It's writers like Henry Miller that make me appreciate Bluey.

[mundungus42]

I thought I'd take a stylistic break from "Of Human Bondage" by reading Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," and while it is undoubtedly a stylistic break, I'm nearing my saturation point on vaguely-arty Bohemian types living in squalor in Paris and moaning about the women they can't have. I'm only about 30 pages in, but I'm also a bit annoyed by the

Comments

[dickgloucester]

Funny, but a growing number of published 'authors' make me thankful for the talented writers we have in our corner of fanfic - not just Bluey, though she is of course among them.

[mundungus42]

I swear, a major part of doing my themed reading years is avoiding the glut of lousy new books and wait a few years until publishers' buzz and "bestselling" status wear off. The nice things about classics is that people whose opinions I trust have read them and can either rec them or not *coughBlitheringHeightscough*.

I'll never forget telling my sister that I wrote fanfiction and her responding with a wrinkled nose and, "Why don't you write something real?" If she knew HP, I'd hand her about a dozen of my favorite SSHG stories and thumb my nose. So much fanfiction is being published nowadays. I guess it's just a matter of ficcing something in the public domain and being male. /cynicism

[mundungus42]

Oh dear. At least it's big print and only about three hundred pages. :D

[ariadne1]

*waves arms* Stop. Stop with the Henry Miller. Stop stop stoppetty.

It's really not worth it.

Sincerely,

~ she who had to finish it for comps exams

[mundungus42]

Owwwch! The only problem is that I have equally cringe-worthy things to read lined up after it, like "Heart of Darkness." I may push through, if just as a character-building exercise. Already Miller's "stream of consciousness" is grating on my nerves - it makes me appreciate Beckett all the more. So is the overall awfulness, in your opinion, more stylistic-misogynistic, like Raymond Chandler, or character-driven, a'la Blithering Heights?

It's not terribly long, at least. And I know I can post excerpts here for general ridicule, which I plan to do, starting with the description of a woman's hair being alive from the swarms of bedbugs.

[dickgloucester]

Also, if you want to read about bedbugs, all you have to do is look at Shiv's and PJ's adventures.

[mundungus42]

I have been, which makes me really wonder about the verisimilitude of Miller's vermin. Would a bedbuggy pillow be "alive" with them? I thought they preferred to go for the legs. He also doesn't seem to differentiate between bedbugs and lice, which I find very suspicious. Is this just more of the same La Vie Boheme nonsense?

[dacian_goddess]

Paris I know and love, without the lice and suicide.

*shudders* That's the only Paris I want to know, thankyouverymuch. Ugh.

Oh, I hope the bathroom turned out the nice orange you were hoping for! Course, if it's finished, I imagine it did; you wouldn't have left it looking like you'd taken a highlighter pen (for once the French made a word simpler, calling said pen fluo) to the walls. ;P

[mundungus42]

That's the only Paris I want to know

Me too! Give me food and antiquarian pr0n and skip the vermin. Honestly, I find the isolation peculiar to each city to be far more interesting than rats and bugs, which are the same everywhere. Apropos of the film "Precious" and last year's "Slumdog Millionaire" lots of people have been tossing around the epithet "poverty porn" to describe the lurid fascination we seem to have with people that live in squalid circumstances. It certainly isn't endemic to this century- heck, the VC Andrews juggernaut is still thriving because of it. But somewhere along the line, I lost my taste for it along with gross cheap candy. :D

[dacian_goddess]

Mm, right, comes down to that lurid fascination with a perceived inferior extreme of different, for a given median of Western society.

Whereas I, for example, growing up in immediately post-communist Bucharest, was exposed to it far differently. To name one thing - I would ride the subway to school when I was about 8 and see kids my age or younger huffing paint thinner and living three to a cardboard box under the metro stairs. So I generally feel more "triggered" than voyeuristic about that sort of thing.

[mundungus42]

Excellent point. Also, wow.

It makes my annoyance at the idyllic-or-hellish portrayal of small towns on TV and in film seem like rather small potatoes in comparison. :D

I imagine that seeing something affecting up close rather destroys one's ability to see the stuff of fantasy in it. And if one's only experience with it is the fantasy (like VC Andrews and pubescent girls), it's bound to be more than a bit divorced from the reality.