Gruesy_Spoon
: Y-you mean bonded slavery right? :marseysweat:
Hard agree here.
I was listening to a review for an awful YA series a lot of people read when I was in school and despite the premise literally being "humans as pets in bondage slavery" the reviewer refused to state facts: this was written for someone's fetish.
KoreanGrinchKinghey/hem
Tallest Ricecel on this site. Increasing the East Asian Birth Rate by ANY means necessary
Marbee 1yr ago#4650300
spent 0 currency on pings
But never the actual acclaimed fanfic writer themselves.
High school English class is fricking absolutely the fricking most cringe invention of the fricking modern era
Although it did reach its peak when in response to a fricking book we were fricking reading 14 year old me joked "oh s*x slavery, the fricking best kind!" not knowing the fricking teacher was fricking right behind me at the fricking time lol
fine_wesomemad/cunt
"Latham is a c*nt, a massive c*nt, but he seems better than you"- some guy
WeihnachtenSalvador 1yr ago#4649034
spent 0 currency on pings
What do you think of Red Rising? I proofed it to see if it was appropriate for a 13yo girl. Author steals anything not bolted to the ground, but it gave me the same feeling as reading sir arthur conan doyle as a kid.
Literally the best sci-fi trilogy of the last 25 years at least. And depending on how good Light Bringer is tomorrow, I might even acknowledge the sequels. I like what the author did to turn the Hunger Games into something beyond just torture porn, and unlike the Hunger Games the author actually knew how to build a universe outside of the arena.
That might be heavier than I’d recommend to a 13 year old girl. I enjoyed it but also recognized that it was kinda cringe and badly done in more than a few ways
I doubt there were any serious literary reviews of that. And the YouTuber I saw wasn't exactly gentle with it either (not sure if we're talking about the same person).
Serious literary review would be professional critics, academics, publications like the New York Review of Books, etc. This sphere may have a problem with wokeness and identity grifting, but it's still deeper and more critical than random internet stuff. These guys would not normally touch throwaway YA slop, and I don't see why they'd need to.
Social media "content creators" either gushing about or dunking on books are not the same as literary reviews. It may be entertaining to watch, but online reviews exist for entertainment or background noise rather than critical analysis.
This is something many people don’t understand. They go all “bah, this book is boring, the plot is about nothing”, when actual literary criticism implies going beyond the plot and analyzing the prose and studying characters. A great writer can produce a masterpiece out of mundane affairs if the writing is good and the characters feel like real life human beings evoking empathy instead of one-dimensional archetypes.
The writing is dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs."
I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing. Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
Particularly because the "stretched his legs" part appears to have been completely made up.
A generation later, it looks like he was right though. What did they go on to read after Harry Potter? Apparently nothing, they are just still reading Harry Potter.
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I’m 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I’ve seen the study of literature debased. There’s very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she’d been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn’t even good nonsense. It’s insufferable.
Ivy Leaguers seething over guy who came from the working class, went to a literally who state school and worked as a high school teacher and made it as big as a writer can make it big will always warm my heart.
What's that professor? You went to Harvard, got a master's from Yale, attended the Iowa writer's thing, are a tenured professor at Princeton and none of you books have sold more than 5000 copies? Oh no no no.
Yeah, but at least Rowling is based and good for dramacoin.
As a kid, I definitely preferred A Series of Unfortunate Events over Harry Potter (though I definitely enjoyed HP), which I still maintain was a far superior series for sparking literary curiosity in young people.
Oh shit, that was like my FAVORITE book in 5th grade. My teacher started reading it to us and I loved it so much that he gave me his copy to read ahead with by myself.
On the contrary, there are thousands upon thousands of Harold Blooms. Literary academia is absolutely stuffed up to the gills with people who sneer at anything that can be read with only an idiomatic understanding of English--they only respect books whose reading requires a level of additional education in historical or literary context, or significant familiarity with some historical dialect, idiom, or vocabulary.
For all the noise that is made about "woke" academia, feminist literary analysis, etc, that stuff is still by far in the minority, and is noteworthy for being a challenge to what is still the overwhelming majority of literary academia, which is overwhelmingly dominated by boring and useless gatekeepers whose life's work is to validate their own existence of perpetual college, by coming up with complicated rules to explain why the only good books are ones that are difficult for people outside of academia to read. Howard Bloom was sort of a high priest of that world, but not necessarily the best nor smartest of them. If anything, he was like the JK Rowling of his own field, popularizing and dumbing-down literary snootiness to a digestable level, so that people who never managed to make it all the way through Gravity's Rainbow could still have some quips to talk shit about John Grisham at cocktail parties.
I believe the article is referring to criticism for the general audiences, the type Bloom did, rather than scholarly criticism. Regular people buying books will probably read reviews from websites like goodreads or from famous magazines and newspapers, and it seems like professional critics writing for the latter are the ones who got too soft.
We watched Educating Rita in english class and my main takeaway from it was that literary academics are miserable and broken people who desperately are reading tealeaves and making up nonsense to try and convince themselves they're not worthless parasites
Whe/he
Tungsten
CMYKFox 1yr ago#4651146
spent 0 currency on pings
There's actually a good article recently put out there about the general public's hatred for literary criticism, and how we got here.
Basically, literary criticism used to be a small, wonderful thing (Montaigne, Sam Johnson, Hazlitt, DH Lawrence) predicated on producing the most coherent close-reading of the most literate layperson for the average layperson. It was done by very few people, but it was made for very many people, to compound enjoyment for already-liked works.
Nowadays it's 'publish or die', so an infinite list of talentless, uninteresting people create papers built out of an opaque argot designed to tendentiously reinforce ideas that nobody but the aberrant, noisome literati could agree with. This shit is read by up to two people: the writer himself if he proofreads it (unlikely), and his mother is she's alive or still loves him (more unlikely).
The Death of the Author means that Moby Peepee means what I want it to mean: frick Melville, and frick you. Ahab was a trans cutie because he was into body modification, and Ishmael's disrespect for Queequeg's BBC and a BIPOC's innate closeness to nature explains Moby Peepee's anger.
Stream-of-conscious that shit, get tenure, and die covered in dust: the public isn't wrong about current criticism.
It's long and dense and psychedelic and it has a lot of oblique references to science and history and literature.
Also, the novel and movie Trainspotting stole perhaps the most memorable scene from Gravity's Rainbow, except in Gravity's rainbow a young JFK is involved.
Also, there is part where a character is eating a turd and imagines it is a black man's penbis.
So...only recommended if that sounds like stuff you would be into.
Also, the novel and movie Trainspotting stole perhaps the most memorable scene from Gravity's Rainbow, except in Gravity's rainbow a young JFK is involved.
At Swim Two Birds and the Dalkey Archives are both funnier and a bit more approachable than Third Policeman, which is a bit more heady. But they are all great.
It's incredibly oblique and hard to get through, at times incoherent, very much the sort of thing where there's a 'meaning' encoded like six levels deeper than the actual surface text, lots of pass-by-reference stuff that you'd never get unless you've read what it's referring to... a lot of fetish material buried in there... something something octopus eyes
I enjoyed it though...
If you get more than a third of the way through it and you haven't had any 'this seems like a callback to...' bells ringing in your head I'd skip the rest of it.
If you're reading Gravity's Rainbow for the _right_ reasons then you should have... organically... read enough of the material that's referenced within it to be getting little tingles of 'hey that seems like a a nod to...' every now and then, like, it should feel familiar to you. In short it should be a comfy experience.
You shouldn't have to look anything up, it shouldn't be a chore.
You could say that it's a bit self-indulgent because it's so many little nods to people and authors that move in the same literary circles and share the same mindset. It's a bit of a catalogue of sorts.
If you're interested in reading Pynchon then Inherent Vice is where I might suggest you start. Movie's good too.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Hard agree here.
I was listening to a review for an awful YA series a lot of people read when I was in school and despite the premise literally being "humans as pets in bondage slavery" the reviewer refused to state facts: this was written for someone's fetish.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
A lot of YA authors now are women who frequented Tumblr in their teens.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
But never the actual acclaimed fanfic writer themselves.
Strange.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
High school English class is fricking absolutely the fricking most cringe invention of the fricking modern era
Although it did reach its peak when in response to a fricking book we were fricking reading 14 year old me joked "oh s*x slavery, the fricking best kind!" not knowing the fricking teacher was fricking right behind me at the fricking time lol
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
She's right behind me, isn't she?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
At uni @_____ was forced too read doughnut economics
JEWISH LIVES MATTER
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Same lol
Fun read, kinda regarded but what're you gonna do
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
LOL. We’ve all had moments like that man.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
You're a zoomer?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
30 year old single foids read ya so not necessarily
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Yup, mid zoomer. I'm 22
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Old hag, boomer zoomers get the rope
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Gladly
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I refuse to die until I've got a six pack any day now I'll be shredded
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I'm sure
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Biofoid ?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Uh yeah
I'm in biofoids for a reason
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
reason:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I'm not a I'm just tall
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
post height
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
6'2
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Fellow zoomers rise up! (Actually gets drunk at home like a boss)
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Fellow farmpilled zoomer woman. Never thought there would be two of us.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
What do you think of Red Rising? I proofed it to see if it was appropriate for a 13yo girl. Author steals anything not bolted to the ground, but it gave me the same feeling as reading sir arthur conan doyle as a kid.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Girls shouldn't be reading, they should be doing household chores.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Borpa
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Chudpa strikes against legacy models
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Literally the best sci-fi trilogy of the last 25 years at least. And depending on how good Light Bringer is tomorrow, I might even acknowledge the sequels. I like what the author did to turn the Hunger Games into something beyond just torture porn, and unlike the Hunger Games the author actually knew how to build a universe outside of the arena.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Thoughts on The Quantumn Theif?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Haven't read it yet.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
I've never read it, I'll have to look into it
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
That might be heavier than I’d recommend to a 13 year old girl. I enjoyed it but also recognized that it was kinda cringe and badly done in more than a few ways
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
It's 100% shonnen.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
@Greu no I mean bondage
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Gor?
Even has their LARPers.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Excuse me hwat
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
You read that right friend.
In this universe it's legal to own girls who are genetically engineered to be pretty, doll like and max out at 5 feet tall.
These are called "pets" and they're sold into slavery via auctions.
I wrote bondage slavery because they chain the MC to furniture so she won't run away.
It's fricking weird, man.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
What is this series called?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
it's called the perfected series, it's written by Jarvik Birch
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Maledom pet fetish. Pure coombrain author.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
poorly written and good for a laugh
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
I doubt there were any serious literary reviews of that. And the YouTuber I saw wasn't exactly gentle with it either (not sure if we're talking about the same person).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I suppose I don't understand what you mean by "serious literary review", the person I was talking about was recapping the books and giving commentary
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Serious literary review would be professional critics, academics, publications like the New York Review of Books, etc. This sphere may have a problem with wokeness and identity grifting, but it's still deeper and more critical than random internet stuff. These guys would not normally touch throwaway YA slop, and I don't see why they'd need to.
Social media "content creators" either gushing about or dunking on books are not the same as literary reviews. It may be entertaining to watch, but online reviews exist for entertainment or background noise rather than critical analysis.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Aaaah I see
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Seriouscritiquing primarily its literay value, not primarily reviewing its plot
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
This is something many people don’t understand. They go all “bah, this book is boring, the plot is about nothing”, when actual literary criticism implies going beyond the plot and analyzing the prose and studying characters. A great writer can produce a masterpiece out of mundane affairs if the writing is good and the characters feel like real life human beings evoking empathy instead of one-dimensional archetypes.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Oh then the value of the writing itself is just shit on the merit it's a YA novel written post hunger games
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
I never thought about that but I suppose that critics are also affected by current year social norms to be as corporate and non-abrasive as possible
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
There will never be another Harold Bloom
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I love the pasta he inspired so much
Particularly because the "stretched his legs" part appears to have been completely made up.
A generation later, it looks like he was right though. What did they go on to read after Harry Potter? Apparently nothing, they are just still reading Harry Potter.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Holy shit this guy rules
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-sep-19-oe-bloom19-story.html
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Ivy Leaguers seething over guy who came from the working class, went to a literally who state school and worked as a high school teacher and made it as big as a writer can make it big will always warm my heart.
What's that professor? You went to Harvard, got a master's from Yale, attended the Iowa writer's thing, are a tenured professor at Princeton and none of you books have sold more than 5000 copies? Oh no no no.
Stay mad
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Yeah, but at least Rowling is based and good for dramacoin.
As a kid, I definitely preferred A Series of Unfortunate Events over Harry Potter (though I definitely enjoyed HP), which I still maintain was a far superior series for sparking literary curiosity in young people.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
upmarseyd because ASOUE was childhoodbookkino of the highest order
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I liked that series. I remember also being impressed by The Phantom Tollbooth.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Oh shit, that was like my FAVORITE book in 5th grade. My teacher started reading it to us and I loved it so much that he gave me his copy to read ahead with by myself.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
I liked the Warrior cats books, they had marseys.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Most Warriors fans I knew were fricking foids, I preferred the fricking series about bears.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
And the Netflix adaptation wasn’t even bad.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Nah she still a c*nt
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
What an utterly incredible double-kill
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
I read HP as a kid and Stephen King as a teen and went on to read real literature as an adult
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Gay erotica also teaches you to read Mishima
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Hahahah frickin owned that b-word Rowling and that cuck
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
On the contrary, there are thousands upon thousands of Harold Blooms. Literary academia is absolutely stuffed up to the gills with people who sneer at anything that can be read with only an idiomatic understanding of English--they only respect books whose reading requires a level of additional education in historical or literary context, or significant familiarity with some historical dialect, idiom, or vocabulary.
For all the noise that is made about "woke" academia, feminist literary analysis, etc, that stuff is still by far in the minority, and is noteworthy for being a challenge to what is still the overwhelming majority of literary academia, which is overwhelmingly dominated by boring and useless gatekeepers whose life's work is to validate their own existence of perpetual college, by coming up with complicated rules to explain why the only good books are ones that are difficult for people outside of academia to read. Howard Bloom was sort of a high priest of that world, but not necessarily the best nor smartest of them. If anything, he was like the JK Rowling of his own field, popularizing and dumbing-down literary snootiness to a digestable level, so that people who never managed to make it all the way through Gravity's Rainbow could still have some quips to talk shit about John Grisham at cocktail parties.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I believe the article is referring to criticism for the general audiences, the type Bloom did, rather than scholarly criticism. Regular people buying books will probably read reviews from websites like goodreads or from famous magazines and newspapers, and it seems like professional critics writing for the latter are the ones who got too soft.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
We watched Educating Rita in english class and my main takeaway from it was that literary academics are miserable and broken people who desperately are reading tealeaves and making up nonsense to try and convince themselves they're not worthless parasites
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
There's actually a good article recently put out there about the general public's hatred for literary criticism, and how we got here.
Basically, literary criticism used to be a small, wonderful thing (Montaigne, Sam Johnson, Hazlitt, DH Lawrence) predicated on producing the most coherent close-reading of the most literate layperson for the average layperson. It was done by very few people, but it was made for very many people, to compound enjoyment for already-liked works.
Nowadays it's 'publish or die', so an infinite list of talentless, uninteresting people create papers built out of an opaque argot designed to tendentiously reinforce ideas that nobody but the aberrant, noisome literati could agree with. This shit is read by up to two people: the writer himself if he proofreads it (unlikely), and his mother is she's alive or still loves him (more unlikely).
The Death of the Author means that Moby Peepee means what I want it to mean: frick Melville, and frick you. Ahab was a trans cutie because he was into body modification, and Ishmael's disrespect for Queequeg's BBC and a BIPOC's innate closeness to nature explains Moby Peepee's anger.
Stream-of-conscious that shit, get tenure, and die covered in dust: the public isn't wrong about current criticism.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
That's nice sweaty. Why don't you have a seat in the time out corner with Pizzashill until you calm down, then you can have your Capri Sun.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Is it nonsense if it passes a research grant application?
Pay me to read, prole. That's why you're here.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I notice you didn't bother to refuse the miserable and broken part, bookcuck
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I agree with you, for the most part.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Also 'Re-Educating Rita' by Carter USM is a fricking great song
It really goes hard
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
You had a chance to not be completely worthless, but it looks like you threw it away. At least you're consistent.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Gatekeeping is good.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Wrong. They are all wokes scared to hurt authors feelings.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
That's on my "to red" list. Any of you neighbor's read it? If so, how was it?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
It's long and dense and psychedelic and it has a lot of oblique references to science and history and literature.
Also, the novel and movie Trainspotting stole perhaps the most memorable scene from Gravity's Rainbow, except in Gravity's rainbow a young JFK is involved.
Also, there is part where a character is eating a turd and imagines it is a black man's penbis.
So...only recommended if that sounds like stuff you would be into.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
What's that scene?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Diving into the potty
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Sounds perfect
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
If that sounds like your thing, then Flann O'Brien might be another writer to check out.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I read The Third Policeman a long time ago and remember really enjoying it. Any other recommendations from him?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
At Swim Two Birds and the Dalkey Archives are both funnier and a bit more approachable than Third Policeman, which is a bit more heady. But they are all great.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
I've read it
It's incredibly oblique and hard to get through, at times incoherent, very much the sort of thing where there's a 'meaning' encoded like six levels deeper than the actual surface text, lots of pass-by-reference stuff that you'd never get unless you've read what it's referring to... a lot of fetish material buried in there... something something octopus eyes
I enjoyed it though...
If you get more than a third of the way through it and you haven't had any 'this seems like a callback to...' bells ringing in your head I'd skip the rest of it.
Half in front and I'm on the way!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Is it like reading James Joyce where I will need a reference guide or something to look things up the whole time?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
It's like...
If you're reading Gravity's Rainbow for the _right_ reasons then you should have... organically... read enough of the material that's referenced within it to be getting little tingles of 'hey that seems like a a nod to...' every now and then, like, it should feel familiar to you. In short it should be a comfy experience.
You shouldn't have to look anything up, it shouldn't be a chore.
You could say that it's a bit self-indulgent because it's so many little nods to people and authors that move in the same literary circles and share the same mindset. It's a bit of a catalogue of sorts.
If you're interested in reading Pynchon then Inherent Vice is where I might suggest you start. Movie's good too.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Lol my dad loved John Grisham books i always figured it was for out of it boomers
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Street fighter black trans is ultra ugly and disgusting and he shits on bipocs
But @_____ bet you can’t criticise that shit for ethical reasons
JEWISH LIVES MATTER
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context