I could write a great novel if my neighborhood weren't so upscale (book thread)

[Greg Nog]

The whole time I read The Corrections, I was like, "I guess I like this?  Maybe?" and then I finished it, and I was like, "I guess I liked it?"  And now I barely remember anything about it.  Frankly, that annoys me enough that even though I think I remember liking The Corrections, I kinda feel like I'm coming at Freedom with a bit of a chip on my shoulder.

[Bernard]

Corrections was like the Miami Vice movie. Unintentionally hilarious. I loved Perfume, though!

[hannah]

I'm reading Moby Dick, I'm going to be one of those people who have read Moby Dick. I like it so far. Once you get into the rhythm of that old-fashioned writing it's quite relaxing. I haven't yet hit any of the passages Dad told me about (it was a birthday present) that are amazing and sound like they could have been written yesterday. Not getting much time to read it though, due to diving my time between school and inertia and friends.

I just finished Moby-Dick. It was... what's the word?... amazing. I'm sorry I waited so long to read it.

I also read The Confidence-Man, which I think I previously mentioned, and Woolf's Orlando, and Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza and Palestine. Now I'm reading White Jacket, because obviously Herman Melville should have my children.

Greg, I read the opening chapter of Freedom, or whatever excerpt/version was published in The New Yorker a couple months ago. It made me sick to my stomach. Hateful shit. You should just reread Moby-Dick.

[Greg Nog]

While I sure do love Moby-Dick, I already bought Freedom, so there's no turning back now!

How'd you like Orlando?  I'm generally a huge Woolf fan, but I was a bit surprised by how non-Woolfish it seemed.

[Anne the Man]

I got to this bit

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

and thought it was real neat. Me and Grace will probably trade after I've finished that and she's finished Paradise Lost.

[Ah_Pook]

i got a new book shelf and then i filled it up with the books that had accumulated without proper shelving. some of the books that had accumulated, i should say.

still though, its nice to have less piles of books and a snazzy new shelf.

[davy]

I got to this bit

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

and thought it was real neat. Me and Grace will probably trade after I've finished that and she's finished Paradise Lost.

Methinks your sis will be getting the better end of that deal.

[Ignatius]

They are both pretty cool. One has way more jokes, though. Way more.

[G.C.R]

Yeah, Paradise Lost ain't a bunch of hilarity, but its pretty fucking awesome so far (I'm still only two books in.)

[ellaguru]

We should have a book club, Grace! I'm starting the fifth book. It's really good, but I am being almost unbelievably lazy about actually picking it up.

[Ah_Pook]

i got howl's moving castle by diana wynne jones and the sequel, house of many ways, today. i am very excited about theses books, since howl's moving castle is a kickass movie, and until recently i didnt know that it was based on a book. looking online i see that these are actually the first and third books in a series, so i guess i need to get the middle one too now. anyway, im stoked to read them.

[G.C.R]

Oh man, Pook, Diana Wynne Jones is awesome fun. Charmed life; the Homeward Bounders; Fire and Hemlock (soooooo romantic); The Lives of Christopher Chant... she's one of the best children's fantasy writers. Howl's Moving Castle the book is quite different from the film though.

[Thermofusion]

The latest Nicholas Sparks novel, Safe Haven, is set entirely in the little town where I presently reside. Remembering how hilariously awful A Walk to Remember was, I've decided to read the thing for shits.

Holy FUCK it's bad. I'm gonna have to type up some excerpts.

[Greg Nog]

I look forward to that!

I'm still reading Freedom, and I think I pinpointed what I hate most about it: I feel like I'm getting psychologically sick as I'm reading it, all the crappy petty viciousness of the characters bleeding into my own mind. 

Second-most-hated thing is that the writing style is about as engaging as the back of an oatmeal carton.  Third-most-hated is that Franzen's descriptions of a punk show feel like Stephen King's dialogue for Detta Walker -- I just end up clutching my head and being all "WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING"

[Aglaya]

I'm reading Traveling with Pomegranates right now.  It's pretty good, and I had to work at the off-site book signing the other night so I got my copy signed by the authors, and got one for my mom too. 

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

I look forward to that!

I'm still reading Freedom, and I think I pinpointed what I hate most about it: I feel like I'm getting psychologically sick as I'm reading it, all the crappy petty viciousness of the characters bleeding into my own mind. 

Second-most-hated thing is that the writing style is about as engaging as the back of an oatmeal carton.  Third-most-hated is that Franzen's descriptions of a punk show feel like Stephen King's dialogue for Detta Walker -- I just end up clutching my head and being all "WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING"

I have friends who really do think this is the best modern novel.

When they talk about it I resign myself to screaming until they stop.

(To be fair, I haven't read it yet, but what you've imparted thus far, Greg, suggests it will instill in me an undue fury.)

[auto-da-fey]

honestly, I'd like to read that, but the odds of it happening anytime before May 2011 are exceedingly slim. my lady printed out his preview-chapter-thing from the New Yorker (?)--the one Hannah hated, but M likes a lot--ages ago and I haven't even gotten around to that yet.

mostly I am reading early American history these days, and lots of it. not what I'd necessarily choose in a vacuum, but not as bad as one might think.

[elpollodiablo]

I've read about 600 pages of theory, two novels, and a bunch of boring bullshit on rhetoric & composition since the last week of August. Favorites from the last month have been S/Z, Things Fall Apart, and this hilariously self-defeating Stanley Fish essay.

[Ah_Pook]

i picked up the windup girl by paolo bacigalupi after seeing some reccs around and seeing that it won the nebula award this past year. its pretty good so far. i really like the world the guy has set up. he has a couple phrases that he keeps repeating over and over again that rasp at my brain, but aside from that im enjoying it. if youre into sci fi it might be worth a look. hopefully he nails the ending, ive still got about 100 pages left.

[Antero]

this hilariously self-defeating Stanley Fish essay

"Hilariously self-defeating" is a pretty good description for basically every essay he's ever written.

[donblood]

pollo, have you read Vollman's The Atlas?  I'm halfway through and it's fantastic.  Dude is definitely not afraid of his prose.  So far there have been dozens of sentences that would have sounded tortured and wanting-to-be-Hemingway out of context, but were just the thing for their place.

Also I have never read a gigantic travelogue full of whores and getting shot at before, so that's good.

[elpollodiablo]

I haven't. I've got it in a stack along with The Ice-Shirt and The Royal Family, though. Soon!

I also want to write something on Europe Central in the near future. Have you picked that up yet?

[elpollodiablo]

Also wanted to mention that I'm really psyched to see people reading Vollmann. What he does is so far beyond what other writers his age like the Brooklyn Jonathans do. Everyone should be reading Europe Central or Imperial instead of The Corrections II.

[donblood]

I haven't. I've got it in a stack along with The Ice-Shirt and The Royal Family, though. Soon!

I also want to write something on Europe Central in the near future. Have you picked that up yet?

Nope!  Maybe that one's next.  I keep fooling myself that I'll read my new copy of 2666 before exhausting Vollman's work.

For some reason I haven't been able to get this out of my head - it's from one of his many trips to the Northwest Territories:

"Christians and Buddhists agree that a sure sign of spiritual development is drinking more water and enjoying it more.  Maybe swimming is like that."

[elpollodiablo]

What do we think of Pierre Bourdieu? I read a slice of Distinction this morning and was impressed enough to have just ordered the book. The introduction goes a long way toward articulating a lot of the inchoate ideas I've long had about culture and privilege, and the fetishization of the mundane (refined junkfood, artisanal jeans, all the bathetic admixtures that define our current ideal of 'cultured' in the aggregate).

The pure gaze implies a break with the ordinary attitude towards the world, which, given the conditions in which it is performed, is also a social separation. Ortega y Gasset can be believed when he attributes to modern art a systematic refusal of all that is 'human', i.e., generic, common-as opposed to-distinctive, or distinguished-namely, the passions, emotions and feelings which 'ordinary' people invest in their 'ordinary' lives. It is as if the 'popular aesthetic' (the quotation marks are there to indicate that this is an aesthetic 'in itself' not 'for itself') were based on the affirmation of the continuity between art and life, which implies the subordination of form to function. This is seen clearly in the ease of the novel and especially the theater where the working-class audience refuses any sort of formal experimentation and all the effects which, by introducing a distance from the accepted conventions (as regards scenery, plot etc.), tend to distance the spectator, preventing him from getting involved and fully identifying with the characters ( I am thinking of Brechtian 'alienation' or the disruption of plot in the nouveau roman). In contrast to detachment and disinterestedness which aesthetic theory regards as the only way of recognizing the work of art for what it is, i.e., autonomous, selbstandig, the 'popular aesthetic' ignores or refuses the refusal of 'facile' involvement and 'vulgar' enjoyment, a refusal which is the basis of the taste for formal experiment. And popular judgements of paintings or photographs spring from an 'aesthetic' (in feet it is an ethos) which is the exact opposite of the Kantian aesthetic. Whereas, in order to grasp the specificity of the aesthetic judgement, Kant strove to distinguish that which pleases from that which gratifies and, more generally, to distinguish disinterestedness, the sole guarantor of the specifically aesthetic quality of contemplation, from the interest of reason which defines the Good, working-class people expect every image to explicitly perform a function, if only that of a sign, and their judgements make reference, often explicitly, to the norms of morality or agreeableness. Whether rejecting or praising, their appreciation always has an ethical basis.

 Popular taste applies the schemes of the ethos, which pertain in the ordinary circumstances of life, to legitimate works of art, and so performs a systematic reduction of the things of art to the things of life. The very seriousness (or naively) which this taste invests in fictions and representations demonstrates a contrario that pure taste performs a suspension of 'naive' involvement which is one dimension of a 'quasi-ludic' relationship with the necessities of the world. Intellectuals could be said to believe in the representation-literature, theatre, painting-more than in the things represented, whereas the people chiefly expect representations and the conventions which govern them to allow them to believe 'naively' in the things represented. The pure aesthetic is rooted in an ethic, or rather, an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world, which may take the form of moral agnosticism (visible when ethical transgression becomes an artistic parti pris) or of an aestheticism which presents the aesthetic disposition as a universally valid principle and takes the bourgeois denial of the social world to its limit. The detachment of the pure gaze cannot be dissociated from a general disposition towards the world which is the paradoxical product of conditioning by negative economic necessities-a life of ease-that tends to induce an active distance from necessity.

 Although art obviously offers the greatest scope to the aesthetic disposition, there is no area of practice in which the aim of purifying, refining and sublimating primary needs and impulses cannot assert itself no area in which the stylization of life, that is, the primacy of forms over function, of manner over matter, does not produce the same effects. And nothing is more distinctive, more distinguished, than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal or even 'common' (because the 'common' people make them their own, especially for aesthetic purposes), or the ability to apply the principles of a 'pure' aesthetic to the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing or decoration, completely reversing the popular disposition which annexes aesthetics to ethics.

 In fact, through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose, the different ways of relating to realities and fictions. of believing in fictions and the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment, are very closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and, consequently, hound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of the different classes and class fractions. Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed. And statistical analysis does indeed show that oppositions similar in structure to those found in cultural practices also appear in eating habits. The antithesis between quantity and quality, substance and form, corresponds to the opposition-linked to different distances from necessity-between the taste of necessity, which favours the most 'filling' and most economical foods, and the taste of liberty-or luxury-which shifts the emphasis to the manner (of presenting, serving, eating etc.) and tends to use stylized forms to deny function.

Bourdieu also comes uncomfortably close to echoing Stalinist rejections of formalism, though it's hard to tell if he's really all that absolutist just from reading the introduction.

Anyone else? I'm curious about this guy.