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?
"No more cheese for you; and put down that wine glass, too."
...why...???
Because I suggested that, if a book is DREADFUL, WHY continue to read it...???
I mean...are you the literary masochism police or what...???
"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! "
I must have been REALLY stoned when I read that malarky...
I actually thought I 'GOT IT' at the time....
Forgetable at best.
It's a good reading exercise. I had to trade off reading that and Proust because any more than a few pages of either at any one time makes you want to talk in 100 word sentences using a lot of incomprehensively-glued-together words. Also, either or both of these require entirely too much time to be appropriate as a reading assignment in a semester.
He captures the individual stories much better in his novels. My view.
Seriously. WTF? It's completely unreadable. I think I made it through 60-odd pages before giving up.
On sentence length: it was amusing to find an editorial comment on one of de Montaigne's sentences about Caesar, that it is considered very long, going on an entire page, after digesting thousands of pages of Proust for practice.
Kierkegaard is incomprehensible from first sentence to last. You'll just end up as depressed as he was if you try to read it.
As a child, I recall a Ripley's Believe it or Not item about an 800 word long sentence, and I seem to recall it was from a piece of French literature. I wonder if this is the same one.
It could be. Proust is famous for that. But, they are very well composed sentences and easy to understand after you get used to keeping the whole sentence in mind at once. Just takes practice.
But I assume one needs to read them in French for best effect. (?)
There are some jokes that work in French and not well in English translation. Proust is very funny here and there; the Moncrieff translation conveys some of that if you know some French and read footnotes.
I'm not questioning anybody's salvation, but the fruit in the article is rotten and good for nothingness.
Dianetics,L Ron Hubbard.
Nothing wrong in discerning good from bad fruit though faith in Him. Posts 73 & 346 provide similar insight.
The issue of understanding Revelation begins with the ministry of God the Holy Spirit. In advanced study, a considerable amount of Bible doctrine is also useful in understanding His Prophecy. Faith upon faith assists the student in discerning the meanings being communicated in His Word, all of it provided by the work of the Holy Spirit in the individual believer. This also only occurs while the believer remains in fellowship with Him.
Good post.
I agree full heartedly.
I absolutely agree.
Foucault's Pendulum is one of my favorites. It is lucid, well written and clear compared to "The French Lieutenant's Woman".....
In which article?
"The Saggy Baggy Elephant."
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.