Jasmine ,'Power Play'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Oh, this is awesome: Ta-Nehisi Coates discovers Moby Dick.
Melville eats Klingons like part of a complete breakfast!!
Melville! Melville! Melville!!!!
Do not come to me with your drab and sorry works which I have not read. Melville desecrates their temples, steals their horses, and howls among the lamentation!
Hee! I am still not done with Moby Dick (maybe on the trip to Ireland!) but I love it. It's so FUNNY. Nobody ever told me Moby Dick was funny.
Kind of relatedly, what Irish Literature available for free (i.e. pre-1923) should I download for the Kindle for Ireland? I have read: Castle Rackrent (meh), some Synge (ugh), a lot of Yeats (yum!), Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners (yum!), and Gulliver's Travels (fine). Do not ask me to read Ulysses; this is a pleasure trip.
That's the way I feel about the first paragraph of Moby Dick.
If you finish it on the way to Dublin, flea, you should also read some of Ray Bradbury on living in Dublin to write the script for the movie.
Kind of relatedly, what Irish Literature available for free (i.e. pre-1923) should I download for the Kindle for Ireland?
I love love love Flann O'Brien. At Swim Two Birds, or The Third Policeman. I think he's the funniest writer ever.
I love the first paragraph of Moby Dick too. Pity my love could not withstand the endless "non-fiction" chapters in which we learn that whales are fish, and so forth.
I should try to read it again, some time.
The endless non-fiction whale chapters are actually very funny. You have to imagine Ishmael saying everything in such a dry droll way that you're almost, but not quite, certain he is kidding.
I have read Flann O'Brien! I wrote a kick-ass paper on The Third Policeman, though I think we did not read At Swim Two Birds.
The endless non-fiction whale chapters are actually very funny. You have to imagine Ishmael saying everything in such a dry droll way that you're almost, but not quite, certain he is kidding.
They were my favorite part of the book! Maybe that's why.
Hee! I am still not done with Moby Dick (maybe on the trip to Ireland!) but I love it. It's so FUNNY. Nobody ever told me Moby Dick was funny.
Have I somehow neglected to ever post my rant here about how everyone treats Moby Dick like some horrible Doorstop Of Great Significance before which you should cower and tremble, when in fact it's really fucking funny? Because it is, and I've been delivering that rant since I read it for AP English in 1985. Really fucking funny.
Where's Corwood or Hayden or whatever he's calling himself these days? He'll back me up on the funny!
And, ha, so will P-C! Didn't we have this exact conversation a couple of years ago when you were first goaded into reading it? Someone is perpetrating a terrible fraud on the reading public, scaring them away from a really fucking funny book.
For Irish literature, I'd say some Seamus Heaney and some mythology, maybe the Tain.