Literary confessions.

[chequita guevara]

Kant is down wit' da homies, G!

[lord of the mark]

Flanery O'Connor. Picked up "everything that rises must converge" It was painful, very painful. Made it through the first two stories, IIRC. By sheer willpower. Give me Tolstoy over this any day.

[Elok]

The thing is, Citizen Kane was groundbreaking in terms of technique, I know, but there's not much to like about it. Not only is Kane himself a ****, some of it is so overdone it induces vomiting. Like the part where the reporter puts this sensitive look on his face and says, "I don't think there's any one word that can sum up a man's entire life." Ooh, aren't we profound. What a lot of high-art jerking-off. Even A Beautiful Mind was less guilty. The only thing I liked about CK was what my film teacher told me about the double meanings in it-apparently, Welles gossiped with some of Hearst's old friends. "Rosebud" was Hearst's pet name for his mistress's clitoris, apparently. I have to admit, it takes guts to deliberately PO one of the most powerful men in America that way, even if it is stupid.

And the Stranger...meh. I felt no reason to care what happened at all. It was just this ineffectual French loser who didn't care for his mother, stumbling around northern Africa banging some chick from his office, dodging commitment to her and everyone else, and shooting a random Arab. He was completely spineless and reprehensible. I couldn't even hate him like I hated Holden, I just wanted the stupid book to end so my English class could go on to something interesting.

Maybe there was a point somewhere in there, but as Mersault barely even acted human it's hard to feel that anything he did could be applicable to our lives. Maybe I just got a bad translation, but even the prose was mediocre. Some parts were good, sort of, but overall it was like a manic-depressive trying to imitate Hemingway more than anything else.

[chequita guevara]

Why would you read The Stranger for an English class? Isn't it French lit?

[Elok]

Yes, but this was high school English class, we'd read anything that was on the approved list even if it was not, originally, English. We read Candide too and I liked that, so I'm ambivalent on that particular policy.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Elok
The thing is, Citizen Kane was groundbreaking in terms of technique, I know, but there's not much to like about it. Not only is Kane himself a ****, some of it is so overdone it induces vomiting. Like the part where the reporter puts this sensitive look on his face and says, "I don't think there's any one word that can sum up a man's entire life." Ooh, aren't we profound. What a lot of high-art jerking-off. Even A Beautiful Mind was less guilty. The only thing I liked about CK was what my film teacher told me about the double meanings in it-apparently, Welles gossiped with some of Hearst's old friends. "Rosebud" was Hearst's pet name for his mistress's clitoris, apparently. I have to admit, it takes guts to deliberately PO one of the most powerful men in America that way, even if it is stupid.

Reported said a hackneyed thing - well of course, cause he's like a REPORTER - and a hackneyed, Time reporter working for Luce, not the kinda guy whoda worked for Hearst. The whole "play within the play" thing, the Time style documentary is a profoundly ironic - since it represents jus the kind of journalism that was taking over from Hearsts style. I dont think the Time folks are meant to speak for Welles. And the guts to PO Hearts - well thats what its all about - a constant wink, a satire and a psychoanalysis on a guy so big. I dont know, i just find it very watchable.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Elok
And the Stranger...meh. I felt no reason to care what happened at all. It was just this ineffectual French loser who didn't care for his mother, stumbling around northern Africa banging some chick from his office, dodging commitment to her and everyone else, and shooting a random Arab. He was completely spineless and reprehensible. I couldn't even hate him like I hated Holden, I just wanted the stupid book to end so my English class could go on to something interesting.

Maybe there was a point somewhere in there, but as Mersault barely even acted human it's hard to feel that anything he did could be applicable to our lives. Maybe I just got a bad translation, but even the prose was mediocre. Some parts were good, sort of, but overall it was like a manic-depressive trying to imitate Hemingway more than anything else.

I surely didnt read it for anything applicable to my life. IIRC (and its been a LONG time) It was a very striking portrait of numbness and rootlessness. I could be misremembering, but i dont think so.

[Elok]

Wait a minute, I thought Hearst made his fortune with trashy yellow-journalism papers like the NY Post. Wouldn't smarmy crap like that be right up Hearst's alley?

Mersault was rootless, yes, but that's precisely why I didn't care about him. If such a person as him did exist IRL, it might in fact be kindest to send him to the chair or whatever it was that offed him in the end. I'd call him a sociopath, except sociopaths tend to have charm and ambition, he just shambled down the path of least resistance. He basically wasn't even a human, just a dumb animal going to its preordained fate.

There was nothing in the story to strike my interest precisely because I could see nothing of myself or anyone I knew in the main characters. In good fiction, you have a reason to care what happens because the characters mean something to you. Even if they're nothing like you there's something in their situation that compels you to read on, because you feel something for their plight. But Mersault is entirely reactive, sitting around in a pathetic situation he might easily have avoided had he possessed a soul.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Elok
Wait a minute, I thought Hearst made his fortune with trashy yellow-journalism papers like the NY Post. Wouldn't smarmy crap like that be right up Hearst's alley?

different kinda crap - trashy yellow journalism vs Timese slickness and pretense.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


different kinda crap - trashy yellow journalism vs Timese slickness and pretense. Read some Time back issues from the '30s, 40s, 50s.

Oh, and the NY Post in those days was a respectable workmans paper, leaning liberal. Never a Hearst paper, IIUC.

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by alva
Crime and punishment should be at leasr 200 pages shorter, it might be even good then, Tolstoy is decent thoughI never got around reading his major works(and never will).

Totally agree about Crime and Punishment. I find his other books are also fairly bad at keeping me interested. They could lose some description as well.

I've never read Tolstoy, mostly because his books are about thing I have no interest in reading about, and partly because they're far too long.

Anything written by a Brontë is tedious. Actually, anything written by a Victorian-era woman is tedious.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is excessively long-winded.

Catcher in the Rye was just pointless. Boy gets expelled again, ****s around, goes home. My give-a-**** is broken. My disaffection was with adolescents, not adolescence.

Moby Dick took me four attempts.

I have read woefully little Dickens.

[Tuberski]

My confession? I haven't read most of the books mentioned here.

My other confession? Most of these books mentioned seem to be books people read so that they can say they read them.

However, I have read every Bloom County anthology ever published.

ACK!

[Agathon]

I've read most of them.

Try reading classics.

[Zkribbler]

Re: Literary confessions.

Originally posted by Elok
Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have never read Dostoevsky, even though I know I should. No Tolstoy either.

Never read either author. A former girlfriend majored in Russian literature...does that count?

Citizen Kane = garbage.

I burned Atlas Shrugged. It wasn't censorship; it was revenge for having been forced to read it.

Washington Irving couldn't write for nothin' :shame.
Hated Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Moby Dick defeated me.

To Kill a Mockingbird.
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Mark Twain
Kafka = okay.
Scarlet Pimpernel
Bram Stroker's Dracula
Frankenstein

[Verto]

Originally posted by Ramo


LOTR is ****e (granted, I stopped reading after Fellowship). Some interesting linguistics, but the only decent thing about it.

/me faints.

How can you say such hateful things?