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Seven of the top ten books of all time are by Ayn Rand or L. Ron Hubbard... who knew?
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Glad we were able to clear this up so quickly.
My opinion is that it is impossible to get excited about Ulysses by yourself. The motherfucker is so impenetrable and unreadable, the only reason you could possibly want to read it is in order to talk about its preposterous density of layered meaning with other people who want to do the same.
If you absolutely must climb the Everest that is Ulysses, take a class or start a book club. Otherwise, your only hope of finishing it lies in your being a person of Herculean will, with the power to slog through some of the most opaque arrangement of words the English language has ever seen for its own sake: if such people exist, I have not met a single one to date.
That's pretty much exactly why I have tried to do it twice.
I have really no literary friends, nor people to discuss it with aside from this fine audience here, which seems to be comprised of people far smarter and well-read.
When I took my course on Ulysses, I wrote my final paper/presentation on a couple of different techniques that I found used throughout; one of them was an effect I called "time dilation". There is this thing that happens all over in Ulysses where you get bombarded with description of various things... it's kind of like the literary equivalent of bullet time, you fly around through these different scenes and get closeups of this that or the other, and then you take a step back and realize that a fraction of a second, or a handful of seconds have passed in the book, while you've read 3-5 pages of material.
Well, it turns out this is a thing that actually happens in the motherfucking Odyssey. It's no where near as pronounced or protracted as it is in Ulysses, but you do have moments where a character will arrive somewhere and you get sort of a birds eye veiw that goes on for stanzas, telling you all about this place before the narrative loops back around to whomever it started the description with; the professor called it "ring composition".
I just thought it was pretty incredible that Joyce would go so far as to incorporate literary techniques so specific to the Odyssey in Ulysses; so much was made in that class of plot points that correspond to plot points in the Odyssey, characters that correspond to characters, and a lot of the physical make-up of the poem, but nobody talked about anything in terms of technique and devices. Kind of makes me wish I wasn't separated from my first reading of the Odyssey by four years when I took that Ulysses class, I could have written a much more directed and focused paper. =P
Jesus, I'm a nerd.
Good luck to you. As much fun as I had in that class, actually reading the book was a fucking nightmare.
Yeah, its certainly something to just experience it at face value.
Next time I might grab one of the annotated versions and actually learn wtf is going on.
So I guess technically I've read Ulysses three times, really.
There is definitely some interesting stuff in Ulysses. I got caught up in the cycle of life, death and decay. I felt like that was one of the topics that really bound the book together and it was already a big part of my outlook on life. I wrote a paper teasing that theme out of Hades, and I really enjoyed writing it.
The Nationalism stuff was the most frustrating for me, and the Irish politics sort of just washed over me as something that, while important, I just was not into.
That's the shittiest part about Ulysses, it's so hard to follow that ultimately almost none of it is memorable.
But aren't Objectivists supposed to believe in the Invisible Hand of the Free Market? To let the great consuming masses reward the worthy and punish the unworthy with their wallets? Or internet poll votes?
Not that I'm surprised Objectivists are hypocrites, but how do they deal with the cognitive dissonance?
By... being... hypocrites?
Any Objectivists I've met aren't self-aware enough to even notice any contradiction there
But in reality they'd probably just see it as a "the masses have spoken" event.
I like Orwell.
"And he said that the last time he had shown it to a publisher in New York, he walked into the office to find out what the reaction was, the publisher called for the reader, the reader came in with the manuscript, threw it on the table and threw himself out of the skyscraper window."
That is one hardcore critic.
the amount some authors that can put into a single poem?
holy fuck
all those constraints to put in so much depth
I kind of want to stab this book in the throat
any major dude will tell you
here's everything in this building block off some things
make a life form that's absurdly complex from some coffee
our a computer! bunch of binary switches
the complexity from small constraints and form restrictions is amazing
Its an internet poll, right? I mean, the masses have spoken.
The masses of people who are the types to vote on an internet poll, at least.
well fucking said
I'm not a huge poetry fan
but you're a classy man, Zenny
I don't know, there are some parts that I will remember for quite a while that are outside of my specific interests. It's really dense though, I cannot fault anyone that has a hard time remembering stuff that they did not work on directly.
Having now read a little bit of Finnegans Wake I can honestly say that my interest is piqued, but fucking James Joyce man, that dude had some crazy shit going on in his brain.
It's one of the reason I'm not a fan of the no-conventions "do whatever I want" stream of consciousness poetry that seems to be so popular with modernists.
You took all the poetry out of poetry, you assholes.
Man was good at what he did.
He had a pretty giant ego about it, but he was good at his video game, no mistake.
Well, yeah, but normally the masses "speaking" other than through their wallets runs contrary to objectivist mentality.
Similar sorts of lists that come up with things they don't like tend to garner "liberal media telling us what we're supposed to like" type responses.
Saying "this is good, and so ought to be supported" is, like, the exact thing Rand hated. Collectively saying (either through formal or informal means) "Objectivist literature is good so you should all buy and/or read it" is pretty hypocritical. According to their own doctrine, if it's really so good, it'll succeed on its own.
These people are out of their minds.
Literally exactly the same as Christians who don't go to the doctor because God will heal them.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/426125/may-07-2013/promposals
the main reason I gave up on Infinite Jest was because it had taken me three months to read three hundred pages, but I really liked those three hundred pages! it just really slowed me down
also I have never been more grateful for the inbuilt dictionary on the kindle
I won't fault anybody who gives up on Infinite Jest, but I got to a point quickly - a single passage, even - where I realized there's no way I'd be able to walk away from it unfinished.
They're a cult, as well. They just mistakenly believe they aren't in a cult.
Unless a movie they created fails financially. Then they blame society for being "moochers."
I'd just like to apologize in advance for any attempts to light anyone on fire as a consequence.
Thinking of similar decisions I don't regret, though?
You know who rules?
Tolstoy.
I mean, I don't think there's anyone else like him. Every other classic novel I've read past a certain length, it's filled with cruft. Good cruft, sometimes. Like, Dostoyevsky? The man could write cruft that's better than the centerpiece of some pretty good books. But he still tangented. Like crazy.
War and Peace? It was focused. This was a novel that earned every sentence of its length.
Well worth the effort.
You are truly a joy sir. I agree fully.
Like in high-school I had a hard time with Grapes Of Wrath and a tale of two cities. Looking back,I enjoyed both books, but man were they hard to read at first.
Now Catcher in the Rye, I dunno, I just hate Holden so much
Would this be something people would be interested in?
Bro you are conflating plot with the "point" of a book, which is stone-cold silly.
In Brothers Karamazov, the plot is the "cruft." Wide-scoped conversations about faith, good, evil, nature, nurture, life, death, greed, lust, love? THOSE are the point.
Humanity ain't got focus, and Dostoevsky's goal was (often) to capture humanity in all its unfocused, messy glory, and try to fix it.
Yes, one of my my mythology classes we discussed this at length, and literary bullet time is a great way to describe it. A few other books do it, but I think more should. It's like a Zac Morris time out and I feel it's a good representation of the millions of things that go through your head at any given time. But you have to be careful, to much of it and your just rambling on about crap
I'd be way into that