r/TrueLit • u/pregnantchihuahua3 ReEducationThroughGravity'sRainbow • 1d ago
Weekly General Discussion Thread
Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.
Weekly Updates: N/A
5
u/ToHideWritingPrompts 1d ago
last week, or the week before, I mentioned working off of a self-made syllabus for improving my literary analysis writing. I've been working on it and writing some samples, but have run into a road block of not having anyone to give me feedback.
I was toying around with using an LLM but, surprise surprise it is very not good at it.
So now I'm trying to see if there's any interest in getting a group going. If you have been interested in writing more criticism-adjacent stuff, and would like to receive peer feedback in a group setting, let me know! It'll probably be a discord server with rotating pair assignments
3
u/lispectorgadget 21h ago
I would definitely be interested; I've been thinking of getting back into blogging, and I would love feedback, though I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind.
Also--I'm not sure if you've heard of this, but this is an interesting resource for syllabi: https://syllabusproject.org/
2
u/foxinanattic 1d ago
I'm definitely interested!
I think one of my major issues in this area is that i mainly read and would like to write about prose literature, but most of the criticism I enjoy reading is about poetry :|
6
u/bananaberry518 1d ago
Late in the day update, as my first official day of working was today! but it was all just training modules and going over the city employee handbook etc. But they gave me a reflective vest, a whistle, a stop sign and a (GIANT ass) raincoat so its feeling very official. Tomorrow I do a shift at the school working with another crossing guard. Aaaand of course a tropical storm is blowing in so I’m gonna get baptized into it right away lol.
Otherwise I’ve just been reading about those (fictional) viking dudes. Red Orm is a real hypochondriac and I was not expecting that. At one point he’s getting his hair combed out and when they find no lice on him he decides his blood must be poisoned and he’ll probably die soon. He doesn’t of course, that would be a bummer of an ending (if a little funny).
5
u/lispectorgadget 1d ago
This is an extremely niche complaint I think only people #onhere will understand: I hate the Portable Feminist Reader released by Penguin. I see it constantly in bookstores, and it always irks me. The omissions in it are just crazy: no Shulamith? No Dworkin? No Sophie Lewis? No Kate Millett? You're including Rebecca Solnit--but not any of these writers? That is a J.O.K.E.
2
u/Soup_65 Books! 20h ago
we are at the point where if something is calling itself feminist and is the slightest bit marketable I don't trust it. Sounds like lib scammery.
2
u/lispectorgadget 20h ago edited 20h ago
I am so triggered by it. Like??? Where is the stuff that's going to light you on fire, you know?
The cover is so ugly too--a bunch of abstract figures with flat, shadow-less breasts and smiles. GROSS. Like why not a protest? Or a consciousness-raising meeting? Or even a photo of the Combahee River Collective?
4
u/lispectorgadget 20h ago
Anyway. I read In the Time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig for a book club and LOVED it. So good. It gave me a YEN for female-centered books by twentieth-century leftist women. It inspired me to start Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante, which I've been meaning to read forever; it's incredible, so far. I also have on my list The Time of Doves by Mercè Rodoreda and Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg. Anyone have any recommendations similar to these?
I also went to the Strand Saturday night. I have never seen a bookstore so packed on a Saturday night. It made me feel really grateful to live here :,)
2
2
u/ToHideWritingPrompts 15h ago
Loved Lies and Sorcery by Morante the first time I read it - I felt like it stalled a bit on my second read through somewhere around the 300 page mark, but I still have very fond memories especially of the beginning. The intro is killer. I went on a Morante binge a few years ago. There's a biography of her by Lily Tuck that is not very good but still entertaining if you're into that.
Continuing the italian theme of Morante and Ginzburg - Alba de Cespedes made the rounds a few years ago with some new translations. You should definitely check those out if you haven't already, they might be up your alley.
3
u/Soup_65 Books! 13h ago
ya know, i was listening to bob dylan's street-legal earlier. and if anyone wants to make the case for dylans christian stuff im all ears, but dang that shit feels a real battle between gorgeous gospel vocals, solid, instrumentation, and the fact that the track señor tale of yankee power utterly fucking rips, all warring against the fact that the albums prove to be very painfully mid.
all of this is to say i passed my driving test LMAOOOOOOO
2
u/foxinanattic 1d ago
for the past few months, or so, I've been reading poems from a large anthology of british and anglophone poetry that I picked up, called the School Bag. I usually try to read two to three a day, but I often miss that target, because I'm not really in the habit of reading short/lyric poetry, which is the majority of poems in this book
the book is organised in some kind of thematic order, though I haven't exactly been able to figure out any sort of logic behind. but it's completely non-chronological, so you might have one poem from the 16th century, one from the early 19th and then one from the 1960s. it's especially interesting reading medieval poets like Chaucer and early modern poets together, because I normally think of them as completely separate, with the early moderns being closer to what came after, but reading them in proximity, they can actually feel quite similar to the medievals. There's one poem, an extract from a 1567 translation of the Metamorphoses, which I was surprised was as recent as that, it really felt older. Partly because they'd kept the original spellings (which can make a huge difference), but even on the level of sentence structure and vocabulary, it seems to have something in common with medieval verse
It's interesting to see the effect of retaining the original text versus modernising: I think you can really see the difference with the original and modernised texts of They Flee From Me by Sir Thomas Wyatt
1
u/ToHideWritingPrompts 21h ago
not to give another thing on your reading list - but that's the companion to The Rattle Bag which is also edited by Heaney and Hughes. I really liked picking through Rattle Bag - it's ordered I based on alphabetical order of title (or first line, if there is no explicit title).
Interesting to hear about The School Bag ! I didn't know it was a duology lol
2
u/foxinanattic 20h ago
yes, I've heard about that one as well. actually, I only bought this one because it's massive (over 500 large sized pages) and I found a very affordable copy (around 1 or 2 pound). But I've really enjoyed it, so I'm definitely planning on getting the Rattle Bag once I'm through with this.
2
u/Ok-Swan1152 16h ago edited 16h ago
The House Of Mirth is still haunting me. Not as bad as a week ago... Or two. But it's ever present in the back of my mind.
I did go scouring the net for others' thoughts on the book. And I found an enlightening comment on 'the word' that is never spoken out loud in the final two chapters. I have been turning over 'the word' in my mind but none of the words fit, and no I don't think it's 'love', that doesn't make a lot of sense I think this anonymous commenter hit the nail on the head when they said that the word was FATE. It's perfect. Not only does it fit with the Greek tragedy themes of the book (Eumenides anyone?) but it would be the same word that Lily and Selden stumbled upon, for Lily it was the word that kept them apart and for Selden it was the word that would bring them together. So he went running to her once he has 'the word' because he was going to tell her that they were fates to be together.
And it hit me all over again 'in the feels'...
I have been very snuggly with my husband, more than usual. It did make me want to savour every minute of what we have. I love him so.
I tried to watch the movie by the way, and it is not good... The actor who plays Selden is simply not strong enough. That's just one of the problems of this movie. That said... The love scenes are something else. They are intensely erotic and tender and beautifully filmed. (No clothes come off, fyi!) You can just skip the movie to those parts, lol.
1
u/Soup_65 Books! 7h ago edited 7h ago
I tried to watch the movie by the way, and it is not good... The actor who plays Selden is simply not strong enough.
it's funny, my mom, whose favorite book is house of mirth, doesn't like the movie, and it's exactly because she thinks the casting is a whiff. (fwiw the scorcese "age of innocence" rocks. utterly gorgeous and daniel-day lewis is the male lead so i think we are good there)
but overall i love this comment, your point about fate is so real. it feels like they are constantly fighting with/events, a reality they know rules them but are still fighting, and one with talons...
1
u/Ok-Swan1152 2h ago
I honestly think the portrayal of Selden needs to be more 'rakish'... He gives off playboy vibes. This actor is not it. I think someone like Matthew Goode would be a great fit if he wasn't too old and British lol.
Gillian is great. I adore her. But I think her Lily Bart was very sultry/sexy and not naive enough.
The writing is off though, they took the lines from the novel but managed to completely miss the point.
2
u/big_arj 4h ago
Has anyone read Simon Pare’s translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, that was published earlier this year?
I am reading this book for the first time. Couldn’t really get into it after reading 50 or so pages of the Lowe-Porter translation, and there seems to be somewhat of a consensus that her translation is clunky. Now choosing between the Woods translation from the 90s, or the new Pare translation that’s just come out.
Any thoughts appreciated!
1
u/Plastic-Persimmon433 7h ago
About halfway through Nicholas Nickleby and I've noticed a pattern with myself and Dickens. I greatly enjoy the first 300 pages and then my interest completely falls off a cliff during the middle portion. By the last third I'm usually fairly interested again, but never to the same level. In fact, the endings to his longer books have honestly disappointed me more often than not. I remember David Copperfield resolving the main conflict in basically one or two chapters and then kind of coasting along to the end afterwards. Dombey and Son's was actually a bit more thrilling but still felt very rushed relative to the books length.
The only books of his that have sustained me the entire way through are Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. Obviously these are some of his shortest works, which is no coincidence I think, but the former is one of my favorite novels and the latter I think has some of his best writing.
I'm wondering how other people generally approach Dickens. He's kind of the only author I've had this trouble with and I'm curious what people think. I was greatly enjoying Bleak House about halfway through and think that one could have maintained my interest but I moved states and didn't bring it for some reason. Aside from that, it's kind of amusing just how much Nicholas Nickleby reminds me of Kafka's Amerika.
1
u/Ok-Swan1152 2h ago
I've always struggled so much with Dickens. That said. It's been an absolute age though so I should probably try again at some point...
8
u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 1d ago
Thought about going back to look over essays I remember reading and responding to them but most of them have been annihilated by time. One essay had been about Gaddis and the Protestant Work Ethic in The Quarterly Conversation, which no one really mentions anymore. And I remember another essay from eXile which also seems to have vanished into thin air covering something about Bret Easton Ellis and Hubert Selby Jr. I found a couple others that I liked a lot: Elif Batuman's essay on the short story and Daniel Green's retrospective on John Hawkes are still floating around. It's a shame I didn't have the presence of mind back then to save some of the articles. Think it would have been a fun idea to tally them up and respond to them somehow. All that rhetoric about the internet lasting forever--what these systems really create is a homunculus for market speculation and the perceived value-form of social interaction. Dante had a thing in the Inferno where if someone was evil enough, their soul would die ahead of time while their flesh went on living it up, probably possessed by an imp, but nowadays everyone just does that every day, even multiplying them. Anyways: I'll probably keep poking around. Never know if it is somewhere or not after all.