Latest Gene Wolfe book you read (1-10 scale)

[Gay for Cock]

[Whee of the Dead]

I read The Fall.

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

I didn't get it.

[pooptastik]

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

[Kurt Russell's Beard]

I read The Fall.

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

I didn't get it.

Try it again.

Maybe you were too young for it at the time?

[Whee of the Dead]

I read The Fall.

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

I didn't get it.

Try it again.

Maybe you were too young for it at the time?

Possibly. I've never really done much literature and read mostly for entertainment value. I can appreciate great prose but deeper stuff is mostly over my head. Maybe I should start a little lower on the poll?

[VueeeuVueeeeuV]

I read the second two books of the foundation trilogy, and I found them both rollicking good times! Filled with space ships and disintegrated cigarette butts! Haven't read any sci-fi since dune which I read years ago. The Mule is the finest name for a villain ever.

I made a really shitty attempt to read that new fagles translation of the Aniead, but I doubt I'm actually gonna get back to it. I found it a good synergy though!

[EEEOOOEEEOOOEEEOOO]

I read The Fall.

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

I didn't get it.

Try it again.

Maybe you were too young for it at the time?

I've never read The Fall, but isn't existentialism better when you're young?

[EEEOOOEEEOOOEEEOOO]

Graham Greene is another author that I really should I have read. i stood in front of the hotel in Sierra Leone where he wrote The Heart of the Matter. It was destroyed during the war and it's now just a pile of charred bricks.

[EEEOOOEEEOOOEEEOOO]

Those of you who haven't read Sarte's "Nausea" in a while...I urge you to reread it...god does time make a huge difference with that thing.

See, this is what I mean. Nausea in combination with The Plague were life-changing for me when I was 18/19. I reread it a couple years back and it tickled all the right part and I think I picked up on more than I did at first reading, but it was just a book this time around. I enjoyed it and then put it down.

[EEEOOOEEEOOOEEEOOO]

Nothing is stopping me. In fact, I'm creating a mental list of books to read the coming year.

[EEEOOOEEEOOOEEEOOO]

Nothing is stopping me. In fact, I'm creating a mental list of books to read the coming year.

If I remember correctly you were in Africa, right? Did your experiences there and in other places color in any way your rereading of Conrad?

Well I read Conrad either after or during my first trip in 2004. The short answer is no. The Africa of Conrad like the India of Kipling. It has much more to do with the author's location in his own imperial history than it does with the actual place. Said and all that. That's not to denigrate Conrad, but it would be difficult for a contemporary American traveler to Africa to experience it as a place where their morals were run aground and their lives loosed from their cosmological location or whatever.

I actually discussed Conrad in an English class at the University of Ghana. The students there were totally unwilling to accept Conrad's literary work separately from his image of Africa, much like Achebe. I thought that was too bad.

[EEEOOOEEEOOOEEEOOO]

Haven't read Greene, but I'll get back to you on that.

The Immoralist is the only novel I've ever managed to read in its entirety in French because of this version:
http://www.amazon.com/Immoralist-LImmor ... 0486426955

It forced me to read it really slowly and deliberately, which made its impact far more severe and sinister. Fantastic. It's true that the colonies were a figure for all of these authors - Sierra Leone for Graham, Algeria for Gide and Camus, the Congo for Conrad.

[EEEOOOEEEOOOEEEOOO]

My French blows. Embarassingly bad. I was only able to read Gide by looking to the English-language page after reading every sentence, and then re-reading the French. It took forever, but it was really interesting to read a novel in a way that I normally normally reserve for very few non-fiction essays.

[Gay for Cock]

I had to go back and reread most of Sade...which is always terrible, you know. At the end of it you feel like whipping young girls and fucking geese in the nose, but for me, right now, where I live...it's a nice diversion. At least it gives one nice dreams.

Back at my first job I was friends with this girl who bought a copy of Justine and we would read a few pages of it a day on our break. We always felt so dirty after reading it. It changed you. You started to give off this vibe of being a dirty old man and when people looked at you they could see this, they'd look at you like you were Bukowski or something. It was great. That and that every vile thought you could ever have was just a rerun. It was thought up centuries before you were born. It kind of took the edge off of things a bit.

[featherboa]

will someone read some Ellul

[featherboa]

I never read anything like that, but I had some pretty guilty boners in the community college library reading naked lunch and tropic of cancer maybe.

nowadays kids just have the internet.

[Honky Kong 64]

Bataille's "Blue of Noon."

a personal favorite of mine

[caldwell.the.great]

always curious to hear what people get from Bataille... "Blue of Noon" didn't do much for me... Madame Edwarda and The Story of the Eye, on the other hand...

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I read The Fall.

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

I didn't get it.

Try it again.

Maybe you were too young for it at the time?

I've never read The Fall, but isn't existentialism better when you're young?

The Fall is the more retrospective book though. I can see an argument that The Stranger, with it's more intense, younger protagonist, or The Plague, which is more action-packed, would work better for younger readers. I've liked the Fall more and more each time I've read it in progressive years.

[caldwell.the.great]

has anyone else gone through Visions of Excess and actually bashed their head against some of those essays?
The Psychological Structure of Fascism is one of the most amazing essays I've ever read... and reading it along side stuff like Story of the Eye, The Accursed Share (terrible English translation of a very sly French title), and Erotism is very eye-opening...

everything Bataille ever wanted to say is in The Story of the Eye, though; it just didn't have the political shade to it that his later writing did. You can still go over it and find the seeds for his best writing, though... pretty amazing book. His biography is outstanding and worth going over as well.

[caldwell.the.great]

everything Bataille ever wanted to say is in The Story of the Eye, though

WTF?

go read it again, damnit
it's all there
just not sorted out, yet, and not refined
everything just waiting to bloom

[caldwell.the.great]

I'm spot on is what I am

if you don't see glimmers of what he's going to write later on in that book, I don't know what to tell you to convince you that they're there; his obsessions with energy, fascism, sexual violence, death, and "acephalism," as well as the foundations for his pseudo-poem-essay-thing "Formless" (informé), and his general economy. I've read several essays that conjecture relationships between Story of the Eye and Inner Experience, and do a fairly convincing job of making the connections.

there's even a hint of his Nietzschean obsession swimming about in the background, especially when the main character is gazing at the stars...

we could make a blueprint of his career from different chapters in that story; of course, it all gets fleshed out and becomes infinitely more nuanced... and the political aspect is essentially missing, so I guess it's not a complete outline, really... but all the ingredients are hiding in that book - and once you've read a huge chunk of his theoretical writings, going backing to that book is a bit of shock. It's haphazard, not nearly as poetic as Madame Edwarda, but perfect in its scope. He knew what he was doing very early on, and it only took time for him to elaborate on those early notions. I stand by that.

[Hell-haine]

C'est alors que tout a vacillé. La mer a charrié un souffle épais et ardent. Il m'a semblé que le ciel s'ouvrait de toute son étendue pour laisser pleuvoir du feu. Tout mon être s'est tendu et j'ai crispé ma main sur le revolver. La gâchette a cédé, j'ai touché le ventre poli de la crosse et c'est là, dans le bruit à la fois sec et assourdissant, que tout a commencé. J'ai secoué la sueur et le soleil. J'ai compris que j'avais détruit l'équilibre du jour, le silence exceptionnel d'une plage où j'avais été heureux. Alors, j'ai tiré encore quatre fois sur un corps inerte où les balles s'enfonçaient sans qu'il y parût. Et c'était comme quatre coups brefs que je frappais sur la porte du malheur.

Genius.

[fallbacktostone]

i agree with bored here

[EEEOOOEEEOOOEEEOOO]

Smoking. Not smoking.