Tumgik
grandhotelabyss · 26 minutes
Note
How does one find good contemporary literature without simply wading through the dross? Are there any reliable prizes, or reviewers that cover the contemporary a bit more actively than yourself?
I'm probably the wrong person to ask. But a few hints. First, if you live near a good library, like a city's downtown library or university library, I strongly recommend wandering the stacks, or their new book shelves. Just pull books down and look at them, flip through them, read the beginning, reading the ending, read page 99. It's a form of aesthetic divination. As in Tarot or I Ching, the controlled randomness turns up meanings you might not have found otherwise. Second, and here is a controversial opinion, you want to find writers with interesting online presences. This isn't the 20th-century broadcast age when there was ethical power and artistic glamor in being a recluse; being a recluse back then meant you were refusing to allow your image to be used by the incredibly narrow state-corporate information channels—an honorable position. But a writer who isn't making use of the communications technology we have now, which is readily bent to the ends of literature and art, is probably not checked in enough to write anything interesting either. I have no patience for writers who complain that they have to go online and self-promote. It's not self-promotion; it's part of the writing. We all have the opportunity to write in an unmediated way to the world! Emily Dickinson would have killed for this! Third, the corporate publishers are pretty compromised at this point by Netflix thinking and bien-pensant politics, so you will probably want to be focused on what small presses and self-publishers are doing. I hope that helps!
0 notes
grandhotelabyss · 5 hours
Note
Thoughts on Ambrose Bierce? Based on his Wikipedia page, he seems to be among the most notable American writers — your best satirist and anti-war writer, and among the greats for weird fiction and criticism, and more. But I’d only heard of his weird fiction before today, which makes me suspicious
I only know his brilliantly satirical Devil's Dictionary, which should be given to all 12- to 14-year olds, provided they're also guided to outgrow it (I pored over my father's illustrated copy as a kid), and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which is a gimmick (I taught it as a T.A. in an American lit course once), but a gimmick that inspired Jacob's Ladder, a great film, so I can forgive it for its gimmickry. I have never read his weird fiction, unfortunately. I need to get into that whole loosely connected scene of weird writers before Lovecraft coming out of the Late-Victorian Gothic—I haven't even read The King in Yellow yet—and will get around to it someday.
0 notes
grandhotelabyss · 20 hours
Note
While we're talking about grand old Victorian men, how do you feel about Trollope? I've known some real Trollope addicts who swear by his meticulous psychological realism, which by your chronology maybe makes him something of a predecessor to James.
Sadly, my deepest engagement with Trollope has been watching the BBC miniseries of The Way We Live Now, years and years ago. It was fine. I've always been put off by the way his advocates contrast him with Dickens—I believe he contrasted himself with Dickens, calling him "Mr. Popular Sentiment," in the same way—and I also am not that interested in meticulous realism, whether social or psychological, without some extra dimension, like Dickens's visionary strain or George Eliot's philosophical awareness or James's crypto-mysticism and Symbolism, or even just the strong Christian ethical undertow in Austen. Maybe he has this and I just haven't heard about it, but those who love him seem to love him for not having it! I shouldn't disparage books I haven't read, though...
0 notes
grandhotelabyss · 1 day
Note
Lol your Zappa clip is the final piece to the puzzle in my paranoid mind - for context in my lil american-proxy country, on the state chanel in its various quizz shows, very often questions about Zappa comes up no matter that nobody here cares about him and he isnt even that popular back in the USA - like compared to MJ he is a nobody, yet he comes up more often.
looking at the mythos of him, he for some reason is considere "super intellegent" while seemingly being just a standard 80s hollywood liberal atheist while also leaning fiscally conservative -
but thats the consensus politics of the ruling party and the entertainers on tv here (well its one and the same, everyone is a wacky show man and serious political and future presidental prospect)
So with the whole astroturfed mkultra thing...
Anyways, maybe this sounds irellevant to you but personally I find it interesting
Yes, according to the extended version of David McGowan's argument in Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, Zappa became an investor and activist in Eastern Europe for liberalization (both social and economic) in the aftermath of the Cold War. I'm not sure where you are, but if you are in Eastern Europe, that would explain his prominence! "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" was so totally the default political position in America when I was growing up in the '90s that I've almost unavoidably retained aspects of it myself. I see its faults, obviously, and I see them even more clearly insofar as they were used as cover to enable pure gangsterism in post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, the rich stripping the state for parts and letting the desperate citizenry drink itself to death in the street. But the people who have risen up to challenge this worldview in America in the last decade have included literal Stalinists, Maoists, Catholic theocrats, ethno-nationalists, etc. So I try to see these things in a balanced perspective if I can.
0 notes
grandhotelabyss · 1 day
Note
Replying to the last anon, Zappa was a smart anti-intellectual, which is ironic given that he loved the highbrow avant-garde classical of his era. He’s kinda got the same bifurcation between high flying content and sub-sophomore comedy as Pynchon, minus the marijuana use. I don’t think you’d like him, but his best work belongs to the American Sublime imo
Thank you for taking the question more seriously than I did! That all sounds right—I'm sure he's good, but he also doesn't sound like my type exactly.
2 notes · View notes
grandhotelabyss · 2 days
Note
Thoughts on Americas obssession with Halloween as a holiday?
We need a secular but also post-secular feast-day to replace Christmas (too Christian) and Thanksgiving (genocide etc.), especially if it's not family-friendly in our family-unfriendly epoch. Plus, modernity has come to value fall over spring, "season of mists," as part of a revolt against the Enlightenment beginning in the Gothic and Romantic eras. (Fall is a prettier and more pleasant season than spring in the Northeastern and Midwestern U.S. Spring is a snowstorm one day, 80 degrees the next, winter and summer miserably battling it out from mid-March to mid-May. But fall offers the indeed misty and mellow gray skies and the flame of the treetops and day after day of an even 45 or 50 degrees, what they call sweater weather.) The horror genre of narrative, always native to Anglophone North America with its witch trials and whatnot, has ascended in the last few decades to its final apotheosis of respectability, thus domesticating Halloween as a truly cultured festival when we may revisit our literary and cinematic favorites. And consumerism, of course, in all senses, this being money-minded and morbidly obese America: candy and costumes, what's not to love? I'm sure I am supposed to perform some penetrating Christopher Lasch critique here, but I am a child of my time and love Halloween myself, love it for the atmosphere if nothing else: I don't don a mask or anything, but I love it as I love Poe and Hawthorne, as I love The Exorcist and A Nightmare on Elm Street, as I love the alluringly sinister flicker of orange on smoky black.
1 note · View note
grandhotelabyss · 2 days
Note
Just rereading Gerald Murnane's 'In Praise of the Long Sentence' and it got me wondering what your favorite sentences were — of other people's work, and of your own
I generally take note of passages more than single sentences, even long ones, but I will single out the almost page-long penultimate sentence of DeLillo's Underworld as perhaps my favorite long sentence (you can read it without "spoiling" the novel, which has no plot, but it does pick up phrases and motifs from earlier in the book that give it some of its power):
And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor’s yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and it’s your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk’s candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hall and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it’s only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive—a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.
And then this, from early in Mrs. Dalloway, a sentence that opens the day-in-the-life novel out into immensities of time past and time future, is pretty unforgettable:
But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth.
Among older classics, I love the first sentence of Emma, for which see Paglia's reading thereof—about how the sentence begins in the 18th century and ends in the 19th—in Sexual Personae:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Favorite sentences in nonfiction? I love the rolling rhetorical thunder of the one from Ruskin's "Nature of Gothic" I recently read out in one of my Invisible College lectures:
And therefore while in all things that we see, or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honorable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, that we may the more surely enjoy the complacency of success
I'm sure I'm forgetting things. Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, Bellow, Morrison. Shakespeare, the Bible. The last sentence of Suttree. That's what I have for now, though.
In my own work? My favorite sentence in Major Arcana, to cite only my latest production, is probably this, the conclusion of an early chapter:
The social worker kept saying Jakey had “died by suicide,” and, because she was insane by this point and couldn’t really breathe, she’d said, just to see if she could say something, “Isn’t it ‘committed’? ‘Committed suicide’?” and then the social worker with the mousy hair and the glasses had said, “Well, that implies it’s a sin,” and she’d answered with the question, “Isn’t it? Against life, I mean?” and the social worker who may once have been a sex worker had said, with pity in her eyes, “I’m sorry—are you very religious?” and Jessica Morrow had said, finally, “No. I don’t believe anything at all.”
If that's too sentimental, or too particular to its context, and not euphonious enough, try the sound effects in this one:
Her head spun, rung, drummed; her stomach churned, burned, surged.
Or this, from an early description of the city called Cosmopolis:
The older buildings, the banks and department stores from the first part of the century, held runic messages on their friezes; strange demons nestled, staring, from their eaves and buttresses; masonic mysteries hid in the upper air.
2 notes · View notes
grandhotelabyss · 2 days
Note
I don't know how much of a film guy you are, but from a narrative perspective, what do you think of Rashomon? It seems to me that retelling the same thing from four perspectives, one after the other, is much less interesting, ambitious, and revealing than trying to tell it ambiguously once. I've only seen it once but it feels closer to a gimmick than a profound statement on ambiguity. Like "wow you told four versions of the story and each is told differently", who cares. confront the fact that events in real life only come round once, and still manage to be ambiguous
I also only watched it once, and that was 20-some years ago. I remember liking it, but I tend to agree in general that the structure is a somewhat literal way to depict the ambiguity of perception in a fictional narrative. The idea of such ambiguity, though—that our perceptions are necessarily colored by our psychological states, our personal histories, our social interests, our aesthetic sensibilities, etc.—was a profound and revolutionary modern idea from Kant to Freud, with literary expressions in such Rashomon precursors as The Ring and the Book or As I Lay Dying. So maybe, to speak in somewhat historicist or Hegelian terms, these more literal multiple-viewpoint approaches to ambiguity were necessary in their time, and cinema itself needed some locus classicus for the insight.
2 notes · View notes
grandhotelabyss · 3 days
Note
Thoughts on swearing in non-fiction?
The performative Millennial swearing that infests even the titles of popular nonfiction books is annoying because it's supposed to signify rebellion or impiety when it actually demonstrates that a battle against older forms of propriety has long been won. They want credit for being rebels while actually conforming. I even have a passage making fun of this in Major Arcana:
Ash del Greco knew the average office girl she saw online, the one working in what they called corporate and living in an SF or Chicago high rise, a girl who seemingly slid from the womb with her yoga mat under one arm and matcha latte in the other hand, the type who had thousands of extra dollars to spend on psychotherapy, mindfulness coaches, wellness retreats, moleskine notebooks, and a color-organized library of sassy self-help books with bright spines, all of them titled some variation on Girl, F*ck This Sh*t: How to Maximize YOUR Bad*ss Life, wasn’t going to listen to a gender-struck teen with a spiral scar on xir big ugly face broadcasting from the dark and cracking wise about the sinking of the Pequod.
Such people would never violate the new proprieties, which is fine—I don't violate them either—but neither will they defend propriety as such. In Light in August, Faulkner abbreviates with a period a word we are now permitted to spell out: "fucking." On the other hand, he spells out a word—a racial epithet—we are obliged to abbreviate. I've often thought they could reissue the novel with this self-censorship reversed. To me, this proves that some words or other in a language are always taboo—literally unspeakable in any context, not even available for quotation or permissible in fictional dialogue.
Aside from that, though, I'd consider it as part of a broader question about how close to speech one's prose style should get. I personally tend to prefer a more "elevated" or artificial style, somewhat campily and ironically so in fact, as I learned it from writers like Harold Bloom and Christopher Hitchens and Susan Sontag, who liked to play up their acquisition of a "class" manner they hadn't been born into, and I therefore tend to find excessively conversational styles patronizing, or else the slumming gesture of someone who was to the manner born. If you can make it work, though, then go for it.
With the aforementioned vanquishing of older models of propriety, many swearwords have retreated to neutrality, the downscale sting and earthy tang gone from the Anglo-Saxon. Sometimes, if one isn't using them (as the Millennial writers do) to convey a now-nonexistent shock or intensity, they can just read as commonplace language, calling shit "shit" the way Chaucer did when the language was new.
youtube
1 note · View note
grandhotelabyss · 3 days
Note
Who are the greatest characters in all of literature?
(Sub-questions: Best characters in Shakespeare? Do you agree with Bloom's sextet of Hamlet and Falstaff first equal, followed by Macbeth, Rosalind, Cleopatra, and Iago?)
It's an interesting question, because there essentially are no "characters" exactly before Shakespeare. People act scandalized by Bloom's "invented the human" line, but he's transparent about deriving it from Hegel, and it's not that different from the academically respectable New Historicist thesis on "Renaissance self-fashioning."
Before Shakespeare—and then after Shakespeare but only in popular fiction—there are myths and archetypes to whom a few stable characteristics attach but who are available for reinvention and recirculation, an infinitely malleable legendary surface without inherent psychological depth: Prometheus or Odysseus, Arthur or Roland, Count Dracula or Sherlock Holmes.
On the other hand, the type of modernity inaugurated by Shakespeare—and then passing from him into Romanticism, realism, and modernism—gives us the character of bottomless, labyrinthine depth rather than an iconic or archetypal but flat figure: tragic heroes like Hamlet, Milton's Satan, Goethe's Faust, Captain Ahab, and the Brothers Karamazov, or more strictly novelistic figures like Emmas Woodhouse and Bovary, Hester Prynne, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer, Clarissa Dalloway. And then, reuniting the novel to the epic, the character to the archetype, perhaps the 20th century's greatest literary character: Leopold Bloom.
(Honorable mention for accomplishing the same synthesis as Joyce but from the other direction: Ursula Brangwen. If Joyce tailors a Homeric hero to Flaubertian proportions, Lawrence turn an Austen heroine into a Biblical prophetess.)
Best characters in Shakespeare: I do mostly agree with Bloom (Harold, not Leopold). I love Falstaff less than he does, though; there's a meanness or squalor in Falstaff he doesn't seem to see. I would also replace the bewildered Macbeth with the raging Lear, and I might add Prospero to our roll call, since he is (I fancy) the closest thing we have to a Shakespearean self-portrait.
2 notes · View notes
grandhotelabyss · 3 days
Note
Thoughts on William Empson?
I love Milton's God: so well-reasoned, so wide-ranging, so clear and funny. I've read it twice and wrote a bit about it here, including a mild critique of its variant of atheism. Seven Types of Ambiguity, however, is not a book I could ever get started with—too dry for me. I haven't gone deeply into the poetry, but he certainly wrote one of the great villanelles in the grim "Missing Dates."
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is not your system or clear sight that mills Down small to the consequence a life requires; Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills Of young dog blood gave but a month's desires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires. Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills. The complete fire is death. From partial fires The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is the poems you have lost, the ills From missing dates, at which the heart expires. Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
2 notes · View notes
grandhotelabyss · 4 days
Note
Could you sum up your thoughts on Magister Harold Bloom?
I answered a question about my disagreements with him here, and I think that gives a pretty good overview, including links to some other things I've written about him.
1 note · View note
grandhotelabyss · 5 days
Note
Do you write in your books? If not, what's your note-taking process when you read?
Yes, I write in books. I underline, I write in the margins, I take notes on the flyleaves or inside covers, etc. I recommend it: it makes the books your own, and tactile interaction with your reading helps you to remember things. I don't use separate notebooks or anything, because that would become unwieldy. I use a pencil, because I feel like I'm doing less damage than if I used a pen! Still, I try not to get neurotic about keeping books pristine; sometimes I think people who buy fancy editions of the classics are subtly discouraging themselves from reading the books. I like a good cover design as much as the next aesthete, but I prefer to read a sturdy functional paperback that I don't feel bad about writing in.
1 note · View note
grandhotelabyss · 5 days
Note
The negative reception of Ridley Scott's Napoleon is even more baffling after seeing the new Dune movie everyone is raving about - cause it tried to do the same "Oh the betrayl of the emancipated women as backsliding into reactionary self destructive politics" thing but just a lo more clumsly, without any passion and in a much more juvenile way - the romance in Dune 2 legit made me feel better about my chilidish attempts at writting romance in my stupid comics lol.
Maybe the crazys that say Lynch did it better were right all along lol
In Napoleon it was organic to the whole conception of the project, whereas in Dune it was gracelessly tacked on to inhospitable source material. The last sentence of the novel is literally, "While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives." The problem with cinematic adaptations rooted in fandom/nerd culture is that the filmmakers aren't free enough to reconceptualize the source material and make it their own, so they produce a 95% faithful adaptation with 5% inelegantly inserted current politics. I'd rather see Dune reimagined as some feminist vision, if this is indeed what a serious artist wants to do with it, from the sand up. Since there was no mandated source-text, the feminist elements of Blade Runner 2049 didn't feel forced, for example, but integral to the story. Or, more drastically, compare what Yorgos Lanthimos did to Alasdair Gray in Poor Things—he took a postmodern socialist novel about Scottish politics and national identity and made it into a neo-modernist pornographic libertarian steampunk movie in which Scotland is not even mentioned. Which is fine: fiction and cinema are different art forms—and Alasdair and Yorgos are different artists.
1 note · View note
grandhotelabyss · 5 days
Note
Do you agree that Frank Zappa was a midwit?
I don't know anything about Frank Zappa except this:
youtube
0 notes
grandhotelabyss · 5 days
Note
calling de Beauvoir uneducated for that reason is a bit ridiculous in my opinion.
Yes, that's why I defended her! I have to take the anons as they come, however.
0 notes
grandhotelabyss · 6 days
Note
Any thoughts on Djuna Barnes's Ryder?
Haven't read that one yet! Not sure about the Elizabethan pastiche...
0 notes