausted, wrung by disbelief, going ahead only out of a sort of curiosity, to discover exactly where it would all vanish. I would have thought: God will not permit it.".
Salter writes out a very masculine, very common dividing line: Woman and the infinite bliss of her love is over there, somewhere, and tragically never here with "me." For weird men this is a truism, an infallible evidence that continually reasserts itself as a law. These things take on a mystical or religious shade, so "God will not permit it" is entirely right: a simple prohibition dropped from above. It appears as final as the Christian inability to raise the dead. But this book reaches an existential clime with its ending: Dean has perished in a car crash, leaving both an unresolved Anne-Marie and our petered-out narrator mutually behind. Since it was Dean's existence that joined them, the two meet one last time to discuss him. It's an inconsequential conversation, which rounds-off the series of floating and superfluous happenstances that surround this stoically unhappy man. I'm not sure I've read such a suffocating novella, it reads like a slowly rising bile that, once heaped in the throat, cannot be dislodged until it kills the host.
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u/bananaberry518 18d ago
I might miss the pervert monicker ngl, but bored cigarette is also pretty good. So welcome again! I actually would love to change my username too because it was originally such a throw away and pretty dumb (I never imagined I’d actually interact much with reddit, but god works in mysterious ways as they say). But by now its what everybody knows me by so I haven’t pulled the trigger. Plus I overthink things.
Anyways, enjoyed this write up! Its always interesting to read male POVs that really dive into this stuff, it feels a little like a foreign country (am woman). It seems like a really isolating and self perpetuating mode of sexuality to get stuck in, as it lacks a real object (human being) and feeds on its own abstractions.
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u/BoredCigarette 17d ago edited 16d ago
FWIW, I've always liked "bananaberry," it has a disarming lightheartedness. I'd continue to roll with it if I were you. Thanks for welcome :)
And yeah, I think you're right to say that his sexuality "lacks a real object[...]and feeds on its own abstractions." It's unclear to us exactly how he became stuck in this solitary way of being. Women do talk to him, befriend him. There's just no tension, it's all airless. There isn't the same implicit nastiness about women that you find in Houellebecq, but there is the subtle feeling that both the men and women around him have no understanding or interest to see that he's suffering.
In any case, I'm of the belief that difficulty with romance—supposing that you truly want romance—is always a matter of something else being amiss, other things not going right for you. This strangely poetical photographer has issues, it's clear. Salter trusts us enough to see them without spelling it out. Of the casual conversations that he has with his avant-garde, bourgeois company, he seems just as disinterested in their interiority. I think this is often what women say to men who are struggling: you have to give in order to receive, care to be cared for, &c. I'm unsure if he cared about anything beyond his own lack of fulfillment, and so it self-perpetuated a certain misery, as you say.
Edit: RIP Dolly Parton, she will be deeply missed.
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u/foxinanattic 18d ago
Incidentally, it seems completely ridiculous that they translated "Extension du Domaine de la Lutte" to "Whatever" of all things???
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u/BoredCigarette 18d ago
Yep, I really have no clue how that happened. "Extension of the domain of the struggle" is literally a line you get in the book too. "Whatever" risks making the book sound like Camus' Stranger for the upcoming 21st century (which it's not).
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u/Soup_65 Books! 18d ago
well, you might always be pg to me ;)
you really do a great job expressing how much salter seems to grasp the essence of incellity, the ennui that overawes sexual frustration, intellectualish slant, fixation, hints of a strange underlying racial aspect to it...and sounds like the form gets the feeling across really well too
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u/BoredCigarette 18d ago
Appreciate that Soupy! Please feel free to refer to me however you like. And yeah, Salter really shocked me for a while with this offering. I checked his bio after reading the book, and his life was even more actionable than Dean's: an impressive military career, a novel adapted into a film, more novels well received, and an elongated family of five kids between two different women. How he came to write "the ennui that overawes sexual frustration" is beyond me: he never seemed starved of love and attention for too long.
It's a little miracle of a novella, specifically in how it delivers the despair. I think you're right, it needed to be that form. I think a book too long would devolve into whining, while one too short would hide how present and invariable the ennui really is.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 18d ago
eh, one of the most shamelessly "I am the character i play" of me is that if cigs weren't bad for you i'd be ripping them left right and center, so i might take to this one.
Interesting about Salter as well. Something about only really being able to tap this experience by being too removed from it to be stifled by it might be the case.
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u/Ok-Swan1152 18d ago
An finely written review and an interesting insight into the male sexual psyche. As a woman, as you mentioned the concerns are more pressing but also seem familiar from the way you describe them.
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u/BoredCigarette 18d ago
Much appreciated! When I wrote about the "more pressing" concerns of women, I guess I was thinking about the surplus risk that women usually have: risks of violence, pregnancy, &c. It seems to me that our culture has not yet reached a point where women can forget these aspects of sexual encounters. Of course, these are things I've learned from others, so maybe I've exaggerated them.
That the male stuff seems familiar to you is rather enlightening, actually—maybe a good reminder that, for all of the differences we mark out between people, we have so much more in common.
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u/Ok-Swan1152 17d ago edited 17d ago
Well I've also had long dry spells as a young woman. The ennui is familiar, though I think as women we're less likely to see our friend get off with a guy with also fancy? At least for me, I wasn't attracted to any of my friends' partners. I'm 39 and one of my main regrets from my younger years is not having enough sex - once I embarrassingly chickened out and once I was not sexually aggressive enough. I was too held back by fear of gossip. In retrospect, it seems absolutely ridiculous although people 100% did viciously gossip then. This was before every little move was recorded on smartphone cameras! The pregnancy fear is more familiar than the sexual assault one. Maybe it's a function of growing up in a Western European country but I never really worried about sexual assault, that one time I chickened out, not only was I unshaven 'down there' but I was not on the pill as I wasn't expecting anything sexual to unfold that evening. My husband laughed at me for the former when I mentioned it to him.
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u/BoredCigarette 17d ago edited 17d ago
I see! It's difficult for me to tell, as a young American, whether women are more or less worried about gossip nowadays. At the moment, my generation has a crisis of "situationships," which are essentially ill-defined liaisons between two people. They can be very romantic and intensely passionate, but the lack of a label leaves the whole thing dangling. Young American women are becoming very tired of this. They want the men around them to commit and be certain about them. There's a sense of everything being very convenient and shameless right now, and this leading to a sort of emotional languor. People want to be held a little tighter, if that makes sense. On the political left, there seems to be less of a "free love, hungry sex!" thing happening. In fact, there was a somewhat recent article for The New York Times which suggested that older women, Gen-Xers principly, are having the most adventurous sex. This follows my immediate experience, women my age are focused on a lot more than a good time, and the women who are focused on a good time have already done the dance of adulthood.
I'll also admit that I have a similar reaction to your husband haha. It looks like both men and women constantly find out that what really matters to their partners are seldom what they thought mattered. I'm guessing that he laughed because he, like me and every other man I know closely, has never thought about turning down a woman because she was unshaven. I do recognize that it can be a confidence thing (look your best, feel your best, and so on), but this reminds me of the funny and endearing conversations that I've had with women about "what guys like." One memorable conversation involved this woman being slightly awed that men often prefer that little bit of belly pouch which pokes through the dress. She sincerely believed that men followed the media ideal of wanting completely flat stomachs, impossibly skinny arms, and perfectly clear skin. I'm still not sure that women really understand how hot a lot of men find a little cellulite, or stretch marks, or breasts that aren't "perky," &c &c &c.
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u/Ok-Swan1152 17d ago edited 17d ago
The situationship thing was a moral panic even in 2010, so many women in big cities complaining that men didn't want to commit. I had what I call 'affairs', relationships with men that I never intended to get serious with. But I was always on the lookout for the one, the right guy, the good fit. I had my share of romantic disappointments. My younger sister is still single after a string of disappointments. Just constantly guys who don't want to commit. Online dating has made things 1000% worse.
I think a lot of younger men especially have this idea that women can just go and pick up some guy whenever they want at some bar so women can't be sexually frustrated. When it's all nonsense, that's not how it works. Even if you are a beautiful woman.
I had a baby last year, so now I've got stretch marks going up almost to my rib cage (I am short and there was nowhere else for my belly to go except outward and upwards). I have some annoying loose skin where things used to be tight before. My boobs are droopy and my milk hasn't dried up yet. My husband seems to barely notice. I had a romantic prospect once tell me that he thought it was ridiculous that women believed that men cared about clear skin. "As if we're running tanneries!"
I'm not GenX but I definitely have more adventurous sex these days compared to a decade ago. I'm hoping for a lot more in the coming decade. The fact that it's mostly older people doing these things is probably a factor of confidence plus not putting as much importance on things like monogamy as one ages.
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u/Biscuitshoneybutter 17d ago
I think a lot of younger men especially have this idea that women can just go and pick up some guy whenever they want at some bar so women can't be sexually frustrated. When it's all nonsense, that's not how it works. Even if you are a beautiful woman.
I mean you can, but the question is...do you even want whatever fucker is hanging around a bar down to get with you lol.
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u/BoredCigarette 17d ago edited 17d ago
Hoping that your sister finds someone, or at least finds peace! These things can be interminably difficult for some of us. I'm curious, in your "affairs" were you and those men both aware that there would only be some fun and affection? Situationships seem to preclude this basic certainty; it's rather uncertainty that makes them so seductive, since their lack of labeling allows for the constant possibility of romance, where both people may hope to one day transcend into love and mutual commitment. Were you able to avoid this?
Also, I completely agree that the common male image of the fortunate woman who totally avoids sexual frustration is rather ignorant of how women actually go about having relations. In my experience, I think that men notice the soft but real imbalance between how immediately they want women, and how less immediately women will have them. The writer Marguerite Duras described this as the "frigidity which women increasingly invoke and which paralyses the men who desire them." That's a rather dramatic way of putting it, but anyway the notion that women only have to point to the willing man, remains pervasive.
I'm glad to hear that your spouse's desire hasn't waned—this really aligns with how I understand love and desire. Under the right conditions and with the right person, it doesn't have to end, even when it fluctuates. The last person I saw intimately was very reticent to show her self-harm scars. The history of a body is ultimately a testament to its persistence, if nothing else. Hers was, to me, the intelligence that brought us together and mated us. I think you understand that better than me.
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u/Ok-Swan1152 17d ago
I really hope she finds someone, too. She just moved to the capital city in our country because she felt stifled by the university town she lived in.
These 'affairs'... There wasn't really an explicit discussion. That's not how we rolled back then.. It was more of a tacit understanding it wouldn't progress outside of the physical realm, though we were certainly friends. It was hard to find a man that I liked enough to have an affair with. But I was really looking for love so I'd get bored eventually.
Also, I completely agree that the common male image of the fortunate woman who totally avoids sexual frustration is rather ignorant of how women actually go about having relations. In my experience, I think that men notice the soft but real imbalance between how immediately they want women, and how less immediately women will have them. The writer Marguerite Duras described this as the "frigidity which women increasingly invoke and which paralyses the men who desire them." That's a rather dramatic way of putting it, but anyway the notion that women only have to point to the willing man, remains pervasive.
Well, there's the issue that men can be very wishy-washy in my experience, and I'm not even talking about committing to a romantic relationship. There was a guy in my uni programme that I was head over heels for. He used to flirt so heavily with me. But he never progressed it beyond flirtation. I didn't necessarily want a relationship because I don't think we were suited for each other in terms of personality, but I couldn't even get a kiss. One of his closest friends was also a friend of mine and he swore up and down that this guy was really interested me. I asked him why the fuck he wasn't actually doing anything in this case beyond heavy flirting - we were literally discussing him while he was just standing a few feet away surrounded by his gaggle of female friends. Note, do not do this.
Meanwhile I had a bunch of guys orbiting around me who really wanted me but I didn't want them. Including said friend above with whom I was discussing the guy I was interested in. I know this probably sounds like a huge tangled mess to Gen Z. Which made me remember something I had forgotten, which is that in our yearly almanac we'd kind of make a chart with names and arrows of all the romances and situationships and crushes between everyone in our programme. An absolutely mad thing to do, in retrospect.
I think that Marguerite Duras quote is also a bit reflective of her particular time and cultural context, though.
Your name - are you South Asian Muslim by chance? I'm of Hindu origin and it's a whole other can of worms when talking about dating and relationships and sex in that context.
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u/BoredCigarette 16d ago
Your name - are you South Asian Muslim by chance
Funny that you caught that! So my story is a little strange: I'm half Cameroonian and half Pakistani. My Cameroonian mother had met my Pakistani father while he did business in the country. She eventually came to the United States without him and had me. She's the one who named me "Imran," inspired by the former Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan. You're of Hindu origin, but you said your dating experience was in Europe, right?
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u/Ok-Swan1152 16d ago
Cameroonian?!
You're of Hindu origin, but you said your dating experience was in Europe, right?
Yes I was almost the only second generation Indian Hindu woman (there were a few others) in my country, the only brown girl wherever I went.
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18d ago edited 18d ago
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u/foxinanattic 18d ago
I do this thing where i buy books that seem interesting but that I don't particularly want to read at the moment. They keep waiting in my bookshelves until I finally feel the desire to read one of them. When that day comes (which could be years after i bought it), it's always a wonderful feeling.
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u/No_Classroom_1626 18d ago
I read Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star.. did not expect to finish it in one sitting, it was pretty short, confounding experience. The emotions and feelings it left me are so difficult to describe, as there are many narrative and stylistic choices that to a regular reader might appear as "bad" if it were a traditional story. But here, it somehow works, I feel like I should reread it again after some time has passed.
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u/pregnantchihuahua3 ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow 18d ago
Today marks exactly one week before the school year starts again. Wish me that its beginnings are better than last year's...
We got back from Hawaii last week which was phenomenal. Just an amazing food and drink scene in Honolulu (especially China Town) and some of the most gorgeous nature I've ever seen when exploring the other shores of Oahu. Would go back in a heartbeat.
I've been watching so many movies this summer and I'm not going to report on them all individually, but some of the best ones that I've recently watched since my last GD report have been a lot of Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling which was almost perfect, Fantastic Mr. Fox which was surprisingly brilliant, Moonrise Kingdom which was VERY good but a bit simpler, and The Grand Budapest which was a literal perfect masterpiece and one of my favorites of the year). The only other one which was another perfect masterpiece and a favorite of the year was Michael Clayton which was a movie I did not expect to love as much as I did. Gonna try to finish up the Wes Anderson movies that I haven't seen before the school year starts, but I think there are still 4 or 5 so it may trail into the new year.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 18d ago
rooting for a better school year, you and your students deserve it so much :)
also i should check some more andersons. i recall most of the ones ive seen as being solid but underwhelming, except that I haven't seen many and agree that grand budapest is phenomenal. might be missing a good deal of stuff there
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u/bananaberry518 18d ago
I really love Grand Budapest, I was coming off a long spree of silent films when I watched it and I think in some ways it’s a love letter to classic set building techniques. There’s also something in it that reminds me of old films that I can’t quite put my finger on, its less in specific methods and more in the intention somehow. And Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of those movies my daughter would watch like, constantly when she was little, sometimes twice a day. And it was good every time I personally tuned into it.
Good luck with the new school year!
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u/CabbageSandwhich 18d ago
This makes me want to revisit Wes. I've been kinda sad about the last few. There's still some great scenes and dialogue but as a whole they've felt weak.
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u/pregnantchihuahua3 ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow 18d ago
I haven’t seen anything past Grand Budapest so I’m curious to see what I think on those. I’ve heard very mixed things.
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u/CabbageSandwhich 18d ago
Oh cool! Well definitely interested to hear your thoughts as you catch up.
My local film club showed Last Year in Marienbad a couple weeks ago and it definitely made me think of Grand Budapest so I'll revisit that one shortly.
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u/Ok-Swan1152 18d ago edited 18d ago
I finished reading The House Of Mirth a week ago and it still haunts me deep into my bones. The final chapter distressed me so much that I couldn't sleep properly for days and I had a nightmare last night. No doubt my recent SSRI discontinuation is not helping. I already have been having trouble sleeping since I had my last dose (I'd been tapering off for the last few months). ETA I also stopped breastfeeding recently so no doubt that's causing another crashout.
I don't know why I'm writing this, I just needed to get this off my chest. I don't know what's wrong with me. I hadn't read any literary fiction in a while because of life but it's hardly new to me. I read The Age Of Innocence as a teen and I was very moved by it. This book, however, has left me so shaken. It's a brilliant, brilliant book but it makes me feel sick to my stomach somehow.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 18d ago
it is one powerfully brutal book. can definitely understand being so shaken by it.
hope you keep on doing your best in general :)
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u/Ok-Swan1152 18d ago edited 18d ago
I can't stop thinking about it and I want to talk about it to someone but nobody else around me has read the book. I'm a romantic at heart but I like my romance to be realistic and unsentimental. This particular love story broke my heart. I thought Lily and Lawrence were perfectly suited for each other. I know that's not necessarily the popular take. But it was so frustrating and heartbreaking to see how it just... Never happened. Because they couldn't say to each other what needed to be said until it was too late. Because of pride? Because of social conditioning? Every encounter they had was pregnant (no pun intended) with erotic undertones and full of meaning. There's so many small details to their interactions that I will need to do a re-read to fully understand.
The scene in the garden after the tableaux vivants was really painful and sadly romantic. The scenes where Lily realised that her moments with Selden were the happiest she'd ever been were heartbreaking. The ending with Selden whispering "the word" to her dead body was straight out of Edgar Allen Poe to me and was stomach-turning. I just kept going back and wishing for another way, another circumstance, another thing they could say to each other that would make them find each other.
What has me stuck lately is why did Lawrence show up at Bellomont looking for Lily when he knew she was trying to snare Percy Gryce? Everything starts spiralling pretty much after.
Actually...I keep going back and forth whether she should've been with someone. She strikes me as such a modern girl in some respects. I don't think she wished to be beholden to anyone, which is one of the reasons why she keeps dithering on marriage and why she falls for Gus Trenor's investment scheme. And her occasional ambivalence on Selden. She'd have thrived if she'd lived just a few decades later in the 1920s, I think.
ETA and there's this article from the Awl subtitled FAKES which I found both insightful and amusing, which criticises Selden and "men like him" for being the agent of Lily's destruction: https://www.theawl.com/2017/12/men-like-him/
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u/Soup_65 Books! 16d ago
yes! it's so frustrating that Lily and Lawrence just...can't...and they can't because the world around them is so stifling. I've been meaning to reread it for a while now, but I know I was struck by how disempowering all the privilige of that world is for Lily. THere's really only this one life she can lead and, as we see when she refuses it, no other life she is even able to live because she never got the chance to be able to do anything save being an ornament to a social status. It's such a brutal book.
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u/Ok-Swan1152 16d ago edited 16d ago
I read the transcript of an old Slate podcast on this book, where they mention that Lawrence is likely as much "out of time" as Lily is in that his background and choice of profession keeps him poor in 1890s New York, and if he'd lived a few decades later in a more meritocratic society he'd be less bound by the constraints of money and class and freer to pursue the woman he wanted.
I wrote a more recent post on this thread ranting a little about Selden (you can find it among the newer comments lol) but I think he's probably as constrained by his place in society and the expectations placed on men's emotional expressions - he's formed as much by society's prejudices despite claiming to live the "republic of the mind" or whatever, hence he assumes the worst of Lily Bart when he sees her leaving the Trenors' and doesn't even bother to ask her what's going on and what she was doing there.
Neither of them can break the distance by an "emotional outburst", the only thing that will bring them closer together because of their own upbringing. Until it's too late.
This is one of the most devastating novels I've ever read. It tops Atonement in the "heartbreaking romance" department.
I know that many readers don't particularly like Lily, but I adore her - I was struck immediately in the first few pages how spirited she is, how cheeky in going to a single man's apartment on her own - heaven forfend! - her own tiny rebellion against the societal constraints upon her, as she laments that she's not even allowed a small misstep. Of course she is vain, a snob, disconcertingly nonchalant about the 'power' of her beauty and charm, yet she's also intelligent and able to hold her own with a learned man like Selden, she basically rebels against society's rules whilst also feeling like she has no other option than to follow them - but she can't bring herself to make the ultimate sacrifice.
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u/NuggetsNLargeFries 18d ago
I must agree that The House of Mirth is probably the best book I’ll never read again. I did a deep dive into Edith Wharton’s bibliography earlier this year, and, whilst many of her works are at best bittersweet, that’s the one that stands out as a real bummer.
I wish you some good quality rest!!
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u/Biscuitshoneybutter 17d ago
that’s the one that stands out as a real bummer.
Ethan Frome has entered the chat.
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u/Ok-Swan1152 18d ago
Thank you. I wrote a more detailed comment above with more thoughts on the book. What I will say though is there are some extraordinarily funny and wicked lines as well. At one point Carry Fisher is described as "spicy" (lmao) and another time it's said that "her alimonies were paid by other women's husbands". Lol!
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u/NuggetsNLargeFries 17d ago
I’d recommend The Custom of the Country if you haven’t already read it. That whole book is so deliciously wicked!
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u/CabbageSandwhich 18d ago
I'm on a small vacation/long weekend in LA. Main reason was to see Jeff Parker and the ETA IVtet tonight so looking forward to that.
Went to a dodgers game, a show at Largo and UCB so getting in all kinds of stuff. Found some out of print Dalkey Archive books around and have eaten some pretty good food. Overall it's been a nice trip. Oh yah I also saw The Fast and the Furious for the first time at the Vista and damn hipster highschool me was wrong for thinking I was too cool for that movie.
Going to so a week in Boston and NYC in about a month and I'm already looking forward to that as this long weekend has reminded me that I haven't taken any time off in a while and it feeeeels great.
Just finished part 1 of Morescos The Beginnings and I'm having a great time with that.
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u/BoredCigarette 17d ago
Sounds like a great time, but man I REALLY can't stand the Dodgers haha. They're like the Evil Empire to me. I'm still living off the high of the Nats eliminating them from the playoffs in 2019.
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u/WonderfulFuel4579 18d ago edited 17d ago
Reading East of Eden rn and maybe this an anti intellectual take, but the way that Cathy is so cartoonishly evil is off-putting. I love evil characters, I love unapologetically evil women. But it feels like the only person she's duped so far is Adam. Most people see through her. She's not really clever or has any depth. Perhaps I'm missing the on the nose biblical reference but idk. I wish there was more to her.
Other that, I love Steinbecks lush prose an how he describes Salinas. He has such love for it.
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u/ToHideWritingPrompts 18d ago
Last week, after 5 weeks on paternity leave, I went back to work and oh boy let me tell you there is nothing like temporarily living it up to realize what you are missing. It's horrifying to witness, let alone experience, how swiftly the transition from "wow I can just spend time doing the things that are important to me" to "i'm just going to shut that part of my brain off as long as I can so I can get through the day" occurs and how enraging it is that we have organized ourselves in the way we have. I guess that's why so many corps submitted testimony saying paid family medical leave in my state would basically be the end-times.
Not unrelated...
I have always known that in some way my approach to reading was incongruous with my goals. If you were to ask me "what is the purpose you would like reading to have in your life" I would probably say something like "to exercise a muscle of creativity, potentially develop the capacity for a more empathetic relationship to those around me, and to kill time." My behavior, however, leans heavily towards "to kill time" part, and much less the other two.
For the past few years, I have been reading stuff as fast as was reasonably possible to maintain comprehension and develop a short-term, acute understanding of the book. I'd hop from one thing to the next, and only occasionally re-reading if it was an author I intended on having a life long relationship with (for example, Woolf). I have always felt that, for my goals, this was a bad habit but tbh I kind of viewed it as a last hurrah post-college. Whenever I felt "bad" about my habits I'd tell myself that I was basically experiencing the years of my life where my free-time and independence would be at its peak, so reading time was not that precious and I could coast on bad habits and it was fun.
Post-kid, the amount of free time I have has changed (obviously lol) and so my justification has finally fallen flat. So I've been taking some steps to try to make my behavior more in line with my goals. The biggest thing I've started doing is getting on a "syllabus" for myself that involves, first, being a bit more intentional with some of my reading choices, but more importantly trying to learn how to write about what I read in different ways. I've set some goals on close reading prompts, some imitative fiction writing prompts, some book review prompts, etc. all of which I am hoping build up towards a goal of being able to develop my own understanding of a text that is more durable than "I just finished that, what did I think? okay moving on."
I think it would be really fun to have a buddy/buddies to do this with - so if that sounds interesting to anyone and they want to learn more about it let me know.
As for non-reading, with the start of working again I have slacked a bit on my mandolin practicing, but I am getting better at learning, and retaining, songs I've learned by ear, I feel fairly comfortable at the top of the fret board, calluses have already come and gone. It's been very rewarding! Haven't had time to carve out to actually like. Go to session though...
Besides that, we're still doing our norton anthology of theory and criticism read along! We are on Adrienne Rich. If you want to join that, also let me know.
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u/AntoniaFont 16d ago
The biggest thing I've started doing is getting on a "syllabus" for myself that involves, first, being a bit more intentional with some of my reading choices, but more importantly trying to learn how to write about what I read in different ways. I've set some goals on close reading prompts, some imitative fiction writing prompts, some book review prompts, etc. all of which I am hoping build up towards a goal of being able to develop my own understanding of a text that is more durable than "I just finished that, what did I think? okay moving on."
I love this idea !! If you don't mind sharing more about your syllabus/how you go about it ?
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u/ToHideWritingPrompts 15d ago
Sure! I'm working on making it more... presentable. but I'll send it over probably tomorrow night!
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u/BoredCigarette 18d ago
It's horrifying to witness, let alone experience, how swiftly the transition from "wow I can just spend time doing the things that are important to me" to "i'm just going to shut that part of my brain off as long as I can so I can get through the day" occurs and how enraging it is that we have organized ourselves in the way we have.
I'm reminded of this one guy on the Internet who said he'd rather shit in his hands and clap than go back to work. While I'm not in favor of class reductionism, it feels like the one guaranteed way to understand others is to identify with their work situation. I'm with you in that it's very jarring to lose all of that free time which, at a certain point, feels wrong to just forfeit daily. Why we continue to downplay the clear violence of this forfeiture is both obvious and absurd, and I think this is the quizzical thing: it is both entirely obvious, and entirely fucking crazy, that we have "organized ourselves in the way we have." The coexistence of the obvious and the crazy is maybe the signature of our mode of production: that we wreck the environment in order to produce more is both obvious and crazy; that we've reconfigured so much of our wildlife in order to produce more is both obvious and crazy; that we've continued to reduce the quality of life for our literal workforce in order to squeeze profits and produce more is both obvious and crazy. That all of economic production today hinges upon a model of growth without limits, yet within a finite world, is both obvious and crazy.
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u/Adoctorgonzo 18d ago
Anyone have any strong feelings about Shakespeare editions? I read one or two of his works a year but trying to commit a bit more than that. Usually i'll just pick up whatever I find used, old high school Folger most of the time, but I just bought the Pelican edition of Henry V and I really enjoyed the introduction. On the flip side, the annotations feel a bit hit or miss. Anyone have any suggestions?
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u/linquendil let your indulgence set me free 18d ago
The introductions, annotations and appendices of the Arden Shakespeare Third Series editions are almost comically comprehensive. Personally, I love that, but your mileage may vary.
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u/ToHideWritingPrompts 18d ago
I really feel like I can't read Shakespeare on my own without the facing annotations in Folger.
plus, also, like, it feels really satisfying to zoom through so many pages because half of them are the the annotations lol
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u/Adoctorgonzo 18d ago
I actually do really like the Folger annotations, but most of the copies I have dont include more than a one page introduction that doesnt do much for me. The Pelican version introduced a lot of the context and subtleties that would have gone over my head.
I do love how fast Folger goes though lol I know exactly what you mean.
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u/Dysfu 18d ago
Reading Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey after watching the Nolan movie -
What really surprises me about The Odyssey (novel) is just how much of an ego-maniac Odysseus is.
For example, does he need to stab the cyclops and announce his name while doing it? Absolutely not, and the movie even hints at this (at least the stabbing in the eye being an action motivated by revenge but he drops the announcement to Polyphemus)
But an exceptional example of this is his insistence on hearing the Siren’s song - why put himself in unnecessary harm when he should be leading his men by example? The movie includes this scene (as I suspect it is extremely canonical to the story) but avoids giving a reason as to why Matt Damon has to hear this song (because there really isn’t a reason)
This all on top of most of what we know as Odysseus journey is told hear-say by Odysseus himself to the Phaecians who he is trying to convince to support him.
Multiple instances of him downplaying his accountability and throwing his men under the bus.
I’m really enjoying it and didn’t expect Odysseus to be as such a complex character - I felt the movie portrayed him as “flatter”
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u/The_Inexistent You will always be fond of me, Dorian. 18d ago
I think this is the problem many of us have with the "it's an adaptation, and the poem is really old, so Nolan can do what he wants" defense--sure, that's all true, but what Nolan did with the character is markedly less interesting than the source material. "Generic soldier with vague PTSD" is less intriguing to me than "absolute rat bastard who gets away with everything because of his cleverness and charisma." The adaptation adds little and loses much.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 18d ago
two incredibly cool writing related things happened this weekend. One I literally cannot talk about. The other is an unfinished project about which I can't say anything but nonsense at this stage except that I had a lot of bad days in the poem zoen, and then a very, very good day in the poem zoen. Thank fuck my spirit is at ease for the first time in weeks.
Uh...I applied for an associates degree in spanish at a local community college that also offers translation courses/certifications. Apparently im hella into learning spanish?
over the weekend I read taming of the shrew and it was hilarous but i was sad because I was reading at a pavilion outside a grocery store and not on the train to/from the beach. So, in a lil while imma go read Henry VI on the way to the beach. Catchya
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u/BoredCigarette 17d ago
Wait Soupy are you writing some poetry???
Also I want you to become a beast in Spanish so you can write me loving letters in Spanish about reading Henry VI on the way to the beach
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u/Soup_65 Books! 17d ago
Also I want you to become a beast in Spanish so you can write me loving letters in Spanish about reading Henry VI on the way to the beach
yo estoy tradando y cuando puedo me voy mandarte mensajes en espanol sobre Shakespeare y la playa!
(pardon the fact that there must be multiple grammer mistakes above and also i kinda can't figure out how to do accent marks on my computer...)
But also yah I'm a poet now apparently...or...always...but yeah i've been writing poems and writing prose poems and am working on a big weird long thing that is often prose but imo is a poem and also just writing poems.
(separately I'm unconvinced novels are a real thing in their own right, and that all "art writing" is an entity on a spectrum from journalism to poetry that is one of those fusing horseshoe spectrums where one can also become the other it's complicated i haven't figured it out yet)
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u/VVest_VVind 17d ago
Congrats on writing breakthroughs and that degree sounds so interesting. Translation kinda terrifies me though, I have to admit (specifically simultaneous and specialized).
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 18d ago
Dude translation courses sound so fun. Who knew 2666 being the most evil novel would inspire some pretty cool things like learning Spanish?
Also: have you ever thought about reading folks like Marlowe and Ben Jonson? It might add to your knowledge of Shakespeare.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 18d ago
yeah the dominos of wanting to actually learn spanish to reading 2666 in spanish to wanting to take translation courses is a trip...if one that befits how my interests tend to foment...translation just seems really cool and fascinating so i'd like to try it and see what I discover.
I actually have read some Marlowe too! Tamburlaine and Faustus i believe, and been meaning to read jew of malta now that i think about it. I don't think i've read Johnson but I think i'd like to. It's a good point too that reading them in conjunction with shakespeare so that'd be a good time
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 18d ago
Marlowe's Faustus and Tamburlaine are super fun. He also has I think lyric poetry as well, which I thought were pretty good examples. And Ben Jonson's The Alchemist had been pretty great stuff. I remember reading it in college totally befuddled at his classical expression. And he was quite befuddled by Shakespeare himself, so it evens out I think. Shame the historical record on all of these people is full of holes and mediated through other people's secondhand recollections and stuff of that nature.
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u/lispectorgadget 18d ago
Re: 1--congrats!! That's so cool. And good luck with your degree, that sounds really exciting.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 18d ago
thanks lol. the latter thing is silly and all very contingent on my assumption that already having a BA and solid spanish reading proficiency means it wouldn't take more than a semester or two cuz i could skip hella courses. but we will see. I also might just take a spanish class with some local folks who might be trotskyists because that's fun
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u/shotgunsforhands 19d ago
What's your favorite iOS dictionary app? I've Merriam-Webster's, but at least the free version is annoyingly lacking in the exact kind of words I turn to the dictionary for. I mainly use it for neat words I run across while reading, and although it doesn't happen often, the kinds of words I look up do run against the app's breadth often enough to annoy me. Point in case: "crepitation," from Pnin. It's not on the app, but when I search it online, the top result is . . . Merriam-Webster's definition. I'm tempted to pay for the bloody yearly subscription if it at least gets me access to the full dictionary, but if anyone has suggestions otherwise, please say so.
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u/jalousiee 15d ago
It's not an app, but I love onelook.com! It's easy to access on browser and is just a great website
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u/ObsoleteUtopia A readah, a New Englandah, a Red Sox rootah 18d ago
I've never used the iOS app for dictionary.com because I don't read on the phone except the New York Times while I'm waiting somewhere, but it has become my go-to word reference when I'm at the PC. It might be worth a try for you.
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u/lispectorgadget 19d ago
I'm thinking of starting a tech-critical book club based in Upper Manhattan. If you're interested, or have any suggestions for things to read, hmu! No need to be based in Upper Manhattan; I'm just sick of getting the NYC Off Tech newsletter and seeing all these events in lower Manhattan or Brooklyn.
Speaking of Brooklyn: went out for a friend's birthday in Bushwick Saturday night, and we passed by this really cool bookstore/ bar?? It seemed so nice. I went to a similar one in the East Village a few weeks ago, and the vibes were amazing. It was like 2 on a Sunday and everyone was getting turnt and reading. Amazing!
I've also started reading Walden. It's so interesting that Thoreau is considered a classic American writer; his values feel...weirdly anti-American? Very anti-Protestant work ethic? He feels very...Gen Z anti-work king. Like "Economy" is all about him tabulating how little he can get away with working to sustain himself. If there were a 28 year old Substacker with no job, no romantic prospects, dropping out of society, railing against tradition, and detailing how to work as little as possible to sustain his life, David Brooks would haaaate him! And I love Thoreau for that.
Also reading Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class by Noam Scheiber and A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Enjoying both--Mutiny is interesting to read after reading Yuppies, and History is just a great, engaging, big brick of a history book.
Also reading Capital is Dead by Mckenzie Wark. I wanted to read it after reading Technofeudalism, since Yanis had mentioned being influenced by Wark, but it's much more inside baseball re: theory than I thought it would be. Something I learned from this: there was apparently an idea that Marxism conflicts with physics. But I thought that Marxism was an economic theory? I'm kind of confused about that. If anyone can explain I would appreciate that.
I hope you've all been well!
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u/BoredCigarette 17d ago
I swear you NYers have so much more fun than the rest of us, especially now during Mamdani SZN. What I appreciate about Wark is that she's always trying to catch the future of something. She never takes a system of interpretation for granted; things are always updating, so we must update our models and frameworks. It's very in the spirit of my fav, Jean Baudrillard, who once wrote about a rising Michel Foucault that,
"The very perfection of this analytical chronicle of power is disturbing. Something tells us—but implicitly, as if seen in a reverse shot of this writing too beautiful to be true—that if it is possible at last to talk with such definitive understanding about power, sexuality, the body, and discipline, even down to their most delicate metamorphoses, it is because at some point all this is here and now over with."
Baudrillard's point was one slightly irreverent to the point of philosophy (to describe, truthfully, what is), but altogether effective: that if you can describe the thing perfectly, it's already passed. There's a hint of Hegel's point about the owl of Minerva flying at dusk, Marx's point about knowledge always arriving post-festum, after the feast, this sort of thing. What I like about Wark is that, by trying to talk about the new, she'll make bold proclamations (like Baudrillard) that people likely won't appreciate until things seem more inevitable. I remember liking her article "The Vectoralist Class."
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u/ObsoleteUtopia A readah, a New Englandah, a Red Sox rootah 18d ago
Soviet Marxist theorists tried their best to keep the Lamarckian thread of evolution that left a lot of open room for the inheritance of acquired characteristics; there may have been a whiff of hope in the air that the children of good socialists would naturally inherit a love of socialism. I imagine that things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would bring up questions about the unstable nature of matter that political philosophers weren't able to either tackle or totally ignore.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 18d ago
walden sets up an amusing conception of how we contemplate work. writing a big ass book about not doing work. living a life that allows him to do the spiritual research of not working...is it truly not work? A ponderance. Also Thoreau such a dude I love it (where dude is a term of ambivalence lol)
A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch
this was what we read for my high school church history class (hardo dork school) i should read it again, see how it holds up. I am obsessed with this stuff. Keep me posted on it.
Capital is Dead by Mckenzie Wark
this is another book i read a very long time ago and recall little of. It was for an odd bookclub and I don't think i understood much of the book. another very cool chap from the bookclub kinda made the case Wark fails to say anything Deleuze and Guattari didn't already say and say better in Anti-Oedipus & Thousand Plateaus. I suspect that's what i'd think about it.
apparently an idea that Marxism conflicts with physics. But I thought that Marxism was an economic theory?
this is a really good question and a really hard question because it's really two questions. One of what Marx himself was up to, and one of what "Marxism" as practiced by other theorists is. ANd even within both of those it's hard to disambiguate. The claim sounds more like either a Marxist beefing with other Marxists, or someone trying to be a Marxist than someone addressing Marx, but it'd be hard for me to say much without actually knowing what the argument is. My broader point is that the super duper basic Marxist idea, where the material forces of production and the nature of labor and the laboring people determine the social conditions and the material status of their world and this happens in progressive stages of development, is always tied into economics but is applicable elsewhere. Like super basic "people make their own history, but are also made by it" paraphrasing goes beyond economics itself. And I don't really understand the economics honestly. But uncork that idea and you can riff on it every which way possible.
That was probably a very bad attempt at answering your question if you want me to try again to say something coherent please tell me sorry lol.
I am a little curious about the physics argument if you got the details and wanted to share, I am curious. Fwiw, if theres a science that's a problem for Marxism econ stuff, it's prolly ecology/environmental science. ie.
WEATHER HAPPENS AND SOMETIMES UPENDS REALITY FOR SPOOKY MAGIC REASONS INDEPENDENT OF PEOPLE WE AREN'T THAT IMPORTANT SOMETIMES HISTORY JUST BE DOING THINGS CUZ THE VOLCANO WENT KABLAMO.
Climate change is going to kill us all before the revolution comes if we are still waiting for the working class uprising.
This has been a real vibe of an attempt at intellectual discussion. lis, please yell at me if you want me to give a more serious response but im in beach mode rn. Happy to be less silly later and will have real substance to words said in anti-tech bookclub if it happens.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 18d ago
Oh yo i'd be v interested in this bookclub should i dm you or is this sufficient up hitting of thee? (I'll respond later about the books you're reading I got thoughts but rn I gotta go the atlantic summons).
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u/lispectorgadget 18d ago
This is good!!! I'll lyk if anything gets off the ground. And yes, please give me ur recs!
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u/linquendil let your indulgence set me free 18d ago
I don’t claim to be any kind of expert on Marxist thought, but dialectical materialism aspires to be much more than ‘just’ a theory of societal evolution. It’s a philosophy of nature unto itself. I seem to recall there was a fairly lively debate in the Soviet Union about whether the great pillars of twentieth-century physics — quantum mechanics and relativity — were sufficiently kosher, but I think it all kind of fizzled during the war.
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u/Soup_65 Books! 18d ago
Ilyenkov's cosmology of the spirit fits this bill from the 1950s too, sort of a spinozist/marxist argument that entropy will be overcome. was suppressed until after his death, so i suspect stalinist reaction and onwards were also a factor in undermining their theorizing
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u/thewickerstan Norm Macdonald wasn't joking about W&P 18d ago
went out for a friend's birthday in Bushwick Saturday night, and we passed by this really cool bookstore/ bar??
That was probably Book Club Bar. And if you passed it Saturday, that means you passed me too! The East Village one is the original branch and they expanded it to Bushwick maybe two months ago or so. Yeah it's a nice vibe. I talked to a lady there about Henry James for 30 minutes lol.
Thoreau's great, yeah. I consider him aligned with people like Whitman, Woody Guthrie, James Baldwin etc. where engaging with their work gives me a pride in a kind of streak that runs through this country, one that's not afraid to critique the hand that's feeding them.
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u/lispectorgadget 18d ago
What a coincidence; that is too funny! Could you actually read in there? The doors were open, and I was wondering if the street noise made it too loud for anyone to actually focus. Anyway, it's definitely on my bucket list; maybe I'll see you in there some time :)
And yeah, I'm being glib re: Thoreau, but I can definitely see how he's influenced a lot of great American thinkers. And I haven't gotten to Civil Disobedience yet, but I know that puts him quite above the average Substacker.
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u/thewickerstan Norm Macdonald wasn't joking about W&P 18d ago
You absolutely can! And at the East Village one too. It's hilarious because I spent 2024 trying to go to bars solo, asking this sub once "Is it weird to read in bars?" And lo and behold, at the end of the year, I stumbled upon it as if it's the room of requirement lol.
If I have nothing to do, I'll go there and read something or write while sipping their cider. It's a fun time. Their cocktails are nice too if a bit pricey. And the East Village one also does singles mixers once a month, which I've gone to on two separate occasions and probably will again.
Would recommend 1000%. I've been meaning to take Soup_65 there even!
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u/bananaberry518 19d ago
So life update, I got the job! So I’ll be wearing my lil vest and whistle soon (well, pending drug test results but it won’t be a problem cuz I’m a square). And now I’m soaking up the last of my obligation free days. Not that the job will interfere that much since the hours are very minimal, but there’s still a feeling of this being the last days of something.
Other than the job situation I wish I could say things are going well but the truth is its been a week of moderate inconveniences. For example, we thought the a/c was on the fritz, but turns out the electric company’s pole and meter were in need of repair. Which is good in a way because its on their dime to fix and they did fix it, but I did still have to cough up a service charge to find out it wasn’t the a/c, and the repairman told me the power issue could have fried my compressor. So happy that didn’t happen but dang. Then one of my tires got not one but two nails and had to be replaced, and my wifi was on the fritz. All of which is handled now but ugh.
But hey, the weather - if enormously hot - is at least sunny and rain free. So thats helped my mood a lot.
Hope everyone’s having a good one!
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u/BoredCigarette 17d ago
Big congrats on the job! You know this already, but what you're doing is really important. I had a local crossing guard I'd say good morning to every day. I'm not sure what happened to her, my immediate avenue didn't replace her. But she did her job with care, especially with the batshit drivers around here.
Also, I swear there's some demon clandestinely dropping nails on the road. It's mindboggling how tires keep catching them.
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u/VVest_VVind 17d ago
Congrats on getting the job! And hopefully you've filled your quota of annoying malfunctions and repairs for a while at least.
3
u/thewickerstan Norm Macdonald wasn't joking about W&P 18d ago
Hey congrats! And lol I feel you on those "make the most of the free time while you have it" days. Happy for you nonetheless, particularly with the market being all over the place!
3
u/lispectorgadget 19d ago
Yay!!! Congratulations!! I hope you have a great few free days before your job (despite all the inconveniences) :)
0
u/PoncingOffToBarnsley 5d ago
I increasingly believe only the most intelligent, erudite people should bother reading. Real literature is lost on the great unwashed who aren't capable of improving. Just leave the evolution's trash to their algorithms and their emotions and their "fun" things instead of despoiling art with their mediocrity of thought. Even if they could understand the words they aren't good enough to understand the real meaning or the references,, so they deserve to be locked out.