Reading Wednesday
May. 31st, 2023 06:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby Just finished: Airy Nothing by Clarissa Pattern. This is a book for the teenager I was. It's sometimes odd encountering books like that, where I want to time travel and give it to my past self who would have devoured it. There's a melancholic nostalgia about the act of reading under those circumstances.
It's all very well done—the setting of the Elizabethan theatre and the grimy, menacing streets, the gender play and cross-dressing, the cruelty of the legal and social structures contrasted with the vulnerability of the young heroes. I would have liked to have seen more of an integration of John's search for the Faerie Queen—it's a driving factor early on in the book and kind of disappears, though the fairies as physical manifestation of art do not. But ultimately a lovely story.
Currently reading: A Spectre, Haunting by China Miéville. It was just announced that Miéville's new book is fiction and nearly 600 pages long, so get ready to hear about that from me nonstop. This book isn't that, though, it's nonfiction about the Communist Manifesto.
I love Miéville's nonfiction almost as much as I love his fiction—I just find myself nodding along every time he makes a good point, which is frequent. Each of the essays is an introduction of sorts. They deal with why it's still relevant today, particularly in a climate of anticommunism without communism (a framing I've never encountered before and which...yes), and in the chapter I just finished, the historical and personal context of the Manifesto's writing.
Critical point that I knew but cannot be stated often enough: The name of the organization Marx and Engels were part of when they wrote the manifesto translates to the League of the Just, which evolved out of the League of Outlaws. Or...as it is often translated, the Justice League.
Anyway, it's very engrossing reading. A very smart man gets real geeky about an interesting thing.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Despite this being low-key a cosmic horror book, the Pequod keeps bumping into other whaling ships. Last week it was the Albatross, which had encountered the White Whale; this week, it is the Town-Ho.
You in the back, stop giggling. They used to teach this book to children.
Anyway it is an utterly bizarre chapter in a bizarre book, which is made weirder by phrases like "the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket" that make me giggle. It's a thirdhand story–the Pequod meets the crew of the Town-Ho, Ahab gets one story from the captain, and Tashtego gets another story from the Tahitian crew, and as an old man, Ishmael relays the story to some Spanish guys he's trying to impress. Essentially there is a mutiny, which ends up with the mate getting eaten by Moby Dick and the captain getting marooned on a tropical island.
Okay so. What is the point of this extremely long chapter? Tumblr is trying to make sense of it at the moment. It amounts to: Life at sea is hell. It's weird to name a whale. No one is a reliable narrator. The whale is a metaphor for God, but we already knew that. In case it's not abundantly clear, though, the whale is a metaphor for God.
It's all very well done—the setting of the Elizabethan theatre and the grimy, menacing streets, the gender play and cross-dressing, the cruelty of the legal and social structures contrasted with the vulnerability of the young heroes. I would have liked to have seen more of an integration of John's search for the Faerie Queen—it's a driving factor early on in the book and kind of disappears, though the fairies as physical manifestation of art do not. But ultimately a lovely story.
Currently reading: A Spectre, Haunting by China Miéville. It was just announced that Miéville's new book is fiction and nearly 600 pages long, so get ready to hear about that from me nonstop. This book isn't that, though, it's nonfiction about the Communist Manifesto.
I love Miéville's nonfiction almost as much as I love his fiction—I just find myself nodding along every time he makes a good point, which is frequent. Each of the essays is an introduction of sorts. They deal with why it's still relevant today, particularly in a climate of anticommunism without communism (a framing I've never encountered before and which...yes), and in the chapter I just finished, the historical and personal context of the Manifesto's writing.
Critical point that I knew but cannot be stated often enough: The name of the organization Marx and Engels were part of when they wrote the manifesto translates to the League of the Just, which evolved out of the League of Outlaws. Or...as it is often translated, the Justice League.
Anyway, it's very engrossing reading. A very smart man gets real geeky about an interesting thing.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Despite this being low-key a cosmic horror book, the Pequod keeps bumping into other whaling ships. Last week it was the Albatross, which had encountered the White Whale; this week, it is the Town-Ho.
You in the back, stop giggling. They used to teach this book to children.
Anyway it is an utterly bizarre chapter in a bizarre book, which is made weirder by phrases like "the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket" that make me giggle. It's a thirdhand story–the Pequod meets the crew of the Town-Ho, Ahab gets one story from the captain, and Tashtego gets another story from the Tahitian crew, and as an old man, Ishmael relays the story to some Spanish guys he's trying to impress. Essentially there is a mutiny, which ends up with the mate getting eaten by Moby Dick and the captain getting marooned on a tropical island.
Okay so. What is the point of this extremely long chapter? Tumblr is trying to make sense of it at the moment. It amounts to: Life at sea is hell. It's weird to name a whale. No one is a reliable narrator. The whale is a metaphor for God, but we already knew that. In case it's not abundantly clear, though, the whale is a metaphor for God.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 12:22 pm (UTC)Not read any of his stuff (except, maybe Dial H for Hero?) but I have some. As soon as I find a new Book Dep I will add this.
Or...as it is often translated, the Justice League.
Commies want your kids!
this week, it is the Town-Ho. You in the back, stop giggling.
I didn't. I snorted.
But did it have the same meaning back in the day?
no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 01:34 pm (UTC)Nope, it's "ho" as in "westwards ho!"; the other usage is pretty new (not documented before 1965, according to Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ho ).
Not that this should stop anyone from enjoying it, of course. Much as Tumblr derived great joy from the "queer handkerchief [...] embellished with all the gay flags", in full knowledge that certain connotations have changed.
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Date: 2023-05-31 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-01 09:58 am (UTC)I have find (really fond) memories of the old '70s DHforH, which i expect was totally terrible (do I have a complete collection? I do on a USB), and I recall him being an obvious fit.
I never read more than 2 issues (DL'd them).
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Date: 2023-06-01 11:23 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-05-31 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-01 09:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 12:51 pm (UTC)According to everyone except Ishmael, who has already been so loudly clear that Moby Dick is not "a hideous and intolerable allegory", HOW DARE ANYONE SUGGEST THAT.
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Date: 2023-05-31 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 04:45 pm (UTC)Like, the whale is a whale.
And obviously Ishmael is protesting too much because the whale is also God considered as a cosmic horror. But it is a whale.
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Date: 2023-05-31 06:45 pm (UTC)(Incidentally another thing I love about this book is the degree to which it encourages you to argue with its narrator.)
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Date: 2023-06-01 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-06-01 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-06-02 11:34 pm (UTC)The Narnia I didn’t know I needed.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 12:59 pm (UTC)It's the he Town-Ho, from Moby Dick, a book about sperm whales, and you expect me not to giggle like a 12-year-old about it?
Also, oooh, new China Mieville! I actually just got my hands on Perdido Street Station.
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Date: 2023-05-31 04:16 pm (UTC)Perdido is extremely good. I just loaned my copy to a friend.
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Date: 2023-05-31 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 06:05 pm (UTC)LMAO, as it goes
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Date: 2023-05-31 06:51 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-06-01 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 06:19 pm (UTC)https://ghostwriterofthemachine.tumblr.com/post/715074842754498560/moby-dick-chapter-54
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Date: 2023-05-31 06:53 pm (UTC)