Posted on 03/09/2007 11:22:35 PM PST by Blind Eye Jones
What is the most convoluted, opaque, impenetrable book you ever read?
War and Peace, baby! I never made it past War.
William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch Here is an exerpt:
"The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. That one stepped right off a Sator-day Evening Post cover with a string of bullheads, and preserved himself in junk. His marks never beef and the Bunko people are really carrying a needle for the Rube. One day Little Boy Blue starts to slip, and what crawls out would make an ambulance attendant puke. The Rube flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: "Come back, kid! Come back!", and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded Hat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts."
I am speechless!
LOL
Excellent choice for this thread!
Wow! Your church must sell balcony seats.
It's worse than you can imagine.
Good points. I'm thinking more of encouraging students to read and comprehend complex ideas, plots and characters- not DIScouraging them!
I read it in a single evening. Joined the Church the next weekend.
(Oy got better)...
You look for meaning within the margins.
It's not the easiest. Should some future notion ever strike you give it another look, try doing so from the standpoint of someone 2000 years ago struggling to describe a vision of things to occur thousands of years in the future when words don't even exist in ones vocabulary to describe what he saw.
Were some cosmic event to occur this afternoon giving me a glimpse into a parallel universe of a planet identical to ours only thousands of years more advanced, it might struggle to find words to describe what I saw and my description might not make much sense to someone reading it thousands of years from now.
Anything ghost-written for a Clinton
Postmodernism is a lot like traditional faith; to accept the premise requires an acceptance of the underlying precepts.
One cannot be a product of the postmodern world, one can only be a judge if he is to stand out.
All "Great Works" are written by the dissatisfied.
All are desperate cries for understanding.
A writer's goal is to insinuate his soul into the reader's conciousness; the reader of a single Great Work is thereafter an alter ego of the writer himself.
Multiple Great Works as a class of literature dissastisfies readers and writers alike.
I always thought it was only my auditors who had trouble reading it.
Actually, it's easy to read - the real problem is that the words and references seem to revise/reverse/renege on past promises between each reading.
Is that impenetrable or opaque?
Special Olympics candidate.
These two:"A pocketful of Rye" and "The God of small things" Avoid them like the plague
ANYthing by James Joyce. I think his whole purpose was to write convoluted sentences.
That said, lawyers often, intentionally, write convoluted contracts; and those might even try Joyce.
The Origins of the British.
That said, I dumped The yellow Cross by Rene Weis when I realized about half way though that all I was doing was repeating words that had long since collapsed on themselves.
More likely we want it to be like that.
It is so pretentious to read what an author has so clearly said and then to deconstruct it to find within its spaces and margins what you were looking for in the first place.
Am now about 80% through the book. It has become amusing to read allusions to the book by formerly obscure authors.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.