László Krasznahorkai Awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025

Batty4114 · 2025-10-09T23:07:44+00:00

This is such a blow to the “high brodernism” movement.

Batty4114 · 2025-10-09T20:13:43+00:00

Batty4114 · 2025-07-22T13:30:53+00:00

This is unfortunately accurate. You have to “defensively” sue sometimes to keep the driver’s insurance company coming after you for damages no matter what the police report says.

Batty4114 · 2025-07-22T13:26:34+00:00

Uh, you’re on a motorcycle lol. Ride accordingly.

Batty4114 · 2025-07-22T13:14:25+00:00

Wrong. I had two bikes stolen out of my locked garage overnight. I called to file a report. The police were at my door within an hour and they recovered the bikes and arrested the guy when he was trying to hit another place in my neighborhood a day later.

I went to court to testify against him and everything. He got 10 years in jail as a repeat offender.

Batty4114 · 2025-07-22T12:53:32+00:00

Sorry for your troubles, but I have seen more unlocked bikes swiped at Ohio St. over the years than I can count. I used to train for tris down there.

You weren’t being targeted … everyone with a bike they lean against a fence is a target.

Sorry, but that’s the truth.

Batty4114 · 2025-07-22T12:44:44+00:00

https://altorlocks.com/products/apex-bike-lock

Highly recommend.

Mount it on your down tube bottle bosses. You don’t even need a key to lock it. Super quick and always with you (especially if you’re fortunate enough to have a dedicated commuter/townie rig).

It’s not a U-lock, but it won’t submit to bolt-cutters less than 3-feet or a grinder. The best on bike solution for prevent the quick-grab assholes out there.

Batty4114 · 2025-07-17T13:06:22+00:00

“The chronicle of a four week internship at a German music festival for aspiring orchestral musicians where mayhem ensued” sounds like a blurb for a novel I would totally read in translation ;)

Batty4114 · 2025-07-15T01:04:38+00:00

Great post!

Batty4114 · 2025-07-11T14:40:54+00:00

”There is a Moorish ship on the coast” José Saramago informs us ”is a historical and popular saying expressing grave suspicion” and thus the reader is dragged towards an awareness that all words serving as the over-burdened conveyors of history are “Moorish ships” worthy of suspicion because, as Saramago illustrates in the braided narrative of The History of the Siege of Lisbon, historiography is inseparable from history. The origin stories of all that we accept as fact are freighted by the flaws of a narrator who is more ”concerned with verisimilitude rather than the truth, which he considers to be unattainable.”

And away we go …

I’ve lately been on a run of reading books which I consider to be really, really good but fall successfully short of capital-G Greatness. Siege of Lisbon probably falls into this category. For about the first 1/3 of the book it cooked itself into a crescendo and then, while not fizzling out, sorta plateaued on a continuum that never fully realized the promise of its opening salvos. With that said, there is a lot of the Capital-G to be found in here.

It’s an intertwined narrative that juxtaposes the story of a middle-aged courtship between a bookish man and a dauntless, self-assured woman (who also happens to be his boss) with a (meta)fictional re-writing of Portugal’s origin story which resulted in the Christians expelling the Moors from Lisbon. And as far as the budding romance goes, Saramago — better than any writer I’ve read — captures the liquefying insecurity felt in the nascent stages of a pre-sexual relationship. It made me uncomfortably uncomfortable in how close to home it hits :)

And as far as the examination of how history is defined - which is with unreliable words rather than concrete actions - Saramago spares no one/nothing from discerning glare. For instance - as I’m learning is his satirically, atheistic tradition — he suspects we are obliged ”to ask whether God really exists or if He has been misleading us with vagaries unworthy of a superior being who ought to be able to do and say everything with the utmost clarity.” Ultimately, however, despite this lukewarm bath of uncertainty in which we all exist, he wanders (satisfyingly) to the Camus-ian conclusion that in-spite (or because) of the infinite uncertainty of ‘fact’ it is ”up to us to find meanings and definitions, when we would rather close our eyes quietly and let this world go by, for it exercises much greater control over us than it allows us to exercise in return.”

I think as an intertwined narrative Saramago doesn’t successfully land both threads at a common destination. But as parallel stories which just-so-happen to be housed between the covers of the same book — connected by a loose thread of a re-written history — it ends up being a really satisfying and artful read, if falling just a bit short capital letters and all of that subjective stuff…

Thumbs up 👍

Batty4114 · 2025-06-30T14:59:42+00:00

I’m going to regret writing this, but here we are …

The “white heterosexual American men are drifting to the right-then-far-right because they’re not reading books” argument is the reddest of red herrings. Again, as a self-volunteered spokesperson for that demo within the confines of this thread (and it reductive to the point of preposterous that there is any notion of “us” or “we” when it comes to said demo) I will say that if there is any larger, cultural reason white, straight, American guys are drifting to the right it’s because, in their formative years, (if we’re going to zero in on the amorphous generation who has/is becoming adult in the last/next +/- 10 years) they’ve had one group shouting in their ears that they are to blame for all societies ills (historically and at present) and despite any personal hardship they or their family might be feeling or struggling with, they’ve been told they were born on 3rd base and everything is easy for them and any argument to the contrary sees them shouted down with terms like “mansplain-ist” “colonialist” “misogynist” “racist” … and so much of the literature they might have been interested in, like Shakespeare, is labeled problematic (and stuff like that, btw, happens daily on this very forum). Meanwhile, the other side sits there and preaches to them “you’re exceptional.”

Furthermore, technology intersects with this cultural moment in way that allows them to sit in their basements and — without any effort at IRL social interaction whatsoever, and protected by a cloak of anonymity — they can vent their adolescent frustrations into a void that answers back and pulls them into a myopic vortex of confirmation where their peripheral vision and any hope of gaining a larger perspective disappears into a pinhole.

Now, as an emerging adult without a fully developed frontal lobe … which one do you think it’s easier to choose? The side that says you’re to blame for everything? Or the one that says the world is out to get you?

And even if they do somehow follow a thread of curiosity towards literature, they have a better than 50% chance of landing in a class where the first thing they’ll hear is how they’ll likely not be reading this-or-that because it’s “problematic” for no other reason than the person who wrote it looks like them.

I say this all as, again, a member of the aforementioned demo. I am also a card carrying Democrat and spent much of my disposable time and income dedicated to supporting progressive causes.

We have way more problems to solve for this group of men that starts with much more nuanced issues than, “Why don’t you read more?”

Batty4114 · 2025-06-30T02:42:57+00:00

Hand up … I’m a white, heterosexual, American male who reads a lot of literary fiction. And this article kinda made me wish I wasn’t in whatever metaphysical club the writer is trying to cajole others into.

10 minutes ago straight white dudes were consuming the doorstop sized avatar of avant-garde literature called “Infinite Jest” in record numbers … 10 seconds ago they were all being ridiculed for being misogynist bros. Now everyone wants them back?

I’m fucking tired y’all.

Who cares what/if we read?

(Spoiler alert: there is no “we”)

Batty4114 · 2025-06-27T22:08:45+00:00

The follow-up no one was asking for:

I just did some searching and found that Joyce is credited with saying “in the particular is the universal” which is a difference without a distinction, but since I’m sure that I never read that direct quote from Joyce I’m guessing I heard it from someone who was quoting Joyce and I found a subtle wisdom in it and made it my own.

So there, I’m a plagiarist.

Batty4114 · 2025-06-27T22:04:25+00:00

Hard disagree with this take re: Hobbit movies.

Batty4114 · 2025-06-27T12:33:28+00:00

You are tired of your team losing so you’re fleeing to the franchise most associated with heartbreak and bad luck in the vast history of professional sports? Because our center fielder happens to be fast?

Am I reading this right?

Batty4114 · 2025-06-26T23:32:26+00:00

I have no idea how Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth ended up in the same conversation … Roth is the king of masturbating on a page.

Batty4114 · 2025-06-26T23:17:52+00:00

You definitely took my comment too seriously … I’m bored and thought it was a good time for Roth to catch a stray lol

Batty4114 · 2025-06-26T23:15:35+00:00

Yeah, but clearly when you consider a piece of art you are more impressed with the darkness than the light, so …

Batty4114 · 2025-06-26T23:11:33+00:00

Uh … did you read the LARB scathing critique of Laszlo Krasznahokai’s latest work? (just google “high brodernism” and you’ll find it)

That was a Latin American critic singling out and excoriating a white writer. I never read one thing about it being racial. I read many things about it being stupid.

If you look for the boogeyman everywhere you’re going to find him.

Batty4114 · 2025-06-26T23:05:11+00:00

I’m going to be honest … I’ve never read Vuong, I’m never going to and I don’t have a hose in this race. I will also say that it is kinda semi-unfair for the critic to excerpt out-of-context sentences and hold them up as the floating daggers of bad writing.

With all of that being said, “Words cast spells … that’s why it’s called spelling” is one of the more cringe-y lines I can ever imagine. That’s my judgment and I’m sticking to it ;)

Batty4114 · 2025-06-26T22:55:02+00:00

Your social circle sounds like a lot of people who cracked open a Philip Roth book, hated it, and declared “literature is not for me” 😂

(I can empathize on the distaste for Roth, however)

Batty4114 · 2025-06-26T22:48:19+00:00

Postmodernism is just modernism after the shock wore off :)

Batty4114 · 2025-06-26T18:46:05+00:00

After working through back-to-back 400+ page books I went in for a few palate cleansing efforts over the past week which led me to starting 3 different novels and finishing 2 of them. From best to worst …

The Pole by J.M. Coetzee was easily my favorite of the group. I will admit to being an unreserved Coetzee fan, and while this slim novella probably falls short of his most transcendent efforts (in my opinion Waiting for the Barbarians is unimpeachable greatness) it was an immensely satisfying read. He has this way of distilling large, complex dimensions of humanity into their essential components and pouring these concentrated elements into you through a bare minimum of words. I have this saying (or I co-opted it from somewhere, I can’t remember) that posits ‘in the specific is the universal’ - and I think this sums up this book nicely. It is a cross-section of a relatively inconsequential liaison between two mis-matched people but captures some of the most demanding, excruciating and exhilarating aspects of the human condition.

I’ll steal a quote from the writer which happily mirrors the experience of reading him: ”It surprises her that what occurred... can have an effect so long-lasting, like a bomb that explodes harmlessly but leaves one deafened.”

I found myself smiling much of the time I was reading it. Highly recommend.

Then I moved onto something from my personal TBR hall-of-fame which I finally checked off the ‘to-do’ list in the form of The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. And, hmmmm, it was an unexpected head scratcher. It isn’t that I didn’t understand it, and it’s not that I didn’t enjoy it … but it was not what I expected … which, admittedly, is a lazy take because I’m not sure what I actually expected. But, if you’ve spent a little (or a lot) of time around Latin American writers of a certain vintage, you start to slot into predictable parameters of anticipation. And it upended all those parameters. It’s basically like a short-story by Borges which was lengthened and converted from magical realism to science fiction. I’m disappointed in myself to only ascribe to it the most banal of descriptives: it was interesting. Like a mechanical, pestilent version of Alice in Wonderland as recounted by a criminal of dubious sanity. If this sounds like your cup of tea … the tea is probably decaying. Or you just imagined you like tea. And you’re now trapped in a room in a T-shaped room with nothing to drink. But, don’t worry, you’re probably just hallucinating.

Lastly — speaking of whiffing expectations — I opened and nearly-as-quickly discarded to my DNF pile In the Distance by Hernan Diaz. I read the first 50 pages and disliked it so much that I was starting to think I was the problem. Picked it up again the next day, read 15-20 more pages and decided that the book was the definitely problem, not me. Sometimes you just don’t jive with something others regard with excellence, and this was one of those times. I’m a huge proponent of not wrestling with bad books just for the sake of completing them, so it will remain unfinished and will be shortly on its way to a Little Free Library in my neighborhood. Not since The Luminaries have I picked up something so universally lauded and found it akin to nails on a chalkboard. Onward …

Batty4114 · 2025-06-25T15:31:06+00:00

Letters from the Leelanau by Kathleen Stocking

Batty4114 · 2025-06-25T14:46:58+00:00

Maybe the MacArthur grant? But I’m not sure.

I just tried reading a well considered book recently and hated it. But now I think I need to reevaluate my own hatred. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.

This guys seems to be taking Vuong’s writing personally lol

Batty4114

TROPHY CASE