Marginalia
May. 19th, 2004 03:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentI confess: my mind is not fully on my work today. This is because what I most want to do is go home and settle down to read more of Jeff Vandemeer's City of Saints and Madmen. If you don't know it, all I can say is that it's the sort of book that inspires reviews like this, or even better this...or if you must have something traditional, this. Also, that you should read it.
The New Weird must be real; it's even made it to the Oxford student press. Although I think someone forgot to check the typesetting when they moved the article from a print to an electronic format.
A handy collection of Troy-related links, and an even handier linked list of online sf.
John Clute is at it again: "For good or for ill, the only people capable of understanding the world - which is to say, operating the codes - are geeks. It may be the central insight of this novel, which starts back in 1999 in order to get a running start on the codes of 2002, that when we say, as we so often do, that the world has become SF, what we are really saying is that a world which is operated as though it were SF is a world operated precisely by the kind of people Sterling portrays here." That from a review of Bruce Sterling's new book, The Zenith Angle, which is surely even less SFnal than Pattern Recognition, but sounds like it might make an interesting compare-and-contrast with Hari Kunzru's forthcoming Transmission.
Things I have recently boggled at: the concept of a book without verbs, and the fact that real life has been imitating the Onion.
The last episode of Angel - the last episode ever - airs in the States tonight, and there are articles about its passing all over the place. TVGal has a list of her favourite episodes which, stupidly high placing of 'I Will Remember You' and inexplicable absence of 'Reprise' aside, is actually not that shabby.
EDIT: Fashion inequality #324: on hot days, girls can wear sandals to the office and still be considered smart. Boys cannot. Bah.
The New Weird must be real; it's even made it to the Oxford student press. Although I think someone forgot to check the typesetting when they moved the article from a print to an electronic format.
A handy collection of Troy-related links, and an even handier linked list of online sf.
John Clute is at it again: "For good or for ill, the only people capable of understanding the world - which is to say, operating the codes - are geeks. It may be the central insight of this novel, which starts back in 1999 in order to get a running start on the codes of 2002, that when we say, as we so often do, that the world has become SF, what we are really saying is that a world which is operated as though it were SF is a world operated precisely by the kind of people Sterling portrays here." That from a review of Bruce Sterling's new book, The Zenith Angle, which is surely even less SFnal than Pattern Recognition, but sounds like it might make an interesting compare-and-contrast with Hari Kunzru's forthcoming Transmission.
Things I have recently boggled at: the concept of a book without verbs, and the fact that real life has been imitating the Onion.
The last episode of Angel - the last episode ever - airs in the States tonight, and there are articles about its passing all over the place. TVGal has a list of her favourite episodes which, stupidly high placing of 'I Will Remember You' and inexplicable absence of 'Reprise' aside, is actually not that shabby.
EDIT: Fashion inequality #324: on hot days, girls can wear sandals to the office and still be considered smart. Boys cannot. Bah.
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Date: 2004-05-19 07:37 am (UTC)I saw this in the bookstore the other day and was going to make an entry asking if anyone knew anything about it. Looked fascinating. Thanks for confirming this. :)
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Date: 2004-05-19 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-19 07:46 am (UTC)When your scifi absolutely, positively has to delivered to birmingham, look no further!
Looks like i have a job after all :-D
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Date: 2004-05-19 07:49 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2004-05-19 09:12 am (UTC)Niall leaves me speechless with innuendo. I'm sure thats the wrong way round *is confused*
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Date: 2004-05-19 09:25 am (UTC)*is scared*
Novel with no verbs
Date: 2004-05-19 07:45 am (UTC)She's interested in violence and transgression in literature. Apparently this includes not only subject matter (she told me a great story about reading a passage about anal rape to a seminar group of uptight Cambridge lit students, all of whom avoided her from that moment on) but also the literary style. Novels like the the ones without certain vowels, or like this one with no verbs, are considered violent and seriously transgressive because they're bloody difficult to read. From a reader's perspective these books come across as hostile and even offensive (not in subject matter, but in style) because they're impossible to read naturally. They're disjointed and violent in the way they're linguistically constructed.
I don't know a great deal about the kind of literary theories or the French literature that she's studying, but it all sounds fascinating to me.
Re: Novel with no verbs
Date: 2004-05-19 07:49 am (UTC)Re: Novel with no verbs
Date: 2004-05-19 07:52 am (UTC)Re: Novel with no verbs
Date: 2004-05-19 07:54 am (UTC)Re: Novel with no verbs
Date: 2004-05-19 08:01 am (UTC)Re: Novel with no verbs
Date: 2004-05-19 07:54 am (UTC)I think that's largely the point. These books are really written to be read; they're literally unreadable and intentionally so. I think they're more like intellectual exercises in literary theory than anything else.
Which is interesting to literary theorists, but not so much to other readers.
My firend is studying this stuff, but she admits that she hasn't (can't) actually read it. She dips in and out and reads snatches of the books, but it is impossible to sit down and read them from cover to cover.
Maybe it's conceptual art and not literature?
Re: Novel with no verbs
Date: 2004-05-19 07:55 am (UTC)Re: Novel with no verbs
Date: 2004-05-19 07:57 am (UTC)Actually, I can almost buy that. It does seem to me that if what the writer is trying to do is so outlandish that it's not 'literature' in the usual sense; but considering it as an aesthetic object, to be appreciated and contemplated in the same manner as, say, a painting, makes some amount of sense.
Re: Novel with no verbs
Date: 2004-05-19 08:04 am (UTC)Almost, but I'd say that they're conceptual objects rather than an aesthetic one. They're designed to be jarring, not pretty. Conceptually, these books embody philosophical literary theories. It's this physical realisation of theory that makes them conceptual art, I'd say.
Re: Novel with no verbs
Date: 2004-05-31 03:28 am (UTC)...and then it passes. Removing one whole class of words from a text is really, really dumb. As if you would poke out one eye and expect to improve your vision. Or cut off a leg and expect to walk faster... but you get the idea.
How much more interesting it would be if a writer invented a NEW class of useful words!
-A.R. Yngve
http://yngve.bravehost.com
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Date: 2004-05-19 08:38 am (UTC)Sorry. My desperation to see that film is mounting ;o)
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Date: 2004-05-19 08:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-19 09:27 am (UTC)It was the 9th highest grossing film in the UK last weekend because of this.
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Date: 2004-05-19 10:34 am (UTC)It was also showing in some of the cinemas at or around Edinburgh on the Saturday and Sunday, so I assume this means there were many others, too. Sorry, but no London cinema is that busy. *g*
I was quite annoyed to find this out on Monday trying to book tickets to find it wasn't on again till Thursday.
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Date: 2004-05-19 10:37 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2004-05-19 12:12 pm (UTC)Angel
Date: 2004-05-19 08:39 am (UTC)Re: Angel
Date: 2004-05-19 08:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-19 09:41 am (UTC)Sandals = good.
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Date: 2004-05-19 11:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-20 03:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-19 11:09 am (UTC)Inequality nothing. Your sandals are NOT smart :P
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Date: 2004-05-19 11:15 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2004-05-19 12:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-19 02:01 pm (UTC)So tomorrow you come in wearing high heels.
Yay for equality!
Or invest in the wonders of vented cycling shoes, run/cycle fast and just feel the breeze over your foot :)
no subject
Date: 2004-05-20 01:27 pm (UTC)Wear boots. CRUSH PUNY HUMANITY BENEATH YOUR BOOTED FEET. Take off boots. Solved!
-- Tom