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  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    /\ I never finished The GBG. Not sure if I will revisit it. Let us know what you think of it.
    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine

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    • rider
      eyes of the world
      • Jun 2009
      • 1560

      has anyone read "pillars of the earth"? its next for me on the list.

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      • viv1984viv
        Senior Member
        • Feb 2008
        • 194

        Originally posted by Faust View Post
        Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
        Be good to hear your thoughts on this, such a referenced work, with such an important idea - but when I read it I hated it. Just disliked wilde's writing on every page, found it self indulgent, pretentious and cumbersome to the actual ideas and story telling. I think he's one of those love or hate authors....

        Still reading Lermentovs 'a hero of our time'. Fantastic - its mostly hypo-diegesis' and hypo-hypo-diegesis ( which I find remarkable considering how old it is ), not dissimilar to a W G Sebald..... it's a technique I love.
        Notes from the Vomitorium - The Nerve Of It -

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        • Mail-Moth
          Senior Member
          • Mar 2009
          • 1448

          Never read Sontag yet. On the other hand I must admit that I'm growing more and more tired of melancholy. I spent too many years deluding myself in considering it as the only virtuous path to beauty and deep understanding of the human condition, etc.

          How lazy it was. How small a universe it leaves you in the end.
          Well - who cares.

          Now reading Bolano's The Savage detectives. I believe someone already mentioned it a little earlier. Great book - full of poets without poems, and whose life is true poetry.
          I can see a hat, I can see a cat,
          I can see a man with a baseball bat.

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          • mesko
            Senior Member
            • Nov 2009
            • 208

            Camillo Sitte - Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen in Swedish.

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            • Faust
              kitsch killer
              • Sep 2006
              • 37852

              Originally posted by Mail-Moth View Post
              Never read Sontag yet. On the other hand I must admit that I'm growing more and more tired of melancholy. I spent too many years deluding myself in considering it as the only virtuous path to beauty and deep understanding of the human condition, etc.

              How lazy it was. How small a universe it leaves you in the end.
              Well - who cares.

              Now reading Bolano's The Savage detectives. I believe someone already mentioned it a little earlier. Great book - full of poets without poems, and whose life is true poetry.
              Are you French or something?

              I think there is a certain contemplative beauty in melancholy, but it's certainly not the only path.
              Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

              StyleZeitgeist Magazine

              Comment

              • Mail-Moth
                Senior Member
                • Mar 2009
                • 1448

                There certainly is, Faust, for various reasons - whether it be a meditation upon transience or the perception of that irreductible distance between an agitated self and the enviable stillness of the inanimate world ; I won't deny this. But right now I'd prefer to leave this crutch behind and raise my head a bit more often out of the pit of self-concern, angst and the rest. One certainly learns things by looking through the glass of melancholy ; but passed a certain point it simply becomes a pose, a pathology, or both. Contemplation, when self-related, is not exactly contemplation anymore. There's enough self involved when trying just to look at the physical appearance of things, free from any metaphysical consideration, or existential, or else.

                And Mad for sadness is just a cool title for a live album after all.


                Finally decided to reread The Glass Bead Game after nearly twenty years. It looks much better than expected. The first pages, which describe the period that immediately preceded the age of the Game ang gave birth to it, have lost nothing of their accuracy.
                I can see a hat, I can see a cat,
                I can see a man with a baseball bat.

                Comment

                • Faust
                  kitsch killer
                  • Sep 2006
                  • 37852

                  Well said, Master Moth.
                  Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                  StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                  Comment

                  • thehouseofdis
                    Senior Member
                    • Jan 2010
                    • 696

                    Now reading Bolano's The Savage detectives. I believe someone already mentioned it a little earlier. Great book - full of poets without poems, and whose life is true poetry.
                    I also have Bolano's 2666 in my queue. A book recommendation from Patti Smith.
                    THE HOUSE OF DIS
                    embrace the twenty first movement

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                    • FashioniSing
                      Junior Member
                      • Aug 2010
                      • 4

                      I am trying to finish reading Cloud Atlas so I can re-read The Unbearable Lightness of Being before I give it to a friend to read.

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                      • gnarjen
                        Senior Member
                        • Oct 2009
                        • 106

                        Comment

                        • mesko
                          Senior Member
                          • Nov 2009
                          • 208

                          Comment

                          • Atom
                            Senior Member
                            • Sep 2009
                            • 310

                            La Vie mode d'emploi

                            Just finished Georges Perec's Life - A users manual. I must say I enjoyed reading it, but hmm, it wasn't quite what I was expecting. Anyone else read it?

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                            • todestrieb
                              Senior Member
                              • Mar 2009
                              • 239

                              ^What did you expect from it? Not my favourite Perec by any margin. La Disparition (translated into the English as A Void) wins it for me by some stretch.

                              Originally posted by viv1984viv View Post
                              Just disliked wilde's writing on every page,
                              Nothing more than a Huysmans wannabe. And without the erudition, the panache, the danger, the elegance, and the intensity to match, prosaically and culturally speaking. If that's not bad enough, he wrote in the most retarded language known to mankind, English.

                              BTW, the Lermontov is a top read. Read it numerous times. Interestingly enough, I picked up a piece of Russian literature myself. A new translation of Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit.

                              Comment

                              • Atom
                                Senior Member
                                • Sep 2009
                                • 310

                                Originally posted by todestrieb View Post
                                ^What did you expect from it? Not my favourite Perec by any margin.
                                I was expecting more heavier and umm, difficult read. But I got a relatively light book full of tragic, yet funny stories of people's everyday lifes and deaths. I know that there can be found lots and lots of internal connections and hidden meanings between stories and characters, as well as self-made restrictions he's known of, and I'm sure I missed a lot of those. But I'm not sure if those are necessary to understand the core meaning of Life.

                                Perec definately has a fixation on lists and numbers, and he plays a lot with them in the book. I found that sort of playing a bit boring and unnecessary. But then again, one might argue that's what the life's all about. Sometimes boring, sometimes more interesting and full of action. And often totally random.

                                La Disparition hasn't been translated in Finnish, and I'm afraid Perec's writing might be a bit too complex for me to understand and enjoy in other languages. I might give it a try though if I find a copy in English. We'll see.

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