ClumsyMonkey.net

I just finished Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and I can't stop mentally superimposing Nadsat in everyday conversation. It's bezoomny.

I'm reading Dracula

i'm reading empire by orson scott card. it's about terrorists and the american military and a conspiracy by the american government to set up a civil war in america, and i'm not sure if i like it yet or not.

'I Am America (And So Can You!)' by Stephen Colbert.

Orson Scott Card = bigot.


I'm trying to finish up Catch-22, The Minister's Wooing, and I have to start Uncle Tom's Cabin for tomorrow afternoon.

What I WANT to be reading right now is the new Yasmina Khadra book, Sirens of Baghdad. Damnit I love that man.

Did you hit your goal of reading like 50 books this year?

right now i'm reading charle's dickens' 'hard times', chretian de troyes' arthurian romances, ken babstock's 'airstream land yacht', eugene ionesco's 'rhinoceros', and when i get the chance i want to start jacques poulin's 'volkswagon blues'...probably not till the semester's over, though.

i'm really diggin everything i'm reading right now, and i'm excited to get to see a performance of rhinoceros next week, though the performance will be in english, and i'm reading it in french.

I'm still reading Dracula

Kicker774 wrote:Did you hit your goal of reading like 50 books this year?

Nope, I'm only about halfway there. Unfortunately I just don't have the time anymore to catch up.

beautiful liar wrote:right now i'm reading charle's dickens' 'hard times', chretian de troyes' arthurian romances, ken babstock's 'airstream land yacht', eugene ionesco's 'rhinoceros', and when i get the chance i want to start jacques poulin's 'volkswagon blues'...probably not till the semester's over, though.

Chretien de Troyes is amazing Are you reading him for a class? I took an entire class on Arthurian Romance and so I have the complete de Troyes book. It's awesome

i'm reading him for my medieval comparative lit. class ... i love arthurian romance. i'm writing my essay on how chivalry evovled from the germanic tradition of comitatus merging with christianity. i'm super excited about this paper...and kind of neglecting my other work

i think in grad school i'm going to focus on medieval period literature...i just love it!

what else did you read in your arthurian class? mallory? sir gawain and the green knight?

Yep, we read both of those, as well as some other stuff...I have the books around here somewhere but it was about three years ago or so and I don't remember everything. I love the literature of the period. You sound a lot like my teacher, he's a Medieval freak and I LOVE it. I love it too, but I think I love classical literature as a whole - Ancient Greek and Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantics...all of it. Right now I'm working on an argument that modern science fiction is a scholarly genre because of how heavily it draws on classical literature such as Chaucer and Keats and Shakespeare and even Ancient Greek literature, and mythology that no one really knows about. Science fiction and fantasy are mostly just brushed off as an "entertainment" genre, when in fact most of it is relevant to the study of classical literature and even the study of our own time.

yeah, so i like stephen king a lot.

i'm gonna go over into this corner and feel really stupid for a bit, ok?

I like a couple of the Bachman Books (Rage and The Long Walk), but the books under his own name I'm not a fan of.

myownsatellite wrote:Yep, we read both of those, as well as some other stuff...I have the books around here somewhere but it was about three years ago or so and I don't remember everything. I love the literature of the period. You sound a lot like my teacher, he's a Medieval freak and I LOVE it. I love it too, but I think I love classical literature as a whole - Ancient Greek and Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantics...all of it. Right now I'm working on an argument that modern science fiction is a scholarly genre because of how heavily it draws on classical literature such as Chaucer and Keats and Shakespeare and even Ancient Greek literature, and mythology that no one really knows about. Science fiction and fantasy are mostly just brushed off as an "entertainment" genre, when in fact most of it is relevant to the study of classical literature and even the study of our own time.

oooh, interesting subject these days i'm digging tolkein's treatment of epics, particularly beowulf, in light of his huge contributions to the fantasy genre. i was particularly tickled to find out that he tried to write in the alliterative half-line style of germanic poetry.

science fiction does often get short-changed, though the occassional author gets through to be held as a literary success (some of ursula le guin's work, for instance, or margaret atwood); i have seen it said that they reach that status "despite" writing science fiction. you know, my college does not have a single course that deals with science fiction, and york has only one that i know of 'apocalyptic science fiction' which i haven't had the ability to take. i'd be interested in getting an 'academic' perspective on it, though.

I actually want to get my PhD in science fiction. How awesome would that be? Another sci-fi writer who has really hit it big is Dan Simmons - he's immensely popular for just about all of his work, but I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that he's a cross-genre author. He's written just about everything under the sun - historical fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, horror, mystery, you name it he's written it. He's actually the main focus of my paper - he draws on Keats, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Teilhard, Jack Vance (who is another critically acclaimed sci-fi writer even more famous than Simmons), and so so many other people. Then there's Robert Holdstock who blends fantasy and horror so well - I hate reading horror because I'm a squeamish person but I read his books because they're JUST SO GOOD. He actually has a character in one of his books named John Gaunt, which is SUCH a play on John of Gaunt, one of Chaucer's very good friends. I still haven't found the connection but that's just because I don't know much about the real John of Gaunt except that his wife died unexpectedly and he was heartbroken over it. Which I guess could be said for John Gaunt in Holdstock, because his whole life is consumed by a search for a long-lost city, to the point of obsession and I think his ultimate death (or disappearance - I haven't finished the book yet). And in The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer makes the argument that you can't mourn (search) for someone forever - that there's a limit to your mourning and that after a while you have to pick up and move on.

...Wow, I totally didn't mean to make that so long. But that actually just helped me shape part of my argument. Cool

Oh, and also - every now and then they offer a SF course here at my school - Dr. Simon teaches it, and I got to take it when I was a senior so that was exciting. We actually did a lot with the intertextuality of SF which really helped get me further into these ideas. Dr. Simon is our resident SF buff, so it's cool to talk to him about stuff like that. I'm hoping that when I do have a class of my own they'll let me teach an entire course of F/SF. That's what I want to be known for

laurel wrote:yeah, so i like stephen king a lot.

i'm gonna go over into this corner and feel really stupid for a bit, ok?

Steven King is the wealthiest, most adapted and best selling current day author for a reason!

No reason to go into the corner and feel stupid. He's a genius.

he also manages to link characters and references together from book to book, even when seemingly unrelated, (such as the small referrals to the phrase rooty-toot) or even when obviously related (using the same town with the same characters, albeit in smaller parts depending on the story) and then linking them allllll together in a massive story (the dark tower series).

seriously, read every single one of his books in the right order, and the amount of references to other books are insane. even short stories tie into the books. but they can all be read on their own. the man's a genius for being able to keep track of everything...it makes the books seem like parts of a whole, instead of just random novels he churned out...

the literary critics absolutely destroy him...but god, that man has one of the greatest minds of our time...and his writing, although nothing special to the literary snobs, is something you can actually connect to. he can create a scene like no one else...in Gerald's Game, he describes a woman slicing the skin on her wrist with a piece of glass so that she can escape a handcuff, and she ends up essentially skinning her hand. he described it in such perfect detail that i damn near passed out. i've never been that affected by an actual real visual, but he described it so that it made me nauseous and dizzy. that's talent.

so. in other words.
some people may read big books with fancy language written by dead guys. i read big books with boring language written by stephen king, and they're one hell of a good time.

literary critics know as much about books as movie critics know about movies... so essentially nothing... it's all just opinions, some valid, most not so valid...

but hey, some of the dead guys are pretty damn good too! they use fancy language!

myownsatellite wrote:Oh, and also - every now and then they offer a SF course here at my school - Dr. Simon teaches it, and I got to take it when I was a senior so that was exciting. We actually did a lot with the intertextuality of SF which really helped get me further into these ideas. Dr. Simon is our resident SF buff, so it's cool to talk to him about stuff like that. I'm hoping that when I do have a class of my own they'll let me teach an entire course of F/SF. That's what I want to be known for

that would be an awesome course to get to teach. i think doing a course tracing fantasy from the middle ages to modernity would be fun to do, it could even focus specifically on the epic genre. i'd also like to explore the epic genre in relation to comic books hmm. i haven't read any robert holdstock, but from what you're saying it sounds like it might be worthwhile to check out his stuff.


about stephen king...i dig the way he promotes short-stories. not enough big name authors give back to the literary community that gave rise to them that way. i haven't read a huge number of his books, because horror is not a genre i'm particularly fond of (i'm way too squeamish too), but what i have read (Cujo, Salem's Lot) were intriguing, and absorbing.