jenks

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You should try reading these stories @jenks maybe a bit fantastical for you but they're only short. I like them anyway.
I’ve read them all years ago. I’ve also taught them as part of a first year undergrad course on the short story. I didn’t contribute as I didn’t want to come across all teacher-like
 
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linebaugh

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Are you taking the piss with this sentence? I can't tell if it's meant in earnest or not.
That comment was meant as a lob for someone like yourself to say something clever on. I do think it's hard to talk about these stories without sounding like youve just ripped the bong
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
And I think the struggle I was originally talking about is addressed in the story, when the magicians first attempt to dream the boy fails. He starts the project like a proffesor, thinking the boy can be realized if he can just find the boy with the right information only to realize he had 'not really dreamt.'
 
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sus

Well-known member
This is what Trilling's all on about. The conflict between creativity and reasonableness. You go about it the reasonable way you end up with a novel like Trilling wrote, or a boy like the magician not-dreamed: autobiography—re-capitulation instead of genuine summoning.

Of course, Borges also wrote that a man sets out to draw the world, only to realize, near the end of his life, that he has drawn a portrait of his own face. And some of the best—Annie Baker comes to mind—claim to write 100-page character profiles before embarking on the 60-page plays these characters inhabit.
 

luka

Well-known member
I’ve read them all years ago. I’ve also taught them as part of a first year undergrad course on the short story. I didn’t contribute as I didn’t want to come across all teacher-like
Try and contribute without being the teacher
 

sus

Well-known member
This is what Trilling's all on about. The conflict between creativity and reasonableness. You go about it the reasonable way you end up with a novel like Trilling wrote, or a boy like the magician not-dreamed: autobiography—re-capitulation instead of genuine summoning.

Of course, Borges also wrote that a man sets out to draw the world, only to realize, near the end of his life, that he has drawn a portrait of his own face. And some of the best—Annie Baker comes to mind—claim to write 100-page character profiles before embarking on the 60-page plays these characters inhabit.
@version what do you make of this w/r/t the methods of e.g. Joyce? His obsessive diagramming of the Wake, the schematisms of Ulysses.
 

version

Well-known member
I think it applies to Joyce as much as anyone else. There's a lot in Joyce, but it's still rooted in his Irishness, his Catholic background and so on. It's a much more detailed portrait of his own face than you get from some, but it's still the face of Joyce.

I dunno whether that's what you're asking though.
 

version

Well-known member
This is a good Borges thing from Dreamtigers,

A Yellow Rose :: J. L. Borges​

Neither that afternoon nor the next did the illustrious Giambattista Marino die, he whom the unanimous mouths of Fame — to use an image dear to him — proclaimed as the new Homer and the new Dante. But still, the noiseless fact that took place then was in reality the last event of his life. Laden with years and with glory, he lay dying in a huge Spanish bed with carved bedposts. It is not hard to imagine a serene balcony a few steps away, facing the west, and, below, marble and laurels and a garden whose various levels are duplicated in a rectangle of water. A woman has placed in a goblet a yellow rose. The man murmurs the inevitable lines that now, to tell the truth, bore even him a little:

Purple of the garden, pomp of the meadow,
Gem of the spring, April’s eye . . .


Then the revelation occured: Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise, and he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not — as his vanity had dreamed — a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.

Marino achieved this illumination on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I enjoy his work... i mean I've only read a couple of his books but I've seen virtually all his films which normally tend to temper the repetitive and circular nature of his books with, well, with a load of tits basically.
Typical Robbe-Grillet plot is there may or may not be a murder and some guy may or may not be investigating it and everything is very confusing and he describes several scenes several times and then at the end, as a result of investigating the murder that may or may not have happened the guy makes the murder happen for definite. Or maybe not. Probably.
 

sus

Well-known member
Only read Jealousy. I struggled but liked the vibe. The missus is better at constructing mental images than me, she gets a hoot outta meticulously building mental landscapes, one banana tree at a time.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Marienbad is a bit different as he didn't direct. Perhaps cos it was a proper director it feels more like a clinical adaptation of one of his books.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The older ones (Trans-Europ, L'Immortelle) are more dry. I recommend Gradiva, La Belle Captive, Successive Slidings of Pleasure off the top of my head. Also Marienbad of course.
 
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