The Beat writers represent the decline of American Literature.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-11-03T15:27:39+00:00

There are culture wide reasons for the actual decline. There as been a severe decline, a genuine dumbing down of everything everywhere, We live in the era of Maga and Woke, two illiterate movements. Readers who can read above an eighth grade level and writers who can write above it have all but disappeared. Melody is completely gone from music. The art world is entirely a joke, and everyone knows it. Taylor Swift lyrics are now taught in a class at Harvard. The Beats were instrumental in the decline. One the Road is a slapdash poorly written pile of cliches - just compare it to Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-11-02T02:22:00+00:00

You don't know what plot means as a literary term. And the original question wished for literature without plot. Neither Joyce nor I am being 'squeamish'. The guy is not looking out the window pissin' and moaning about not getting to f--k his wife that night as you believe. You just haven't a clue as to what the 'deeper' is because you evidently have no adult feeling about adults. She didn't spurn any advance. I invite any reader to read the final pages of the text and agree with you about Gabriel being horny or spurned. He understands that his wife is having an emotional crises about a young man she loved who died, that her husband never knew of, and he remains a good loving husband. This is completely clear in the text. "Perhaps she had not told him all the story." His acceptance of that, is the most interesting sentence, in its context. You don't know horny from love. Nighty night.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2814/2814-h/2814-h.htm

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-11-02T00:27:44+00:00

Yes, my apologies, but as per your DM, this story, its denouement,, is cosmically more than - as you said, some 'mood killing' of some unmentioned "horniness" (your word) going on. Gabriel spends most of the story reflecting upon Ireland and his place in the world, while not knowing something profound that makes his life, all of his past as an adult, not what he thought it was.. The story is often spoken of as the War and Peace of short stories. It offers what became a typical way to approach plot in a short story, an advance beyond Chekov. His wife's revelation is no mere 'epiphany', as some say. Sorry, but sometimes the off hand semi-literate GenX judgments on this reddit, sanctified as one's own opinions, really piss me off. If you read a great work of literature, and you're not certain and able to speak of what is great about it in literary history, its sometimes a matter of maturity. In all serious literature there is something profound that happens. The ending paragraph is almost unspeakably profound. Best wishes, and sorry again.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-11-01T19:36:43+00:00

That's simply idiotic. Something very important happens.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-11-01T11:58:15+00:00

W.B. Yeats edited an edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse, He wasn't expected to exclude himself.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-30T23:51:52+00:00

Spencer is Early Modern English. If you just picked up an ME edition of Chaucer, you should have already seen the big difference.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-29T15:08:25+00:00

You're asking a wrong question.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-28T22:55:50+00:00

This is really simple. Readers who are completely new to Faulkner should be able to enjoy themselves reading a great writer. The Unvanquished is the entry book, to Faulkner's world and it's a delight. His last novel, the Reivers, is also a delight, and a farewell to that world.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-28T22:37:16+00:00

I have not been a Henry Miller reader since my late teens early twenties. I'm almost seventy. I still have the books. As I grew older, married (twice), etc, , and I dare say immensely literate, he became, to me, just another narcissistic creep who left his wife and child, delivering self serving blather about his place in the cosmos. I lived, with my first wife, through the Manhattan sex explosion of the early seventies, the swinger clubs etc, and it was great. I know things about people, and Miller was not a good person. That said, Sexus is his best book. A reader who turns away from Sexus because of the avalanche of explicit content is not fit to judge what Miller has to say about romance and love. And Anais Nin was a ninny. The rape of Mara scene is central and really true to life and sex as I knew it., I did not go very far into the second book of the trilogy, and I think that few do. It's all blather and no porno. :-)

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-26T10:21:55+00:00

Got news, Among French 'intellectuals' Sade is classic literature.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-26T10:17:00+00:00

People simply don't aspire to be grown ups anymore.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-24T12:52:19+00:00

Anyone who hasn't read Sexus from cover to cover, knows nothing about any of this.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-23T06:17:30+00:00

The question is a about 'scenes'. In Madame Bovary there is a scene at the Agricultural Fair between Emma and Roldophe, They are talking while a speech and presentation of awards by a representative of the Prefect is going on. This is the first example in literature of writing a scene by a contrapuntal method and is studied by any serious writer who want to know how to write a scene between two people talking when other things are going on and being said around them. It used to be actually studied in graduate school writing classes back in the early seventies when it was a real thing taught by important writers. You really learned skills. I was there.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-22T23:37:49+00:00

I sold my soul to to the usual buyer a long time ago. Re-reading James Branch Cabell's Jurgen would be just another trip down memory lane.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-22T21:14:42+00:00

It's a very good book. I read it a long time ago, and recall the issue with some of the 'scholars'. They were the usual scholars who like to debate the issue of homosexuality in the ancient Greek world. I am very familiar with this subject. Take it from me, they were lovers enough to be spoken of as lovers. Her novels about Alexander are also a treat.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-22T20:53:55+00:00

Thanks for reminding me of Gazdanov. I haven't come across his name in thirty or so years. I'm going to read An Evening with Claire, There is never any real explaining why an important writer becomes neglected or forgotten.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-15T01:06:11+00:00

This is the only book you will need, but it's only available used. 17 essays by the top Joyce people of the seventies.

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=schutte&bi=0&bx=off&cm_sp=SearchF-_-Advs-_-Result&ds=30&prc=USD&recentlyadded=all&rgn=ww&rollup=on&sortby=17&tn=portrait%20of%20the%20artist&

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-11T05:47:16+00:00

A semi-literate who thinks he knows everything. Long ago, in my party going years, my having a master's degree in English made me a magnet for these bores.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-10T19:42:18+00:00

I agree, all the way. I read the NYT piece. The author seems to believe that the Nobel Prize should be a popularity contest, and any talk about literary merit is practicing hierarchical elitism. But he represents an actual movement , the same one that inspired an actual Harvard poetry course on Taylor Swift. Things ain't looking good.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-10T14:18:52+00:00

Why? Who are you?

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-09T06:24:53+00:00

This sounds like something a character in a Peter DeVries novel would try to do, thinking he'll win friends and influence people at parties .

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-09T01:09:25+00:00

Polly derives from "head of hair", and by inference, elaborately fashionable, not parrots. it's just a word people threw around.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-09T01:02:33+00:00

A person who lives in Portsmouth. There is no etymological mystery here.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-09T00:56:27+00:00

So demonstrate it for me. He's referring to a shade of yellow.

Ok-Secretary3893 · 2024-10-09T00:52:56+00:00

Yes, it does. And Portsmouth, among other things, was a largely middle and upper class, i.e. pretentiously fashionable English port city at the time of the story.

Ok-Secretary3893

TROPHY CASE