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Nov 26th, 2008 11:29 AM
Grislygus Considering that he was the only "Fundamentalist" on the entire planet who made a point of admitting that he could easily be wrong and that it wouldn't bother him too much, I'd recommend actually paying attention to what people are saying rather than half-reading and reinterpreting. But you're kind of crippled in that regard, huh sport?
Nov 25th, 2008 07:02 PM
Bahmo You may be right about me not liking it just because I don't understand exactly what he was dissing. However, I'm coming into this as a guy who's come to loathe fundamentalists in general, so I don't have a lot of sympathy for Mr. Lewis and his work.
Nov 24th, 2008 03:03 PM
Grislygus It was written in the forties as a response to what amounted to a bunch of muddy horseshit from King and Ketler

What I like about high school intellectualism is that, having been raised on literary standards and conventions first helped along by the very books that they trash, they feel they are justified in their attempts to be (what they believe is) unique and cynical through masturbatory criticism of classic novels. You're not smart or original, and Oscar Wilde beat you to the punch centuries ago (he was a lot better at it than you, by the way).
Nov 23rd, 2008 06:58 PM
Bahmo Slurs alone aren't offensive, so if you read my comments dissing on the people who think the book Huck Finn is offensive, you'd know I actually agree with you on that one. (Don't get used to it!)

The point is really that Tom Sawyer is a more arguably-racist book because it actually portrays the minority as the villain, whereas Huck Finn is progressive in its views, yet the former is considered a classic halmark of children's literature, while the latter gets slammed as racist. Still, I do apologise for steering the thread off course, as I actually did enjoy those books.

So, to get it back to basics, anyone else forced to read The Abolition of Man? I fucking hated it. It's not that I disagree with the points it advanced, so much as the percieved reason it did so. Basically a bunch of Christian propaganda against moral relativism, and almost the entire first chapter is a bunch of babbling that's barely even relevent to that point. I never really liked the Narnia series, either, so reading this book pretty-much sealed my opinion of C. S. Lewis.
Nov 20th, 2008 08:56 PM
executioneer guys i love how this thread is about being racist now

way to jew it up for everyone, bahmo
Nov 20th, 2008 05:59 PM
Tadao Who the fuck cares. Being a certain race is not an achievement, so there is no way that it is an insult. Anyone who is insulted by being called a racial slur has a ad life awaiting them because there are far worse things out there than that.
Nov 20th, 2008 05:56 PM
ZeldaQueen Can I add "squaw" to that list of impolite/not politically correct terms?

[quote]"it's better to be thought a fool and remain silent, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"[quote]

Amen sir, amen.
Nov 20th, 2008 03:21 PM
Grislygus Jesus Christ, you're retarded.
Nov 20th, 2008 03:20 PM
Bahmo I'd say if it denotes skin color, "Redskin" is closer to Negro. It also bears mentioning that negro is an actual word, it simply is Spanish for "black." No African American objects to being called black in English.
Nov 20th, 2008 02:37 PM
Grislygus Injun is the equivalent of negroe. Impolite, not offensive. "Redskin" and "******" are insults that denote utmost contempt. Remember what Franklin, Lincoln, and Twain said, "it's better to be thought a fool and remain silent, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"
Nov 20th, 2008 02:21 PM
Bahmo
Quote:
Originally Posted by Grislygus View Post
"Injun" is just redneck for "indian", actual slurs were terms like "Diggers", as in "40 Diggers bagged by the Ukalamente Mining Group"! Have fun talking out of your ass, sweetheart
You can use the same "redneck" arguement for the N word. The real point is not that it's a colloquialism; what separates it from things like "Brit" or "Aussie" is that it was originally used by people to refer to a race for which they had contempt. So yes, "Injun" fits pretty well into the latter designation.
Nov 20th, 2008 01:10 AM
Brandon
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bahmo View Post
The Great Gatsby wasn't terribly painful for me, but it certainly didn't strike me as being at all important enough to force High Schoolers through. I still don't get what the message of that book was supposed to be.
Literature isn't about delivering a message. If you leave a book with more answers than questions, you've probably just been lied to a whole lot.
Nov 19th, 2008 10:46 PM
Fathom Zero I had to read Bless Me, Ultima (Rudolfo Anaya) this year. Fuckin' awful.
Nov 19th, 2008 07:53 PM
ZeldaQueen One of those booklets writen by Patricia Pulling. I swear it killed half of my brain.

On second thought, those had good entertainment value. I think I nearly cracked a rib laughing at some of those (like where she describes teenagers who could possibly be involved in Satanism).
Nov 19th, 2008 03:18 PM
Sam
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bahmo View Post
Never liked E.E. Cummings. His poetry's blatant disregard for grammar is allegedly individualistic, but a true individualist gains enough notability from talent alone. I find looking at ungrammatical text gives me a headache.

To go off on a tangent a little bit, I don't understand why everyone is getting all sack-cramped about their allegations that Huckleberry Finn is a "racist" book. The book is one of the most socially advanced works of its time, and yet people hate on it just because it contains the word, "******." I point out that the only reason it contains that word is because it phonetically writes all common Southern slurs, another major one being, "I druther" in the place of "I'd rather." Also, people seem to ignore Tom Sawyer, which not only contains the slur "injun," but clearly portays Native Americans in a negative light.

Edit: And sure enough, I-mockery also does not censor the latter ethnic slur. I suppose that everyone thinks it's less offensive to use ethnic slurs to refer to minorities the US Government willingly murdered than it is to refer to those the government grudgingly freed. What fucking hypocrisy.
Go craw about it somewhar elst, nagger.
Nov 19th, 2008 12:45 PM
Grislygus "Injun" is just redneck for "indian", actual slurs were terms like "Diggers", as in "40 Diggers bagged by the Ukalamente Mining Group"! Have fun talking out of your ass, sweetheart
Nov 19th, 2008 03:07 AM
Bahmo Never liked E.E. Cummings. His poetry's blatant disregard for grammar is allegedly individualistic, but a true individualist gains enough notability from talent alone. I find looking at ungrammatical text gives me a headache.

To go off on a tangent a little bit, I don't understand why everyone is getting all sack-cramped about their allegations that Huckleberry Finn is a "racist" book. The book is one of the most socially advanced works of its time, and yet people hate on it just because it contains the word, "******." I point out that the only reason it contains that word is because it phonetically writes all common Southern slurs, another major one being, "I druther" in the place of "I'd rather." Also, people seem to ignore Tom Sawyer, which not only contains the slur "injun," but clearly portays Native Americans in a negative light.

Edit: And sure enough, I-mockery also does not censor the latter ethnic slur. I suppose that everyone thinks it's less offensive to use ethnic slurs to refer to minorities the US Government willingly murdered than it is to refer to those the government grudgingly freed. What fucking hypocrisy.
Nov 19th, 2008 02:36 AM
kahljorn siddharta's an alright book to read if you want something quick to read and you're bored. I bought it for 80 cents at the good will
Nov 18th, 2008 06:26 PM
ZeldaQueen
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bahmo View Post
The Great Gatsby wasn't terribly painful for me, but it certainly didn't strike me as being at all important enough to force High Schoolers through. I still don't get what the message of that book was supposed to be.
I actually enjoyed The Great Gatsby. The point (which I got from it) was that most people are shallow morons who only like you if you have money and give parties (not to spoil the ending, but check out how Gatsby's guests act before and after the "trigger" bit)

Quote:
A book that I hate with every fiber of my being, and one whose author must have been truly sadistic, is The Call of the Wild. What the fuck?! I have always loathed "touching dog stories" because the dog usually dies in them, but this "classic" is by far the most depressing piece of shit out of all the depressing pieces of shit.
I know! In fourth grade, we read this story about a boy who lives in Alaska (or somewhere similar) with his grandfather and faithful sled dog. The grandfather falls ill and the boy has to have the dog enter into a sled race so that he can win the prize money to keep the house. Again, I don't want to ruin the ending but it was so freaking sad the teacher (who apparently hadn't read this book before) broke down crying and gave it to a student to finish reading.

Quote:
Shakespeare writes incredibly well, but I dislike his style. All of his characters speak the same high-poetry sort of English, from the University Graduate in London right down to the illiterate peasant, and not only is that unrealistic, the sort of dialogue it leads to actually starts to (in my opinion) upstage the content of the actual story, and make it less immersive.
I like Shakespeare quite a bit, but I can understand why you wouldn't like him. I took a Shakespeare analysis class in 12th grade, and the teacher pointed out all of these funny little details. For example, everyone remembers the "Get thee to a nunnery" part in Hamlet, right? Apparently in Shakespeare's time, "nunnery" actually meant "brothel". So Hamlet wasn't exactly telling Ophelia to repent and serve God there.

Most of the books we studied in high school I'd have liked, but what soured me to them was the whole talking and picking it apart and writing a stiff paper about it and generally just making it a chore.

Though it's more of a play, I hated when we read Strindberg's Miss Julie, which is basically about a sadomasocistic count's daughter (Miss Julie) who has sex with a servant and then the rest of the play is them bickering and fighting and trying to figure out how best to run away and hide so that the count doesn't figure out what they did. The idea of actually just staying and keeping their mouths shut occurs for all of two seconds (the servant claims that if they stayed, they'd be tempted to "do it again" until they were caught). They never actually come to any conclusions or anything.

Finally, in Religious Studies I read this ridiculous book called Sidhartha. One chapter, I kid you not, described how Sidhartha wants to leave his father's home to visit the Buddha. When his father refuses, Sidhartha stands in the living room perfectly still. His father wakes up multiple times in the night, sees his son, "his heart was troubled" and he goes back to sleep.
Nov 18th, 2008 04:30 PM
Bahmo Oh, where to start.

The Great Gatsby wasn't terribly painful for me, but it certainly didn't strike me as being at all important enough to force High Schoolers through. I still don't get what the message of that book was supposed to be. A book that I hate with every fiber of my being, and one whose author must have been truly sadistic, is The Call of the Wild. What the fuck?! I have always loathed "touching dog stories" because the dog usually dies in them, but this "classic" is by far the most depressing piece of shit out of all the depressing pieces of shit.

In general, I love Mark Twain, but I found his story The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County to be stupid, and not very funny compared to what its reputation suggests. In fact, that's not a solid story; it's a written monologue that just drones from subject to subject.

Shakespeare writes incredibly well, but I dislike his style. All of his characters speak the same high-poetry sort of English, from the University Graduate in London right down to the illiterate peasant, and not only is that unrealistic, the sort of dialogue it leads to actually starts to (in my opinion) upstage the content of the actual story, and make it less immersive.

My single most hated author that I read in school, based on everything I've read from him, is Ray Bradbury. I admit he writes well, but all that talent is wasted on what he writes. He's simply a one-sided blowhard; almost all of his stories are the same bit of luddite propaganda over and over again. It also enrages me that the mass of literary critics have the nerve to call him a great science fiction writer, when many of his stories are completely contemptuous of actual science, such as facts about what the climates of Mars and Venus are like. Bradbury is just a big ego.
Apr 8th, 2008 11:55 PM
BLEU
Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiteRat View Post
World War Z. What a shitty, shitty book.
Really? I've heard nothing but good about it. Well that sucks.
Apr 8th, 2008 11:04 PM
WhiteRat World War Z. What a shitty, shitty book.
Apr 2nd, 2008 05:02 PM
Asila Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.

DOESN'T THAT JUST SOUND SPOOKY GUIZ! Well, it's not. It's a random collection of random events that loosely relate to each other but never actually conjure up any dire emotions. And I like Ray Bradbury.
Apr 2nd, 2008 02:07 PM
BLEU Gravity's Rainbow.

I tried to enjoy it. I really did.
Apr 1st, 2008 07:39 PM
Grislygus
Quote:
Originally Posted by Protoclown View Post
I thought this book had some really interesting shit in it, but the ending just sort of fell apart for me. Were you disappointed by the ending as well? It just seemed to really go nowhere after all that.
Well, I wanted the book to be a full-on horror, but since it was more of a realistic character study than anything, so I felt the characters breaking down rather than resolving the situation fit the mold.

Of course, that's only if you count the Navidson record. I unfortunately got the impression that goddamned, tedious, retarded-ass commentary was building towards something big, so I stupidly read all of it (and, even worse, paid attention). Finally figure out that everything involving Truant and Zampano amounted to a whole mess of literary masturbation pissed me off a little bit.

I mean, edgy and experimental writing is cool, but not if it's completely detached from and irrelevant to the meat of the story.
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