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

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

Hmm, I started Orphan Black Season 1, but I'm too far behind, and Dr Who is just too way out for me. :P

But anyway, sorry to change the subject, but I just -had- to share this:



Do not ask me how he manages to make it defy gravity in that astonishing way! :O

It looks as if, if someone could sit on his head, they would have some very convenient handlebars to drive him with! :D

But how about we, at the very least, make a thread for "The Martian: Film vs Book" ?

I quickly had a look at it now, and it doesn't really seem the kind of thing we'd want to do a "close reading" of: so maybe 3 threads - one for initial impressions, one for ending spoilers, and one for book-film comparison. I think that might be our best compromise. Let's make it a flash-read; I'll make the threads and send out a group message/newsletter after I had done so.

Are the rest of you agreed on that? Or any suggestions to the contrary?

Poet Gentleness wrote: "I stay away a bit and I'm already lost. Are we starting the Martian in October?
Traveller, this is my 1st virtual group, where do I find the schedule?"

Well, The Martian is not officially scheduled yet, (we were going to take a bit of a break to catch up with all our other reading in October) but you see, the film is coming out in cinema theaters in most countries - well, I think it's out already - and hence the rush.
You know, people often want to first read the book of anything adapted to film, before watching it, to avoid the film spoiling the book for them... - and that is why we're considering trying to squish it in, you see.

The "official" schedule is here :
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

(We often have polls, but not for all our discussions, if enough people vote for a book in the forum itself.)

I should have sent out a newsletter already, I apologize... will do so in the next day or so.

Sumant wrote: "It's good that many people are interested in reading Books of new sun."

Indeed! I think we should start thinking of how we're going to fit it in! Perhaps starting around April-ish next year...?

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "
I'd like to do that. I didn't much enjoy the New Sun when I first read it. But I'd love to reread it with people who did! .."

Oh, good!
Did you read only The Shadow of the Torturer, though? They really follow on quite closely...

Puddin Pointy-Toes wrote: " The length doesn't faze me; I'd consider sub-400 to be a fairly short length, in fact. ;).."

Yeah, yeah, you Stephenson fans... ;)
Okay, I am convinced we should make at least one thread for it - but now what worries me, is enough time to actually read it.... :S

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Cecily wrote: "I found it quite a quick read (unless you want to agonise over the detail of every bit of science). "

Oh, I DO :-) I like my SF to be either very good science, or pure fantasy. Th..."

Hoo boy! That just gave me a flashback to a certain Snow Crash thread, ROFL. It's good to have you posting again, Derek, tho I might not have the time to write page-long rebuttals if we do The Martian in October.... :D

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Sumant wrote: "Here is my review of Lord foul's bane , 1st book in Thomas covenant series. "

Covenant is the ultimate anti-hero: most of the things you disliked are absolutely vital to the book—wi..."

Hi Derek! Welcome back! ^_^
We have quite a gap now in October before we start on the Calvino - perhaps we should do a flash-reading of The Martian, or is there too much else too catch up on?
*me looks* Hmmm, it has 369 pages, quite long-ish...

You know, guys, I know I have often referred to Umberto Eco in relation to this story in particular, and now that Nell has highlighted the importance of spotting the playfulness, I want to mention that it is very hard to get through the book i most compared this story to, being Foucault's Pendulum, if you don't spot the playfulness it was written with.

I wrote a huge review for that book, mainly elaborating on historical aspects and about how Eco sees patterns in history and culture and draws them together, but not only that, how he also comments on how people generally create their own patterns out of the world around them, and also on how they eventually start believing in systems or patterns that seem true to them - whether it really is true or not.

...but the one thing I forgot to talk about is how playful he is! To give you an example - oh grr, I have to go now, actually. So will have to post this unfinished, sorry.

Btw, if any of you are interested in reading Foucault's Pendulum, we had our discussion of it here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

Poet Gentleness wrote: "Pathetic: not applied at dream-type connections or how literature can be approached by a different angle but to his need to destroy others' works by dissecting their supposed and hidden inner struggles when he was an author himself..."

Oh, okay, yes, now I see - it was hard to try and figure it out without that added context, thanks for posting it.

Yes, what he does there seems almost obsessive. (And mean too).
In a certain way, actually, Borges also seems a bit obsessive to me, especially if you start reading a few of his stories and start to see his repetition of themes. Not that he does not manage to present them in new and interesting ways, mind you.

...or is this just me?

Nell wrote: "it is about playfulness..."
Yes! ..and indeed, that is why I mentioned that to me Borges is very po-mo. When I was still new to the idea of especially the most recent "periods" in literature, being modernism and postmodernism, I could not for the life of me see the difference between modernist literature (written mainly between say 1900 until about the sixties, or some will say late forties), and postmodernism (which started around about the early seventies but had forerunners), I eventually decided that the two main differences are that postmodernists tend to make stylistic pastiches, so their works often present itself as a hodge podge of styles - you guys mentioned Cloud Atlas in the other thread - but also, playfulness! One of the main things that I enjoy about Jeff Vandermeer is that he plays with the reader. Part of that playfulness is exactly what Borges does in this Tlön story, he plays! He plays hide-and-seek with the reader...

Sorry Poet Gentleness, I meant to reply to you first but..- will now.

Nell wrote: "Yes, yes. Precisely.

I'm much happier now, I just posted on the TUOT thread. I believe I had a BB.*

* Borges Breakthrough"

\O/ <--- yaye!

...in any case, I am enjoying the discussion about ways that members feel are good ways in which to approach a text, including our discussion of ways in which "the experts" feel we should view and discuss a text.... XD

I imagine it is important to thrash out such issues, especially when a group aims to discuss such a wide variety of material as we aim to look at with this group.

Nell wrote: "He is so difficult. And yet, at the same time, I feel he is trying to say it is so simple...

I can't explain what I mean. .."

I wonder if I know what you mean; could you mean, perhaps, that he is simple because he touches on things that are intuitively familiar, but difficult because he arranges them in complex patterns and couches them in dense, less familiar terms?

Guys, are we missing one another on the whole point of discussion groups here? Maybe we should start a thread about "Why i joined a discussion group, and what i hope to get out of it."

Some of the people here are also on the Year of Women group, and some of you came over from Mievillians, the latter where we always did close readings of texts where the authors' background tended to be incidental because of the specific focus of the group.

I think we were never so meta about it, we just... basically read together and had lots of fun mainly as we have also done on the Blind Asssasin and Like Water for Chocolate threads here. In one of the LW4C threads - and i plead guilty to being the main instigator there, made some pee jokes which fit in with the text at that point, since reference was made to washing clothes in urine. I noticed that one of the participants was obviously put off by this, because she stopped participating at that point. Ah, well, you win some, you lose some. Why must a book discussion group on a hobbyist reading site be so prim and proper and serious? (I know there are many groups like that, and although they are quite informative, they're not FUN!)

I think our main goal with Mievillians had been to get together to enrich one another's experience of a text and mainly to have fun.

Yes, we welcome scholarly discussions, most certainly, but after all, nobody is paying us to post things on GR - and Amazon most certainly is never going to, so the MAIN thing is to have fun! Yes, GR is a place to learn, I have learned an immense amount here, and it is nice to indulge in scholarly rigor - you will see that some of my reviews, for example, are quite serious, but a lot of them are FUN, and, yeah... I think it's very nice if one can achieve a mix of those.

Poet Gentleness wrote: "I just made that comment because:

http://universitypublishingonline.org...

https://books.google.com.br/books?id=......"

Sadly, the second link (Google books link), doesn't show text for me - it says I have reached a page that is not available.

Ok, but I tried to get the gist of it, and am wondering if you are saying that studying the interrelationship of writing with dreaming, is pathetic? ...hmm, it actually sounds quite interesting to me, but perhaps I am just a clown, ha ha ha.

Most definitely, there is a lot of dream-type connections to be found in the work of Lewis Carrol, and oh well, I have always found Jung's symbolism and archetypes interesting.

Poet Gentleness wrote: "Our colleague and her fan was the first to open debates, with this pearl (something around the lines):
"Clarisse lived in the same building my mother did and I had the opportunity to cross paths with her. She was clearly schizophrenic, especially when one analyses her writings, her characters, ....."

Ha, yes, that's a good example! (And of course you guys are there applying the (or attempting to!) reader-response approach).

I usually start on a work vanilla, and then I will often, because I feel curious as to why he/she wrote something, will read up about the author.
...but sometimes a work's reputation precedes it, (Like with Wide Sargasso Sea for example), and then, unfortunately, some of the surprises are spoiled for the reader in advance.

Borges certainly has a reputation, but I don't think it detracts from the experience of interacting with his work. It's not that kind of fiction - and some of it is so dense that it's almost impossible to be "spoiled" as to the content.

Magdelanye wrote: "just finished a book that might qualify as hilarious...that is, if the reader is up for it, for the theme is dark and horrifying. in the hands of chuck palaniak its theater of the absurd. ' beautif..."
I find Chuck Palanuik to be almost too dark for my tastes.

Cecily wrote: "Traveller wrote: "I hated the books of The Hunger Games, but found the movies passable"

I disliked the book and avoided the film, but I'm sure it worked better on screen. Bad books often do! (Or a..."
In this case the book was so atrocious that the film had to be an improvement ! :D They handled it much better and cut out all the... most icky bits. But the book was simply written badly, irrespective of how one felt about the plot and characters.

Cecily wrote: "Having the same actors in different stories was part of that, too, and resulted in the awkwardness of actors playing races other than their own. ."

Ugh yes...- I can see why they did it, but I also feel it didn't work out too well at all...

Regarding the question of whether to focus on the text of a work of fiction alone, or whether it is useful to see it in it's socio-historical context, well, personally I tend to support 3 main theories of criticism, being New Criticism, Reader Response theory and New Historicism.

The first of these says that the text has merit on its own irrelevant of the author's intentions (but it also instructs the reader to ignore anything extant to the text) - yes, I do feel that a text has a life of its own, but that external information is also valuable, especially when you additionally agree with the reader-response approach (which focuses on the reader's reaction). However, I like to have the best of all worlds and feel that socio-historic context is also important, and may in fact be of utmost importance when it comes to certain texts, such as for example the more prominent works of Victor Hugo, and most of the works of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, also the two satirical texts I mentioned earlier, since for all of these people writing was an act of social activism.

But more to the point - how do we read Borges? I feel Borges is a bit of a special case, a bit like C.J. Jung. Jung may or may not have been dilly himself, but that is not important, because he somehow did tap into universal human symbolism by way of his "arcehtypes", and Borges seems to do a similar thing but with regard to ideas.

Yes, I feel it is important to me personally that when examining the works of Borges, that I also become cognizant of how Borges' work has been responded to and built upon by other humans. After all, this is how culture works - the generations that follow build upon the knowledge and creativity of previous generations, and in this way, we build up much richer tapestries than we could have, were we to keep ourselves in isolation.

...and often, things that one person introduces, becomes part of the culture of the entire species, or at least of a large section of a species - have you guys ever heard of the now-defunct urban myth of the 100th monkey effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred...
It may not quite have happened the way Watson told it, but it still illustrates how quickly a certain behavior can become part of the behavioral repertoire of a large section of a species/sub-species.

I think for example, that, by looking at things in unusual ways and by playing "mind-games" in his fiction, Borges did in fact set in motion quite a number of memes.

So yes, I do feel it is important that one examine the text itself to see what you get out of the text and text alone - (and I think in the case of Borges, it is often fun, the way he "plays" with ideas), but I also feel one can be enriched by the whole sub-culture that surrounds him as well.

Nell wrote: "do you think... that either Borges' obscurantist style or that of those who came after, who are called magical realists, developed because of the dangerous political climate?".."

Sorry, there is so much to comment on that you guys threw out last night that I lost part of the thread there. I had meant to say, in my previous post, that I agree with that as far as certain authors are concerned most certainly, and I was going to mention that the example that most immediately came to mind, being The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov which is more of a low fantasy satire, but which perfectly fits the description of delivering political satire under a "veil" of fantasy due to dangerous circumstances - well, Bulgakov desired to criticize the Stalinist regime while still living in Moscow - not the safest thing to do under the circumstances.

Another instance of veiled satire that immediately comes to mind would be Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, this time, presented as science fiction.