Lemme just say something about the Bard here before I start. Until very recently I hated the shit out of his 16th century ass, all his stupid anachronisms and puns and perceived asshattery. I loathed his lace collar wearing, quill in ink dipping, sonnet composing and unrhymed iambic pentameter spouting ass. I raged, literally, every time I saw the texts of his plays in the bookstore. Seriously, who the fuck reads plays? Anyway, the reason for this is my high school freshman English teacher. The bitch, probably dead now, was this giant asshole that, if I recall correctly, had the nickname Big Bird. She was an ass and had a huge fucking gapey wet snatch for ol' Bill Shakespeare and she rammed Romeo and Juliet down our throats and abode no type of criticism. She'd heard it before from innumerable generations of uncouth louts, hayseed hick motherfuckers who asked, "What for we gotta read this for?" So, I hated her, which meant also that I hated W.S. and I refused to read him.
Recently, I had a change of heart and, realizing his influence on shit, decided to give him another try. I picked up Julius Caesar and read it in like two days and it was good. Chock full of good quotables, a keen eye for the details of mob behavior, and brimming with the crazy wine fueled rash decisions where people kill themselves. I liked it, but I wondered that, in 500 years, will the shit that still gets read and heralded as groundbreaking and timeless be the best-sellers of today or will it be the things that are truly "literary" (whatever that may be)? Like, when we're zipping around the solar system, near extra-solar planets and colonizing the fuck out of local space, will humanity be reading Dean Koontz and John Grisham or Thomas Pynchon? What texts will future English graduate students discuss as canonical and everlasting and which ones will be regarded as mere blips on the history screen of literature? What the fuck are they going to make of Nicholas Sparks?
Fuck you future graduate students, you asses aren't even going to exist. World's ending next year.
I liked how Updike managed to write in the present tense because I really think it takes balls and is hard as fuck to do. That aside, this book was fucking awful. Just fucking terrible. And do you know what makes it terrible? The main character is a goddamn douchey fuck. Like this, "Aww, poor me, I peaked in high school and I couldn't be assed to broaden my horizons past basketball and now I'm so pissed that life happened around me and I wasn't man enough to make shit happen on my own so it's everyone else's fault that I can't make my present/future what it should have been." What a fag, seriously.
This, however, was fucking awesomely brilliant. Just go read it. I can't say anything that would add to this work.
I know, everyone raves about Joyce except Gertrude Stein, but I'm just not feeling his flow. He's good sure, but I just ain't feelin' the mothafucka. I don't know, maybe I don't understand the zeitgeist (there I fucking said it) during which he wrote, or I can't comprehend all the other deeper shit that's supposed to be happening with Joyce's work. Anyway, I read it and felt neither strongly for or against A Portrait. The internet proclaims that Ulysses is golden, though, so we might see about that.
If all you have to do to win the Nobel is write a story with a bunch of bumble fuck asshole villagers doing stupid shit, then put my name down for one and I'll shit out a story. This was another seemingly great novel that I felt should have earned the author a punishing fist to the balls. I hate characters that are fucking stupid and do foolish things and never learn from them. Discussing the circular nature of history and family dynamics aside, and forgoing a look at Marquez's magical realism horseshit...
I forgot where I was going with that because I had to yell at the children. Anyway, I didn't care for this novel. It fell flat and none of the characters were worthwhile, they were all assholes doing stupid things that I couldn't be bothered caring about. Fuck those villagers. I don't give a goddamn about them.
There you have it. Next up, I'm working on a bunch of Plato's dialogues, Homer's The Illiad, Infinite Jest by DFW, and I'm going to try to get my hands on a copy of Moby Dick and give that another try.
No comments:
Post a Comment