Need a hot feminist take need a hot feminist take. Oh I know
"A woman could never write Finnegans Wake or Ulysses"
I totally get the criticism that the current canon is too white, male, and heteronormative, it objectively is, and opening up the canon to new voices is a good thing. This person doesn't even seem to want to do that though. It's just flatly dismissing difficult to read books, which is just lazy. Unsurprisingly this person writes adult romance novels, you get this garbage from a ton of twitter authors who either write very horny books or young adult fiction, and seem to aggressively refuse to read literature.
Hell, she might have a good point if she had asked, do current expansions of the canon miss important works because while they accept the easy to read novels by women, and other marginalized groups, there's still a bias against difficult to read and experimental works by those groups.
Yep. It's the "Bernie wearing mittens is male privilege" school of feminism, and it's really fucking stupid.
The types to bitch about classic literature on twitter also like to tweet about how some potboiler YA bullshit made them cry and how sex scenes make them uncomfortable, just utterly Barney Brained "adults"
So many of these people are "authors". Harry Potter did more damage to millenials than just generating cringey political takes I guess.
Idk if being uncomfortable with sex scenes in media makes someone barney brained or less of an adult. I'd be perfectly happy to never have to see or read one again, being a non-horny person, and they do actively make me uncomfortable. You're dead on about the YA brain poison, though.
Movies fucking suck now because they are incapable of portraying people having actual emotions and relationships. The end of sex scenes is a part of that
Please support me in my efforts to not have to see awkwardly shot and drawn out scenes of heterosexuals fucking every time I want to watch a tv show or movie.
But what if it's in silhouette with an 80s ballad playing over it
Nothing against the chapo hosts but this is one of the culture takes they make that you have to take with a grain of salt, male-gazey box-checking badly shot sex scenes and their accompanying shoehorned hetero relationship plots were not crucial to good movies, they were mostly just weird. They also weren't a part of movies, many many excellent movies, for a long time before they became ubiquitous during the 'especially creepy rapist producer' Hollywood era. Not that they aren't necessary and great in lots of films, just not most that they were a thing in. We also don't need a return to the stock scene where prepubescent boys peeped on undressing teen girls, as much as Will Menaker may like that, as an example. More realistic attitudes towards sexuality in movies doesn't mean more sex or nudity, my favorite sex in movies is of the embarassing and uncomfortable sort, or sexual repression and feeling being represented by a lack of sex or even masturbation (sadly underexamined in cinema).
Now, squibs and practical effects in general? Absolute must, parrot the podcast by all means on that
i aint parroting the podcast, if anything the idea comes more from this chick
https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/
and no, its true, bring back titties, if that makes you uncomfortable you can always watch kids movies
"Movies stopped being good after the 90's" brain
Fucking 60's stuff made under the hays code had more emotion and humanity than movies nowadays
A Serious Man came out in 2008 and that's the best movie that's ever been made, but I take your point, there is a distinct quality dropoff, I just don't think it's attributable to sex scenes, or even "everything being PG now", because as you said there were real bangers in the Hayes code era (although often because they did everything they could to get around it). I think the problem is more to do with the demands of marketing, of which "less sex" is only a sliver, like, all those shitty Michael Bay movies everyone holds up as the height of trash are very sexy in an unappealing way
Felix was right that there's an entire subculture now that wants all media to just be Barney
It's a problem in media no doubt but we should all try to find ways to rephrase this sort of idea because it's bad to just copy what they say on a podcast you are a fan of and that goes doubly for tweets made by those podcasters
Or talk about the difference between a hat and a snake that has swallowed an elephant.
Anglos just assume anything related to Ireland is inherently nonsense, thus making Joyce completely incomprehensible to them.
Also, Ulysses is an eminently readable book, like it's very dense which means you have to read it a couple times and read commentary/annotations, but that's something every great work of literature requires. They teach you this in HS English. Finnigan Wake I could take or leave, but Ulysses is a genuine masterpiece.
Was thinking might try it someday, just because I've heard so much about it over the years. Is there a particular annotated edition you think is good?
Everyone interested in Joyce should read Re Joyce by Anthony Burgess - basically commentary and annotations of Joyce's work for normal people. I'm never going to read Wake, but definitely feel like I got a piece of it in my head from Burgess walk-through of the text.
I have Don Gifford's 'Ulysses Annotated' which is comprehensive but almost as long as Ulysses itself.
Another option you might want to try is the Ulysses lecture series that the Great Courses produced, its cheap/free to listen to on Audible. The professor give a 1 to 2 hour lecture on each chapter, going through the events, giving background and some light commentary.
Is it better do you think to read the notes beforehand so I know what I'm getting into, or afterwards to contextualize what I read? Or maybe both? Probably both is best for me lol.
I'd read a section of Ulysses, the relevant annotations, and then I'd reread the section of Ulysses. Other strategies may vary, and of course I already knew that if I wanted to read the book I wouldn't mind reading it twice. The first two sections of Ulysses are perfectly comprehensible - it's when you get to "Ineluctable modality of the visible" that a lot of people give up. (Stephen Dedalus walking down the beach thinking about Aristotle.) So maybe you can do the first fifty pages or so and see how far you want to take it.
Ineluctable modality
Fuck I don't even know what those words mean without context much less in a sentence :ohnoes:
This is good advice though, I'm bad at reading and would need a strategy.
Here's Burgess, ReJoyce, page 22:
The thing to do is to forget that the field of the novel is as limited as the cult of the contemporary best-seller is making it, and to consider that Joyce may be within his rights in turning language into one of the characters of Ulysses (perhaps in Finnegans Wake the only character). In Ulysses, the poeticising and the pastiche and parody serve, as we shall see later, a dramatic enough purpose; they also deepen the human characters by adding to their ordinary human dimensions the dimension first, of history, then of myth.
I love learning that I am not the only living person to have read that book. We should do a whole thread on Burgess some day.
I'm down. The people who dig Joyce's fart humor will love Inside Mr. Enderby.
The chapter about Shakespeare in Enderby's Dark Lady is fucking magnificent.
You can also skip most chapters and come back later without missing too much. Like Wertheimer said, a lot of people get real frustrated at Chapter 3 and give up, but I personally think you can just skip it, especially for a first go through.
It'd be a separate volume, but Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated. Or you could go another route and read Anthony Burgess's Re-Joyce, which attempts to make the case that annotations are unnecessary.
I think I'd rather go with the annotated, just because like if I get to the end of the book about why we don't need annotations then I could have just read Ulysses without annotations in that time, and if I disagree at the end then I have to read the annotations anyway. :galaxy-brain:
Damn, the annotations book is 700 pages long? And that doesn't include Ulysses? That's intimidating damn.
It's basically footnotes. Useful as a reference but not necessary to read cover-to-cover. Like, there's a part in the "Cyclops" episode that's a few pages of ridiculous names, and Gifford tells you what they're referring to. But you don't need to know that Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler means "penis in bath, inhabitant of the valley of testicles" to know that it's a funny name.
Just dislike something and complain about it like a normal person instead of making it a political statement, that goes for you fucks reading this that make hot take threads about how Skyrim is reactionary just shut up shut the fuck up post some Todd Howard meme instead and just dislike Skyrim.
skyrim is actually revolutionary. the horny mods count as queer.
Yes lol I notice it tons lately everywhere. For some reason people are mildly annoyed by something and they make up a weird political metanarrative about it.
i thought like this too but then i went back to play skyrmi as if the character was really me. Got to the point where I had to side with the imperialists or the racists and ended up quitting.
I'm pretty sure you can just not do those quests, either way this still falls under "I dont like game".
You're right lol I didn't look into it. Regardless, I would've liked there to be some sort of even slightly left leaning faction/questline.
I can't play Skyrim like the character is me because I wouldn't do anything. I'd start farming.
ah shiiit a dragon wiped out your farm and your favourite goat. Better go wipe out his entire bloodline.
John Wick: Origins
But for real I would never ever consider being able to fight a dragon. That's like trying to get revenge on a flood or hurricane as far as I'm concerned. I'd probably move on to begging and petty theft.
Although that gave me an idea. They should do an open world where your character ages and dies, it would make roleplaying as anyone but a giant epic hero way more doable.
the real question is what's up with the person taking a "grad class devoted to Ulysses" who's mad that it has a lot of of scholarship devoted to it. Like, how do you begin to get a graduate level education in literature if you find the idea of obsessively studying literature laughable? what are you even getting a degree for?
Actually maddening. The fact a book took a century to be fully understood by scholars should be appealing to you if you're doing a graduate degree in literature.
Some goof wrote a weird book that then took a century of academic navel gazing to figure out
Imagine if that time and effort had been spent helping people instead.
Maybe they thought it was about going really deep into Hunger Games lore or something.
Dunno about grad school, but I've known English or Literature majors who don't read anything past YA fiction.
Those letters where he got super horny about women farting were 🔥 tho
Not to mention the work that queer, feminist and anticolonialist critics have done reinterpreting older works from a fresh perspective and achieving new insights thereby.
No they're saying a woman could never write a book as bad as Finnegan's wake or Ulysses as they are saying those books are hard to read and unentertaining.
And if they didn't then that's a sign of the times, and a mistake that can be rectified today without shitting on books written a century ago.
OP is dunking on the tweet. I'm pretty sure that sentence is supposed to be a parody of the people tweeting. It just came out weird.
I kinda like Finnegan's wake. It makes zero sense and isn't readable but it has some sentences I really like.
She's awesome. Less stream-of-consciousness, more philosophy and humor. A Severed Head is the one I've read most recently, and it's hilarious. Haven't read The Black Prince yet but I've heard good things.
:cat-vibing:
flight from the enchanter and the bell are two of my favourite books, but honestly all her stuff is super worth the readThe Bell is wonderful. Haven't read the first one. I keep having bad luck with Murdoch at both libraries and used bookstores, but, yeah, from what I have read, I hope to read and expect to like them all. What do you think of her non-fiction works?
that anyone studying sartre, ever, absolutely must read her book (sartre: romantic rationalist) on him, not only for it being one of the earliest analytical works on him (writen like.. ten years after he wrote age of reason iirc, analysis of which forms a decent chunk of her approach), but also because it offers a unique perspective, and because it does a brilliant job of explaining essentialism.
but also metaphysics as a guide to morality is pretty good as a philosophy text on its own
Awesome. Yeah, the second one's been on my list for a while. I should just bite the bullet and buy it new. If I read it anytime soon I'll ping you with some thoughts. Thanks for the recommendations.
Marguerite Young, too. The fact that she's frequently out of print is not James Joyce's fault.
twitter, so far as I can tell, follows the code of saying more than you need to or less than you should. NEVER the correct amount.
According to Twitter style guides you didn't use nearly enough emoji to convey sarcasm.
At the same time, I think it's absolutely fair to read a bit of Ulysses and think "this is fucking gibberish" without it being philistinism.
Ahem, excuse me, but YA is so last decade. The discerning philistine of today finds their muse in that most fertile literary field of isekai LitRPG. 🙃
Do you have a newsletter or something? I'd like to subscribe, please.
I found that reading it aloud makes it a lot more fun but I've only read a few pages of it this way. Ulysses and other Joyce however I love.
Yeah it’s best read aloud, makes it easier to catch some of the puns that way and is aesthetically pleasing
There is an incredibly smug affectation that has developed on tiktok with these kinds of videos that is so fucking insufferable
You can't just make a point or state an opinion online anymore, it has to be out of spite for someone. I think that's where the smugness comes from
I’m sure it’s also liberal smugness in a lot of cases. But I do think that the way social media is set up incentivizes take downs and dunks so people are just gravitating to what works. But there’s a way they do it that is so quintessentially tik tok that just makes me feel like I’m at a brunch table being lectured by some lib lol
white women love saying "white man"
white men also love saying "white women" to be tbh
This is weird because it says that books written decades ago by straight white men can't describe her perspective and condition and then she says "fuck Steinbeck read Percy Jackson". Ok but Percy Jackson is also written by a straight white man, it's just more recent I guess...
fuck percy jackson was written by a straight white man! Rick Riordan is not fundamentally different from Steinbeck in that regard!
I think it's fine to have strong feelings about media for children, and even to find deep meaning in it, but like, there's other stuff out there!
I want to meet one of these people IRL so I can tell them that Hemingway is the GOAT author.
Only if you do it in a single stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence with awkward splices and no pausing for breath because commas are revisionist and sentences that span six pages are the only way to convey the depths of your alcoholic stupor.
I, for one, choose to believe that the fish in The Old Man and the Sea was a metaphor for Hemingway's liver.
The Old man and the Sea was a nonfiction about Hemingway hunting Nazi U-boats with grenades.
It's been like 15 years since I've actually read Hemingway. I thought his sentences were generally shorter than most authors.
hemingway maintained that he never wrote drunk. he'd work from 5am to noon and then get blasted.
he also didn't really do run-on sentences and "commas are revisionist" sounds nothing like what hemingway would say
