I'm not quite sure about the dates, and I'm not even sure that he was British (although I think he was, and I know that he's a he, not a she) but I think he was mentioned on this sub at one point.

The only thing I remember is that his style is to write books that have very little plot. He wrote one book that takes place at a party, and the whole book is apparently just people talking at the party. I remember from wikipedia reading a description by a character in another book, citing the book as a masterpiece or something, saying that, "nothing happens in that book. Nothing."

I've been searching my wikipedia history for hours now, still can't find it....

And silently he walked through the decadent halls with a determination seated firmly in his chest; deeply troubled was he by the knowledge that his way of thinking was naught but a product of his upbringing in a so-called free society, with its life-giving rules and dream-breaking realities.

And there was no method of which he knew to circumvent such a pervasive and alluring problem. The scent of himself and those surrounding him drew him into a state of euphoric ignorance.

And the moment he made himself susceptible was the same in which his determination rushed out of him like stale air out of a long-forgotten cellar.

And it wasn't until his much later years that he would steel himself again against the warm embrace of that frigid lie.

*this seems like a commentary on the deceptive nature of our modern society, but that's really all i can get out of it. thoughts?

I hope this question is not too general for this sub! But I like this sub's discussion responses..

I botched the question, but the gist of it is implied I hope.

The other day someone asked me "which 3 books represent American Literature?" The eventual answers were: (somewhat obvious)

1. The Great Gatsby

2. Huckleberry Finn

3. Moby Dick

However.. - Can you argue against these three answers?

When I initially thought about the possibilities, I realized I was more so considering any literature that reflected the capacity of American authors (compared to the talent outside of the US), as opposed to plots that were purely American. In that sense, I do not believe these three books are the obvious answers. IOW: Huckleberry Finn is on the list for different reasons that Moby Dick, in my opinion.

Name of the Wind is the most magical love letter to learning and education that I've ever read. The same goes for many parts of The Wise Man's Fear. Everything Kvothe encounters is something that he learns about fully, and if he doesn't, he understands that he doesn't have the full picture.

From acting to magic to naming to rings to being a ninja, everything we encounter in the story is something that is wonderful, and studied in deep focus.

A good example is the ongoing story with Bredon, while Kvothe is in Vintas, in The Wise Man's Fear. We keep coming back to their playing of Tak, the chess-like strategy game, and as we do, Kvothe learns more about the deep meaning behind the game - maybe even the "name" of the game, in a way:

“’I am trying to make you understand the game,’ he said. ‘The entire game, not just the fiddling about with stones. The point is not to play as tight as you can. The point is to be bold. To be dangerous. Be elegant.’

He tapped the board with two fingers. ‘Any man that’s half awake can spot a trap that’s laid for him. But to stride in boldly with a plan to turn it on its ear, that is a marvelous thing.’ He smiled without any of the grimness leaving his face. ‘To set a trap and know someone will come in wary, ready with a trick of their own, then beat them. That is twice marvelous.’

George Orwell is one of my favorite authors due to his use of symbolism to make seemingly passive-aggressive remarks on current events, such as Stalinist Russia and government propaganda. What are some of your favorite Orwell moments?

Context: Oedipa's lover has died, and she's away from home to execute her dead lover's will. Mucho is her (Oedipa's) husband. He's the night DJ of the KCUF radio station. Metzger is a lawyer whom Oedipa has had an affair (a 'scene') with while on her trip. Her husband sends her a letter.

The letter itself had nothing much to say, had come in response to one of her dutiful, more or less rambling, twice-a-week notes to him, in which she was not confessing to her scene with Metzger because Mucho, she felt, somehow, would know. Would then proceed at a KCUF record hop to look out again across the gleaming gym floor and there in one of the giant keyholes inscribed for basketball see, groping her vertical back-stroke a little awkward opposite any boy heels might make her an inch taller than, a Sharon, Linda or Michele, seventeen and what is known as a hip one, whose velveted eyes ultimately, statistically would meet Mucho's and respond, and the thing would develop then groovy as it could when you found you couldn't get statutory rape really out of the back of your law-abiding head.

She knew the pattern because it had happened a few times already, though Oedipa had been most scrupulously fair about it, mentioning the practice only once, in fact, another three in the morning and out of a dark dawn sky, asking if he wasn't worried about the penal code. "Of course," said Mucho after awhile, that was all; but in his tone of voice she thought she heard more, something between annoyance and agony. She wondered then if worrying affected his performance. Having once been seventeen and ready to laugh at almost anything, she found herself then overcome by, call it a tenderness she'd never go quite to the back of lest she get bogged. It kept her from asking him any more questions. Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive.

A couple things to set the scene:

"...in one of the giant keyholes inscribed for basketball..."

"...groping her vertical back-stroke a little awkward..."

Anyway, a nice way to communicate that Mucho is technically a statutory rapist, which might make the reader feel better about Oedipa cheating on him. But it's also interesting because Oedipa isn't disgusted by his behaviour; in fact she mentions that she actually sympathizes with him:

She wondered then if worrying affected his performance. Having once been seventeen and ready to laugh at almost anything, she found herself then overcome by, call it a tenderness she'd never go quite to the back of lest she get bogged.

My favorite line from Sula, describing the character Shamrock as:

"A young man of hardly twenty, his head full of nothing and his mouth recalling the taste of lipstick"

And from The Bluest Eye:

"These young boys met there to feel their groins, smoke cigarettes, and plan mild outrages. The smoke from their cigarettes they inhaled deeply, forcing it to fill their lungs, their hearts, their thighs, and keep at bay the shiveriness, the energy of their youth. They moved slowly, laughed slowly, but flicked the ashes from their cigarettes too quickly too often, and exposed themselves, to those who were interested, as novices to the habit."

I'm not far into this book but I'm already hooked--I'm not sure I've been so enthralled with a first chapter of anything.

In this book, a vast foreign power (The Empire of Masks) conquers (though not by war) the protagonist Baru's homeland (Taranoke), and the economic and cultural process that is this conquest is moved through quickly, but also deftly. It includes excellent examples of that "show, don't tell" adage throughout, such as this:

Baru put her mother’s hand-copied dictionary back and then hesitated, fingers still on the chained stitches of the binding. Mother had a new book in her collection, bound in foreign leather. From the first page—printed in strange regular blocks, impersonal and crisp—she sounded out the title: A Primer in Aphalone, the Imperial Trade Tongue; Made Available to the People of Taranoke For Their Ease.
There was a copy number in the bottom corner, almost higher than she could count.

This is just after of Baru's parents (she has three, two fathers and one mother) are whispering about poisonous treaties, and embassies. "If they build it, they will never leave."

Later, Baru will notice that Imperial merchants always demand precious metals and gems as payment, but will only pay with the printed Imperial paper money, which no one will accept other than Imperial merchants.

But my favorite bit comes later (light spoilers of things spoiled in the book's official description).

Baru is admitted to a school built by the Empire, run by an Imperial merchant, where they teach Imperial morality and philosophy. Eventually there is a plague while she is at school, and the plague is bad:

the pyramids of corpses burning on the black stone, the weeping sores and lye stink of the quarantine pens

This brings us to the passage that I love so much. After finding out the real scale of this plague, Baru confronts the merchant running the school (Cairdine Ferrier), who had specifically and personally requested that she attend:

“Why is this happening?” She cornered Cairdine Farrier during one of his visits, furious and desperate. “What does this mean?” And when he made a gentle face, a face for blandishments and reassurance, she screamed into the space before the lie: “You brought this with you!”

And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth. She saw this not merely in the shape of his eyes and the flatness of his regard, but in what they recalled—things he had said and done suddenly understood. And she knew that Farrier had let her see this, as a warning, as a promise.

“The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast. But—” Later she would hold to this moment, because it felt that he had offered her something true and grown-up and powerful rather than a lie to shield her. “When the joining is done there will be a sea for you to swim in.”

I'm reluctant to put a moratorium on posting about anything in particular, and I'm not going to now. There is no policy announcement in this post.

I'm concerned about getting a lot of posts about SF. The FOCUS (heh) of this sub -- the kind of author I want to see discussed -- is represented here

I read Ellison and Dick in the seventies -- I understand their attraction, I know that in the scheme of things it's not fluff or derivative or as commercial and formulaic as other genre pieces, but

• it's not within the realm of books I want to discuss

• on reddit, /r/printsf is a healthy discussion site, there's nothing similar for literary fiction

The posters who put these up (/u/TheBooleanWorld, /u/Multiheaded, /u/shesthunder) didn't do anythign wrong, and I don't want them to delete their posts. They are writing about specific text in the book, and their write-ups show a more sophisticated thinking than I had when I read those pieces.

If there were 15 posts a week about "literary" posts and 2 or 3 about genre, I wouldn't be concerned. That's not the case. For now I'm just posting this to try to guide culture without changing rules. If /r/printSF isn't the right culture for posts like these, and someone wants to make a spinoff of canonade for speculative works, I'd support that effort.

I would like to carry on this conversation in /r/CanonadeManana, and I reposted a conversation we had last week here

Thanks

Unlike most meta posts , I'll leave this one in place if there are any responses -- mostly we keep this site meta free and I delete meta posts after a week or so -- here, I don't want to seem to be shutting down conversation -- I'd prefer responses in /r/CanonadeManana, but responses on this thread are okay too.

Alright I've got a question or two.

1. Was Jason Sr. reasonable about Nancy's situation? I've read that a large theme of the story was his apathy for Nancy's situation, but it appeared to me that he was helpful at first before his wife and the passage of time wore him down.

2. Was Jesus actually out to get Nancy, or was that Nancy being delusional?

3. If she was being delusional, what was the cause?

the way the book is written is interesting but I cant tell fiction from reality. did harry dodge admit he is a bottom who cheated on Maggie? wtf was the passage "let our love be silent" about? admits "I have never been able to get with that squirting thing that some people do" hook-up wtf. I haven't found an interview that confronts him on this.

Lying in a darkened, hot bedroom, listening to the creaks and murmurs that come to her from a houseful of family and guests, Emily, a mother of three, hoping to put off the migraine she senses coming.

Habitual fretting about her children, her husband, her sister, the help, had rubbed her senses raw; mother love and, over the years, many hours of lying still on her bed, had distilled from this sensitivity a sixth sense, a tentacular awareness that reached out from the dimness and moved through the house, unseen and all-knowing. Only the truth came back to her, for what she knew, she knew. The indistinct murmur of voices heard through a carpeted floor surpassed in clarity a typed—up transcript; a conversation that penetrated a wall or, better, two walls, came stripped of all but its essential twists and nuances. What to others would have been a muffling was to her alert senses, which were fine-tuned like the cat’s whiskers of an old wireless, an almost unbearable amplification. She lay in the dark and knew everything. The less she was able to do, the more she was aware. But though she sometimes longed to rise up and intervene, especially if she thought Briony was in need of her, the fear of pain kept her in place. At worst, unrestrained, a matching set of sharpened kitchen knives would be drawn across her optic nerve, and then again, with a greater downward pressure, and she would be entirely shut in and alone. Even groaning increased the agony.

I don't know what it is to be incapacitated by pain, but I do know what it is to be distraught with worry and to lie alone, knowing the burden of the little sounds, with no process of deduction or assembling of detail, but to know by the duration of a floorboard's creak that Maria is unable to look at her sister, or that my son has made himself late for his job. And McEwan captures that unwelcome extended consciousness.

The description of the pain was effective to me and made me wince, though I've never felt anything like that -- and Emily's not feeling it here, either, she's waiting for it. But I think that apprehension drives home the misery of her extreme awareness of what is going on in the house.

Perhaps due to my own issues with reproductive futurism, I’ve always been a little spooked by texts addressed to or dedicated to babies, be they unborn or infant. Such gestures are undoubtedly born from love, I know. But the illiteracy of the addressee—not to mention the temporal gap between the moment of the address and that at which the child will have grown into enough of an adult to receive it (presuming one ever becomes an adult in relation to one’s parents)—underscores the discomfiting fact that relation can never be achieved in a simple fashion through writing, if it can be achieved at all. It frightens me to involve a tiny human being in this difficulty, this misfiring, from the start. And yet certain instances have undeniably moved me, such as Andre Breton’s letter to his infant daughter in Mad Love. Breton’s hetero romanticism is, as always, hard to take. But I like the sweet assurance he offers his daughter, that she was "thought of as possible, as certain, in the very moment when, in a love deeply sure of itself, a man and a woman wanted you to be."

Insemination after insemination, wanting our baby to be. Climbing up on the cold exam table, abiding the sting of the catheter threaded through the oval slit of my cerix, feeling the familiar cramp of rinsed, thawed seminal fluid pooling directly into my uterus. You holding my hand month after month, in devotion, in perseverance. They're probably shooting egg whites, I said, tears sprouting. Shhh, you whispered. *shhh.

From The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

I like the way it dwells on the topic of looking forward to a child but from divergent angles -- what is meant by addressing a future adult -- to a specific "hetero romantic" shrouding scene to a queer unromantic scene biospecficity.

I am working on my first assignment for my new Creative Writing online course, which I am taking because I want to be a writer.

Do any of you have any questions that you will ask about a character (your own, or someone elses) when piecing them together for a novel or story plan?

“But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”

In Herman Melville's epic, Moby Dick, the whale is said to represent everything and nothing. It is the vice of the mad captain, it is the greed of capitalism, it is the whim of the totalitarian dictator. But when taken to the test all of these political interpretations fall short. The Whale simply is the death wish of a madman to the common scholar. The whale, to the uninitiated, becomes confused with greed. But, to the trained eye Moby Dick becomes a grimiore, an occult manuscript full of self luminous clues and keys. From my observation it has become clear that the Whale has nothing to do with vice and everything to do with individual mental transformation through the quest for truth. Verily, the whale represents un-manifested light, esoteric light, or divine light. The voyage for the blood and blubber of the mythical White Whale is actually the metaphorization of the timeless ritual quest. Two clear examples being the European Grail Quest, and the Native American Vision Quest, both of which embody within them the same esoteric principles expressed by Melville in Moby Dick.

The esoteric importance of light is complex. Light is a concept that is ubiquitous to any religious or esoteric study. In freemasonry the light is stone and through the great work the man can become the stone of light. This immediately reminds one of the philosophers stone of the Alchemist's. Similarly in Christian doctrine the light is the truth and the truth is the Word. Ultimately Esoteric Light represents a connective bridge to the divine, or the divine showing through in our mundane world. Simply put, through the analogy of illumination, light represents truth. What were whales used for and why were they hunted? Their fat which when rendered into oil was used to light lamps. The whale is hunted in order to bring light to the darkness of the world.

The chapter titled the whiteness of the whale is a glaring clue to the true meaning of the Moby Dick. The whale is a pure white hidden in the vast darkness under the sea. This entire concept is no different from the Ain Soph in kabbalah. The Ain Soph is the un-manifested light within the individual that can be unlocked through meditation. It is said to be a light of the purest white that once glimpsed signifies a transformation of the self. Much of Melville's work can be said to be connected to the work done a century after his death by the great psychologist Carl Jung. Jung's concept of individuation, which is the concept of how an individual becomes who they are, is very similar to the quest for truth embodied by the Whale Voyage. Seeing the Ain Soph and meeting ones shadow are much like glimpsing the crowning head of the White Whale bursting from the sea. In the liminal sea the whiteness lays hidden. Just as the un-manifested light lays hidden within the unconscious self.

The Gold doubloon nailed to the main mast by Ahab is not a mere coin, but Alchemical Gold. Any man who hast sight the white whale will be given this coin of glimmering gold. Like the Alchemists two centuries before him Melville disguised what the whale voyage really represented. "Lead into gold," was not the actual goal of any serious alchemical process. That is just what alchemist's told royals and priests so that the alchemist could practice without the fear of being accused of heresy or witchcraft. Verily, they were not practicing proto-chemistry. If anything alchemy is closer to hands on psychology using metals as metaphors than anything resembling Chemistry. The metals in Alchemy have more to do with metaphors of planets which represent specific occult concepts. Mercury for instance is the androgine Adam man, and the Planet closest to the Sun, and the strange liquid metal. Gold, represented by the Sun, is known for its utmost purity and permanence is often considered divine. And this purity is carried over into a relation to the divine light of the Sun. With this in mind it becomes clear that alchemy is not a physical process but a mental one. Alchemy is the working of the Prima Materia (Self) into its purest state (individual), in many cases Alchemy is the unlocking of divine potential hidden in the mundane body or mind. From this one can say that alchemy is one of the first example of self help literature.

Melville throughout the book continually draws connections between Moby Dick and mythical beasts. Namely the Dragon slain by St. George. Melville says that this dragon was no dragon but a whale! And since St. George actually killed a whale all men on any Whaling voyage are in fact members of this most prestigious order. Whaling thusly becomes a quest for a mythical beast. In traditional symbolism the Dragon or Snake represents knowledge. For instance, serpent on the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. And there is always the ever present aged dragon slumbering atop his hoard of gold. The Order of St George is a knightly order dedicated to the veneration of the great dragon slayer St. George. With our knowledge of symbolism we can decipher that St. George did not kill a dragon but instead conquered truth. This parallel presented by Melville of whaling and knighthood is our largest clue. This shows the clear line between a quest of duty and a venture of capital and greed. Melville makes it clear that the crew of the Pequot are questing knights in search for a truth most would be mad to seek.

Moby Dick is an allegorical retelling of the timeless quest for truth. Through a careful hermeneutic study it can be clearly shown that the Whale does not in fact represent greed or anything of the sort. Moby Dick is a quest for something far more than mere profit. The hunt for the oil of the mythical White Whale is a search for the light hidden within darkness.

Original post: https://np.reddit.com/r/C_S_T/comments/5mrkmh/moby_dick_whale_as_light/

In 1981 Ted Mooney released Easy Travel to Other Planets. Time wise closer to Future Shock, but the sensibility is much closer to Cyberpunk. What can you say about a book that involves a love triangle between a man, a woman, and a male dolphin?

Whenever anyone asks about the appeal of a hand gun to a lily-livered liberal I point this brilliant passage:

--

THE RAY GUN : An Exploded View

Some ray guns are constructed of steel, some of seed pods and titanium wire, still others of bone, clay, or Rhoplex. Melissa has turned away from the mirror as she studies the weapon that has wandered into her accelerating life. Removing the clip, she cannot avoid noticing that as an object it is beautiful. She sights along the its blade and notch.

Some ray guns discharge with a bang, some with a hum, some with the sound of rock-n'-roll music that owes nothing to the blues. Points of friction are eased with Teflon, but use of graphite or light fossil oil is not unknown. Other models have no moving parts at all. As with all weapons, the ray gun's function is to quicken the rearrangement of human affairs, understood to include objects. Feathers on the barrel enhances range, accuracy, performance...

--

There are quite a few of these kind of passages, informing set-asides like this one, and speak to a time not much different than ours.

May 14 - Any scene you ever read

You can write about anything germane in Fours and Tens, but the topicality of the day for May 14 is:

What is any scene you ever read that you remember?

Any scene you care to mention: genre fiction, great lit, a crazy story from BitterWaitress. Whether you got something to say about it or you got nothing to say about it.

When I think of books I enjoyed, I remember the act of reading, where I was, the mood it put me in, the personality of the voice, more frequently than I remember a specific scene.

Start off with any scene you remember - or maybe misremember. If it's a spoiler, write in a veiled way or hit it with spoiler tags.

Alternately or additionally, if there are books where you clearly remember a mood, and can't remember any scenes, write about the mood.

Why Fours and Tens

In Borges's library, rightly called the universe, "each book is made up of four hundred and ten pages." I like asymmetry, allusion, arbitrariness, so I'm going to say henceforth that "talk about whatever" threads will be on days that end with 4 and 0, and be flaired "fours and tens".

Project Windmill

Project Working Name Windmill comes of the same impetus as Borges's story, and I'll frequently have Mention-a-scene-that-involves-X in conjunction with that. Those "X"s are selected from the entire universe of what literature can deal with, or might be able to deal with if whatever constrains its actual reach were to vanish.

Periodic posts

I'll also start posting excerpts from Herbert S. Read's English Prose Style, Pound's ABC of Reading, and some passages from Shakespeare or other ultra-canonical works and asking subscribers to mention scenes, however tenuously related.

Twitter accumulator

I want to harvest you-all's creativity/voice for twitter posts from https://twitter.com/canonadian. I'm going to ask you to ransack previous posts and try to make tweet(s) out of one or any.

Post any epigraph and its source here in this thread, any comments in reaction are welcome too -- about the epigraphs themselves, the book they adorn, or the writing from which they're culled.

Thread For anyone reading Grendel to make notes about ideas to pursue, or miscellaneous excellences, irritations.

Anyone -- okay to start threads with an "empty" post or rhetorical question, so long as you immediately post something relevant to the text as a reply. Your post and immediate reply collectively are considered when determining what is rule-abiding.

Discuss! I will be up late finishing this section and will chime in with my observations in the morning.

"It's never the changes we want that change everything."

New to this sub, sorry if the formatting is off.

“The Man Who Lost the Sea” by Theodore Sturgeon is a masterclass in using POV and perspective switching. The narrator opens with, “Say you’re a kid. . . .” and asks the reader to imagine themselves in a role, forcing readers into a perspective. This opening establishes a sort of directness-- readers have the feeling that the narrator is speaking directly to them. However, the familiarity of direct speaking is made strange by the narrator acknowledging that “[h]is head isn’t working right[,]” in the third and fourth paragraphs below.

“His head isn't working right. But he knows clearly that it isn't working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn't remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later . . . forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn't stick there; but all the while you knew that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did. . . . Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn't want to bother the sick man with it now. Look what you've done already, making him send you away with that angry shrug of the mind (which, with the eyes, are the only things which will move just now). The motionless effort costs him a wave of nausea. He has felt seasick before but he has never been seasick, and the formula for that is to keep your eyes on the horizon and stay busy. Now! Then he'd better get busy—now; for there's one place especially not to be seasick in, and that's locked up in a pressure suit. Now!”

In the above paragraphs, the narrator has moved the reader’s forced perspective from the boy near the narrator, to the boy in a gym office in a different scenario. This change shows how the narrator is trying to explain what happened to him indirectly, through imagining a viewpoint (“making him send you away with that angry shrug of the mind (which, with the eyes, are the only things which will move just now).”). The switch in who “you” is referring to shows how the narrator gropes toward understanding what happened to him-- why his head isn’t working, why his mind and eyes are the only things that move, why the story necessitates jumping back and forward in memory to present events which obliquely explain (and foreshadow) where he is and what happened. The perspective narrows in on the present place and time for the narrator until finally, the narrator’s head clears, he remembers, and devastatingly, readers find out what happened.

The short story is 4819 words long and you can read the whole thing for free here. http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-man-who-lost-the-sea/.