SZ Book Club?

[Avantster]

The narrative isn't as prominent and he gets in to the MoQ fairly quickly, no gentle build up like in ZAMM! As a novel it's still quite readable but to fully appreciate the philosophy I'd have to take notes as I read. Hence reading it more than once :-) Only a quarter of the way through though, will report back.

[Faust]

Cool. Well, I've read ZAMM about 5 times to get a comprehensive view. I'd imagine Lila requires 10 ;-)

[Ohrstrom]

Hello everyone!
Been a follower of this forum for quite som time now, and I saw this as a perfect moment to join in.
Just before i stubled in to this thread i was just about to read Bellows Herzog.

Looking forward to discuss more about this!

/E

[Faust]

welcome.

I'm 75 pages into the book. It's a beautiful exercise in masochism.

[Fade to Black]

It's a beautiful exercise in masochism.

this is a pretty intriguing description of something

ive never read any of Bellows work...might get a library card and take this one out some time in the week

[Faust]

It's my first Bellow. Good as advertised.

[Classique]

Should we format the Book Club? For discussion; To avoid speaking of important plot details, some readers may not know, yet? We can read a certain number of pages, daily / weekly. Individually write something resembling, this example.

Day 1 - Herzog, 20 pages.

Voluntary isolation by a deteriorated modern intellectual. Utalitarian: Housing, clothes and food. Can any individual successfully survive with: A disordered mind state and a "Valise of notes[?]" Which reflect cold and humorous thoughts; Hopeless response, for an impossible questionnaire.

Or

Week 1 - Herzog, 100 Pages.

...

[Classique]

Fuuma - I entrust your response.

But, the conflict between personal favorites and technical masterworks in literature is shattered by centuries of critical acclaim by: Professional writers, scholars and popular culture.

I could edit my statement with a preface or the words...

- Probably, the best.
- In my opinion.

However, the prescriptive valuing is the exact; Granular, top of the pyramid is x, formula. As you have written.

"[I]n history"

Is Shakespeare really THAT good? Within the hundreds of classic masterpieces I have read by native, english speaking authors *Writers* and the millions of books, I have not. I don't know, is he?

If not him, then who?

There should be a standard of excellency.

[marco-von]

How's everyone getting on with herzog? i am slacking a little but enjoying it even though its certainly not something i thought would interest me and there is a fair bit which is way above my intellectual limit! Bellow really has given herzog a great unique weridness in depth, for some reason i've found it a really funny read so far.

Read 2 pages this weekend, weather ment to many parties and bbq's and gardening to be done

[Faust]

I'm nearing 100. Immensely enjoyable, but dense. A LOT to think about in those letters. I think we should start posting random quotes that strike us here. One that I already posted for merz,

"No man can satisfy a woman who does not want him."

[zamb]

Should we format the Book Club? For discussion; To avoid speaking of important plot details, some readers may not know, yet? We can read a certain number of pages, daily / weekly. Individually write something resembling, this example.

Day 1 - Herzog, 20 pages.

Voluntary isolation by a deteriorated modern intellectual. Utalitarian: Housing, clothes and food. Can any individual successfully survive with: A disordered mind state and a "Valise of notes[?]" Which reflect cold and humorous thoughts; Hopeless response, for an impossible questionnaire.

Or

Week 1 - Herzog, 100 Pages.

...

i have given this same question some thought, and also did some reasearch as to what guidlines could be established to get us all on the same page, I will try to post some ideas/suggestion tonite/ early tomorrow as I am reaaaallly busy right now, Studio should have been done for official opening tomorrow, but only about 75% of the work done............ so working late tonite

How's everyone getting on with herzog? i am slacking a little but enjoying it even though its certainly not something i thought would interest me and there is a fair bit which is way above my intellectual limit! Bellow really has given herzog a great unique weridness in depth, for some reason i've found it a really funny read so far.

Read 2 pages this weekend, weather ment to many parties and bbq's and gardening to be done

I havent read as much as i wanted to, but will definately pick up some steam early this week................

[Faust]

LOL at the new sig, Zam. Totally missed that.

[Ohrstrom]

The above idéas sounds good. Would be helpful if we all where more or less in the same part of the book.

As well as many others i have been slacking abit aswell, too much to get ready for final exams, but looking forward to be around page 100 by the end of the weekend.

One of my favurite parts of the book so far must be the conversation between Herzog and the salesman and the fact that it obvously was written so long ago. Amusing.

[Faust]

Mind blown

Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled, himself, to see it - eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, "comical." It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure. But this was becoming the up-to-date and almost conventional way of looking at any single life. In this view the body itself, with its two arms and vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew the agony of consciousness and separate being. For that matter, he had been taking this primitive cure, administered by Madeleine, Sandor, et cetera; so that his recent misfortunes might be seen as a collective project, himself participating, to destroy his vanity and his pretensions to a personal life so that he might disintegrate and suffer and hate, like so many others, not on anything so distinguished as a cross, but down in the mire of post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartiesian dissolution, next door to the Void. Everybody was in the act. "History" gave everyone a free ride. The very Himmelesteins, who had never even read a book of metaphysics, were touting the Void as if it were so much salable real estate. This little demon was impregnated with modern ideas, and one in particular excited his terrible little heart: you must sacrifice your poor, squawking niggardly individuality - which may be nothing anyway (from an analytic viewpoint) but a persistent infantile megalomania, or (from a Marxian point of view) a stinking little bourgeois property - tho historical necessity. And to truth. And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth. But of course he, Herzog, predictably bucking such trends, had characteristically, obstinately, clumsily, tried to be a marvelous Herzog, a Herzog who, perhaps clumsily, tried to live out marvelous qualities vaguely comprehended. Granted he had gone too far, beyond his talents and his powers, ut this was the cruel difficulty of a man who had strong impulses, even faith, but lacked clear ideas. What if he failed? Did that really mean that there was no faithfulness, no generosity, no scared quality? Should he have been a plain, unambitious Herzog? No. And Madeline would never have married such a type. What she had been looking for, high and low, was precisely an ambitious Herzog. In order to trip him, bring him low, knock hims sprawling and kick out his brains with a murderous bitch foot. Oh, what a confusion he had made - what a waste of intelligence and feeling! When he thought of the endless anxious tedium of courtship and marriage with all that he had invested in arrangements - merely in practical measure,s in trains and planes and hotels and department stores, and banks where had banked, in hospitals, in doctors and drugs, in debts; and for himself, the nights o rigid insomnia, the yellow boring afternoons, the trials by sexual combat, and all the horrible egomania of it, the wondered that he had survived at all. He wondered, even, why he should have waned to survive. Others in his generation wore themselves out, died of strokes, of cancer, willed their own deaths, conceivably...

So, are still doing this? Looks like a failed SZ project. I'm approcahing page 200.

[Faust]

To tell the truth, I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy. When a man's breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown - he is free, he is light. And he longs to have his vultures back again. He wants his customary struggles, his nameless, empty works, his anger, his afflictions, and his sins.

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