/lit/ General
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Dead Souls by Gogol
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@alpine-raspberry I have, it was altogether pretty dense and repetitive but that's to be expected of a dissertation. imo he also spends too much space arguing with other academics, again to be expected. The sections on Pindar, nature, and the origin of aristocracy were good
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my favorite author is knut hamsun
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@peatyourmeat I am also a big Hamsun fan, although I detest Hunger. The praise for Isak in Growth of the Soil due to his practical intelligence, strength, openness, and willingness to try out his ideas in the world, is very Peaty. Hamsun's critique of Isak's son who worships dead material, is also very Peaty. That being said, Hamsun had a tragic view of life overall.
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@sunandblood yes
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Any Peaters enjoy Thomas Pynchon? Currently reading Inherent Vice. Pynchon clearly has high metabolic rate.
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@Norwegian-Mugabe detesting hunger is understandable, though no one can say it's a bad book. Would be lying if I said i didn't see parts of myself in it. I love Isak, best archetype of Boomer ever.
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@aristotle Mason & Dixon is the only one of his I finished, probably the funniest book I've read
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@peatyourmeat quickly becoming one of mine as well, loved Mysteries ... still thinking about the blue silk sail ...
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@Lamassu M&D was the first one I read. Incredible book, deserves to be put on the re-read list once I finish my Obs.
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@aristotle I'm a Pynchon enjoyer but never finished Gravity's Rainbow. There was a passage in V that gut punched me:
“He was blushing. Crew cut Harris tweed. "Say, you are new," she smiled. "I am Esther.”
“He blushed and was cute. "Brad," he said. "I'm sorry I made you jump."
She knew instinctively: he will be fine as the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing something, and so hangs at the edges of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever have been line, or even if there is a line at all. He will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her breasts at a 45 degree angle to his line-of-sight, pointed her nose at his heart, looked up at him through her eyelashes.
"How long have you been in New York?” -
ive been reading fear and loathing in las vegaz... vry kin0
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How great is Eliot's The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock? You stand before the rest of your life and you know what you are in for, and you are already tired of the future that you will come to regret.
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@alpine-raspberry Bennett's Phylactery did a good podcast where he summarises the book and gives his opinion. He says there's more in it than he manages to discuss in the podcast, but it might give you an idea if you want to read it yourself.
https://extradeadjcb.substack.com/p/selective-breeding-and-the-birth -
Dear babycarrot
Babycarrot
Small
Ugly
Lives in the shadow of the carrot
Babycarrot.
- Henrik Ibsen.
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In
Algeria
There is a town
Called
Tit -
Pyotr Mihalitch rode along the bank of the pond and looked mournfully into the water. And thinking about his life, he came to the conclusion that he had never said or acted upon what he really thought, and that other people had repaid him in the same way. And so the whole of life seemed to him as dark as this water in which the night sky was reflected and water-weeds grew in a tangle. And it seemed to him that nothing could ever set it right.
― Anton Chekhov
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@EzraPound I’ve had it on my shelf for a while but have been told it’s a bit of a slog. How does Gogol compare to Dostoevsky?
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Hi @Adonis the Magic Mountain is for sure a Peaterian work. From pages 42-43 Vintage Classic Edition:
*There were pots of marmalade and honey, basins of rice and oatmeal porridge, dishes of cold meat and scrambled eggs; a plentitude of butter, a Gruyere cheese dropping moisture under a glass bell. A bowl of fresh and dried fruits stood in the centre of the table... He began eating rice with cinnamon and sugar...
Opposite him there had sat for a short time a very lean, light-blonde girl who emptied a bottle of yogurt on her plate, ladled it up with a spoon, and took herself off... She complained of relaxation. "I feel so relaxed", she said with a drawl and an underbred, affected manned. And she had 99.1F when she got up that morning - what was she likely to have by afternoon? The dressmaker confessed to the same temprature, but she on the contrary felt excited, tense, and restless, as though some important event were about to happen, which was certainly not the case; the excitation was purely physical, quite without emotional grounds.*
This reads like Ray Peat propaganda. -
There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
- Simone de Beauvoir.
