ULOB: So many thoughts
So it has come to pass that I must return ULOB to the library or incur a fine...so I leave my readers with these passages:
For L & D:
'Franz shook his head. "When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirti. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, ebcause no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalance of words, in the madness of quantityt. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinetly more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities"'..
Uh, yeah...if I can get my dad to read my dissertation i'll be happy...that'll bring the total readership up to three -- and I spent $50,000 on that!
For M:
...Stalin's son habitually left a foul mess....Crying out to heaven in the most terrifying of Russian curses, he took a running jump into the electrified barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp...
Stalin's son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country's territory to the east, the Russians who died to extend their country's power to the west - yes, they died for soemthing idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid the general idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin's son stands out as the sole metaphysical death.
Just like that supposedly Stalin's son ran into an electrified fence because he wouldn't clean up his shitter...
For JF:
"Kitsch" is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figureative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
so does that mean kitsch is acceptable?
For Me:
There are situations in which people are condemned to play act...
lIke me at work each day...
Seriously people, I loved the book...fingers crossed the next one will be just as good!
For L & D:
'Franz shook his head. "When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirti. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, ebcause no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalance of words, in the madness of quantityt. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinetly more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities"'..
Uh, yeah...if I can get my dad to read my dissertation i'll be happy...that'll bring the total readership up to three -- and I spent $50,000 on that!
For M:
...Stalin's son habitually left a foul mess....Crying out to heaven in the most terrifying of Russian curses, he took a running jump into the electrified barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp...
Stalin's son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country's territory to the east, the Russians who died to extend their country's power to the west - yes, they died for soemthing idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid the general idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin's son stands out as the sole metaphysical death.
Just like that supposedly Stalin's son ran into an electrified fence because he wouldn't clean up his shitter...
For JF:
"Kitsch" is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figureative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
so does that mean kitsch is acceptable?
For Me:
There are situations in which people are condemned to play act...
lIke me at work each day...
Seriously people, I loved the book...fingers crossed the next one will be just as good!
Labels: Literature
posted by Lyla @ 10:27 PM
1 Comments:
At 12:40 AM,
Daniela said…
Oh my god, so cool. There's a short story--or vignette or whatever the hell you want to call it--by Julio Cortazar called (this is my own crap translation) "the end of the world of the end".
Anyway, in this story he talks about how everyone in the world becomes a scribe, and because everyone is a scribe then countries become places to manufacture paper and ink for scribes. But since all people do is write and write, then all the paper in the world starts to over-flow. The paper swallows up hospitals, bars, houses, and slaughterhouses. Poor people use books as bricks. The books flow out of the cities and into the fields killing plants everywhere. But the scribes keep going because people respect them, so eventually the paper reaches the sea shore. Presidents meet and decide to dump all the paper from the land into the sea. This of course, causes the sea level to rise and land is redistributed among nations. But the paper begins to absorb the salt water and ships are stranded at sea. The scribes write about these strange events. The presidents decide to make the ships into island casinos and people walk out to sea to dance at the casinos. But the scribes don't stop writing and so the paper piles up at sea and creates mountain ranges. Realizing that the paper and ink factories are going bankrupt, scribes try to economize by writing with tiny print and using every inch of paper. When they run out of ink, they use pencil. When they run out of paper they use tile or bark. (wow, long post, eh?)Eventually, everyone has gone to live on the island casinos and the scribes are alone on land, in danger of extinction.
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