compliment accepted. By the way, I have never more than glanced over Burroughs works aside from some poemish short stories I found on my pop's bookshelf a decade ago. I really just like him as personality and I adore his delivery on the Priest They Called Him, but his writing is a bit drab, cliche even.



agreed, I am way into short stories, because aside from dense, 500 page history monographs, I can't seem to muster up the attention to finish anything more than 150 pages, so collections of short stories are my thing lately. I really really liked The Great Wall of China, and I couldn't stop laughing at the Village Schoolmaster. The Problem of Our Laws is very much akin to the Elizabethan extreme satire which fit the rather gruesome and insensitive era of that time when death and suffering were a bit more commonplace and even public spectacle (today that would be seriously distasteful even in Europe ;) )

No one wants to discuss Gabriel Garcia Marquez? That man is a beast of psychedelic satire, he is like a story telling Carl Jung with the passion and emotive adeptness of a true Latin American. Also, anyone else read any Patrick Suskind?

First I read some book (I don´t remember the name) there were short stories. I think it was quite good, I liked a lot a tale there was woman who accidentally fell into mental hospital. But his classic One hundred years of solitude...It was ok, but there was times that I felt quite bored. So I wondered why it is said classic. Maybe it was my life situation and I should read it again someday.

I have thought I should read more "other world" literature. I have read some book from some African country that was quite good, but now I don´t even remember the name of the writer, tough she was African. I have read many reviews for example Indian writers and the books have seemed to be interesting.

literature fans what you think of this
some writing of me
it's about of falling a sleep and getting into your dream (that part)
euhhm
euhmm
here it comes......




and from my imagination
i drift into my dreams

the dreamscape opens up
it sez nevermind
there is nothing to follow
there is only you
the silence of beyond
makes me lay down
on a cold dark surface
somewhere and nowhere
clouds of all pigments
drif into the open black sky
it's soo beautifull
that i can't close my eyes
it's starts to rain
all that is coming down
falling into my eyes
like meteorites forming life on a new planet
the sea washes inside
washes the darkness of the animal
makes it breaths out like a volcano
leaving a stain on the surface
that flows away
further and further
forming the edge of blindness

Strained similes like a tea cheapskate.

what???
do i hear some critic on my master work
you all should be glad that i bring this out here on sonic gossip

id like to but im swamped with work these days

maybe some day over beers and your californian pakalolo

GGM rules

i can almost hear demonrail scream magical realism!

Noone writes to the Colonel and other short stories!

There are several major motifs regarding modernism and the urbanization experience in Latin America that underline One Hundred Years of Solitude. The major characters, the Buendia family, can represent the different countries and their primate cities in South America, each suffering from various passions, triumphs and downfalls in their pursuit of modernization. Initially, modernization is portrayed from a fanciful child-like perspective. This interpretation gives a glimpse into the bizarreness of the experience of modernizing for Latin Americans, just as the experience of children can be like an unexplainable fantasy. Everything had to be explained, as it does with a child looking through fresh and inexperienced eyes. For Garcia-Marquez, the people of Macondo are often bewildered at the experience of change and development as their world became modern. He himself claimed that he never learned anything after the age of eight. He uses wondrous and stupefying imagery while often portraying his characters with the whimsical temperaments of children. the sources of modernization are portrayed as savage gypsies to take away from the dignity and seriousness of the process. Further, indigenousness and primitivism is deeply romanticized through out the novel, from the maddening of Jose Arcadio Buendia until his body emitted the smell of mushrooms and the forest, the abnormal extraordinariness of the Buendia descendents in relation to their inbreeding of indigenous stock, and especially the more distantly related and earth eating Rebecca. Rebecca’s experience through out the novel is a personification of the Latin American mestizo experience of mix-race identity, attempting to merge indigenous culture with European customs. As Macondo modernizes into the Victorian era, she becomes a proper socialite, however secretly she continues to fight her addiction to the earth. Her soil eating addiction is symbolic of the modernizing Latin American’s desire to return to the past, to the indigenous, to the primordial sources of humanity juxtapose the startlingly dispiriting modern world. Garcia-Marquez writes, “little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food.”

suchfriends, your interpretation is completely arbitrary (and therefore wrong), but it's ok, at least you're reading it, which is what counts.

hey, here's something you will enjoy if you like reading gabo.

http://www.amazon.com/olor-guayaba-S.../dp/968132546X

it's superfuckinghighly entertaining.

i'd like to get into kafka too but another time maybe if this thread survives.

ps shaka moloch great mark twain post

I read the Man with Enormus WIngs....and well...the story itself didn't impress me much.

that is not true at all, but you are of course entirely free to your opinion, though in all honesty, we have completely difference tastes when it comes to latin american literature, as you and I already disagree about Octavio Paz..

please explain to me how my interpretation is either arbitrary or wrong?

I'm rereading a Clive Barker novel, Sacrament. When I first read it a decade ago I enjoyed it thoroughly, but did not fully get it as I do where I am it in life. It is surprisingly insightful and deep. It seems very much autobiographical, I also didn't notice the connection to homosexual culture and monastics in the "nuclear family" and "genetic posterity" sense, which is why Barker drew on religious motifs several times in the book, aside from the more obvious title. I had never reflected upon that before, about homosexuals feeling a bit left out of the Darwinian approach to immortality, sexual reproduction, child birth, a familial legacy. Barker points this out even obviously in several places and moments in the book, but I guess since I had less experience with monastics and priests at the time in my life, and had lives a markedly less monastic life at the time, I just didn't catch it. Interestingly, around that time I was living a rather indulgent life of sex and drugs, and consequently it seems from my recollection that I noticed these aspects of Sacrament so much more so than the more spiritual insights Barker has in the novel, where as now I have had a bit more years living the examined life of religious introspection and spiritual exploration, so I am a bit more in-tune with that vibe, and I see it threaded across this novel with some precision. I suppose in its own way, that may be what this novel is, Clive Barker's own kind of self-reflective analysis of the spiritual experience disctinct of his own homosexuality, and that is quite deep in fact to ponder, it is a subject very much neglected, over-looked, even taboo.

I think many people just assume because of the antagonism from most organized "by the Book" religions that homosexuality is deprived of its own sense of religiosity and spirituality, and that is deceptive, naive and even prejudice. The Rightists would love for people to conceive of homosexuals as being entire atheistic or irreligious because it fits into their own stereotypes of depravity and hedonism which are horrifyingly distorted...
Also, Barker really pushes us into our spiritual reflections as well..

ok suchfriends, this is a quickie, cuz i have a loaded schedule coming up, but the notion that each buendia represents one latin american nation is the first thing that jumps at me as arbitrary (there are others).

i very highly doubt there was such intent in the writer, but if you can demonstrate (with texual examples) that this connections exist, please do so. that's thesis material but if you have the info at your fingertips please convey.

here's an example of a good simple demonstration like the one i'd like: my advisor, who was teaching a class in cronica de una muerte anunciada, said that the cuckold bayardo san roman is french or of french origin or loaded with french references.

bayard = a legendary horse from the chansons de geste
san roman = sans roman = sin novela (without a novel) or sin... romance? since his girl he doesn't get to fuck, cuz santiago nasar bonked her first (or not? or yes? he was good at disguises). it's everything in the text.

anyway, a nice verbal joke and probably a putdown by garcia marquez on the french cartesian mindset which he outspokenly detested, but nowhere by any means a "symbol". symbols are simple, good characters are almost fractally complex. there's always more to them.

go read el olor de la guayaba, i promise it will make you LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.

ok haa ha that was for glice.

anyway gotta go, but thanks for answering.

I think you greatly misunderstand my interpretations. I am not pretending to know the mind of the author, rather I am giving my own reflection and feeling and interpretation of the text standing alone as a piece of art, which is always open to interpretation by the audience. I was not trying to say that the motifs and symbolism I see in the text were necessarily Garcia-Marquez's intentions or implied meanings, rather like a piece of music those are the meanings that I personally get out of it. You must admit in reading it by itself and its own interpretation, that there is some merit to my perspective. If not, eh, but I appreciate your insight with the french puns, those are the kind of literary gems that literally get lost in translation

I think the last opinion you should consider in thinking about a book is the author's. I thought we were all Barthesians now?

Would but it were :(.

Sorry, I of course meant to say was.

lol @ Pookie

oh yeah ok, we can all fantasize and project whatever we want into a text, but that doesn't meant that our fantasies make a part of the text.

and regardless, it's the act of interpretation that i'm against. interpretation assigns an external meaning to the text, it says "what the text is is not really the text, it's what i make of it", which usually tends to be some sort of normative discourse (psychoanalisis, marxism, feminism, frenchwankerianism, etc). sure, humpty dumpty could make the words mean what he wanted, but my point, ultimately, is that it is much more fun and enjoyable to read novels as novels, not as allegories that refer to some other "true" reality. i'm not against the allegories by the way, they have their place in the human mind, and góngora did wonders with them, but my contention is that 100 years of solitude is more of a self-contained world that feeds from colombian history, yes, but becomes its own reality and needs to symbolize nothing.


"we were all". it's that british herd instinct again isn't it? it's like a nervous tic. relax.

anyway, some were barthesians, but barthes himself was such an ever-evolving thinker that i wouldn't know to what period of his work you refer to.

if anything i'm more of a devotee of sontag's manifesto against interpretation. which is (i mean interpretation) a kind of obscene procedure taught in literature departments everywhere. can't the text exist for itself? no, it must be interpreted by every motherfucking critical school that wants to have its way with it. which would be sexy if rape wasn't so boring.

and maybe i misspoke when i said that is not what the author intended, because yes, the author puts a lot of things there completely unaware, but that doesn't mean that everything goes. like this: <<i see the blue color of this screen and i am reminded that chabib, coming from a people of the desert, must be fascinated by the ocean and wanted to give us the impression of being submerged underwater when we post in this here forum.... although this is more of a dark cerulean, which adds the vision of the "other" to this virtual batysphere where we delve into the abyss of the human mind>>

yes, this type of "interpretative" crock is what i've read even in academic papers, and it gave me such hives. the humanities are doomed because of it.

anyway, about the book i recommended, it's not to interpret anything, but because the guy is so much fucking fun to read and it makes you imagine you're getting plastered with him asking him all sorts of questions. cuz the guy who interviewed him was not just a journalist, but his friend, so the conversation had that awesome smell of a latin american bar (beer, piss, and pork sandwiches).

You always talk about art in terms of power, control and orthodoxy. That's all I was getting at; you always argue in terms of empirical sciences. Neither are appropriate here. You're a smart chap, but you're frustratingly dismissive of interpretations falling outside of your ken. That's all I'm saying.

Above, for instance, you've apparently absolutely negated the act of interpretation because sometimes people get it wrong, or say something a bit silly. I don't read books for arid austerity - I actually read them to avoid that. Do books have no erotic value for you?

always always never always. ok so power/control/orthodoxy? in which way? the orthodoxy, if anything, is to apply interpretations.

we can all hold hands and sing kumbaya, but you can't make me believe that each buendia represents a latin american nation without some sort of textual proof. besides, such correspondences would make the characters very stiff and restricted in their possiblities. "this guy is argentina, he must be a boastful loudmouth" "this one is honduras, nobody gives a shit about him".

i don't deny people the pleasure of their fantasies but i do not agree that said fantasies are the meaning of the text or are even in the text.


that's precisely what my books have the most for me: erotic value. the ability to give pleasure. do you ever fuck saying "this is the suspended congress position" "here we are doing the dirty sanchez, it's meaning conjugates anal and phallic aggression"? perhaps you do, but i can't concieve of a more boring way to fuck than to do a play-by-play description and analysis of the act.

interpretation is fine when it is called for-- in translation, diplomacy, a bit of hermeneutics to aid reading. but interpretation is the lowest form of reading pleasure i can think of. it's almost a denial of reading itself. it says that the pleasure is elsewhere--not in the reading, but in the interpretation itself. which is, granted, what eggheads love to do-- not read books, but write papers about them.

Since we're on the subject of Latin American authors, what think you about Bolano? I've read a couple of his things, he was an interesting cat and too bad he won't be around for as long as GGM. Here's a speech published in the latest Nation Magazine on Literature and Exile for a New Directions title:Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches (1998-2003) to the Austrian Soc for Lit.

http://www.thenation.com/article/157...ture-and-exile

See, it's this kind of aggressive return to the vernacular of orthodoxy ('proof') that makes me not want to engage. I've not read Marquez (well, I have, but I thought it was shit and disregarded it) but you've essentially asked for a proof without interpretation; I can't seriously engage in literature that way, and I don't see how anyone can. Verification in suchfriends... case of his interpretation would require the sort of academic footnoting that renders academia un-readable to most; you've both read the book, he has this take, you have the other, but you've been excessively aggressive in asking him to qualify that. You're asking him to bore you so you can say it's boring.


'The book should be a flat surface, empirical, read and never questioned'. How do we enjoy books? Not by a hegemony of experience, but by interpretation. Ok, interpreting Hardy as proto-Zapitista would be well off-mark, but there's a necessity for ambiguity (and thus interpretation) in any given engagement with a text.



Reading comes first, but how do we share books? In silence? In stolid regurgitation? How to we discuss them? I don't see how you're leaving any space whatsoever for discussion of literature.

interesting points but misleading, especially when you question my motives ("You're asking him to bore you so you can say it's boring. "). wrong.

the other misleading misreading is about my verbal conduct, my alleged aggression-- i'm not singling him out and i am making no personal attacks, though i tend to favor the polemic style of argumentation.

by the way, speaking of misleading/misreading, i really like suchfriends, and just because i argue in a certain way it does not mean i do not have good will towards him-- actually, i argue with him like i argue with my best friends-- bluntly and without fear and calling it like i see it, because there's trust that there is an attempt to understand, in both parts. he doesn't need me to pat him in the back and prop his self-esteem. and i also wish to do a good deed by sparing him the purgatory of interpretative reading, that fucking lead chain around literature's throat.

i will answer your more technical points later because i need time to write a response, and to compile a short catalog of the non-interpretational pleasures of reading (which are infinite) as a part of that response, but i have a motherfucking deadline with a video edit and i can't engage fully in this discussion because i need all my powers for the other thing, and i was reading that bolaño letter which was brilliant so that took the time. but later, i promise.

charles bukowski, irvine welsh, pahliniuk, john nieven

that was fucking brilliant. many many thanks.

i've only read los detective salvajes by the way.

There aren't any technical points. I'm just amusing myself. It's a bit like the mastubatory habits of salmon.

no worries. i'll fist you good.

Actually I quite enjoy reading novels and stories in an allegorical way, it allows me to find more depth and substance and in the end give the narratives that much more a personal sense of meaning and impact, rather than be just another means to an end, just another few hours to kill. But my bias is that I am an academic historian, and not only have I been trained to look at everything in the world in terms of meaning, symbolism, and causality, but I thoroughly enjoy it to the core of my being. I wouldn't read a novel anyother way, just look at my analysis of Sacrament, the novel I am currently engaged in.

yes, but you should not be so constrictive in your art, so compartmental and orderly. Art is a language of personal expression, never forget that. People use art to express feelings and thoughts which perhaps may have otherwise been inexpressible. Language is deeply individualistic, you can't even try to limit it with legalism, that shit doesn't fly, and no artist would want to you be so Papist about things..


Regardless of is chabib had any such intentions about the color scheme, if individuals naturally feel and interpret that out of it, how are they wrong? Again, individual interpretation is not necessarily about trying to always find the author's intentions so much as to describe the individual reception and sincere feelings about a work of art. Art is democratic. Even Kurt Cobain rightfully said, "Its whatever you want it to mean."


I notice you keep criticizing only one of my interpretations, but have on several instances neglected any comments on my other interpretation of Rebecca and other characters representing the clash of the indigenous mind set and experience with that of the "modern", "Latin American" should i take it then that you don't disagree or shall I footnote some more for ya ;)

my point exactly.

next up should be Nazi Literature in the Americas, pretty much has it all

yes, it's hard to find in spanish in the USA-- i don't wanna read the translation (blech). i've got it in some kind of interlibrary loan waitlist or something.

----

glice and suchfriends: there are a bazillion ways to talk about literature other than interpretation, just like it is possible to talk about abstract art without asking "what does it mean"? music has no meaning and yet gets discussed here all the time.

as for the idea of interpretation as a pleasure: similar to the enjoyment of taxidermists. the pleasures of literature include things like the beauty (or horror) of a well chosen word, the amazement of creative syntax (which does not exclude things like jarring syntax when called for), the joy of a fortunate image, the enjoyment of evasion (literature as escape), and the immersion in an alternate reality (which, if the writer is good, it will be more fascinating than your own dull reality), the awe at the construction of intricate plots, the fleshing out of memorable characters, the emotional rollercoaster of a good story, the display of virtuosity from the part of the writer (like we get from watching a good musician perform), the pleasure of new knowledge, the delight of an expanded imagination, the poetic rhythm of good prose, so on and so forth, all of these elements compounded and played against each other, in an infinite combination of delights. none of which has anything to do with the question "what does this represent/symbolize/'really'mean?"

i'll skip the additional perorations & refer you directly to the holy saint sontag-- bless her delicious mind.

http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/son...pretation.html

She ends by saying-- "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. "

But that's interpretation. You seem to just not want to use the word interpretation when interpreting literature.

ha ha ha-- you lying sack of shit-- the lenghts that you go to jerk other people's chains. well played though, i did fall for it for a second or two and then i recovered. any reader with 3 interconnected neurons can see that i was speaking of immediate pleasures rather than the transposition of meaning to an external referent in order to "explain". of course you knew that too, being sufficiently intelligent, but it's this salmon masturbation that you practice that makes one confused and i was ready to accuse you of sophistry, you interweb imp.

anyway, go read sontag and enjoy.

you'll find beauties like these:

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.


Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.)


The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

i'm sure others have said similar things before her, but i like how (and when) she said it. & fuck plato!

I´ve just read Parfyme and I have to say I liked it quite a lot. It´s quite a long time since I before enjoyed someone previous unfamiliar writer to me. I´m going to read "the Pigeon" next.

Anyone read AFTER THE QUAKE by Haruki Murakami, a set of stories revolving around the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake?

Do you think any survivors got any relief or better understood their lives?

Do you think anyone was fortified by the book and better prepared for the most recent quake?

Is literature, like all art, quite useless?


I'm not saying. I'm asking. Tell me.

My opinion is that art is quite a good way to cope with all kinds of difficulties life´s bring to you. That´s because with art there is always symbolic distance and it in most cases moves also your feelings. In talking there can happen you never have to affect your feelings, you can talk just rationally. I think art and specially music is the most important think in my life if I think my growing, it could be that I will not here writing if I hadn´t got music. Someone else might need some other art form.