Wekely "what are you reading" Trhead #91

From Rats, Lice, and History, Hans Zinsser, 1935:

When a work of literature, even if it is written in short, capitalized lines, becomes utterly incomprehensible to the sane and sensitive, it has gone off the deep end.

Why, we must ask ourselves, have individuals of unquestionably great powers chosen to play with their minds like captive monkeys with their genitalia? It would be merely tragic had they not created a sort of "holy-roller" school of followers among the permanent intellectual undergraduates. Wyndham Lewis comes close to a definition when he calls it the "idiot child" cult — the child overshadowed by the imbecile. As we have said, Skinner thinks, in the Stein case, it is conscious experimentation with "automatic writing."

One could also postulate: —

(1)    That they are consciously pulling the legs of the large neo-intellectual public either for fun or for profit.

(2)    That they are suffering from a well-recognized form of exhibitionism — the craving for sensational notice, whether approval or attack. This is the mild derangement that probably explains mediums. It is the impulse that, in a less pronounced form, leads people to write to the newspaper, to lend their names to cigarette advertisements, or to say in print that they "suffered from fits" until they had taken one bottle of Neuropop.

(3)    That they are seriously carrying on psychological experiments with themselves — in which case, they ought to do it in decent privacy, as though they were taking drugs.

Or (4)    that it is barely possible they are yielding to the uncontrollable impulse to expose their own diseases, just as the physically sick like to tell about their operations or their chronic colitis.

If they were commonplace people this exercise would attract only sympathetic attention. These are formidable machines and one wishes the insulation had not burnt off the power lines.  6

However one looks at it, it appears to the medically informed that these people are substituting the spinal cord for the brain, or at any rate are moving down from the frontal lobes towards the basal ganglia.

"You 've talked a great deal," said my friend, "but in the end it comes down to a definition of beauty — doesn't it?"

"Well, give me one," I replied.

"Here's the latest one," he said. "Beauty is the mutual adaptation of the several factors in an occasion of experience. Thus in its primary sense, beauty is a quality which finds its exemplification in actual occasions. Or, put it conversely, it is a quality in which such occasions can severally participate."

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I've only read the Crying of Lot 49 and couldn't get into it.

Never read 'em, but they sound cummy.

@CumGod,

I read Gravity's Rainbow for about 30 minutes and got incredibly annoyed but that was like 10 years ago and I can't remember what annoyed me now

I've only read Inherent Vice, back around the time the movie adaptation was coming out. It was well executed, but I don't remember finding it particularly memorable. Kind of a 70s detective/noir but from the POV of a stoner burnout who's stumbling through the case and only understanding half of what's going on around him at any given moment. If the aim was to paint a vivid picture of burnout/dropout 70s counterculture through a narrative vehicle, it was a success in that regard. I don't feel any real need to re-read it afterwards though.

Finally watched a little bit of the start of the movie version just last week and it seemed to do a good job of capturing the book's vibe for the few min I watched. I like the PTA movies that I have seen, but at the time I wasn't quite in the mood for a pondering character-driven period piece so I didn't watch much more than the opening scene.