[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Severian

Yeah, but wouldn't an academic (a fluffy academic... y'know, like a lit prof) be more apt to read it as symbolically than literally?

I probably did read it as a literal account when I was 18, but that's certainly one of the ways it can be interpreted. It's not so satirical in content that it's, like, impossible to imagine it being intended as anything but satire. It's not Animal Farm, you know. If you read that book and think it's about pigs you're a goddamn moron. But Blood and Guts doesn't (from what I can remember) read like a blatant allegory.

I feel like I should probably revisit it, but I made that promise to myself for a very good reason... at least at the time it seems like a very good reason. That book fucked me up a bit, and I don't feel any desire to experience those feelings again.

i dont know if there are good papers about her out there--- i looked at the ones that link from wikipedia and the ones that link from those and all of them were such programmatic useless crap i realized those people didn't get her at all. it's all black and white and binary and reductionist. like a pretension to science. coarse attempts at dissection in service of variosu ideologies.

as for allegory, well, it's not "an" allegory-- this is structured sort of as a picaresque. there are episodes and there are stories, and stories within stories, so you get a few straight-up allegories jammed in there, but the fun of the book is that it's such a wild romp there's layer upon layer upon layer of meaning and it comes in all forms. all types of discourse and narrative modes next to each other. massive orgy. total freedom with the page.

among the most recent shit i read--her "greek" poems cracked me up-- she was a classics student btw and read greek, and her versions (written by the main character) are hilariously demented--broken syntax, broken thread of the subject, but somehow keeping the voice consistent. wonderful. she takes every liberty and makes no apologies. she jumps from that to mallarmé. she's a fucking pirate!

anyway it's great that she made you feel something rather than just bore you (it bored me the first time, missed her point by a million miles--or maybe it irked me and i discounted it as boredom. who knows! i'm glad to have had a second chance.) but yes-- to feel something. isn't that the point of literature? not just dry ideas bouncing inside a head, but what did nabokov say? a tingle in the spine.