Posts by Joe Wylie
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I always try to do the phone surveys when they ring (rarely), because, as a researcher, I know how difficult it is to get responses. And if you don't answer the survey some other shmoe gets called.
Which only goes towards proving that data collected by such surveys is inherently misleading - only those who don't have a life, i.e. have nothing better to do, take the trouble to answer them. Unless you're given to grabbing your ankles whenever a stranger phones there's only one sane response to these intrusions: "Excuse me, unlike your potential victim demographic I already have a life. It may not be the one I'd have chosen, but I'd rather get on with it."
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But I all too often look at our Parliamentarians and wonder if there's something in the notion that people who seek out political power are the very ones who should never be allowed to have it.
Reminds me of a story by a journalist from the NSW press gallery who took a friend along to watch the lower house in action.
Afterwards, when asked what he thought of the show, his friend observed that the parliamentarians had one thing in common - they all looked as if they'd been kicked when they were at school. -
... So, following from our comparative religion discussion above, would that now be one book or three? Or should we treat a single-volume trilogy as a trinity, so recognising both counts?t
How many tomes can you fit on the head of a pin? As I'm not up to fretting over such things I'll go with Shakespeare in don't-worry-be-happy mode:
"Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." -- As You Like It.
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. . . Bob's style of delivery is...um...a little unique....undoubtably it is performance art!t
In my limited experience of such things most performance artists feature a Barbie doll or rubber chicken - sometimes both - in their stage shows. Bob sounds as if he's blasting into some radical new space with his aquatic act.
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Ah, the Victorian novelists propensity for silly names. Trollope was even worse.
You mean he came up with something better/worse than Pumblechook? Do tell.
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I realised that life had more to offer than this turgid book.
Like, why read books when you could be slagging them? If I'd only finished Tristram Shandy I could've saved myself years of reading.
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White Teeth is the worst "good" novel I've read in a while. What a shocker. Genuinely bad on just about every count. A disaster. A piece of shit. Unmitigated crap.
You're probably right , but the awful Autograph Man makes it look like a work of genius.
Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow are equally, but quite differently, two of the best novels ever.
Again, I wouldn't dare to differ, but for me it's Gravity's Rainbow: 90% inspiration, 10% artifice, with Mason & Dixon in inverse proportion.
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Don't they give some kind of prize for endurance for having read Clarissa?
Pamela = Allie McBeal. Pamela's grovelling obsequious psalm-muttering dotard of a dad makes Tom Bombadil look like a model of restraint. Thankfully he makes only minor appearances. -
You seem to be under the impression that I actively studied White Noise as part of an academic exercise, or that it appealed to me because it was set partly on campus. Not at all: I haven't formally studied literature since the 6th form, and I've never been an academic. I read it for pleasure, but my interests in poetry and philosophy meant that "reading" for me isn't just about following a story but about everything that language can do.
No Tom, I'm not assuming any of that. I do rather wish that I'd read White Noise in the wild as you did, rather than as a set text. It's my resentment at how the book was presented, almost as if it were some kind of insightful polemic, with little scope for meaningful discussion. Whatever DeLillo's intentions, it's the way he's allowed himself to be drafted as some kind of seer-savant that rankles with me. A bit like the role Martin Amis seems to fulfil in the UK. I don't think that White Noise is a thoroughly bad book, just ridiculously overrated, and quite possibly misrepresented.
That you were able to make the mediaeval connection via Eco is testimony to the book's power to evoke, and it's a take that I appreciate. For me the best literature works on a personal level. Perhaps I should reconsider White Noise in that light, although it would help if DeLillo would distance himself from the false acclaim that he's attracted.
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It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Nice. Even more succinct than the famous opening line from Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers:
"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."