Turns out a game of sorts with books has finally finished! As of this morning, the artist and owner of the solution Michel Becker, of the famous book Sur la trace de la Chouette d’Or (On the trail of the Golden Owl) confirmed it’s been found. It’s taken 31 years to find it!
This is big news here!
There’s a lot of transformation in hesiods theogony and other creation myths. I finished anaxagoras’ fragments and testimonia. His creation is one based on physical properties of the world and it’s creatures. He imagines elements comprising everything. Things like bone, rock heat and mind mix together to create the variety we see around us. It’s easy to push this a bit into the abstract and see how slight austen to our mixture could cause transformations. I can imagine hesiod and ovid reading his works and using it as metaphor and profound experiences changing our nature.
fascinating. it’s been a long time since i read ovid, but i do remember how graphic and playful they were. anything could happen but the poems still maintain an internal logic, as if it was mercurial content in a stable form. the one that sticks out the most to me is lycaon.
weird tangent, but around that time i was reading ovid, my first creative writing professor ever died midway through the semester. for some reason, i wound up at his house and was invited to pick through his books. the one book i took was this lycanthropy reader. i haven’t read it, but i’m looking at it now and kinda want to. rip christopher leland.
Finished My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. It’s a certified banger in my opinion. It’s a story about a friendship that’s really about a community but it’s also about a hundred other things if you pick it apart. It felt like it had everything I liked from Middlemarch but perhaps more. Very introspective and rich depictions of friendship, family and community wrapped up in an enjoyable read. I felt like I learned things about myself by reading this book which is always a sign that the book was a hit. I’m really impressed when authors are able to do that, it makes them seem incredibly wise to be able to capture human relations in that way. Anyways highly recommended!
using the last post i’m permitted to make in a row to ask if anyone has any interest/predictions for the nobel prize this year, which will be announced on thursday.
i always look forward to seeing who they pick, but only in a horse race sorta way. i still think they picked the wrong norwegian last year.
No horse in this race myself but just going off of who I’m familia with, I’d bet on Murnane. I’m a Pynchonhead myself so would be pleased with that as well. According to SportsGeek Can Xue is the favorite though.
https://www.thesportsgeek.com/blog/nobel-prize-literature-predictions/
Poniatowska not on the list?
would be stunned if murnane won. his work is so myopic and idiosyncratic (not that i’m complaining). it is a little funny how they seemingly refuse to give the award to murakami. almost as funny as when they gave it to bob dylan or when they split the prize with everyone’s favorite serbian war crimes denier. to think munro was once their least controversial pick in recent memory!
This October I wanted to read some feminist horror — I’m about to finish up The Stepford Wives and picked up The Handmaids Tale from the library for a reread.
Any other recs along these lines?
i would recommend anything by carmen maria machado, including this story: The Husband Stitch | Carmen Maria Machado | Granta Magazine
reading Renegade the Mark E. Smith autobiography. Appears to be a minimally structured ramble that the ghostwriter attempted to shape into a narrative. It’s been engaging but man does it get Abe Simpson onion-in-my-belt-as-was-the-style-at-the-time lol. The childhood section opens with an anecdote about little MES talking with his neighbor Steve The Pigeon Guy, who was a Teddy Boy and back in those days Teddy Boys would send messenger pigeons to their girlfriends in Blackpool, because they didn’t have telephones. So I am compelled as usual to ask @Tom if it’s true that Teddy Boys used messenger pigeons to communicate with their girlfriends in Blackpool
yeah strong recs for Things We Lost In The Fire by Mariana Enriquez, take your pick of Angela Carter books that seem interesting to you. I think The Bloody Chamber is the most situated in the horror genre iirc. Since Handmaid’s Tale is sort of SF/horror then why not James Tiptree Jr (lady writing under pen name): specifically the stories “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, “The Screwfly Solution”, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read”, and a few others that escape me atm.
Also, I’m a fan of “The Swords” by otherwise non-feminist writer Robert Aickman who managed to do one anyway I think
Of course. It’s why England is so full of pigeons today, the remains of the old phone system. They’re protected for a reason, so when the next War with the British occurs we still have a way to communicate. That and teletext.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious, but I’m prepared to believe that at face value. This is the entire assertion, in case it helps determine veracity
i always imagined finnegans wake being kinda like this
the power of alcoholism
“I’d prefer to see a good film like Albert Finney in Charlie Bubbles or Dead Of Night. But now you get the BBC and their Carry On seasons! It’s trash! The Beano was better.”
Smith, Mark E. with Austin Collings. Renegade: the Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith. Penguin Books, London, 2009, p. 23
@Tom is this also accurate?
