What are you reading?

[Real Real]

Nice! Enjoy.

[mamaboy]

purple fashion

[Faust]

purple fashion

$35 for any magazine = fail. although i'm sure you bought it in paris.

[Diego]

Retrofitting blade runner
Punktown by Thomas (will work on an adaptation for film)

[jompa]

thanks for the help with poems. will use that one by phillip larkin so especially thanks for that one!

I just finished reading Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe. Anyone read it? I found it quite weird and confusing although it did grow on me the last two parts.

[Faust]

thanks for the help with poems. will use that one by phillip larkin so especially thanks for that one!

I just finished reading Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe. Anyone read it? I found it quite weird and confusing although it did grow on me the last two parts.

Yes. What was weird about it?

[jompa]

Yes. What was weird about it?

I think confusing was a more accurate term. I got quite lost in all the african sayings and ceremonies in the first half. Also the language to me seemed like quite a mish-mash of modern and ancient english. I liked it towards the end though but guess I expected more from it. perhaps i should read it again to understand better..
what did you think of it?

[Faust]

I think confusing was a more accurate term. I got quite lost in all the african sayings and ceremonies in the first half. Also the language to me seemed like quite a mish-mash of modern and ancient english. I liked it towards the end though but guess I expected more from it. perhaps i should read it again to understand better..
what did you think of it?

I liked it for the most part. I thought it was an interesting book, because it did not portray Africa as some pastoral idyll that was ruined by European colonialists that brought the evils of civilization with them, but showed a society that was also savage in its own way. It made no excuses either for the colonizers nor for the colonized. I like books that are ambivalent in tone - where it's not easy to side with one or the other.

[Real Real]

Things Fall Apart was involved in one of my more embarrassing memories from college. First semester of Freshman year, and the one advanced class I was taking was called something like Studies in Afro-American Literature.

First day of class, the professor starts talking about one of the central themes of the class is the literature of abandonment, or something like that. I decide to butt in and prove that I belonged in the class by displaying my already-broad knowledge of African American literature, so I said "one good example of that literature - and I'm not sure if you're familiar with it - is a novel by a writer named Chinua Achebe named Things Fall Apart". A couple of people started snickering, and then two other people started laughing (imagine if you went into a History of Pop Music class and tried to impress someone by name-dropping the Beatles). I wanted to kill myself.

[Faust]

LOL, that's pretty funny.

[Real Real]

Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun

[mamaboy]

derrida "the animal therefore i am"--that shit toooo much for my brain....phylosopher mamaboy....

[mpcec]

Just finished The Politics of Memory by Joanne Rappaport. Going to start Suttree by Cormac McCarthy tomorrow probably.

[Faust]

Just finished The Politics of Memory by Joanne Rappaport. Going to start Suttree by Cormac McCarthy tomorrow probably.

Keep looking at it every day sitting on my shelf, but I need a break from McCarthy, or I will commit suicide.

[maldoror]

what's the deal with everyone being so mccarthy crazy these last couple years? is it the effect of no country for old men the movie, or the road being featured on oprah and getting a massive ad campaign or ____?

what's most amazing to me is the breadth of his appeal. not only is everyone and their grandmother, getting/giving the road at holidays, but he's somehow also managed to become the new hunter s. thompson for millennium high schoolers (e.g., the comments by "endtroducing" upthread), and honestly I never saw it coming.

this is not to say it's a bad thing. on the contrary I'm genuinely glad for him, and would rather see his name on the best seller list than dan brown or janet evanovich any day. but that doesn't make it any less puzzling (the road ≠ the davinci code)