Posts by Tom Beard
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It's a lot of fun, but it still won't be good for playing along to real music until the mini-guitar and drum pads are augmented by a toy keytar, plastic 303, fun-sized MPC and a minituarised (i.e. slightly less than room-sized) Moog modular.
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Sorry about coming back to the Da Vinci Code, but I've just watched Episode 12 of Series C of QI, and Stephen Fry describes it thus:
It is complete loose stool water. It is arse-gravy of the worst kind.
But getting back to classics, I'm struggling to think of supposedly great books that I've detested. There are a lot of them that I've never got around to, many that I can't see myself bothering with, and some that I've struggled with and given up after a few pages (such as Finnegan's Wake, but I did the same with Ada several times but recently made the breakthrough and was richly rewarded), but not many that I've thought are pointless or hugely overrated. Perhaps Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies, though I probably shouldn't have chosen it for airplane reading; and Gide's The Immoralist doesn't live up to the promise of its title. It's probably lucky that I came to so-called "serious literature" after university, so I've generally only read what I've chosen to read.
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From what you appear to have drawn from White Noise it would seem that you've not simply read it, you've deconstructed it. How else would you have made the mediaeval connection?
You seem to be implying a very narrow definition of the word "reading". I noticed a parallel to mediaeval worldviews simply because I'd been reading a lot of Eco, and the similarities were quite clear.
It certainly isn't apparent for someone like me who lacks the wider scholarship. ... My beef with White Noise is the way it panders to academic complacency by portraying a largely imaginary lumpenproletariat. ... Set your novel in a campus and they'll teach it. ... The problem I have with teaching campuslit such as White Noise is that it tends to reinforce a rather smug academic isolation.
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.
And you might find his treatment of the American exurban landscape as condescending, but I find it strikingly real and scary, as a homogenous mallscape expands around the world. It's not about what DeLillo or his supposedly intended audience think of the "lumpenproletariat", but a slightly surreal vision: the end game of a mindset whereby people are given value only through their status as consumers.
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Two-dimensional lesser-mortal characters who blunder about driven by a mumbling fear of death, in a way that DeLillo's intended gentle readership is encouraged to treat with detached scorn?
Well, I suppose your talk of the dimensionality of the characters is an indication that we read it in different ways. I don't generally read in order to be told a story about psychologically realistic characters, but for the joy of reading per se. In many of my favourite books (e.g. Pale Fire) it's hard to tell whether the characters even exist, or which one invented the other.
White Noise is presented like a standard realist novel in some ways (it's not an Oulipo exercise or explicitly metafictional confection), but for me the point was not whether you liked or believed in the characters or whether the treatment of consumerism stands up to academic srutiny. It's the fact that mood, observation, style, prosody, abstract themes, pace and imagination are all woven into whole: not necessarily a coherent one, but one that entranced me. Oh, and for what it's worth, it never crossed my mind to treat Jack Gladney with detached scorn.
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misogynistic talking anuses
Wait, who mentioned Kiwiblog?
Don DeLillo sucks
Now, I have to disagree. I must admit that Underworld didn't quite live up to my expectations or its own promise, but the only reason I had trouble reading White Noise is that I had to stop about twice per page to marvel at the sheer brilliance of his sentences. Not only that, but there's an undertow of melancholic menace that is chilling for all the right reasons, and a way of looking at the hypercommericalised postmodern world of information that links it back to a mediaeval sense of signs and wonders. Some of his preoccupations and stylistic tics lose their gloss in other novels, but White Noise alone is enough to justify his reputation IMO.
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The top google result under my name is ...
For some strange reason, I keep getting pages about Nicole Kidman or Katie Holmes.
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this chick
From that Wikipedia article:
It was here that she became a strip tease artiste, a performance that involved striking lewd poses for the viewers. This act she would later refine by removing the nudity and lewdness, and developing it into what would become her Attitudes.
Striptease: ur doing it wrong.
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I also found The Naked Lunch to be so utterly depressing I had to stop reading it.
Man, I can think of at least two things wrong with that title!</popcultureallusion>
I only made it about halfway through, though I partly blame that on reading it while off work with a particularly nasty bout of gastroenteritis</tmi>
Sometimes reading in "experimental circumstances" can be rewarding, though. I read Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers while suffering from two weeks of fever and borderline alcohol poisoning and living across the road from a famous brothel. The only way it could have been more appropriate would have been if I had been wearing women's clothes that I'd stolen from a friend.
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Three strikes, you're out.
I advocate water pistols. Or maybe just pistols.
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Continuing with Huysmans, I love this quote from Arthur Symonds (found on Wikipedia, natch):
Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor
That could apply equally well to some of my other favourite writers: Pynchon comes to mind.