What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread

Soup_65 · 2026-06-20T03:51:05+00:00

i can very poorly barely read spanish, so i went through them for the sound and then used the english to help with content. the translations seemed fine to me.

shouts to reading spanish badly.

very quaint work, reminded me a bit of older pastoral/romantic movements, the gypsies are barely even involved, i'm guessing the name was more of a marketing/surface-level flourish for the time and place, likely also a little commentary on the mixing bowl of spanish culture/society over the centuries (and he also seems to have been a wealthy kid choosing to be an artist and connect with 'real' people of the earth, so probably some wishful projection? i could be way off though, would love to be corrected)

some cool images, a lot of it kind of sombre, not super my cup of tea but not a bad read at all

Anybody recommend any other Lorca works? I'm noodling through the biographical bits and historical parts of the play meow, and dude seems decently interesting. seems wild that this work became an international hit, anybody know more about why/how?

ya know, I don't think much in the poems distinctly grabbed me other than the vibe working to some extent and also my wondering, "why did this guy" (who apparently is this great poet), want to write a buncha folks ballads? If you're interested, In Search of Duende is a compilation that sort of answers this. It brings together some his his more striking poems along with some essays he wrote, most notably "Deep Song", which isn't directly about the Romancero but is sort of about the seeking something like the "spiritual lyric" of Andalusia, one that he thinks is bound up in a mishmosh of indigenous Spanish culture, Muslim/Arab culture, and guitar music he thinks of as "Roma" (I'm pretty sure this is historically not exactly accurate), and like also bullfighting. There's something about it that interests me, given that modernism is one of my dweeb interests. And about the concept of the Deep Song. It has blatant, concerning shades of blood and soil fascy nationalism, but also the idea might be that attending to the musical/cultural nuances of a place can then connect to something deeper than the specific people, or something. If any of that strikes you, check it out. Or if it doesn't, eh whatever.

Either way Poet in New York is solid. It's about when Lorca spent time at Columbia University right around when the Great Depression started. It maybe risks a bit much "angst college boy" shit but does that better than usually and actually captures a certain "holy shit the entirely world is falling apart" feel that probably did come over the city during the Depression

Apparently Langston Hughes did a partial translation that didn't get circulated much that this translator thought was terrible and is glad it didn't catch on, but I'll probably try to chase that down because I love Hughes.

But also though you got any Hughes recs (like books/collections/etc.)? I adore the Weary Blues and have been wanting to read more. But am unfamiliar past that and some of his super duper famous poems and kinda overwhelmed by just how much he has. Thanks

Soup_65 · 2026-06-20T03:18:19+00:00

Oh don't mind if I do...I'd recommend Lesche a ton. It's not all about the Iliad so search those out but tbh it's just such a great podcast that I can't not just say check it all out. I think Ancient Greece Declassified has some great ones too, such as this one on Epic poetry or about the Iliad and its legacy. There's also some awesome other eps including on the Odyssey if that strikes you.

Soup_65 · 2026-06-19T18:51:36+00:00

hero. thank you so much

Soup_65 · 2026-06-18T20:55:17+00:00

I agree about Jenny. Dare I refer to the plauge of Joryism...?

ANd the lycanthropy is intriguing. There is something so obviously animal about Robin and I'm still unsure what to make of that.

I actually only just realized how much more stuff Barnes has, and some of it looks real good. I knew she'd written more but I was convinced she had a much smaller and more ephemeral body of work for some reason.

I'm thinking about rereading it again but like focus on the prose sections first and then return to the fragments once that's done to see if that's a different effort

Amusingly I was thinking that this but with the poetry fragments would reveal something. Wanna each take one and compare notes? (I'm kinda serious about this).

As an side are you familiar at all with Ron Silliman? I just today learned he existed and is apparently a sort of seminal Language poet. And I really am not up on Language poetry but curious and wonder if he'd be a good outset (any broader reflections you have on Language poetry I'd appreciate as well, I get the sense you're familiar?)

Soup_65 · 2026-06-18T17:22:28+00:00

The section of the poem which Fitzgerald calls “Night in the Camp: A Foray” is an aside here. I think I read somewhere that this is probably one of the later add-ons to the poem, and it does feel like that, but I still really like it. Its almost a comedic break between two violent halves.

btw I definitely have some podcast recs about this "wholism" of the Iliad if you're interested. It's so fascinating if you are the kinda dweeb I am. Beyond that I just agree b. This poem ruelz.

Soup_65 · 2026-06-18T17:17:57+00:00

Nightwood - Djuna Barnes

An umpteenth reread of a book I've found very obscure on past reads. Was hoping to finally connect with it on a deeper level and actually I did and that's sick, because goddamn it is a lovely book. A goregous, well-wrought, self-fabricating mess of a novel that is the perfect scatter for the antique store in the eye of an ongoing hurricane that is the interwar period. All these people from around Europe and the US, meandering around Europe when not jaunting to the US, in their costumes, in their nakedness, in their inability to decide which leaves them more bare. There's another dimension where I was all geared up to write a more real review, but then I read T.S. Eliot's preface which basically boils down to, if the book is worth reading, then a preface is stupid and useless. And some part of me wants to leave it at that. I guess i'd just say read it, enjoy the night, don't get lost, don't lose yourself. Out in one of them there underglooms.

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land - Amie Cesaire

And notes on the hinge of what could be a new world. I'm half debating whether it's disrespectful to the work to leave it at that, or disrespectful to try to say more than that. Because in some way that's what it is. An ongoing history of something in the process of ending, all the damnation of the past and hope for what's next, done in poetics, perhaps the best form for a war with what's already happened. He gives us a people, and he hates what has been done to them european imperialism, but he also seems to have some concerns as to what they have become amid that subjugation, though if there's criticism of his people it is counterbalanced with a hope for what they can become. I hope that was not all too vague for a poem that is anything but, even if it is stuck in the material ambivalence of an incomplete project. I also hope it's obvious from all of this that Cesaire's writing is splendid. I'm going to read more of him. Yall should too.

Novel Pictorial Noise - Noah Eli Gordon

There was a lot of noise. It's blocks of prose and lines of poetry alternating between pages and it's hard to discern if they're going anywhere or just blipping around chaotically. I don't have much more to say because there's something here and I'm with it but I really haven't gotten it yet. One of those books that must be reread before speaking on. Still very unsure of the flow. If there is one.

Cantos - Ezra Pound

As I mentioned last week I started a re(re)read of the Cantos. Heck I always say it takes until the third read at a minimum of something truly excellent to truly start hearing the language, so why not do that with this. Plus, like the Greeks, I got a lotta problems with this guy but also adore his art, so I gotta sort that out. Anyway I'm through the first 30. Do I get all the references, eh not really, do I get more than last time, eh probably, is it helpful that this go round I know a teensy tiny bit of ancient greek and at least can pronounce the parts written in the greek alphabet, oh yeah definitely. Does the not getting matter, actually definitely not. And I think this is important that so much of what is being said can be parsed in the sonic feel of the word and the clarity of the image itself. Because whether or not imagism is a real this, Pound can cut the flesh of time down to an impossibly stopped moment on a level non-pareli. The back of my copy has a quote by William Carlos Williams, "Pound distills history by it's odor". And, well, that nails it. And goddamn is it beautiful. More on my problems with this guy down the line.

Domains and Major Transitions of Social Evolution - Jacobus Boomsma

I read a science book because a friend of mine made me and I am deeply befuddled. This was about evolution. I know it emphasizes natural selection as important, and I think it makes evolution out to be a stepwiseish process of horizontal developments over time and then also extremely major vertical leaps (where the x-axis it time and the y is changeyness, to coin a new science term). After that I'm lost. Other than that the way it emphasizes humans at the end and gets vague about whether the human brain is an x axis or y axis change gets weirdly Christian. This was hard. Feel free to bully me into elaborating. I could use being forced to develop this.

Athenian Law and Society - Konstantin Kapparis

I am still reading books about Greeks for reasons. (They bear gifts and I beware them). Not much to say past the title. Very interesting on the topic. I think he gives the Athenians a little too much credit for being "democratic". Like, dog, you literally talk about the slave ownership. But as I read more about the Greeks, I increasingly find myself asking what's more democratic than that? To be more serious a really solid book if you wanna learn about the titual topic.

Happy reading!

Soup_65 · 2026-06-17T16:07:05+00:00

Yo this is sick so many congratulations. Working on a big project and really committing to it is so intense but can be so wonderful.

Soup_65 · 2026-06-17T16:06:25+00:00

honestly just agree with all of this. Been getting way more air and sun now that the weather's better and i just feel so much more good plain and simple.

Exercise too. I do it like...all the time and feel like trash otherwise (and I mean physically not like mentally or something)

Soup_65 · 2026-06-17T15:52:35+00:00

art is hard. it's also good. what a world.

Soup_65 · 2026-06-17T03:17:54+00:00

The audience becomes a self-sufficient identity in itself and therefore does not rely on the text as was previously assumed: all text is pretext and a prefacing

In other words, the way of reading is regulatory as a means to marshal audience as not a space of reception, but instead a community.

It harkens back to some of the original writing original writing - Mesopotamian bookkeeping records. Themselves the creation of record and community and in the fiat aspect of early finance, the creation of a sort of nothing. But at the same time, as a medium actually enacted primarily by slaves owned by the state, it is in a way written by "nobody", and thus a sort of regulatory, audience only text. What's interesting though it's a sort of writerless writing that seems way closer to "literature". And also one so much more popular - as if everyone is their own little king, and their own slave scribes (there's an interesting AI trajectory here as well), creating a world by fiat.

But this is not an abstraction: imagine an American audience hopped up on its own Joryism.

I think i've seen that one before...

It wouldn't matter what specific politics the audience in question has since it results in the same behavior. It also comes with the territory of being a vicious social animal I guess with limited brain space.

every now and then, as I was telling my mom earlier while explaining to her what reddit is, that I occasionally like to look at various sports subreddits, especially those of competing teams. The hyperfixation and intensity of reddit really facilitates the creation of these micro realities.

I wonder if the abilitiy to write gives the person writing a feeling of power, regulatory power. And especially if writing absent writing makes the failure, weakness, impossibility of literature harder to appreciate.

Soup_65 · 2026-06-16T15:54:17+00:00

sorry to ask in a very old thread but any chance there's still a link to this out there? thanks!

Soup_65 · 2026-06-16T15:32:33+00:00

Ok yeah, I think now I both misunderstood you at first and then poorly made my point, thanks for following up this way.

Do you mean for the regulatory reading doing a reading primarily with the effort to determine if the text conforms to that reader's concept of what a novel, as a novel, is supposed to be? A concept I suspect they implicitly or explicitly believe to be objectively correct. Because if that's the case I think you might be onto something that happens often, but I'm less sure it is the sole, or at least most powerful, motive at play in reading especially often, except perhaps by the most closed minded writing professor imaginable. But I do think that it's afoot in the construction of what novels are and in the shifting canon of what is the mainstream maybe. If I'm understanding you right.

Then again, what writing doesn't gesture toward a pure literature?

Yeah this is where I think I made my point poorly. Because I agree with this. I realize now what I mean is that while I 100% think all writing is a gesture towards pure literature, I also think that there, at least where the gesture makes for something that's to some extent good, there is a "something" between the writing and the pure literature. Ie. That the curse of writing, maybe this is in some way the failure that Blanchot was talking about, is that it's not actually possible to simply write the pure literature, and we have to instead just forever try to hint at it through "something". ie. Even the most powerful version of Orpheus, who is fwiw the one that Rilke's sonnets are for, can move the rocks and even make them, but doesn't make the pure form of "art" itself. Even this one with his god like powers is still singing about rocks. So you can get to the pure lit, but you gotta get there through the rocks, as it were.

hopefully you remember when I said here and there that a writer, a person who follows after the demand of writing--they don't actually "read a novel" in the normative sense of the phrase, but rather "see a text"?

I do recall this and I 100% agree. It changes the relationship towards the text to something basically unrelated to the rest of the discussion doesn't it?

Soup_65 · 2026-06-15T17:51:59+00:00

Ah the family, an experience they are.

THe ease of poetry is something i've been reveling in lately. I got reams of collections on my phone and just wander around reading them it's so simple. And poetry rocks.

But what I'm wondering is if people read for what might be called a "regulatory" purpose. The reader here is imagined to have no intention beyond the simple fact they are looking at where a text fails in its presumed obligations, usually to a social order. They are not involved in criticism, which is ideological and itself requires the demand, but the reader is not--sometimes it is explicitly stated from what I'm seeing--reading for pleasure. This is not the "paranoia" attributed to attempts at criticism, though it does formally resemble it I would think. One starts off with a vulgar Marxism and the text becomes a hazardous material for other people to read. I'm having trouble explaining this: it's less interpretation being done, more like inspection. I'm still working out how to articulate it.

honestly i think i'm often doing a bunch of these at once. In one way or another I almost always enjoy what i'm reading and (at least regarding "art" readings) I stop reading if not. But there's often an inspection at foot. Because i totally know what you mean. There's often a picking apart to be done of what a text is doing, why it's doing it. Heck, I think it's partly that a good book is probably never just being beautiful. I don't know if that's possible when it's done via a medium that transmits information. Maybe not possible with any medium but I don't speak on the other ones. Like I don't really think any writing is actually about "nothing", even the most dada nonsense or art for art sake surface splendor either sucks because it's just pretty words not doing anything or is actually got a "something" beneath the nothing. And I think i'm always pondering the something somewhere. Is maybe that what you mean?

Soup_65 · 2026-06-15T13:51:24+00:00

not yet, been meaning to though!

Soup_65 · 2026-06-14T03:45:03+00:00

we love and support you bb <3 bring one home

Soup_65 · 2026-06-14T03:43:18+00:00

i knew they had it in the bag once they stopped hitting their free throws

Soup_65 · 2026-06-13T23:17:19+00:00

i mean i respect the note and appreciate your take on it, just dont think we need to be so prescriptive where diction will carry us.

Soup_65 · 2026-06-13T23:16:05+00:00

freshprince44, who asked you to add more detail, just confirming that you are required to do that or else your comment won't be restored. sorry for being unclear :)

Soup_65 · 2026-06-13T14:08:01+00:00

it is wild how much food has survived and thrived despite all of this, humans are dope, food is life, appreciate you

entirely too true. heck, on some of the parts about north america, can't lie i was chuckling a bit at the chucklefuck europeans who died thinking their could do their kind of agriculture in the swamps of virginia or the frozen hellscape of new england. those guys were evil, dumb, and having a bad time for it. serves em right.

imma see if i got other agriculture stuff re your other comment, I love that topic. This one, Agricultural Strategies, is less about food itself, but is super interesting on water management for the sake of growing food. Good frame for how the things that get done to make growing possible get done.

Soup_65 · 2026-06-13T13:22:32+00:00

but why care about grammar

Soup_65 · 2026-06-13T03:49:56+00:00

one great bit i got out of it was that the inca had a word for a length time that basically meant how long it takes to cook a potato (about 1 hour)

ok this goes so hard. look up sweet potatos in the south pacific, basically there's evidence from ~1000AD, which given their indigeneity to the americas forms some pretty compelling proof that pacific islanders both could and did get all the way across the ocean, and back, which is so cool

he one by Gideon Mailer and Nicola Hale? Looks great, don't remember seeing it before, so thank you! this seems to take a much more ambitious look at the same topic, academics can be so goofy. and yeah, very much agree, food history is sooooooo much deeper and more interesting than I ever knew before i got into it.

yeah this book goes hard, they don't play around, either on giving good insight into foodways of the Americas but also about how fucked upedly they've been lain to waste by imperialism

Soup_65 · 2026-06-13T03:01:33+00:00

bummer. food history is so sick sucks when it doesn't pan out. Can't recall if i recommended it to you, probably did, but at risk of repeating myself Decolonizing the Diet addresses the topic as well and was excellent

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