Traveller’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2015)

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

..and in chapter 3, the rather brilliant (I think, anyway) commentary on the effect urbanization has on the narrator.
(view spoiler)[ I want to be free of cities and sexual entanglements. Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that floats out of the subways and the tunnels. It’s always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers. The entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.” (hide spoiler)]

Can you see, Ruth, how, even from the start, the novel engages with the postmodernist issues of crowds, urbanization, consumerism, etc. ?

Glad to hear. :) Been missing y'all, you know. :)))

At the end of chapter 2: Note how well this passage fit in with the title of the story:

The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to ‘et us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire. We finished our lunch in silence.

I'll comment more on that later.

However, I do want to, at an early stage already, comment on something else; I'm sure most of you had noticed that there is a lot of commentary on material wealth and consumerism and issues concomitant to that.

Well, there is one postmodernist theme for your list, Ruth! Whereas the complex possibly unreliable narrator, is a postmodern characteristic. ;)

Heheh, nice one. In keeping with the best of po-mo, he seems like a complex character, so I'll reserve my judgement a bit until later.

Let's keep our eye on the idea that many postmodernist first-person narrators are unreliable and complex, and let's try to suss him out as we go along. I apologize that I'm so behind with the reading, will do my best to catch up; I know you're all far ahead.

Ok, then without much more ado, let's jump into the text of the novel itself.
This is just a petty gripe, I know, but I somehow couldn't help wondering where the narrator got the justification for saying the following:

Babette is tall and fairly ample; there is a girth and heft to her. Her hair is a fanatical blond mop, a particular tawny hue that used to be called dirty blond. If she were a petite woman, the hair would be too cute, too mischievous and contrived. Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness. Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.
Hmm, now why would larger women lack guile, and petite women be endowed with lots of it, I wonder? Purely based on physical attractiveness? ...and if so, does that not imply that only petite women can be attractive?

LOL, wow, I saw it so long ago that I'd already forgotten half the story! :P In fact, my current musings have gone more in the direction of wondering who won: Batman or Superman! :D

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Episode I to III were really, really horrible from my perspective...."

I am the only person in the world who actually liked episode 1, and although 2 and 3 sucked in various ways, the production values are just so much better than the first 3 made that featured all those muppets, that I could -almost- forgive the suckiness.

But yes, of course twins are obligatory, as is a female hero and an inter-racial love affair. I could have thought of sexier candidates for the male role there, buut oh well, I do luv luv the female kick-ass character more than I can say. XD

I also really liked that princess Leya was much less of the helpless little princess who has to be rescued than she was in the first 3 epsiodes. (Ep 3-6, that is)

Cool! I hope other members agree...

Also, how about we do one 'serious' book every 6 weeks and one more 'casual' book every 4 weeks?

The serious book would be close reading and the casual book would be 2 threads.

White Noise can be a hybrid for now. :P

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Would it be possible to do a mix? Right now my issue is that I just can't sustain the pace with the books we want to do at the rate we've been doing them and also be able to read other things I rea..."

Yes, and once again I apologize for my absence in organizing things properly. Can we keep White Noise as our semi-causal April read, and then I'll put a poll up shortly ( in the next day or two) comprised of books already on our list, as a choice for a close-reading discussion in May?

I would say that sounds like a good compromise, what say you?

Michele wrote: "Or 2 threads per book: Spoiler Free and Spoilers."

There are already many groups like that, and if we did that, we'd just be a copy cat of those. Our core group is more based on the "close reading" modus operandi, where a book is discussed in detail.

The whole reasoning of the "breaking up in chapters" is to facilitate such close reading, and this formula worked brilliantly for us over at Mievillains. I was hoping to extend such a formula to a group (this one) that would go beyond speculative fiction to include literary and other discussion-worthy fiction, but I think my own lack is at fault there. I suppose I -did- put a lot more trouble into the Mievillians discussions, and I apologize for that.

I'm going to work on my time management to see if I can't keep at GR at a more sustained pace in future.
I was thinking that maybe we can do 'some' books on the shorter formula of just 1 or 2 threads per book; but I really would hate to never have any of our close-reading discussions like we used to have, again.

*{Academic} (view spoiler)[Now, before we confuse ourselves (..and I do find that there are confusing factors in all of this) we need to make a small but important and rather difficult distinction - that between postmodernism and postmodernity (view spoiler)[ (hey, members versed in lit. are welcome to engage with me on this - I'm not saying that I am preaching the holy grail here) (hide spoiler)]

Postmodernism is more the "artistic movement" whereas postmodernity is that state of the world after modernism. Currently the Western world has one foot in postmodernity (the state of the world after the modern age) and one foot in the information age.

Postmodernity has as among other characteristics: globalism, mass media, consumer culture. Writers who engage with issues around postmodernity, such as Don De Lillo, then would focus on issues like these; and perhaps we should leave it at that and perhaps look, in a closer discussion, on how his book White Noise deals with such issues. :) (hide spoiler)]

Jennifer wrote: "I have never payed attention to what category a book may fall under. It has never really crossed my mind. If I think I will like it, I will read it."

*{Academic} {Oh, absolutely, and of course, just because a book falls into a certain genre or period, doesn't mean that it would be like another book that falls withing the same genre or period, so although it would be fair to say that you don't like a book based on sub-genre, for instance, let's say, bodice-rippers or travel fiction; disliking a book based on the time period it falls in, to me is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. :P

(view spoiler)[Postmodernism is rather more complex than just time period, though - it does have characteristics that would put it into "movement" or "genre"; which is why it is so hard to pin it down.

As far as its historical components go, let's start with its pre-cursors: Modernism took place at the maturation of the industrial age early in the twentieth century, when mass media had started taking a hold and the proliferation of technology had made the world feel "modern".

As far as modernist literature is concerned, it focused on experimentation, on breaking the mold of the old traditions, and you find, as common characteristics, examination of existential issues, of exploring the boundaries of pluralism and relativism, and especially with the Bloomsbury group, you find a personal POV and stream-of-consciousness narration.

Beat generation fiction was mainly an American movement (started in the 50's) and tended to be the spiritual pre-cursor of what we could call the 'hippie' movement, where all kinds of experimentation; such as drug-taking and exploration of moral boundaries took place.

In the meantime from a scholarly "literary" POV, you could almost say that postmodernism started off in French-speaking literary and scholarly circles, with writers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault , Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and others.
(More later) (hide spoiler)] }

Sorry that I took so long, but Ruth's many-pronged question left me slightly at a loss as to where to start.

*{Academic} {Instead of giving a structured answer, let me start.. hmm, let's have a look at the nature of postmodernist fiction first, at the risk of boring you.

Scholars in literature and in literary history, have, as you know, always loved to categorize fiction and other literature into categories that would at least in part help to identify and describe written texts; hence genres and hence literary periods, (and movements).

An example of a division of English literature into periods or movements, would be: (view spoiler)[

Renaissance Literature
The Enlightenment
Romanticism
Transcendentalism
Victorian Literature
Realism
Naturalism
Modernism
Bloomsbury Group
Existentialism
Beat Generation
Postmodernism
(Although personally, I would had kept the Bloomsbury group under modernism.)
Anyway, so it's not an exact science, and categorizations can vary.

Those of you who also belonged to Mievillians, might remember that we had discussed the postmodernist aspects of Mieville's literature at times, especially the allusiveness and pastiche that he so richly employs. (hide spoiler)] I discussed po-mo characteristics at lengths in my Railsea review. }

Sorry, gtg, but more later.

Phil wrote: "Traveller wrote: "Also, I think the nature of this group lends itself to less time-efficient reading. I'm in some groups where it's no great commitment to rip through a 150 page book in a weekend, but the books I'm likely to read here will likely take more time and brainpower than that. ..."

...and they are exactly the kind of book, though, that would lend themselves to discussions, so I would really be glad if we can work out a sort of "timeless" formula for our discussions. Perhaps we can use spoiler tags in addition to cutting parts of the book into separate threads to help us achieve that.

Suggestions from you guys are very welcome.

Thanks Jennifer. I love that this group has such an interesting bunch of members!

Ronald wrote: "See, for me, I tend to read in gluts; I'll keep up a pretty breakneck pace for a few weeks, and then I kind of stall for a couple days before starting over again.

I've tried varying the amount I r..."

I have that too, not just with reading, with everything, which sometimes makes it hard to stick to long-term things like work and exercise routines, though luckily exercise is addictive, so that helps. :P
...but I do tend to go all-out, and then experience burn-out for a while. I suspect some of us are just built that way.

Katie wrote: "Hello all! I think I've met some of you around Goodreads before, but I've just joined up with this group and I thought I'd say hello.

My name is Katie and I'm (for the next few months, at least) ..."

Hi Katie, long time, no talk, so how nice to see you popping up here! Yes, like Amy said, we've had a quiet spell this past month or so, but at times, we go like tigers and create great discussions! XD

You are indeed very welcome. Feel free to explore the group at your leisure, and good luck with your studies! Still focusing on medieval studies, and what is your specific focus this year?

Thanks for the interesting feedback, Jennifer!

Ha, ok, I'll post something about the postmodern elements tomorrow, and the other people you refer to, might chime in as well. ;)