[wombat]

OMG, maryjo, that's great!!

I've got to stick up for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

It works best if you dip in and read his riffs, episodically.

Or maybe it's a generational thing, where I don't see the reason for the divide between mechanics and art, and people don't care about that any more because there are no more mechanics. Ha!

The very idea of a middle-class, educated person noticing and caring how the windows are hung, perhaps hanging windows themselves -- heresy!

Pirsig's amusing segments include:

Going back and talking to DeWeese, the sculptor, and remembering clashes of their mentality.

The overturning Aristotle in favor of Plato, while teaching at the Navy Pier.

The beer can shim.

Annihilation ECS. "I don't even have a hangover!"

----

Understand that I come from a long line of engineers on both sides of the family. Father's side: farmers who went into factory, Dad who went to MIT/military flying planes/schizophrenic episode. Planted trees, built fences, fixed machinery, pointed out the errors in a friend's house building blue prints, read books, sculpted, got up to go to a factory, and saw no contradiction in these things.

Moms father: Engineer from Neuchatel, Switzerland.

There is still a divide, or perceived divide, between "those who work with their heads" and "those who work with their hands" and, most engineers are non-athletic, but no-one cares about this issue any more.

Pirsig had something to say because he was informing people of other worlds they did not deign to experience.

[cinegirl]

Anyone reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics? Just finished it & I'm still processing... (blogged about it at http://superfastreader.wordpress.com). Right now I'm reading Ursula LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea.

I've been reading a lot of NF as of late, so nothing really to contribute here. Thinking of picking up The Best of Everything (Rona Jaffe) for some fluff.

I loved The Best of Everything, but I really like reading popular novels from that era (like Marjorie Morningstar, Peyton Place, etc.), and love the career-girl story. It's a cut above the rest, even though it's soapy as all get-out. The movie stars Joan Crawford and it's deliciously bad.

[raisingirl]

Hahahaha... I'm another one who could never get through Zen and the Art..., too.

Bunny! Chugging? What do you think of Middlesex?

I've been reading a lot of NF as of late, so nothing really to contribute here. Thinking of picking up The Best of Everything (Rona Jaffe) for some fluff.

[mornington]

I've started damn zen and the art... twice and never finished it... that bad. We were recommended it as part of our philosophy course at school... I liked the story bit, but the philosophy was interminable. Pirsig's written another book, and I'm semi-curious. Mostly to see if it's any better.

I found the more poetry we did, it became more about how quickly we could get through it. I prefer longer poems; I'm dipping in and out of Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture and have been for a few weeks.

[faerietails]

I suspect the college friend that recommended it to me as "the greatest thing I've ever read" of having read only one book.

LOL! Ouch. That bad, eh?

bunny, I loved Middlesex! How are you liking it so far?

[bunnyb]

mando, don't worry, I'm hugging you instead! I haven't read Neverwhere but LOVED American Gods! Did anyone hear that Shadow's getting a sequel?

morn, the Rushdie is on my wishlist. I adore Midnight's Children.

I have a love/hate relationship with poetry ... I found that the longer I studied the less it became about what could be read into the text and that disappointed me as I find poems to be puzzles that need to be solved (and some do remain unsolved).

If you can believe it, I'm still chugging my way through Middlesex although v close to finishing.

[mr_falljackets]

mornington, I thought zen and the art... was agonizing. The only part that appealed to me was the father/son road trip plotline which, as you know, you could only access ittermittently between miles of pseudo-philosophical pschyobabble. I suspect the college friend that recommended it to me as "the greatest thing I've ever read" of having read only one book.

[mornington]

re the critical analysis... it killed poetry dead for me (maybe that was the teacher, though... and effing Thomas Hardy) but I enjoy it with a lot of prose. I've got to want to discuss it, though. There's something fascinating about picking apart a text; you're seeing into someone's mind, but that sight is affected by your own personality.... *ramble ramble ramble*

mrfj, satre always seemed so gloomy to me... mind you, i don't think i ever got zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance either.

I did it that way round, mando. american gods is a longer read, but a better work that neverwhere, imo. although i'm re-reading stardust.

[mandolyn]

bunny, don't hit me, but i gave up on neverwhere for the time being.

but to redeem myself, i picked up american gods.

but i read little children first. unfortunately i didn't love it as much as many of you did. i was disappointed by the rather abrupt ending. i do want to see the movie, but i wish they cast someone else as todd. i think kate is perfect casting, though.

[mr_falljackets]

I'm reading "nausea" by Sartre. I don't get it.

[maryjo]

I wrote my MA thesis on Samuel Delany...

[wombat]

Oh, hey, that can definitely be fun, too!!

I'm not thinking of reading as fun so much as thinking of it as an entry to another world, a quiet world dictated by the writer. mood, setting, atmosphere, facts o daily life, and a sense of risng above time, placce, and social definitions.

Ever read anyy Samuel Delaney?

Oh, hey, that can definitely be fun, too!!

I'm not thinking of reading as fun so much as thinking of it as an entry to another world, a quiet world dictated by the writer. mood, setting, atmosphere, facts o daily life, and a sense of risng above time, placce, and social definitions.

Ever read anyy Samuel Delaney?

[maryjo]

I get off on critical analysis; on examining the social and/or textual structures that define the meaning we take from a text. I don't demand to be taken with authority, I just like to discuss... You are welcome to your nonanalytical fun, I should go back to my paper-writing anyway.

[wombat]

Yes, EXACTLY. If she were writing it today...
and, that is the problem I have with academic endeavors.

I have been a voracious reader ever since I learned how to read. I wrote my first story when I was six years old. I dug up literature and poetry that were not "children's" at all, by age thirteen or so.

And yet, I never like classes on these subjects very much.

"What does this poem MEAN?"
It could mean a great many things.

And, what does the exact text say and what does this study or authoritative critic say that it MEANS.

Trust me, we girls were extrapolating sexuality in our brains when we read Left Hand of Darkness.

Sometimes what it means can not be found under a microscope. No criticism of you, though.

[maryjo]

"For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that." (Left Hand of Darkness 249)

Not implied! But I will give you the intense emotional connection "between men" (though at the moment of sexual near-contact Estraven *is*, and is perceived by Genly to be, a woman) and, having just read the climactic scene again where Genly realises his connection with Estraven through sexual tension (though the connection is based on their difference, on recognising Estraven as a women as well as a man and therefore as an alien, rather than the man Genly always misread him as before), it is intensely similar to many emotional climax scenes in slash fic.

If Le Guin were writing this today, I am pretty sure she would have them have sex and become partners.

Sorry, I've written too many papers about this stuff...

[mornington]

just finished salman rushdie's shalimar the clown. It was absolutely brilliant.

[wombat]

Okay -- *implied* !

[maryjo]

I adore Le Guin and the Left Hand of Darkness, but Estraven and Genly Ai only sleep together, they don't have sex... I was listening to a podcast interview with Henry Jenkins the other day where he said they had sex and that was one of the initiations of slash, but it isn't true!

[wombat]

Ooh, Ursula K. Leguin! When I was a young teen, The Left Hand of Darkness was popular, because it's feminist (what if everyone was both sexes) and slash-y as well, since she has two 'men' sleep together! LOL

I was always a couple years ahead of my "age level" in reading.

Love Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret, (Louise Fitzhugh with her great drawings and female lead characters) and really loved Eleanor Estes -- the Melendy's and The Witch Family.

Speedy! You have been missed! Boobie squishing hug except you have no boobies -- or DO YOU?

[speedy]

Mickey Spillane! Energetic prose, counterrevolutionary politics, lurid fantasies of freedom as the liberty to beat someone up, something for the authoritarian in all of us. From the fifties, the golden age of subversiveness!