sus
Moderator
First novel. His second novel is 10:04, his first is Atocha, about Spain.
Your Journey to the Alt-Right.
First novel. His second novel is 10:04, his first is Atocha, about Spain.
john eden
male pale and stale
All stories are about Issues.
have you read 'atocha'? any good? madrid not barcelona right? he goes to the prado every day or something?
sus
Moderator
Yeah something like that. Smokes hash by himself, gets sad, is lonely, meets some people at parties, befriends them but ends up lying about his past to garner sympathy, feels guilty about it for a long time, is generally lost/doesn't know what he wants/who he is.
I was never a huge fan, I don't think it's a bad book, there are some really nice images and lines over the course of its 100pages.
“When she reached me she asked gently if I were O.K., what was bothering me. Fine, nothing, I said, but in a way I hoped confirmed incommunicable depths had opened up inside me.”
“My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.”
“because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.”
but 10:04 is in a different league IMO, it's a great book full of mature prose and moral ambiguity, where Atocha is slight and (smewhat intentionally) awkward and inconsistent and clearly the work of a young person
I was never a huge fan, I don't think it's a bad book, there are some really nice images and lines over the course of its 100pages.
“When she reached me she asked gently if I were O.K., what was bothering me. Fine, nothing, I said, but in a way I hoped confirmed incommunicable depths had opened up inside me.”
“My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.”
“because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.”
but 10:04 is in a different league IMO, it's a great book full of mature prose and moral ambiguity, where Atocha is slight and (smewhat intentionally) awkward and inconsistent and clearly the work of a young person
yea but that's why writers should approach the issue obliquely in a way that digs down into the root of it rather than throw buzzwords around, especially since the novel and the internet are basically the worst possible match in terms of form and content. the twenty days of turin is a way better critique of social media than anything from the past ten years and it was written in the 1970s.
(not saying all this applies to the kunzru specifically, it could be great, who knows.)
constant escape
winter withered, warm
Is it a matter of linearity vs network-like/rhizomatic structure? I mean, that shackle was busted a while ago, Ulysses at the latest, no?
One lecture described Ulysses as fascicular, which is a great word I painfully forgot about for a while then recently reencountered. Sort of an in-between of linear and rhizomatic.
One lecture described Ulysses as fascicular, which is a great word I painfully forgot about for a while then recently reencountered. Sort of an in-between of linear and rhizomatic.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Grange Hill got all Issues-y in the 90s. Every episode was about disability, or someone getting bullied for being gay, or being a smack addict. Teen pregnancy. Fatal peanut allergy. Racism. Not that those aren't all real things that affect real people, but it did seem like they were being crowbarred into every episode.
xenogoth
looking for an exit
i dunno, that sounds like an average week at my old school.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Then he met Nancy Reagan. What a buzz.
constant escape
winter withered, warm
I think so too.
Your phenomenology point is critical. Disembodied experience. Incorporeal phenomenology, etc.
Instead of trafficking through matter that houses information, or has information assigned to it, you are trafficking through pure information.
constant escape
winter withered, warm
Its as if one's being is straining beyond one's body, and we are all doing it together, effectively communicating.