Bryan Sevilla itibaren Warmley, Bristol, South Gloucestershire, UK

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11/05/2024

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2018-11-18 05:40

Serafina Ve Siyah Pelerin - Robert Beatty TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: Yabancı Yayınevi

I have written a more substantial but no more real review than the little blurb that used to sit here. The original blurb written on the day I heard DFW died follows this lengthy and self-indulgent exercise. Within a year of each other two works of entertainment were released that have been pretty darn influential to me. One is this book, and the other was Jawbreaker's album Dear You. Both are relatively polarizing works, people either seem to love it or hate it*. Jawbreaker's album was a momentous failure. It alienated just about everyone who had any expectations for the band. Their penultimate album, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy had been vehemently anti-corporate. For a time, Jawbreaker were seen as the poster-children for DIY punk second only to Fugazi. They were producing great music and doing it on their own terms. After the release of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy Jawbreaker would open for Nirvana on the In Utero tour. Accusations of sell-out flew, and people began looking at the band with the beady little suspicious eyes that the punk world loves peering at the world through. Rumors started flying that in no time the band would be signed to DGC the label that Nirvana was on, that this was the first step to their own rockstardom, and of course the chorus of sell-out grew louder. One defender of the band, Ben Weasel who still hasn't been excommunicated from Maximum RocknRoll for the heretical charges of allowing a song of his to appear on a major label produced soundtrack stood by the band and wrote in his column that he'd eat his hat if Jawbreaker signed to a major label. He ended up eating the hat. The band signed to DGC and released their most polished album. The album was a spectacular flop. The punk world turned their collective back on the band and the mainstream world didn't give a shit. It didn't help that the video and single the band released was for one of the two weakest songs on the album. The band ended up succumbing lackluster sales, criticism and infighting. Eventually one member of the band spat gum at another in the middle of an argument and that spat gum ended the band (I'm only adding this fact to show the evils of gum. Bad Blake!). I'm slowly going somewhere with all of this. If Jawbreaker had released this song instead of "Fireman" I think they would have been huge. It would have been the anthem that songs like "Smells like Teen Spirit" and "Cherub Rock" were. The reason for all of this preamble is to share these couple of lines that come towards the end of "Save Your Generation": You have to learn to learn from your mistakes. You can afford to lose a little face. The things you break, some can't be replaced. A simple rule: every day be sure you wake. One of the things DFW liked to point out in interviews is that we are bombarded with a massive amount of information and part of our goal is to make sense of all that information. The problem isn't how to absorb all of the information, because that is an impossible feat, it's how to choose what information we choose to filter in and out of our consciousness and what we choose to do with that information. I'm not talking about what kind of use value we can take from the information bombarding us, what the pragmatic value of the information is. That is an easy way to solve the problem, but it's not necessarily an option for everyone. It also leads to an alienation and objectification of the entire world. Everything is turned into a tool. This is a fine way to live, many people do it. Some people can't do this though, people who see the world in this way would never like this book, but that's ok because they probably will one day own really nice things. Another way out of the problem is to bombard oneself with something so endlessly diverting that no other information is necessary. Both solutions are putting tremendous limits on the uptake of information, and either deliberately or unconsciously limiting the world around us into super-easily manageable nuggets. At the other extreme is to be affected by everything and be so overwhelmed by the world that everything becomes white noise. Unfiltered receptions. Instead there has to be some kind of middle ground. And one could add, the middle ground needs to be made with awareness. One needs to remind oneself to wake up everyday. I'd suggest that the structure of the book is designed to make the reader conscious of not necessarily the fact that s/he is reading a book, but to think about what the reader is reading. An easier book could be read in the way that the boys at the tennis academy squeeze the tennis balls constantly. There is no thought to the exercise. They are developing exaggerated muscles but it is through a mindlessness and it is a very localized improvement. One of my favorite passages (of which there are many) is the second person (ok, I could be wrong about this, maybe it's not in the second person, my memory of it is, but my memory is also very fallible) description of what it takes to succeed at tennis. The pain and repetition involved. The filtering out of everything aside from the focus at succeeding. Someone in this position reduces the world to a very manageable number of bytes a day, the success at tennis bytes. Just like the obsessive pothead reduces the world to a very manageable, things I need to do to smoke a shit ton of pot this weekend bytes. Just like the person watching The Entertainment reduces everything to the this is fucking entertaining (whatever It is) bytes. This book is massive and overwhelming. It's a total onslaught of information. And the information is presented in a jarring manner. There is the non-sequential order of the narrative, there is the long sentences, the difficult language and of course the endnotes. A lot is put in front of the reader, there are a lot of characters to keep track of, thinking about when a scene is taking place in relation to other scenes in the books and this is made even more difficult by the use of corporate names to designate years. It's information overload. And then the information the reader is presented with is hammered with the details DFW chooses to give. As expansive as the novel is it is also incredibly claustrophobic at times in it's interiority. This novel isn't for everyone. I'd never recommend it to someone. I'm fairly certain I've never recommended it to anyone**. I think it takes a particular type of person to enjoy this book, and I think that this type of person is defined by how they experience the world and by what goes on in their head. Most importantly by what happens inside a person's head. I'm probably just projecting here, and I know that there are other types of people than myself that love this book too, but I don't think it's necessarily a happy and healthy person who is the type that this book is written for. I don't think happy and healthy people experience or want to slog through a barrage of reflexiveness. I'm not putting into words really what I'm thinking here. I'm missing the words right now. But this comes back to my ongoing repetition of the question why does one read? For me, reading is work. Rarely, do I read for pure enjoyment, or to just kill some time or to escape. I don't find reading a sort of punishment and I enjoy it more than I enjoy anything else in this stupid world. I think of reading as an active activity, it's not something to narcotize to, and maybe that is a reason why I am baffled whenever I hear that someone reads when they are drunk or fucked up in someway. For me, being in a state like that would be to be too unaware. It might be really pathetic but my real experience with the world I live in is through books, they are frankly more interesting than most people, and the inner conversations and thoughts I have with the books I read are much more interesting than the ones I have with other flesh and blood people. This is my own failing, I'm a generally uninteresting person to talk to, I don't hold up my own weight in conversations, I stammer and I mispronounce words that I can hear correctly in my head but which my tongue wants nothing to do with, I pull verbal punches, my shitty hearing does a shitty job at making sense of everything other people say, my sentences stop abruptly mid-way through a thought as if I expect that whomever is talking to me will be able to fill in the gaps, I fail to say what I'm thinking and end up feeling like an idiot when I speak***. In a way of thinking reading is escapism for me, but it's an escape from the difficulties of dealing with real live people and having the kinds of dialogs I'll rarely have in real life (with maybe the exception of some of these reviews, but those aren't dialogs, those are rants and one-sided diatribes, but where the idea of votes are important not because I want to be popular but because they are the only way to know if some other person (possibly, it's always a possibility that all the votes are just clicked on without anyone having read a word of the review)) has read them, that the thoughts have been heard by another. To leave my self-deprecating blabbering aside, or to use it for uses of good instead of just wallowing, it's partially because of the reasons I read that I find Infinite Jest to be so fucking good. It's a thousand plus pages of small details, of forcing myself to be even more aware than I usually am when reading, it's unanswered questions and openness in the text and clues. It's a self-contained world that can be read without having to bring any of the outside world necessarily into it (yes it helps to have say Hamlet in the back of your mind when reading certain scenes, but I was a shitty student in my English classes in High School so I totally missed the glaring Shakespeare reference in the title, or in Hal's name or in the graveyard scene. Facts like this just add some more richness to the book, but it's not necessary knowledge to enjoying the book), everything you need for the book is inside it. Unlike say Ulysses you don't need to have a firm background in Irish History to know what the hell is even going some of the time, everything and more is constructed and presented to the reader. Presented might be the wrong word. Presented makes it sound like everything is handed to the reader on a silver platter, which it's not, everything needed for the book is given to the reader but the reader has to meet the book at least half-way in putting it all together. We, as a society, don't generally like things that put a demand on us to do that much of the work. There is no reason that anyone should feel they have to do that kind of work just to read a book. Even for the literary minded there is no reason that one should feel like they have to do that kind of work. It's a matter of wanting to read books that demand something of the reader of wanting to read something that demands our attention. There are plenty of excellent books out there that don't put these kinds of demand on us. Even personally I don't always want to be put through the rigmarole that a writer like DFW is asking for. Probably, almost every book of literature can be read with the demands that DFW is asking of the reader, but not every book is explicitly asking the reader to do so. Like, I'm sure The Corrections can be read really actively and a bunch of things can be pulled out of the text that a casual perusal of the book would miss, but it's also a book that can be read relatively passively. It's not a book asking much from us. As a society, we like things to be given to us already in their manageably sized bytes. In my parents downstairs, 'guest', bathroom there is a framed advertisement from the early 1960's for some Volvo (ignore the fact that there is a picture of a car in the bathroom for a moment). This ad isn't necessarily remarkable in anyway, but it is standing in for any advertisement from that era. The thing about the advertisement that stands out is the wordiness, there are paragraphs!!! of text to get the point across about the high level of safety concerns about Sweden and how those carry over into their automobiles. Paragraphs!!!. The advertisement takes a little bit of time to read. This is unheard of now. This advertisement is demanding a very low level of work from the viewer but still much more work to get to the message it's trying to convey than a modern ad in a magazine. As a society, we like things to be given to us in very manageably sized bytes. Just think of the theory behind Twitter marketing where information is given to us in tiny little tweets****. When there is so much already half-digested bits of information already floating around just waiting for our retinas to pass over them and absorb the message without even having to break our stride why would someone stop to tackle something difficult and that demands we help out in the conveying of the information? Infinite Jest is not a pragmatic book. It's not going to make you a better person for reading it. It won't answer life's questions, and it will possibly leave you with more questions coming out of it than going in. It's not an easy and light fun read. It probably wouldn't be the book you want to bring on the beach. It's tough to read on the subway and it's heavy so traveling with it can be a problem. You can't even easily say what the book is about when a curious person asks you "Whatcha reading?" I'm going to wrap up this failure of a review. I wanted to write a positive review of Infinite Jest, I had actually been challenged to write a review of why I loved the book but I don't think I did that. I don't know exactly what this review is, maybe a long rambling something or other about the importance of paying attention to the world around you, to look at the details, to try to remember to wake up everyday even though it is easier to sleep off five year chunks at a time, and that there are loads of ways to do this seemingly simple task and in a way this book is a giant exercise in telling us to be more aware, to engage, to see the details even if sometimes the details just are the what the chemical compounds are in some commonly taken drug, it's the act of having to see there is something more than the commonly known, easily overlooked and empty-ish words to the world around us. And sometimes what we find there isn't that important but it's the act that is, not the guaranteed pragmatic results. *In the case of Jawbreaker the love/hate relationship is generally only seen in the bands fans. In the case of DFW his fans generally love Infinite Jest and it is other works that are held in different opinions. While I acknowledge someone can be a big DFW fan and only like his non-fiction I personally think an enjoyment of Infinite Jest is essential to saying you like DFW. **I could easily be wrong about this fact though. *** FYI, I'm not fishing for compliments or for someone to say, no you aren't like that at all. **** I was under the idea that a tweet was 256 characters of less, but I'm sure everyone knows that it is actually 140 characters or less. I was going to make a point about this being the reduction of manageable bytes down to one byte, where a byte is made up of 8 bits, and in the binary system this leads to there being 256 permutations of ones and zeros in a byte. Based on this metaphor though the manageable number of bytes in a tweet is less than a byte. ------------------------------------- This is my original 'review' I just read a comment on the LA Times story about his suicide, and it said, "the world's a shittier place now." I couldn't agree more. One of our true geniuses kills himself and some asshole douche bag like James Patterson or Nora Roberts will continue pumping out three or four novels a year. Fuck. The world is a shittier place.

2018-11-18 06:40

Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: Kırmızı Kedi Yayınevi

don't bother

2018-11-18 07:40

Yargı 2015 Öabt Türkçe Öğretmenliği Pusulası-Kolektif TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: Yargı Yayınevi

Brilliance. Sad, wonderful brilliance...

2018-11-18 08:40

Gerçek Hesap Bu! - Nejat İşler TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: Can Yayınları

I started this a while ago but gave up. Very dense and I did not find it accessible or enjoyable. I feel like it is a book I should read as I admire what the author is trying to do. Will try again one day

2018-11-18 09:40

Günümüz Türkçesiyle Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi 9. Cilt (2 Cilt Takım) - Evliya Çelebi TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: Yapı Kredi Yayınları

Miniseries: Fatherhood

2018-11-18 10:40

Mister No Sayı - 153 : Fare Kapanı - Guido Nolitta TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: Lal Kitap

;-)) I Like it so Much!!

2018-11-18 11:40

Mahalo U30G/BK Ukulele TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: Mahalo

I've heard there are different versions of this book. I read the one pictured here and there were a couple of entries that I would take out in order to feel comfortable recommending it. I don't think Anne would have wanted them published either so that made reading them a little awkward. However, besides those entries, I liked what I learned from this book. It made me appreciate freedom and feel for those who have struggled without it. It did give you a glimpse of the very evil side of human nature as well as the resilient and good side.

2018-11-18 12:40

Toplu Öyküler 2 Kader Ajanları - Philip K. Dick TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: Büyülü Fener Yayınları

Any athlete, wanna be athlete or fan should read this book. Amazing read on believing yourself. Loved it!

2018-11-18 13:40

İngiliz Belgelerinde Atatürk (1919-1938) Cilt: 2 Nisan-Aralık 1920 / British Documents on Atatürk (1919-1938) Volume: 2 April-December 1920 TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları

This book made me think of my own mortality. I thought about appreciating my own life.

2018-11-18 14:40

Osmanlı Devletinin Son Dönemlerinde Sivas ve Suşehri Bölgelerinde Ermeni Faaliyetleri TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: IQ Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık

I enjoyed this story a lot. I took longer to read this book than usual (one or two days), but since it was a classic I was expecting it. I enjoyed the different perspectives that we were able to see through the additional letters/accounts that the main character acquired to tell the story.

Okuyucu Bryan Sevilla itibaren Warmley, Bristol, South Gloucestershire, UK

Kullanıcı, bu kitapları portalın yayın kurulu olan 2017-2018'de en ilginç olarak değerlendirdi "TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi" Tüm okuyucuların bu literatürü tanımalarını tavsiye eder.