#1791

just finished Dhalgren. still assessing it, but I do think I really enjoyed it. at minimum I found it all very moving, enough so that there were periods where I wouldn’t touch it because I knew I couldn’t really deal with that state of mind in that moment. I don’t quite get the boring/plotless claims people make, whether its part of the larger arc or just small anecdotes a TON happens in that book, and since so much is left open-ended or unexplained there is plenty to interpret and unpack.

I like that the whole thing feels rather timeless, like this could be a book written about some crusty punk type present day. I don’t know if the goal for Delany was specifically to convey his personal experiences of mental illness/dyslexia, coming to terms with one’s self and sexuality as the main purpose, but it does a good job of addressing all of those things in a particular way. I like the idea of it being multiperspective, and this long after its initial publishing I guess there is an additional layer to that. while I do feel there is a timelessness to it, I guess a lot about it can/could/should? be read in the particular context of when it was written with the end of the 60s/early 70s and the shift in countercultures that happened. A sort of peak and end of yippie/hippie utopianism, biker culture’s tenuous ties to a lot of that, the drug scene, racial tensions, white flight, sexual liberation… the thing with non-visible encounter with Calkins to me read like the radical or counter-cultural artist realizing that their patron (the state in this case?) has actually used them to legitimize themselves and their power by supporting particular types of acceptable dissent, triggering the beginning of the end of the artist’s world or motivation.

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#1792

Not sure recommendation requests are OT, but I’ll go ahead anyway.

Can anyone recommend books on musique concrete and/or GRMC? I’m finding my music going more in that direction these days and so want to do my homework.

Tia

#1793

The book definitely feels like visual art specific recommendations and I wholly agree different mediums and different people need other methods or even no methodology at all.

For example, my uncle is a mathematician (which I consider a form of art) who has worked on some pretty iconic theories, and he has to sit in a bathtub for 6 hours a day in order to do his best work.

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#1794

I found Schaeffer - In search of a concrete music - really fascinating and personal - his struggles with turning this novel idea into reality and - often - his huge frustration with the results

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#1796

Really enjoying this poetry collection: https://www.shambhala.com/the-first-free-women.html It’s a modern translation of the Buddhist Therigatha (“Verses of the Elder Nuns”), the oldest collection of women’s literature

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#1797

Theres a great Laurie Anderson quote relevant to those ideas, in this book

Talking Music: Conversations With John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, And 5 Generations Of American Experimental Composers

https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Music-Conversations-Generations-Experimental/dp/0306808935

“Its not like pushing a button and then writing a song. But yes, there is a state of mind that means being open to anything and trying to be extremely vulnerable to things. I try to know nothing, to be simple, curious and open. And I try not to be clever. That’s the state of mind. And you can’t always get into that. If you are feeling frazzled or preoccupied you won’t make it. So I don’t try. If I know that I’m feeling like that, I’ll scrub the floor instead.”

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#1798

I finished Blood Meridian a few nights ago. I had been warned about the violence, but it was way more visceral and intense than I expected (This is up there with American Psycho in its ability to completely ruin my day simply by thinking about a scene). I’m very happy that I bought it on Kindle, as the built-in dictionary saved me about twice a chapter, especially with landscape and architecture terms. I wish I didn’t look up a few of the gore terms :laughing:

The thing that really astounded me about the book is that this is a real period in history, and a recent one at that. The Road was similar in darkness, but it’s an imagined time.

Overall, an incredible book… but I think I need to read something a bit happier next

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#1799

Quite an accurate post, I absolutely loved the first book and was appropriately let down by the sequel. I think anyone with a passing interest in scifi should read Rendezvous with Rama. Like the Alien move franchise, it’s best just to consider the first entry as a standalone.

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#1800

Maybe try “2666” for something cheerful and more uplifting :slight_smile:

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#1801

Two of my all-time favorites in the men-meditating-on-brutality, “high-literature” canon.

#1802

This is a great read, Funny Weather: Art in an emergency by Olivia Laing

#1803

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Just begun this. Been a while since I read anything contemporary or comical (quite darkly so, in this case).

#1804

I thoroughly enjoyed this one! Full of humor, cleverness, a couple of really dark moments, a couple of really triumphant bright moments, super fast read. And it turns out I was mistaken about the Mistborn series being three trilogies and there’s one more in this era… with a whole bunch of new questions raised by this book.

Honestly, now I don’t know which I’m looking forward to more: The Lost Metal (the next in this series, probably to be released in 2021 or 2022) or Rhythm of War (the next Stormlight novel, scheduled to release this November).

#1805

haha. i got through two of the three, just relentless.

#1806

I recently revisited Blood Meridian and while the writing is still glorious, I was left cold by its premise of “inevitable violence”. Like Krasznahorkai, it imposes its pessimism in a way that is overbearing, unhelpful and doesn’t reflect reality.

In contrast, I like how 2666 utilizes deranged violence as a means of condemning that world, which I find much more sympathetic.

I give Savage Detectives (along with Just Kids) as high school graduation reads to counter all the copies of Oh the Places You’ll Go

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#1807

Been reading Stop Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance, which jumps around topics a bit, being a collection of writings, but is both very interesting and contains plenty of quotes that could be used as anti-capitalist post-rock titles.

I also just finished “Splinter of the Minds Eye” which is a Star Wars novel set 1 year before Empire Strikes Back and based on a script for how the sequel could have looked if Star Wars was a flop so they had no budget. I say this as a big fan of a lot Star Wars crap: It’s absolute rubbish.

3 Likes
#1808

Heh, Splinter was the only Star Wars novel I read until 2017, probably because it was trash :slight_smile:

And then while waiting a couple hours for friends to show up at the spot where we watched the “Great American Eclipse”, I read Guardians of the Whills only because my spouse had checked it out from the library and happened to have it with her. It… passed the time. I’m really not tempted to try more Star Wars novels.

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#1809

I’ve read Stormlight, the first Mistborn series (most recently) and Warbreaker at this point, and these super distinct class structures he uses just aren’t that interesting of a way to think about power, and it bugged me a little bit that he doubled down on them between Stormlight and Mistborn. I’ve picked up that part of the idea with the Cosmere is that he’ll write about it changing and progressing over time, so maybe that’ll be less of a theme, but it’s still surprisingly trite from a writer who is pretty good at making other pieces of the story ambiguous and complicated.

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#1810

I think that the extreme class stratification in his books does get used in interesting ways though. In most of his books there are different kinds of tensions between economic/hereditary class structures (which come off as more arbitrary), and those based on power/Investiture (which… sometimes are even more arbitrary, sometimes seemingly “natural” in a way that’s a bit disturbing).

I’m reading Elantris now, and this is very much the theme in it too.

I find the first Mistborn trilogy kind of authentic in how the revolution overthrows the regime but not the system. The Wax & Wayne era is a little frustrating because it seems like Harmony could have fixed it and yet the bad old ways were preserved, partly by the surviving revolutionaries. But there are themes in books 5 and 6 that make me wonder if the third era will be more egalitarian both in mundane power and Investiture.

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#1811

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1 Like