I read Conjunctions and Disjunctions by Octavio Paz. It was cool, but also seemed quite old-fashioned anthropology. Some good stuff about sex in christianity vs hinduism. I've read stuff by only four of the people who have won the nobel prize this century: Kertesz, Pamuk, Vargas Llosa and Tranströmer. And I've studied comparative literature...
I'm really rooting for Pynchon. They've given it to people who probably wouldn't show up before, though that was mainly dissidents... Also, because they gave it to someone from east asia this year, we won't have to listen to all the people who say that murakami should win for a few years. yay.
― Frederik B, Friday, 12 October 2012 01:23 (eleven years ago) link
it'd be so awesome if they gave it to pynchon and he actually showed up.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, 12 October 2012 04:56 (eleven years ago) link
Scott is not a Pynchon fan iirc?
― buzza, Friday, 12 October 2012 05:12 (eleven years ago) link
this is gonna sound mean and i swear i'm not trying to be mean but i think i'd need to be a bigger nerd to be a pynchon fan? i just suck so bad at math and science. i feel the same way about zappa. basically: all that brain power in the service of a titty joke? why, frank, why? i think you need to think that pynchon is funny AND that he is worth following through all the twists and turns. i'm down with borges though. but basically i get all my pynchon-esque needs met by science fiction and stanley elkin novels. and peter de vries is way funnier to me. i don't learn anything from pynchon either, i guess. not that that's a prerequsite for me, but it helps. like nabokov, he feels like a closed system. or a locked room. or an airless room and everyone else in the room doesn't need to breathe air and i do. i could completely change my mind in ten years time. it happens with me. i am constantly changing and evolving. i love eating mushrooms now. i was really enjoying a nina simone album the other day. i would never rule out liking pynchon someday. i should probably try one of the later shaggier ones. i dunno though....i'll look in one of his books sometimes and its like someone gave tom robbins smart drugs and some PKD books to read. for some this is heaven.
― scott seward, Friday, 12 October 2012 12:46 (eleven years ago) link
good overview: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/11/hallucinatory-realism-of-mo-yan-the-first-official-chinese-winner-of-the-nobel-prize-for-literature.html
― 乒乓, Friday, 12 October 2012 13:31 (eleven years ago) link
I read The Crying of Lot 49 and V. (and earlier short stories he was embarrassed about later, in the intro to Slow Learner) while I was in high school, where I also was noooo good at math (kicked in the head by a mule). But I also had nooo probs with those books (also np w first couple Mothers Of Invention records--later met a muso who said Frank told him he started playing guitar in the mid-60s; if true, that may well be why he didn't get very freaking fancy on the good old early stuff)
― dow, Saturday, 13 October 2012 00:18 (eleven years ago) link
Oh yeah and I (more recently) enjoyed the poems of Tomas Tranströmer too. Must've lucked out w the translator, whose name I forget (this was in the New Yorker).
― dow, Saturday, 13 October 2012 00:21 (eleven years ago) link
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o 7/2Haruki Murakami 9/2Svetlana Aleksijevitj 6/1Adonis 10/1Ismail Kadare 10/1Patrick Modiano 10/1Jon Fosse 12/1Philip Roth 12/1Peter Handke 12/1Assia Djebar 14/1Peter Nadas 14/1Joyce Carol Oates 16/1Adam Zagajewski 20/1Nawal El Saadawi 20/1Milan Kundera 25/1Mircea Cartarescu 25/1Thomas Pynchon 25/1Cees Nooteboom 25/1Bob Dylan 25/1Les Murray 25/1Bei Dao 25/1Ko Un 33/1Umberto Eco 33/1Nuruddin Farah 33/1Darcia Maraini 33/1Margaret Atwood 33/1Don DeLillo 33/1Amos Oz 33/1Antonio Lobo Antunes 33/1Richard Ford 33/1Don Paterson 33/1Karl Ove Knausgard 33/1Paul Muldoon 33/1Karel Schoeman 33/1Juan Goytisolo 33/1Salman Rushdie 50/1Javier Marias 50/1Cormac McCarthy 50/1William Trevor 50/1John Le Carre 50/1Tom Stoppard 50/1Colm Toibin 50/1
― the man with the black wigs (Eazy), Wednesday, 8 October 2014 12:21 (nine years ago) link
Go Pynchon!
― Frederik B, Wednesday, 8 October 2014 12:28 (nine years ago) link
That would be tiresome.
Interesting names that I would like to read and don't see any translations of:
Nawal El SaadawiAssia Djebar Darcia Maraini Nuruddin Farah
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 8 October 2014 13:54 (nine years ago) link
an of course Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
If Murakami wins I'm punching somebody
― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Wednesday, 8 October 2014 23:08 (nine years ago) link
Most overrated living "literary" writer
Would Murakami be winning mostly for the wind up bird chronicle? I've read many books by him and i think he's good but WUBC is the only one i can think of that could possibly be considered "great" or "important."
― Treeship, Wednesday, 8 October 2014 23:18 (nine years ago) link
Guess I'm kind of over Murakami myself.
― Do Not POLL At Any Price (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 8 October 2014 23:40 (nine years ago) link
bob dylan should win a nobel prize. i mean, not really... but really.
― Treeship, Wednesday, 8 October 2014 23:44 (nine years ago) link
treesh........
― the final twilight of all evaluative standpoints (nakhchivan), Wednesday, 8 October 2014 23:49 (nine years ago) link
^good answer
― Ƹ༑Ʒ (imago), Wednesday, 8 October 2014 23:49 (nine years ago) link
treesh would be a more deserving winner than bob dylan
― the final twilight of all evaluative standpoints (nakhchivan), Wednesday, 8 October 2014 23:50 (nine years ago) link
bloody over rated rubbish!
― Ƹ༑Ʒ (imago), Wednesday, 8 October 2014 23:51 (nine years ago) link
.....
― the final twilight of all evaluative standpoints (nakhchivan), Wednesday, 8 October 2014 23:52 (nine years ago) link
kadare is such a nobel winner he might as well be given it now
fairly sure he would be given it now if he had cancer or something
― the final twilight of all evaluative standpoints (nakhchivan), Wednesday, 8 October 2014 23:53 (nine years ago) link
Shaun Hutson or gtfo
― Chimp Arsons, Thursday, 9 October 2014 00:14 (nine years ago) link
What makes Murakami such a likely pick? He doesn't seem particularly more Nobel-ish (idealistic, oppressed) than plenty of others.
― jmm, Thursday, 9 October 2014 00:31 (nine years ago) link
Murakami would be a populist pick. After a populist pick last year, maybe that's the way the current committee leans. Kundera at 25-1 seems like appealing odds.
― justfanoe (Greg Fanoe), Thursday, 9 October 2014 00:52 (nine years ago) link
the more i think about it, the more insane murakami seems a pick. his protagonists are mostly slacker everymen who get dragged into a world of sexuality and the unconscious, only to return from it mostly unchanged: a little humbler in some ways, maybe, but in a more important sense more self-assured. this is the same as judd apatow movies.
― Treeship, Thursday, 9 October 2014 01:34 (nine years ago) link
In truth, the most insane pick on that list would be Svetlana Aleksijevitj, at least from a historical standpoint. The only two solely nonfiction writers the award has ever gone to have been Winston Churchill and Theodor Mommsen (the second ever winner of the award). Would be nice to see them expand their horizons though.
― justfanoe (Greg Fanoe), Thursday, 9 October 2014 01:48 (nine years ago) link
awards are terrible why do we do this to ourselves
― lag∞n, Thursday, 9 October 2014 01:52 (nine years ago) link
xp to myself, wind up bird chronicle is the same as this in every respect but integrating the stuff about the japanese occupation of china has interesting consequences. you discover that the placelessness of murakami's books, where most of the cultural reference points are american and characters all speak in the same inflectionless faux-naive manner, is a thin facade concealing a history that has been violently repressed. japanese identity is what the narrator is looking for in the well, i think, but he doesn't find it and eventually he stops looking. this solution to japan's national shame might be unsatisfying but it seems preferable to mishima's fate. although, murakami wouldn't be murakami if he was capable of the sort of un-ironic, literal commitment to an ideology that undid mishima in the end.
it's interesting to me that america hasn't had to reckon with its atrocities in the same way. i mean, in the wind up bird chronicle it seems that both the violence in nanking and the shame of the atom bombs are too traumatic to integrate into a coherent national identity. better to be global citizens. why isn't slavery like this? why aren't the atom bombs like this from our end? are we just assholes or do history's victors just never have to explain themselves?
― Treeship, Thursday, 9 October 2014 01:56 (nine years ago) link
also he goes into a well and then the book is over or something
― lag∞n, Thursday, 9 October 2014 01:59 (nine years ago) link
plus he has to kill his brother-in-law in a dream in order to fulfill an oedipal fantasy that will bring his wife back to him and also kill this brother-in-law in real life.
― Treeship, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:01 (nine years ago) link
yeah i dont really get/remember that part
― lag∞n, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:02 (nine years ago) link
treesh u are reminding me why i read so few novels
― the final twilight of all evaluative standpoints (nakhchivan), Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:02 (nine years ago) link
i liked when the one guy was skinned alive and then the other guy went in the well tho
they had to kill all the zoo animals by firing squad
― Treeship, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:05 (nine years ago) link
Bob Dylan can fuck off too
― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:28 (nine years ago) link
bob dylans book is pretty good tbh
― lag∞n, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:30 (nine years ago) link
bob dylans book is pretty very good tbh
― Treeship, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:40 (nine years ago) link
With (Roy Orbison), it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.
― Treeship, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:43 (nine years ago) link
bob dylans book is pretty very good the best book that has been or will ever be written tbh
― lag∞n, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:44 (nine years ago) link
“When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.
i could read 10,000 pages of this kind of prose
― Treeship, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:45 (nine years ago) link
ya he shd do another one
― lag∞n, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:48 (nine years ago) link
He sang like a professional criminal
this is the line that always made me laugh
― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:50 (nine years ago) link
“I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”
these kinds of lines are really funny to me too. his transparently disingenuous "golly gee" mode
― Treeship, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:51 (nine years ago) link
kinda mad that Marias isn't more highly favored
― The Complainte of Ray Tabano, Thursday, 9 October 2014 02:59 (nine years ago) link
in re: Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature
This man has sold a gazillion units of vinyl, CD and downloadable whatnot. It's like he hit an oil well that never stops pumping money. The committee that awards the prize kind of regards that kind of commercial success as too crass to deserve Nobel recognition. Modest plaudits among the public at large, complemented by a high esteem within academia, seems to be the best way to punch your ticket.
― Aimless, Thursday, 9 October 2014 03:15 (nine years ago) link
dude lives on a tour bus 11 months out of the year
― Treeship, Thursday, 9 October 2014 03:26 (nine years ago) link
dude could buy his own fleet of Lear jets if he wanted to
― Aimless, Thursday, 9 October 2014 03:30 (nine years ago) link
ITT -_------->>> pictures of william t vollmann (no shops allowed)
― dylannn, Thursday, 9 October 2014 03:32 (nine years ago) link
if Dylan bought a fleet of Lear jets it would bankrupt him tbrr
― The Complainte of Ray Tabano, Thursday, 9 October 2014 03:35 (nine years ago) link