Raxivace Reads in 2021

Post Reply
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Raxivace Reads in 2021

Post by Raxivace »

So normally when I'm reading something its some kind of academic film book or whatever, but I feel like I've been slacking on actual fiction lately. With so many audiobooks and PDF's of classic fiction and such online (And also inspired by what a huge hodgepodge of classical cultural references that these Fate anime/games I've been into lately are), I'm trying to correct that through listening (Sorry purists) and actual reading.

So with that said, I guess I'll start listing them out. Ones I hear as audiobooks I'll go out of my way to mark.

1. The Statement of Randolph Carter (1920, H.P. Lovecraft) - There stereotype I've heard of Lovecraft's fiction I've often heard is some formula akin to "There's just some scary thing, so scary I can't describe it lolololol. Also I've been driven insane. The End." and that seems to be all this is (Well without the being driven to insanity part). I dunno, maybe I'm inundated by things influenced by Lovecraft at this point but I guess I just don't find the unknown to be inherently scary like that (Especially when common criticisms of Lovecraft seem to indicate that the "unknown" thing he was so afraid of was women, black people, foreigners in general etc. Thankfully there doesn't seem to be much of that here). I'd still like to try some of his more famous stories, but right now Lovecraft just kind of seems like a worse version of Poe to me.

2. The Bell of St. Sépulcre (1928, M. P. Shiel, Audiobook) - Kind of interesting short story about a bell that possibly causes you to die if you hear it ringing? It's left ambiguous whether there's anything actually supernatural about the bell or not, but the focus is on a woman who "kills" her husband by getting him to hear the bell ringing, only to get a kind of cosmic comeuppance years later when she finds her precious son to have hung himself with the rope of the bell. This of course drivers her insane. Pretty solid stuff.
Last edited by Raxivace on Sun Jan 17, 2021 10:07 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Raxivace »

3. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886, Audiobook) - This one was not what I expected. I was guessing the story would be told from Jekyll's point of view and be more about his becoming Hyde, but really it's more structured as a detective novel. Here the lawyer protagonist Gabriel "Mr. Seek" Utterson is concerned that his good friend Jekyll is perhaps being blackmailed by this mysterious Hyde fella that's started to go around town murdering people seemingly at random, only to find out through investigation that Jekyll and Hyde are in fact one in the same at the very end (Spoiler alert). Only then do the various mysteries throughout the novel about a locked room that would have been impossible to escape, a letter that couldn't have been delivered between two people etc. start to make sense.

Really, its only in the final chapter where we get an posthumous letter from Jekyll where he reflects upon how he first became Hyde, his struggles with transforming, their mutual use of each other despite an equally mutual hatred (Hilariously Hyde would troll Jekyll by writing blasphemous things on religious texts or destroying his precious family heirlooms like a painting of his father, family letters etc.), that the story becomes what I was expecting more of. The novel ends on athis high note, and perhaps its not a surprise that these aspects about moral descent, repressed urges etc. are what seem to dominate interest in the characters today, and not really the detective mystery part since the twist ending has been such a given for well over a century at this point (That a little novel called A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came out one year after Jekyll and Hyde might have something to do with this too. Sorry Utterson but you've got nothing on Holmes and Watson).

Its still an enjoyable read/listen (For the last chapters I tried reading alongside the audiobook version I was listening to using an online Project Gutenberg text, which was quite enjoyable even though reading books in an internet browser is usually [gonemad] for me), but you kind of have to put yourself in the mindset of what it could possibly be like to learn of this story without knowing one of the most famous twist endings in history.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
Derived Absurdity
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2799
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2015 5:07 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Derived Absurdity »

I have nothing to say to any of this except that for the first twenty or so years of my life I thought Sherlock Holmes was a real historical person.
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Raxivace »

Bro... XD

Well to be fair even in Victorian times there were people that thought that Holmes was real too. It got to the point that people would write to Doyle, thinking he was actually Holmes, with some mystery or whatever to solve. Being an English gentleman Doyle would try and solve some of these mysteries anyways and apparently was actually successful a few times.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
Derived Absurdity
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2799
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2015 5:07 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Derived Absurdity »

Oh yeah I was kind of disappointed when I find out. Although his author was the next best thing, it seems.

I also thought Jeffrey Dahmer was a fictional person for a long time. Like an 80s slasher movie killer. I mean, he sounds like he would be, doesn't he? Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger, Jeffrey Dahmer. Was kind of surprised when I found out he was real. I can be pretty isolated sometimes.
BruceSmith78
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 1289
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2015 3:20 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by BruceSmith78 »

You know what's funny, I read the name “Jeffrey Dahmer" and my brain processed it as “Hannibal Lecter", and I fully expected the rest of that sentence to read “was a real person". I had to go back and read it again to understand why the sentence didn't end that way.
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Raxivace »

I can sort of see that with Dahmer. Like it does seem like his name fits the pattern of those slasher villains having the "innocuous first name + two syllable, but somewhat uncommon last name" combo.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Gendo
Site Admin
Posts: 2882
Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2015 7:38 pm

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Gendo »

“There's no such thing as hell; it's just something grownups made up to scare kids; like the boogeyman or Michael Jackson." -Bart Simpson
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Raxivace »

4. The Snow Queen (1844, Hans Christian Anderson, Audiobook) - I didn't think I was familiar with any of Anderson's writing before listening to this, but good lord looking him up will only show you just what a foothold this guy has had on culture to this day with the fairy tales he wrote. The Ugly Duckling, The Little Mermaid, The Emperor's New Clothes, Thumbelina etc. I mean Christ, this guy might have well as been the second coming of Aesop. Even if you're not familiar with the original stories this guy wrote directly, you've probably heard or read or seen an adaptation of something of his at some point in your life.

So anyways, The Snow Queen. Gerda and Kai are friends, however Kai unfortunately gets shards of a magic mirror in his body one day that causes him to see life negatively. If leaves his home, his friend Gerda, and then while running off meets the Snow Queen. They run off to her castle together.

Gerda misses her friend, so she journeys out to find and save him. She meets colorful characters, talking flowers, a crow, a prince and princess etc., and then eventually comes across the Snow Queen's castle where Kai. Her love for Kai heals him, and they return home.

It's a fun children's story. The one thing about it is that uh, Jesus is all over this thing (Like Gerda's “love" really does seem like love in the Christian sense of love for all mankind and such more than anything to me) which sometimes surprised me a bit with how direct it was for a fantasy story, though I guess this story is from the 1840's. Like Jesus is all over The Chronicle of Narnia also but never quite as explicitly as this from what I can remember from reading those as a child.

Still, Snow Queen was an enjoyable listen. I always figured these “girl journeys out to save a boy" reversals on knight/princess stories were a more modern phenomenon but it seems to have not been the case.

Also, this was originally the inspiration for Disney's Frozen, but in developing that movie the story changed so much that it seems the connections were mostly dropped.

5. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Late 14th Century, Author Unknown) - Imagine you're one of King Arthur's knights, specifically Gawain. One fine Christmas you're chilling with your fellow homies of the Round Table when suddenly this green mofo clad in green armor and also carrying an axe barges on in. He demands to play what is now called “the Beheading Game". You chop his head off, and then one year and one day later he'll chop of yours.

The Green Knight challenges King Arthur specifically, but Gawain leaps to the opportunity first and beheads the guy. The Green Knight's head comes clean off, but he picks it back up, and says he expects to see Gawain in a year and a day. Eventually Gawain goes adventuring off to face the Green Knight at the appointed time, but has trouble finding him and eventually takes refuge in a manor. The lord of the manor, a guy named Bertilak, is planning on going on hunts over the next few days, and promises to give Gawain anything he finds- in return, he asks Gawain to give anything he finds in the manor to him.

While Bertilak is off hunting, his wife Lady Bertilak decides she wants to fuck Gawain and keeps trying (And failing) to seduce him. Gawain, trapped between the contradictions of the code of chivalry- loyalty to the lord who gave him shelter, but also to be courteous to women who ask him for help, is unsure how to proceed. Also he still needs to find that damn Green Knight.

This is a weird little adventure poem because it spends very little time on actual adventuring or battles and such, while spending most of its time on the almost sitcom-esque portion of Gawain unsure how to handle the Bertilak and his wife. It ends up actually being pretty central to the whole story, questioning the contradictions of moral codes and such, and its ultimately revealed anyways that Bertilak is the Green Knight in another form. He and the wife were in a plot (Alongside Morgan Le Fay) to tempt Gawain and to see how moral he (And by extension I guess the Knights of the Round Table) really is/are, though I'm not sure if we're meant to see the Green Knight as any kind of ultimate moral authority or not and scholars seem pretty split on it too. Like he chastises Gawain for accepting the magical belt from Lady Bertilak that would protect him from wounds, and yet its like, motherfucker, magical power let you put your head back on when its chopped off, who are you criticize someone else for wanting similar powers? Also because of your deal with Gawain, she kissed him a bunch which in turn made Gawain kiss you in exchange for the game you hunted. Were you trying to hook up with him yourself in some fashion?

Like if Gawain had actually slept with Lady Bertilak, what would Bertilak have done? Demanded he sleep with him too? And if he hadn't, would he have killed Gawain for that? "For the crime of not giving me head, thou shalt lose thy own head! O irony!"

Like the whole setup here with the Green Knight's test is really weird the more you think about it, but that's also what makes the story interesting.


This is a pretty enjoyable and weird poem overall, even if (Or perhaps because) it was pretty different than what I was expecting.

6. The Dunwich Horror (1929, H. P. Lovecraft, Audiobook) - This is definitely a stepup from Statement of Randolph Carter, even if it follows the same basic formula to some extent. Still, between the history of Dunwich as a location, the Whatley family etc. there's just a muuuuuuuucccch better sense of place and people here.

7. The Music of Erich Zahn (1922, H. P. Lovecraft, Audiobook) - This one didn't really land for me though. I dunno, the whole crazed musician thing with spooky secret just didn't do it for me.

8. The Body Snatcher (1884, Robert Louis Stevenson, Audiobook) - The short story that inspired the movie from Val Lewton/Robert Wise/Boris Karloff/Bela Lugosi.

This was a pretty quick and enjoyable listen, and did make me a bit nostalgic for the film. Seems like this version had similar themes to Jekyll/Hyde in regards to private horrors beneath public faces, though I found this one a bit more mysterious. I'm namely thinking of the ending here- I have no idea what to make of Gray's body reappearing. Just, what? Commentary I've seen online say its meant to suggest thematically more than anything how guilt or the truth or such can't be repressed forever, but it's just such an odd ending to have a previously destroyed body just pop up again.

9. Xélucha (1896, M. P. Shiel, Audiobook) - Guy goes to pick up a prostitute, who may or may not be somebody he knew before and did something very bad to. Gotta be honest though, this one didn't do much for me though it may just be because I was pretty tired when I listened to it.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Raxivace »

Still trucking through The Count of Monte Cristo (About 18 hours left in the audiobook version), but in the meantime I finished some shorter things.

10. Serial Experiments Lain: The Nightmare of Fabrication (1999, Yoshitoshi ABe) - A weird little oneshot manga where Lain breaks one of her toys, meets "God", and gets a second toy that she is lead to believe is a fixed version of the first one. Odd like story that I don't really know what to do with.

11. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) - The first collection of Holmes short stories. I skipped the stories that I had read before over the years (Namely "A Scandal in Bohemia", "The Red-Headed League", "The Five Orange Pips", "The Speckled Band", and "The Copper Beeches") and just read the ones I hadn't before ("A Case of Identity", "The Boscombe Valley Mystery", "The Man with the Twisted Lip", "The Blue Carbuncle" (Actually it turns out I had read this one before but had forgotten about it), "The Engineer's Thumb", "The Noble Bachelor", and "The Beryl Coronet").

They're all good fun. I think the the thing that surprised me most about the bunch I happened to read this time is that only two of them were even murder cases ("The Boscombe Valley Mystery" and "The Man with the Twisted Lip". And the latter even ends with it being discovered that the murder never even actually happened, and that it was just a guy trying to hide a double life he was leading from his family). The rest of these cases involve missing people and missing jewels and were perfectly enjoyable, which makes me think S.S. Van Dine was off his fucking rocker for thinking detective stories only must revolve around murder, among many other stupid opinions included in his "rules".

"The Engineer's Thumb" was probably the weirdest one here because its basically about a guy that is nearly killed by a proto-Saw death trap but narrowly escapes (Which I guess makes it attempted murder), asks Holmes to do something about it, and Holmes and Watson can't even do much about because the culprits are long gone by time they're contacted. Almost feels like a different genre altogether.

12. Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (1985-1986, Alan Moore, Curt Swan, Dave Gibbons et al.) - A collection of Superman comics all written by Moore, though with different artists. The first two issues form the "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" story that provides the title to this compilation, and acts as an ending the original run of Superman comics, where Superman has a final confrontation with his rogue's gallery and is ultimately allowed to finally retire.

The second story is called "The Jungle Line" and involves Superman going on a weird drug induced hallucination in the jungle until he's saved by Swamp Thing. It felt kind of random to me tbh.

The last story is "For the Man Who Has Everything..." and involves Superman getting trapped in a dream world by a parasite thing where hallucinates a version of his life where the planet Krypton never blew up, until ultimately he's saved from the parasite and the random asshole who sent it by Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman. This was my favorite of the bunch, and I seem to remember it being adapted into an episode of the Justice League cartoon when I was kid.

I gotta say it was odd to read something from Alan Moore that wasn't as dark as Watchmen or V for Vendetta (Though "For the Man Who Has Everything..." is kind of melancholic. Also, yes, characters die in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" but the tone of that is more "epic final battle" than dreary like Watchmen). I think his talents are definitely more suited to stories like those then stuff like this (Same with Gibbons really, who also did the art for that last comic), though its not bad or anything.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Raxivace »

13. The Count of Monte Cristo (Audiobook, 1844-1846, Alexandre Dumas) - If Hamlet is the perfect antithesis of revenge dramas, then this is perhaps the perfect initial thesis of those stories despite coming some 200 odd years after Shakespeare's tale.

This novel is in two parts. The first part is the story of Edmond Dantès, a merchant sailor who is first mate on board the ship Pharaon who has just returned home to Marseilles in 1815. While at sea, Dantès' captain uses his dying breath to order him to deliver a package to General Bertrand (Who is exiled on the Island of Elba alongside Napoleon), and then to deliver a letter from Bertrand to a man in Paris. Dantès doesn't think much of this being a young man, he simply fulfills his captain's last request and then proceeds to return home so he can marry his fiance Mercédès.

With the captain of the Pharaon dead though, Dantès is next in line to become captain despite being young. This causes fellow shipmate Danglars to become insanely jealous of Dantès. While chatting with Fernand Mondego (Cousin of Mercédès, and he is very much in love with her (Eww)) and Caderousse (Dantes' neighbor that just kind of doesn't like him), Danglars sets the idea of falsely accusing Dantes of being a Bonapartist traitor, who seeks to return Napoleon to France and overthrow King Louis XVIII (Its worth noting here that the initial captain of the Pharaon was in fact a Bonapartist, which gives the accusation some heavy circumstantial weight). Danglars writes the letter, Fernand is the one who actually sends it, and Caderousse chooses to say nothing about the plot to the authorities.

Officials believe this accusation, and during his wedding ceremony Dantès is arrested. Dantes is then interviewed by prosecutor Gérard de Villefort, who actually realizes that Dantès is innocent, it the was the captain of the Pharaon who was the Bonapartist, and initially moves to have Dantès freed...until he sees the letter Dantes was to deliver to Paris, which was addressed to Villefort's father Noitier of all people in the world. Now Gérard is a staunch Royalist, but Noitier being revealed as a Bonapartist would of course hurt his own reputation and to protect his family name Gérard knowingly sends to Dantès to the hellish prison Château d'If to rot away, forgotten.

Dantès spends several isolating years suffering in the Château d'If, not even knowing how or exactly why he was sent there. He tries to tunnel out at one point, but it ultimately fails- however it does lead him to the cell of another inmate, the Abbé Faria, who has also been trying to escape. Faria, despite being dismissed as a lunatic by the prison guards, is an intelligent and learned man, and after befriending Dantes is even able to deduce that there was a plot against him. He educates Dantes over further years, teaching him foreign languages, sciences etc., but perhaps most important he tells him of a treasure that is buried on the island of Monte Cristo.

Unfortunately Faria dies in prison before the two can escape together, though Dantes uses the opportunity to switch places with Faria's corpse in a body bag, thinking he'll be thrown out somewhere he can escape from safely. Unfortunately the "corpse" is thrown into the ocean, though being a sailor gives Dantes just enough of an edge to survive the ocean long enough to be picked up by sailors.

Dantès finds that it has been fourteen long years since he thrown into the Château d'If. He eventually works up enough funds to journey to the island of Monte Cristo, finds the buried treasure to not only be real but vast beyond anyone's imagination. He uses this treasure to buy the island itself, the title of "Count", and then returns home to Marseille to get up to date on what has happened since his imprisonment.

Napoleon's One Hundred Days have come and are now long gone (Side note: Dumas had very good reason to want to tarnish the name of "The Usurper", considering what he did to Dumas' own father.). Dantès learns that his father has died alone and penniless. Caderousse remains in poverty as well, while the rest have risen to the heights of Parisian society. Danglars has become the "Baron" Danglars and a wealthy banker. Fernand Mondego has become a war hero, reinventing himself as the "Count de Morcerf", and married Mercédès. Villefort meanwhile has become the Crown prosecutor of France. Dantès own reputation is basically ruined now of course, as he is now remembered as a traitor to France, though it is thought he died in the Château d'If. This is somewhat to his benefit though, as that belief as well the considerable passage of time (In addition to his imprisonment has distorted his face enough to be beyond recognition to most) allows him to mostly walk freely again without much fear of being recongized.

Dantès decides to secretly assist those that actually tried to help him in prison (Namely the Morrel family, who pleaded that he was innocent and a good man), and then later even meets up with Caderrouse, though in disguise as Abbe Busoni, "Busoni" basically tricks Caderrouse into admitting his part in the plot against Dantès, though Caderrouse seems to regret and feel guilt over his actions/lack of action however, and so "Busoni" rewards him with a diamond that he says Dantès had intended for his friends.

Afterwards, Dantès announces that his doing of good deeds is now finished, and then sets out for revenge against the rest.

That's just part 1 of the novel, and by my estimate covers roughly 15 of the 53 hours of the audiobook version. Part 2 picks up about a decade later, once Dantès, having now reinvented himself primarily as "The Count of Monte Cristo" and leaving his old name behind, begins to actually enact his revenge now that the preparations are mostly complete. The next 25 or so hours involves Dantes straight up trolling and manipulating his way across Europe and into Paris (Including even more goofy disguises such as the banker "Lord Wilmore" and "Sinbad the Sailor"), so he can begin dismantling the reputations, bank accounts, and lives of Danglars, Morcef, and Villefort. This is where the meat of the novel takes place, this slow burn as the Count inches his way into the lives of these three families so can he destroy them from within without them realizing what's going on until its already too late. This is also where I think a lot of the social critique of the novel of comes in as well, as with the implicit argument that most of high society is built on similar crimes.

Anyways while the adventure novel that is part 1 is fun, I still quite enjoyed all of the subtle manipulations and such of part 2 as well, watching the dominoes slowly knocked down one right after the other until bodies have even started to pile up by the end.

Part 2 does seems like it handles things differently than Part 1 though. One way that immediately comes to mind is how it handles Point of View and dramatic irony- in Part 1, while Dantès is clearly the protagonist we the readers actually have much more information than him about what's going on with the plot against him until the chapters that focus on his time in Chateau d'If, where Faria explaining what the fuck is going on finally aligns (Well mostly aligns) Dantès' information with our own as readers. In Part 2 this shifts somewhat- we know that the Count is seeking revenge and who he's seeking revenge against, but the specifics of his plan aren't ever clearly laid out to us and we're left to infer it for the most part. The kidnapping of Albert de Morcef in the Italy chapters is a great example- its never specifically said that the Count had this arranged so he can be the one to save him and have Albert "reward" the Count by introducing him to Parisian society and the Morcef family, but that this is the Count's plan from the beginning and not a series of random coincidences is something were meant to puzzle out (And stands in contrast to, say, how even after years I still don't get what the fuck the Man in Black was doing in Lost). Where we were ahead of Dantès, now the Count is ahead of us and we're playing catch up throughout Part 2- especially because all of the different families and their interlocking drama is much more complicated than anything in Part 1, and the Count already has most of that figured out (Though that he only has "most of it" and not "all of it" figured out is something that comes back to haunt him in the novel's end).

I think this shift in Part 2's POV is also what adds to the kind of mythological bent to the Count as a character, beyond basically every other character just finding him generally mysterious, rather than the mere sailor of Part 1. The Count himself views himself as some kind of avenging angel doing God's work (Until the end, anyways), though this is perhaps paralleled by others suspecting him of being some kind of vampire.

While they're around in Part 1, this is also the part of the novel where the references to One Thousand and One Nights starts becoming more significant- there are some in Part 1 (Dantes' saying "Open Sesame" when looking for the treasure and such), though this really kicks into high gear with Part 2. The most notable example is probably how one of the Count's many disguises includes "Sinbad the Sailor", throughout the story we do sometimes see Dumas even replicate the nested structure of One Thousand and One Nights as well. Chapter 33 is a good example- the chapter where Franz and Albert get told the story of Luigi Vampa. It seems like a really random aside, especially once the story about Vampa himself is interrupted by the story of another particularly brutal bandit Cucumetto. The Cucumetto story eventually moves up a "layer of relevance" within the fiction when Cucumetto is eventually meets Vampa, who agrees to let him hide out for a time. The story starts seeming more relevant once Vampa meets and befriends a man calling himself "Sinbad the Sailor", and later on Vampa just fucking murders Cucumetto and takes over his brutal gang for himself. We later on see Vampa and "Sinbad" working together on friendly terms, and this seemingly random chapter gains new significance as it shows how in some ways Dantes has morally degraded a bit to work with such shady characters as Vampa (Who will be the one to actually kidnap Albert for the Count). Vampa's name even recalls the rumors about the Count of Monte Cristo being some kind of a vampire that I mentioned earlier.

If I had a complaint about the novel its that for as long as it is, a lot of the characters are fairly straightforward though that's arguably part of the point for at least some of them (Danglars being almost comically one-dimensional immediately comes to mind, particularly the bit from the end of the novel where he reveals he's read precisely one book in his entire life and ironically enough for someone who lives such an unexamined life its Don Quixote), and a lot of the cast is at least still pretty memorable which is saying something considering how large it gets and complicated the plot becomes in Part 2.

So in a lot of a ways The Count of Monte Cristo may be "just" a straightforward revenge novel but at the same time its hard to imagine one being done much better than this. More than anything, its just so damn fun.

EDIT: This Tweet seems to suggest that Dumas may have intended Dantès to be black when initially drafting the story. I'm not sure what their source on this, but it would make certain elements of the story make more sense- mainly why there's an even a plot against Dantès to begin with (I.e. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination at all to imagine Danglars is racist), but also that Dantès was probably based on Dumas' father anyways, and it would even fit with my own argument that there's a theme in the novel of the crimes of colonialism and such (I.e. you could then easily read the novel also as the colonized getting revenge on the colonizers).

14. Markheim (Audiobook, 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson) - Markheim is a guy who kills a shopowner is a dispute, and then while wandering around in a daze meets a strange a guy who Markheim believes might be the Devil. They debate the nature of mankind and sin and such, whether good intentions can justify awful crimes etc., with the stranger primarily arguing that as he's followed Markheim his whole life he knows him to be an evil man who will always commit sin and do crimes (Like robbery, more murder etc.) and whatnot. The devil/stranger then tries to get Markheim to commit even more crimes.

Markheim gets so fed up with this that he basically tells the first other person he meets to contact the police so he can admit to the crime, almost to spite the stranger more than anything.

It's a neat little short story. I'm not entirely sure whether the devil/stranger actually even exists or just isn't some psychological projection of Markheim's guilt or not. Either way, I'm also not sure whether he was trying to manipulate Markheim into giving himself up to the police or was sincerely just trying to corral him into doing bad deeds together. Interesting how there's a few ways to look at it.

15. Lobo, the King of Currumpaw (1898, Ernest Thompson Seton) - A "fact-based short story" about the author hunting Lobo, the leader of a pack of wolves that's going around eating cattle and stuff. Not a whole lot to really say about from my end, though the whole thing is more sad than any kind of triumphant adventure, particularly with regards to how Lobo is actually killed.
Last edited by Raxivace on Thu Aug 20, 2020 7:11 pm, edited 5 times in total.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Raxivace »

16. The Legend of St. George (Mid 1200's, Jacobus de Varagine)
17. The Life of St. Martha (Mid 1200's, Jacobus de Varagine) - I'm grouping both of these together because they're both excerpts of something called The Golden Legend. From what I can tell, it's a collection of stories about various Catholic saints and their exploits.

These two I picked follow a similar formula, a saint slays a dragon, converts people to Jesus, and then dies venerated. The St. George one particular feels like an action story more than anything, since after he kills the dragon he gets captured and then basically calls upon God to rain death upon the non-Christians that captured him.

I guess you could call both of these chivalric romances in a ways (St. George is even described as being a knight), though that makes them an interesting contrast with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight- both in style (From what I can tell the stories in The Golden Legend are meant as history, whereas Sir Gawain is a poem), but also attitude toward knightly ideals and such. Both Golden Legend excerpts are about the glory of following God and such (Giving the stories a kind of a propaganda-ish feel), while Sir Gawain is far more morally ambiguous in its attitude toward codes of honor and such and how teneable they are.

Still, for what it is these two tales were interesting enough. It does kind of make me want to go through the entirety of The Golden Legend at some point. I've read other stories about saints in college and some of them are pretty whacky.

18. Batman: The Killing Joke (1988, Alan Moore, Brian Holland, John Higgins et al.) - A kind of curious comic that Moore seemed to disown even before his more harsher stance of superhero stories in recent years.

Moore's criticism seems to be that the comic seems to be more about Batman and the Joker as characters than anything that relates to the world in any real way (The way that Watchmen is about power, V for Vendetta is about fascism etc.), and I can sort of see where he's coming from. The thing is, I do think there's a seed of an idea in the whole premise of the story being that Batman wanting to honestly end the feud between him and Joker through non-violent means and get him sincere help, though that does seem to be at odds with the actual “Killing Joke" plot being pulled on Gordon and Barbara.

19. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Audiobook, 1818/1831*, Mary Shelley) - More like Frankenstein's Monster: The Modern Incel. I'm not the first person to make this observation, but seriously that's what a lot of the Monster's character is. “Waaahhh why don't I have a wife? I DESERVE a wife and you are a horrible person for not making me my own woman! I'm going to murder tons of people to prove what a dick you are Frankenstein!"

This is a good book in the sense that Shelley has some created some very, very strong archetypes in her core characters here (And at only 20 years old too!), but man. For all that people say “The doctor was the real monster!" it really doesn't come across in the original book because most of this is just Victor regretting he created what is little more than a completely unsympathetic serial killer and also the Monster whining that nobody likes him even though he's going around serial killing.

Like I honestly think James Whale did more than anyone to really mine out the most interesting parts of this story with his famous 1931 film adaptation, even if he had to completely change the Doctor and the Monster's respective personalities in the process.

*I think the audiobook version I listened to was based on Shelley's second edition published in 1831, but I'd have to really research this to know for sure.

EDIT: I've cooled a bit on my anti-Monster sentiment in the days after reading this, but I still really do think people are awfully quick to whitewash the Monster of his more troubling aspects and crimes.
Last edited by Raxivace on Fri Jun 05, 2020 12:20 pm, edited 3 times in total.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
Faustus5
Super Poster
Posts: 246
Joined: Sat Jan 10, 2015 3:08 pm

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Faustus5 »

Raxivace wrote:16. 19. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Audiobook, 1818/1831*, Mary Shelley) - More like Frankenstein's Monster: The Modern Incel. [url=https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=frankenstein+mary+shelley+incel]I'm not the first person to make this observation, but seriously that's what a lot of the Monster's character is. “Waaahhh why don't I have a wife? I DESERVE a wife and you are a horrible person for not making me my own woman! I'm going to murder tons of people to prove what a dick you are Frankenstein!"

This is a good book in the sense that Shelley has some created some very, very strong archetypes in her core characters here (And at only 20 years old too!), but man. For all that people say “The doctor was the real monster!" it really doesn't come across in the original book because most of this is just Victor regretting he created what is little more than a completely unsympathetic serial killer and also the Monster whining that nobody likes him even though he's going around serial killing.

Like I honestly think James Whale did more than anyone to really mine out the most interesting parts of this story with his famous 1931 film adaptation, even if he had to completely change the Doctor and the Monster's respective personalities in the process.

*I think the audiobook version I listened to was based on Shelley's second edition published in 1831, but I'd have to really research this to know for sure.
Fun synchronicity: yesterday I just watched "Mary Shelley", the movie based on the influences that lead her to writing her famous novel. And the week before that, I started playing the solo version of the Universal monsters board game, "Horrified".

The movie suggested that her ill treatment by the men in her life was the basis of the monster's bitterness.
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Raxivace »

I didn't dig too deeply into it, but I read some similar claims online. Some went as far as saying that whole novel was an allegory for Mary's marriage with Percy Shelley, with the Monster being a stand-in for Mary and Victor being a stand-in for Percy.

I'm not sure the novel is meant to be that personal of a story though I don't doubt there's at least some influence from Mary's personal life.

There's also this bizarre-ass take I just found online: https://augusta.openrepository.com/bits ... sAllowed=y.
Someone who is clearly a genius wrote:The story of Frankenstein is typically seen as a battle between Victor Frankenstein and the “monster" of the story. However I argue that that the real “monster" of the story is infact Victor Frankenstein who is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and that the “monster" is really just a delusions that Victor uses to cope with the idea that he in fact is the killer of the story. This concept is evident in the fact that no one in the story has ever seen both Victor Frankenstein and the “monster" alive in the same place. The characteristics of the “monster' also point towards the idea that the “monster" could not possibly exist. Even the way that Victor acts throughout the book pointto the idea that he does not really care for the safety of his loved ones. Overall the actions that play out in the story point towards the idea that VictorFrankenstein is the real “monster" of the story.
[laugh]
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Raxivace »

20. The Mystery of the Blue Jar (Audiobook, 1933, Agatha Christie) - Local dumbass Jack Harrington is playing golf one day when he hears a cry of “Murder!". Jack runs toward the source of the cry to find a girl nonchalantly gardening who says she has no idea what Jack is going on about. Jack meets a local doctor who convinces Jack that something supernatural might be afoot… The girl eventually mentions to Jack she's been having a recurring dream about a blue jar, which Jack recognizes as being similar to one his uncle bought. To make a long story short, the doctor and the girl were conning Jack with all this talk of supernatural screams and dreams so they could get this Blue Jar off of him, which turned out to be a priceless Chinese relic or something.

It's a fun little short story with a bit of a predictable twist ending, though I have to say this Jack Harrington fella reminds me of Jimbo's kookier friends from IMDB 2.0, like that Arlon guy.

21. The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb (Audiobook, 1924, Agatha Christie) - The actual mystery plot here about a supposed Egyptian curse is less interesting than the running question of the short story being “Does Hercule Poirot believe in magic or not?". The answer ends up being of course not- when he says he believes in superstition having power, he's talking about the belief in superstition affecting human perception and cognitive abilities rather than anything metaphysical. Still a fun little short though, even if it covers some similar ground as Mystery of the Blue Jar ultimately.

22. The Vampyre (Audiobook, 1819, John Polidori) - Apparently the originator of the vampire story as a specific genre, influencing later works like Dracula. It's still kind of neat today, but mostly as an origin of sorts for later works that would expand upon its ideas like vampires trolling people and such.

This has two interesting connections to stories I posted about earlier. Firstly, it was created during the same writing contest that birthed Shelley's Frankenstein. Also, during The Count of Monte Cristo I mentioned that the Count was accused of being a vampire during the novel. Well, the character the Countess G-- specifically believes he's Lord Ruthven, the vampire character from The Vampyre.

26. A Midsummer Night's Dream (Audiobook, 1595/1596, William Shakespeare) - I've been going through some Ovid off-and-on recently, and after going through the 'Pyramus and Thisbe' story in Metamorphoses and reading that Shakespeare riffs on it in a subplot, I pushed myself into finally checking out Midsummer Night's Dream.

Good stuff. While there's a subplot of about a "Pyramus and Thisbe" play being performed (Which makes me realize that Shakespeare used the play-within-a-play idea more than I realized, between this, Hamlet, and Taming of the Shrew), the whole thing really does kind of read like a parody of the early Metamorphoses stories between characters getting trolled over love, transformed etc., though I guess there's no bloodshed or violent rape here.

23. Tochmarc Emire (AKA The Wooing of Emer, 700's)*
24. Verba Scathaige (AKA Scathach's Words, 700's)*
25. Aided Óenfhir Aífe (AKA The The Tragic Death of Aífe's Only Son, 800's)*
28. Fled Bricrenn (AKA Bricriu's Feast, 700's)*
27. Tïin Bó Cúalnge (AKA The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge, 1391-1401?)*
29. Aided Con Culainn (AKA The Death of Cu Chulainn, 1100's)* - These stories are all selections of Irish mythology, all episodes covering the life of Cu Chulainn, a sort of Irish Achilles. I didn't know very much about him coming in, but I tried to pick a bunch of stories that sort of creates a full narrative from his early days to his death.

The first major story here is Tochmarc Emire, which to simplify things is in two parts. The first part is Cu Chulainn trying to woo a woman called Emire, who according to later stories will become his wife. Here though he's kind of revealed to be a complete idiot compared to her (This podcast really goes into it), which kind of feels modern in a lot of ways, the “idiot hero" idea. Anyways some stuff happens and Cu Chulainn is told to go train under the warrior woman Scathach, a kind of Chiron or Yoda like figure, except a woman. She gives Cu Chulain his legendary weapon the spear “Gae Bolg", and teaches him and only him how to use it. Also they fuck. Then they get attacked by Scathach's enemy Aífe, and Cu Chulain beats her and combat and uh they fuck also. Thing is, our boy Cu gets her pregnant, but tells her that the child can never reveal he's related to Cu Chulainn so Emire doesn't find out.

Anyways then Cu Chulainn returns home to Emire. Honestly this whole second part of the story is unfortunately kind of choppy, and it's a shame because its fairly interesting stuff.

That leads us to Verba Scathaige, which apparently is included in some versions of Tochmarc Emire but not the one I read. Basically it's a poem where Scathach predicts Cu Chulainn's death. Its pretty brief and I dunno why it would have been cut off from Tochmarc Emire, but it adds a bit of a darker undertone I think to what is otherwise lighter tale.

After that we come to Aided Oenfhier Aife- Cu's son (Now called Connla) is grown up and back, and tries to invade Cu's homeland. He can't say his name though because of aforementioned promises, and Cu goes to fight him off not realizing who he is, and kills his own son, his guts coming out in the water. Great job Cu. It's a curious little tale, though it does remind me reading about post-Homeric tales of Odysseus and his son Telegonus, born from Circe. In some versions of the story Telegonus actually kills Odysseus though (Without either realizing who the other is)- I'm not sure if those stories were an influence on these tales of Cu Chulainn, but the similarities are interesting even if who actually gets killed gets switched around.

Next comes Fled Briciren. I actually goofed and read it after Tain Bo Cualinge, but its set before. Basically, this villainous character Briciru decides a bunch of Celtic heroes (Including Cu Chulainn) haven't been trolled enough and decides to host a feast in a new mansion he's constructed and tries to set various characters against each other through various competitions (While their wives have a competition of their own). Curiously, one of the competitions is straight up the Beheading Game that was in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to the point that some scholars say the latter was either based on the former or they share some similar source.

After that is Tïin Bó Cúalnge, which involves Cu Chulainn single-handedly having to fight a war against again an army lead by warrior woman Medb and another Celtic hero in Fergus mac Roich, all fighting over not just cattle but a specific bull that apparently was very fertile. Gotta be honest the English translation of this one was pretty dry, though I'd be curious about revisiting it in a better/more modern translation. Curiously this tale also features a story about Cu Chualainn's childhood and how he got the title "The Hound of Ulster), though strangely its narrated by Fergus.

The last story is Aided Con Culainn, which shows how Cu Chulainn finally died in battle as foreseen by Scathach. Not a whole lot to say about this one.

It was pretty fun going through some stories in a "new" mythology that I didn't know a whole lot about, though I don't feel like I did the stories any real justice here (The translations are sometimes pretty dry, and often vague and not even complete simply because of limited sources available), though I'd be curious to revisit them at some point and learn more about Irish mythology. The most interesting thing about this selection me was how often women were in them, especially as a warriors. Other mythologies have female warriors of course, but they seem prominent here.

*I'm not really confident that I'm getting of the dates on these right, nor am I really sure what to list as an author for these.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
Derived Absurdity
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2799
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2015 5:07 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Derived Absurdity »

Man. When you said you were getting into the classics you weren't kidding.
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: I'm Trying to Get Back into Fiction

Post by Raxivace »

Derived Absurdity wrote:Man. When you said you were getting into the classics you weren't kidding.
Haha yeah. And believe me, there's plenty more to get through!
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2020: "It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy

Post by Raxivace »

30. Medea (431 B.C.E., Euripides) - I watched a film adaptation of this earlier this year, but I think I like the play even better (Though I do appreciate von Trier's attempt to make his version cinematic through emphasizing atmosphere and such). But yeah, Medea herself is a fascinating character, and the play really gives off the idea that this is also the world's most fucked up marriage drama. That's its also ostensibly the “sequel" to the Golden Fleece quest story* really hit me this time too because its, well, weird to have a marital drama (Even a really dark one) as ostensibly a sequel to an epic adventure story.

Like imagine if Marriage Story had a) Been any good and b) been the sequel to a Star Wars movie or something. But yeah good stuff, and was also actually the first Greek tragedy I had ever read. It kind of "fixed" The Argonautica for me too, since knowing more of the context of where Jason and Medea's story puts the entire Golden Fleece quest in a very different light, whereas when I read it in college it just seemed like a collection of random heroics to me and not the prelude to something much darker (And with some good old Dantean ironic punishment at the end to boot!).

I also couldn't help but compare this story with Frankenstein since that's still kind of fresh in my mind- Medea and the Monster are arguably very similar characters even. I found Medea herself far more sympathetic than I did the Monster though despite arguably committing even worse crimes at this play's end, and I've been trying to reason out why I felt this way. In spending a few days thinking about it, I think its because that Medea had way more valid of a grudge against Jason (Really she gave up nearly everything in her life for him and the Golden Fleece quest, only to get thrown away for it), whereas the Monster still just kind of comes off as entitled that he isn't gaining things that nobody is automatically owed (Wife, companionship etc.) and honestly I don't think he tried very hard to get people to like him before going on a serial killing spree.

Also Medea and Frankenstein have nearly the exact same ending scene which is kind of interesting.

*Previously I thought the most famous adaptation of this tale, The Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes, was written before Eurpides' Medea but turns out it was written 100+ years after this.

31. Coriolanus (Audiobook, Sometime between 1605 and 1608, William Shakespeare) - This one of the weirder Shakespearean tragedies, in that it seems very plot driven more than his other plays. We know Caius Marcius (Later Coriolanus) is kind of a huge dick upfront who hates the people he's supposed to protect, tries to run for political office after a successful military action and fails because of the worst PR ever, then later turns on Rome to team up with the invader he was fighting against to begin with (Tullus Aufidius) and starts threatening to burn Rome. His mom talks him out of it though, so Coriolanus backs down and is killed by Aufidius for it.

Its weird that I'm only slightly simplifying what actually happens here, because despite everything in the play revolving around Coriolanus there doesn't seem to be all that much to him (I don't think he even gets a soliloquoy). The most I've seen people suggest is there perhaps being something homoerotic between him and Aufidius but that's about it.

From what I can tell discussions about the play instead of focusing on the characters seem to focus on what Shakespeare might be saying politically. Most of this seems to be about what exactly Shakespeare is saying about populism (There seems to be as much for as against it here), though its perhaps also worth noting that Coriolanus' major tragic flaw is his willingness to make peace with an enemy that ultimately betrays him. Normally I think of "making peace" as a positive quality, though in a political interpretation of the play it perhaps becomes a xenophobic statement to an extent. I say "perhaps" because despite Aufidius being a "traitorous foreigner" he's still well characterized and its not like the Roman characters themselves are without flaws.

It's a good play and like the best of Shakespeare its hard to get a simple message out of it, but unlike the best of Shakespeare it doesn't have quite as much of the notable language as I like from him- though there are some good bits like the "Rome is a body" conversation (It's interesting too when one of the things that turns the people against Coriolanus is his refusal to show off his scars and battle wounds to them- his literal body vs. the "body" of the state).

32. Culhwch and Olwen (11th century to 12th century, Anonymous) - This Welsh story is supposedly the oldest existing Arthurian romance. This follows the story of Kilhwch (Culhwch), who pissed off his step-mother and was cursed so that he would only ever love Olwen, the daughter of a dangerous giant named Yspaddaden Penkawr (Ysbaddaden Bencawr). Kilhwch decides to ride out and find Olwen, but first visits King Arthur to request some help. Arthur sends some of his knights off to help Kilhwch, including Kai (Kay), Bedwyr (Bedivere), Gwalchmei (Gawain), and then like three other randos I don't care as much about.

This initial meeting with Arthur is honestly one of the two weirdest parts of the whole story, since we seem to break off from to the narrative into what almost reads like a historical document of sorts. Like just try reading this section here:
Culhwch and Olwen wrote:"I will tell thee, " said the youth, "I am Kilhwch, the son of Kilydd, the son of Prince Kelyddon, by Goleuddydd, my mother, the daughter of Prince Anlawdd."

"That is true," said Arthur; "thou art my cousin. Whatsoever boon thou mayest ask, thou shalt receive, be it what it may that thy tongue shall name."

"Pledge the truth of Heaven and the faith of thy kingdom thereof."

"I pledge it thee, gladly."

"I crave of thee then, that thou obtain for me Olwen, the daughter of Yspaddaden Penkawr; and this boon I likewise seek at the hands of thy warriors. I seek it from Kai, and Bedwyr, and Greidawl Galldonyd, and Gwythyr the son of Greidawl, and Greid the son of Eri, and Kynddelig Kyvarwydd, and Tathal Twyll Goleu, and Maelwys the son of Baeddan, and Crychwr the son of Nes, and Cubert the son of Daere, and Percos the son of Poch, and Lluber Beuthach, and Corvil Bervach, and Gwynn the son of Nudd, and Edeyrn the son of Nudd, and Gadwy the son of Geraint, and Prince Fflewddur Fflam, and Ruawn Pebyr the son of Dorath, and Bradwen the son of Moren Mynawc, and Moren Mynawc himself, and Dalldav the son of Kimin Côv, and the son of Alun Dyved, and the son of Saidi, and the son of Gwryon, and Uchtryd Ardywad Kad, and Kynwas Curvagyl, and Gwrhyr Gwarthegvras, and Isperyr Ewingath, and Gallcoyt Govynynat, and Duach, and Grathach, and Nerthach, the sons of Gwawrddur Kyrvach (these men came forth from the confines of hell), and Kilydd Canhastyr, and Canastyr Kanllaw, and Cors Cant-Ewin, and Esgeir Gulhwch Govynkawn, and Drustwrn Hayarn, and Glewlwyd Gavaelvawr, and Lloch Llawwynnyawc, and Aunwas Adeiniawc, and Sinnoch the son of Seithved, and Gwennwynwyn the son of Naw, and Bedyw the son of Seithved, and Gobrwy the son of Echel Vorddwyttwll, and Echel Vorddwyttwll himself, and Mael the son of Roycol, and Dadweir Dallpenn, and Garwyli the son of Gwythawc Gwyr, and Gwythawc Gwyr himself, and Gormant the son of Ricca, and Menw the son of Teirgwaedd, and Digon the son of Alar, and Selyf the son of Smoit, and Gusg the son of Atheu, and Nerth the son of Kedarn, and Drudwas the son of Tryffin, and Twrch the son of Perif, and Twrch the son of Annwas, and Iona king of France, and Sel the son of Selgi, and Teregud the son of Iaen, and Sulyen the son of Iaen, and Bradwen the son of Iaen, and Moren the son of Iaen, and Siawn the son of Iaen, and Cradawc the son of Iaen. (They were men of Caerdathal, of Arthur's kindred on his father's side.) Dirmyg the son of Kaw, and Justic the son of Kaw, and Etmic the son of Kaw, and Anghawd the son of Kaw, and Ovan the son of Kaw, and Kelin the son of Kaw, and Connyn the son of Kaw, and Mabsant the son of Kaw, and Gwyngad the son of Kaw, and Llwybyr the son of Kaw, and Coth the son of Kaw, and Meilic the son of Kaw, and Kynwas the son of Kaw, and Ardwyad the son of Kaw, and Ergyryad the son of Kaw, and Neb the son of Kaw, and Gilda the son of Kaw, and Calcas the son of Kaw, and Hueil the son of Kaw (he never yet made a request at the hand of any Lord). And Samson Vinsych, and Taliesin the chief of the bards, and Manawyddan the son of Llyr, and Llary the son of Prince Kasnar, and Ysperni the son of Fflergant king of Armorica, and Saranhon, the son of Glythwyr, and Llawr Eilerw, and Annyanniawc the son of Menw the son of Teirgwaedd, and Gwynn the son of Nwyvre, and Fflam the son of Nwyvre, and Geraint the son of Erbin, and Ermid the son of Erbin, and Dyvel the son of Erbin, and Gwynn the son of Ermid, and Kyndrwyn the son of Ermid, and Hyveidd Unllenn, and Eiddon Vawr Vrydic, and Reidwn Arwy, and Gormant the son of Ricca (Arthur's brother by his mother's side; the Penhynev of Cornwall was his father), and Llawnrodded Varvawc, and Nodawl Varyf Twrch, and Berth the son of Kado, and Rheidwn the son of Beli, and Iscovan Hael, and Iscawin the son of Panon, and Morvran the son of Tegid (no one struck him in the battle of Camlan by reason of his ugliness; all thought he was an auxiliary devil. Hair had he upon him like the hair of a stag). And Sandde Bryd Angel (no one touched him with a spear in the battle of Camlan because of his beauty; all thought he was a ministering angel). And Kynwyl Sant (the third man that escaped from the battle of Camlan, and he was the last who parted from Arthur on Hengroen his horse). And Uchtryd the son of Erim, and Eus the son of Erim, and Henwas Adeinawg the son of Erim, and Henbedestyr the son of Erim, and Sgilti Yscawndroed the son of Erim. (Unto these three men belonged these three qualities,--With Henbedestyr there was not any one who could keep pace, either on horseback or on foot; with Henwas Adeinawg, no four-footed beast could run the distance of an acre, much less could it go beyond it; and as to Sgilti Yscawndroed, when he intended to go upon a message for his Lord, he never sought to find a path, but knowing whither he was to go, if his way lay through a wood he went along the tops of the trees. During his whole life, a blade of reed grass bent not beneath his feet, much less did one ever break, so lightly did he tread.) Teithi Hên the son of Gwynhan (his dominions were swallowed up by the sea, and he himself hardly escaped, and he came to Arthur; and his knife had this peculiarity, that from the time that he came there no haft would ever remain upon it, and owing to this a sickness came over him, and he pined away during the remainder of his life, and of this he died). And Carneddyr the son of Govynyon Hên, and Gwenwynwyn the son of Nav Gyssevin, Arthur's champion, and Llysgadrudd Emys, and Gwrbothu Hên, (uncles unto Arthur were they, his mother's brothers). Kulvanawyd the son of Goryon, and Llenlleawg Wyddel from the headland of Ganion, and Dyvynwal Moel, and Dunard king of the North, Teirnon Twryf Bliant, and Tegvan Gloff, and Tegyr Talgellawg, Gwrdinal the son of Ebrei, and Morgant Hael, Gwystyl the son of Rhun the son of Nwython, and Llwyddeu the son of Nwython, and Gwydre the son of Llwyddeu (Gwenabwy the daughter of [Kaw] was his mother, Hueil his uncle stabbed him, and hatred was between Hueil and Arthur because of the wound). Drem the son of Dremidyd (when the gnat arose in the morning with the sun, he could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen Blathaon in North Britain.) And Eidyol the son of Ner, and Glywyddn Saer (who constructed Ehangwen, Arthur's Hall). Kynyr Keinvarvawc (when he was told he had a son born he said to his wife, 'Damsel, if thy son be mine, his heart will be always cold, and there will be no warmth in his hands; and he will have another peculiarity, if he is my son he will always be stubborn; and he will have another peculiarity, when he carries a burden, whether it be large or small, no one will be able to see it, either before him or at his back; and he will have another peculiarity, no one will be able to resist fire and water so well as he will; and he will have another peculiarity, there will never be a servant or an officer equal. to him'). Henwas, and Henwyneb (an old companion to Arthur). Gwallgoyc (another; when he came to a town, though there were three hundred houses in it, if he wanted anything, he would not let sleep come to the eyes of any one whilst he remained there). Berwyn, the son of Gerenhir, and Paris king of France, and Osla Gyllellvawr (who bore a short broad dagger. When Arthur and his hosts came before a torrent, they would seek for a narrow place where they might pass the water, and would lay the sheathed dagger across the torrent, and it would form a bridge sufficient for the armies of the three Islands of Britain, and of the three islands adjacent, with their spoil). Gwyddawg the son of Menestyr (who slew Kai, and whom Arthur slew, together with his brothers, to revenge Kai). Garanwyn the son of Kai, and Amren the son of Bedwyr, and Ely Amyr, and Rheu Rhwyd Dyrys, and Rhun Rhudwern, and Eli, and Trachmyr (Arthur's chief huntsmen). And Llwyddeu the son of Kelcoed, and Hunabwy the son of Gwryon, and Gwynn Godyvron, and Gweir Datharwenniddawg, and Gweir the son of Cadell the son of Talaryant, and Gweir Gwrhyd Ennwir, and Gweir Paladyr Hir (the uncles of Arthur, the brothers of his mother). The sons of Llwch Llawwynnyawg (from beyond the raging sea). Llenlleawg Wyddel, and Ardderchawg Prydain. Cas the son of Saidi, Gwrvan Gwallt Avwyn, and Gwyllennhin the king of France, and Gwittart the son of Oedd king of Ireland, Garselit Wyddel, Panawr Pen Bagad, and Ffleudor the son of Nav, Gwynnhyvar mayor of Cornwall and Devon (the ninth man that rallied the battle of Camlan). Keli and Kueli, and Gilla Coes Hydd (he would clear three hundred acres at one bound: the chief leaper of Ireland was he). Sol, and Gwadyn Ossol, and Gawdyn Odyeith. (Sol could stand all day upon one foot . Gwadyn Ossol, if he stood upon the top of the highest mountain in the world, it would become a level plain under his feet. Gwadyn Odyeith, the soles of his feet emitted sparks of fire when they struck upon things hard, like the heated mass when drawn out of the forge. He cleared the way for Arthur when he came to any stoppage.) Hirerwm and Hiratrwm. (The day they went on a visit three Cantrevs provided for their entertainment, and they feasted until noon and drank until night, when they went to sleep. And then they devoured the heads of the vermin through hunger, as if they had never eaten anything. When they made a visit they left neither the fat nor the lean, neither the hot nor the cold, the sour nor the sweet, the fresh nor the salt, the boiled nor the raw.) Huarwar the son of Aflawn (who asked Arthur such a boon as would satisfy him. It was the third great plague of Cornwall when he received it. None could get a smile from him but when he was satisfied.) Gware Gwallt Euryn. The two cubs of Gast Rhymi, Gwyddrud and Gwyddneu Astrus. Sugyn the son of Sugnedydd (who would suck up the sea on which were three hundred ships, so as to leave nothing but a dry strand. He was broad-chested). Rhacymwri, the attendant of Arthur (whatever barn he was shown, were there the produce of thirty ploughs within it, he would strike it with an iron flail until the rafters, the beams, and the boards were no better than the small oats in the mow upon the floor of the barn). Dygyflwng, and Anoeth Veidawg. And Hir Eiddyl, and Hir Amreu (they were two attendants of Arthur). And Gwevyl the son of Gwestad (on the day that he was sad, he would let one of his lips drop below his waist, while he turned upon the other like a cap upon his head). Uchtryd Varyf Draws (who spread his red untrimmed beard over the eight-and-forty rafters which were in Arthur's Hall). Elidyr Gyvarwydd. Yskyrdav, the Yscudydd (two attendants of Gwenhywyvar were they. Their feet were swift as their thoughts when bearing a message). Brys the son of Bryssethach (from the Hill of the Black Fernbrake in North Britain). And Grudlwyn Gorr. Bwlch, and Kyfwlch, and Sefwlch, the sons of Cleddyf Kyfwlch, the grandsons of Cleddyf Difwlch. (Their three shields were three gleaming glitterers; their three spears were three pointed piercers; their three swords were three griding gashers; Glas, Glessic, and Gleisad. Their three dogs, Call, Cuall, and Cavall. Their three horses, Hwyrdyddwd, and Drwgdyddwd, and Llwyrdyddwg. Their three wives, Och, and Garym, and Diaspad. Their three grandchildren, Lluched, and Neved, and Eissiwed. Their three daughters, Drwg, and Gwaeth, and Gwaethav Oll. Their three handmaids, Eheubryd the daughter of Kyfwlch, Gorascwrn the daughter of Nerth, Ewaedan the daughter of Kynvelyn Keudawd Pwyll the half-man). Dwnn Diessic Unbenn, Eiladyr the son of Pen Llarcau, Kynedyr Wyllt the son of Hettwn Talaryant, Sawyl Ben Uchel, Gwalchmai the son of Gwyar, Gwalhaved the son of Gwyar, Gwrhyr Gwastawd Ieithoedd (to whom all tongues were known), and Kethcrwm the Priest. Clust the son of Clustveinad (though he were buried seven cubits beneath the earth, he would hear the ant fifty miles off rise from her nest in the morning). Medyr the son of Methredydd (from Gelli Wic he could, in a twinkling, shoot the wren through the two legs upon Esgeir Oervel in Ireland). Gwiawn Llygad Cath (who could cut a haw from the eye of the gnat without hurting him). Ol the son of Olwydd (seven years before he was born his father's swine were carried off, and when he grew up a man he tracked the swine, and brought them back in seven herds). Bedwini the Bishop (who blessed Arthur's meat and drink). For the sake of the golden-chained daughters of this island. For the sake of Gwenhwyvar its chief lady, and Gwennhwyach her sister, and Rathtyeu the only daughter of Clemenhill, and Rhelemon the daughter of Kai, and Tannwen the daughter of Gweir Datharwenîddawg. Gwenn Alarch the daughter of Kynwyl Canbwch. Eurneid the daughter of Clydno Eiddin. Eneuawc the daughter of Bedwyr. Enrydreg the daughter of Tudvathar. Gwennwledyr the daughter of Gwaledyr Kyrvach. Erddudnid the daughter of Tryffin. Eurolwen the daughter of Gwdolwyn Gorr. Teleri the daughter of Peul. Indeg the daughter of Garwy Hir. Morvudd the daughter of Urien Rheged. Gwenllian Deg the majestic maiden. Creiddylad the daughter of Lludd Llaw Ereint. (She was the most splendid maiden in the three Islands of the mighty, and in the three Islands adjacent, and for her Gwythyr the son of Greidawl and Gwynn the son of Nudd fight every first of May until the day of doom.) Ellylw the daughter of Neol Kynn-Crog (she lived three ages). Essyllt Vinwen, and Essyllt Vingul." And all these did Kilhwch son of Kilydd adjure to obtain his boon.

Then said Arthur, "Oh! Chieftain, I have never heard of the maiden of whom thou speakest, nor of her kindred, but I will gladly send messengers in search of her. Give me time to seek her."
Like what the fuck, there's no possible way that anyone could be expected to read that for like the purposes of pleasure. Its just a huge bludgeon of a list out of nowhere- there seem to be some interesting interpretations of it at least, but still. Before this the poem reads like relatively modern literature and then BAM out of nowhere a wall of text gets dropped on you.

There's also the part where Kilhwch and co. actually meets Yspaddaden, who lists his demands before Olwen can be given to them.
Culhwch and Olwen wrote:And the next day they came again to the palace, and they said, "Shoot not at us any more, unless thou desirest such hurt, and harm, and torture as thou now hast, and even more."

"Give me thy daughter, and if thou wilt not give her, thou shalt receive thy death because of her."

"Where is he that seeks my daughter? Come hither where I may see thee." And they placed him a chair face to face with him.

Said Yspaddaden Penkawr, "Is it thou that seekest my daughter?"

"It is I," answered Kilhwch.

"I must have thy pledge that thou wilt not do towards me otherwise than is just, and when I have gotten that which I shall name, my daughter thou shalt have."

"I promise thee that willingly," said Kilhwch, "name what thou wilt."

"I will do so," said he.

"Seest thou yonder vast hill?" "I see it." "I require that it be rooted up, and that the grubbings be burned for manure on the face of the land, and that it be ploughed and sown in one day, and in one day that the grain ripen. And of that wheat I intend to make food and liquor fit for the wedding of thee and my daughter. And all this I require done in one day."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though this be easy for thee, there is yet that which will not be so. No husbandman can till or prepare this land, so wild is it, except Amaethon the son of Don, and he will not come with thee by his own free will, and thou wilt not be able to compel him.

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Govannon the son of Don to come to the headland to rid the iron, he will do no work of his own good will except for a lawful king, and thou wilt not be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get; the two dun oxen of Gwlwlyd, both yoked together, to plough the wild land yonder stoutly. He will not give them of his own free will, and thou wilt not be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get; the yellow and the brindled bull yoked together do I require."

"It will be easy for me to compass this."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get; the two horned oxen, one of which is beyond, and the other this side of the peaked mountain, yoked together in the same plough. And these are Nynniaw and Peibaw, whom God turned into oxen on account of their sins."

"It will be easy for me to compass this."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Seest thou yonder red tilled ground?"

"I see it."

"When first I met the mother of this maiden, nine bushels of flax were sown therein, and none has yet sprung up, neither white nor black; and I have the measure by me still. I require to have the flax to sow in the new land under, that when it grows up it may make a white wimple, for my daughter's head, on the day of thy wedding."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou gets this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Honey that is nine times sweeter than the honey of the virgin swarm, without scum and bees, do I require to make bragget for the feast."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"The vessel of Llwyr the son of Llwyryon, which is of the utmost value. There is no other vessel in the world that can hold this drink. Of his free will thou wilt not get it, and thou canst not compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. The basket of Gwyddneu Garanhir, if the whole world should come together, thrice nine men at a time, the meat that each of them desired would be found within it. I require to eat therefrom on the night that my daughter becomes thy bride. He will give it to no one of his own free will, and thou canst not compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. The horn of Gwlgawd Gododin to serve us with liquor that night. He will not give it of his own free will, and thou wilt not be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. The harp of Teirtu to play to us that night. When a man desires that it should play, it does so of itself, and when he desires that it should cease, it ceases. And this he will not give of his own free will, and thou wilt not be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. The cauldron of Diwrnach Wyddel, the steward of Odgar the son of Aedd, king of Ireland, to boil the meat for thy marriage feast."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. It is needful for me to wash my head, and shave my beard, and I require the tusk of Yskithyrwyn Benbaedd to shave myself withal, neither shall I profit by its use if it be not plucked alive out of his head."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. There is no one in the world that can pluck it out of his head except Odgar the son of Aedd, king of Ireland."

"It will be easy for me to compass this."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. I will not trust any one to keep the tusk except Gado of North Britain. Now the threescore Cantrevs of North Britain are under his sway, and of his own free will he will not come out of his kingdom, and thou wilt not be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. I must spread out my hair in order to shave it, and it will never be spread out unless I have the blood of the jet black sorceress, the daughter of the pure white sorceress, from Pen Nant Govid, on the confines of Hell."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. I will not have the blood unless I have it warm, and no vessels will keep warm the liquid that is put therein except the bottles of Gwyddolwyn Gorr, which preserve the heat of the liquor that is put into them in the east, until they arrive at the west. And he will not give them of his own free will, and thou wilt not be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Some will desire fresh milk, and it will not be possible to have fresh milk for all, unless we have the bottles of Rhinnon Rhin Barnawd, wherein no liquor ever turns sour. And he will not give them of his own free will, and thou wilt not be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Throughout the world there is not a comb or scissors with which I can arrange my hair, on account of its rankness, except the comb and scissors that are between the two ears of Twrch Trwyth, the son of Prince Tared. He will not give them of his own free will, and thou wilt not be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. It will not be possible to hunt Twrch Trwyth without Drudwyn the whelp of Greid, the son of Eri."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Throughout the world there is not a leash that can hold him, except the leash of Cwrs Cant Ewin."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Throughout the world there is no collar that will hold the leash except the collar of Canhastyr Canllaw."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. The chain of Kilydd Canhastyr to fasten the collar to the leash."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Throughout the world there is not a huntsman who can hunt with this dog, except Mabon the son of Modron. He was taken from his mother when three nights old, and it is not known where he now is, nor whether he is living or dead."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Gwynn Mygdwn, the horse of Gweddw, that is as swift as the wave, to carry Mabon the son of Modron to hunt the boar Trwyth. He will not give him of his own free will, and thou wilt not be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Thou wilt not get Mabon, for it is not known where he is, unless thou find Eidoel, his kinsman in blood, the son of Aer. For it would be useless to seek for him. He is his cousin."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Garselit the Gwyddelian is the chief huntsman of Ireland; the Twrch Trwyth can never be hunted without him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. A leash made from the beard of Dissull Varvawc, for that is the only one that can hold those two cubs. And the leash will be of no avail unless it be plucked from his beard while he is alive, and twitched out with wooden tweezers. While he lives he will not suffer this to be done to him, and the leash will be of no use should he be dead, because it will be brittle."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Throughout the world there is no huntsman that can hold those two whelps except Kynedyr Wyllt, the son of Hettwn Glafyrawc; he is nine times more wild than the wildest beast upon the mountains. Him wilt thou never get, neither wilt thou ever get my daughter."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. It is not possible to hunt the boar Trwyth without Gwynn the son of Nudd, whom God has placed over the brood of devils in Annwn, lest they should destroy the present race. He will never be spared thence."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. There is not a horse in the world that can carry Gwynn to hunt the Twrch Trwyth, except Du, the horse of Mor of Oerveddawg."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Until Gilennhin the king of France shall come, the Twrch Trwyth cannot be hunted. It will be unseemly for him to leave his kingdom for thy sake, and he will never come hither."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. The Twrch Trwyth can never be hunted without the son of Alun Dyved; he is well skilled in letting loose the dogs."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. The Twrch Trwyth cannot be hunted unless thou get Aned and Aethlem. They are as swift as the gale of wind, and they were never let loose upon a beast that they did not kill him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get; Arthur and his companions to hunt the Twrch Trwyth. He is a mighty man, and he will not come for thee, neither wilt thou be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this there is yet that which thou wilt not get. The Twrch Trwyth cannot be hunted unless thou get Bwlch, and Kyfwlch [and Sefwlch], the grandsons of Cleddyf Difwlch. Their three shields are three gleaming glitterers Their three spears are three pointed piercers. Their three swords are three griding gashers, Glas, Glessic, and Clersag. Their three dogs, Call, Cuall, and Cavall. Their three horses, Hwyrdydwg, and Drwgdydwg, and Llwyrdydwg. Their three wives, Och, and Garam, and Diaspad. Their three grandchildren, Lluched, and Vyned, and Eissiwed. Their three daughters, Drwg, and Gwaeth, and Gwaethav Oll. Their three handmaids [Eheubryd, the daughter of Kyfwlch; Gorasgwrn, the daughter of Nerth; and Gwaedan, the daughter of Kynvelyn]. These three men shall sound the horn, and all the others shall shout, so that all will think that the sky is falling to the earth."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. The sword of Gwrnach the Giant; he will never be slain except therewith. O his own free will he will not give it, either for a price or as a gift, and thou wilt never be able to compel him."

"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."

"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get. Difficulties shalt thou meet with, and nights without sleep, in seeking this, and if thou obtain it not, neither shalt thou obtain my daughter."

"Horses shall I have, and chivalry; and my lord and kinsman Arthur will obtain for me all these things. And I shall gain thy daughter, and thou shalt lose thy life."

"Go forward. And thou shalt not be chargeable for food or raiment for my daughter while thou art seeking these things; and when thou hast compassed all these marvels, thou shalt have my daughter for thy wife."
Like hot damn it really does seem like it devolves into parody after like the 15th repetition or so. Most of these acts aren't even actually accomplished either, but sidestepped through basically only doing some of the tasks until they find some other guys to just kill Yspaddaden. This leaves Kilhwch and Olwen to get married.

Its a weird little story, even before wrapping your head around all of the additions from later Arthurian stories that are absent here (No Lancelot, no Round Table, no talk of the Holy Grail etc.). One of my favorite parts too is Kai just deciding to fuck off from the quest and even being one of Arthur's knights altogether after Arthur writes a poem about him that, from what I can tell, says little more than "Lol you're a little bitch Kai". Its just such a random addition to the story.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2020: "It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy

Post by Raxivace »

33. Erec and Enide (Around 1170, Chrétien de Troyes) - Apparently the second oldest existing Arthurian romance, this follows the story of the knight Erec and his wife Enide. The first part follows Erec going on an adventure to find out who some random asshole knight that was rude to one of Guinivere's servants was (Later revealed to be named Yder), beating the shit out of him, and also meeting Enide in the process. They fall in love and marry.

Part two begins with Erec's reputation having declined because instead of doing heroic knightly shit he just stays in bed all day with Enide. Enide worries about this, and Erec decides to go on adventures but with Enide instead of any other knights. Most of the rest of part two revolves around various battles with bandits and other knights they involve themselves with. Eventually they return home after Erec's father has died, and King Arthur crowns Erec as a king in his own right.

Its an interesting little story. Erec and Enide's relationship is the most interesting part here, since Erec honestly is kind of a dick to her the whole story. A lot of the story is Enide having something genuinely important to say (Like, for example, “Oh holy shit look Erec there are bandits riding toward us!") and then Erec getting mad that she has spoken without first being spoken to. I think the idea is supposed to be that this is one of Erec's flaws and that we're meant to find Enide as the reasonable one here, though it does make Erec seem kind of dumb at times.

Probably the most interesting part of the story though is the episode of the “Joy in the Court". While traveling through around Erec and Enide hear about a challenge in a nearby Kingdom that seems to kill anyone who fails it. Erec jumps to best it despite the warnings of locals (Including a king), and sets off to the enchanted garden where the "Joy of the Court" is located, only to find the severed heads of knights on pikes.

Turns out the "Joy of the Court" isn't even a monster or dragon or something, but another knight called Maboagrain, who is cursed to be trapped within the magical garden's invisible walls due to a promise made to his wife (Who, strangely, seems to go nameless in the story unless I missed it), guarding her forever until he is defeated in combat. Erec bests Maboagrain however and is able to blow a magical horn freeing the all three of them from the prison of the garden.

What's most curious here is how Maboagrain and his lady are parallels to Erec and Enide. Maboagrain is a highly skilled knight like Erec is, but one who never got to go on adventures due to his devotion to his wife, his skill even becoming perverted into something that traps him. That Erec finds the lady sleeping when he first comes to the garden too makes the whole Joy of the Court scenario recall the initial fears that set Erec and Enide off on adventures in the first place, that Erec's love for Enide had caused him to give up chivalry and adventure. The whole magical garden even seems to become a kind of distorted version of the bedroom Erec and Enide were thought to spend all of their time in, forever trapping Maboagrain, killing knights he "should" be adventuring with instead in the name of dedication to his love. To further drive the parallel home, we even find out later that Maboagrain initially intended served under the court of Erec's father King Lac when he became a knight and the that the woman is even Enide's cousin.

Of course this isn't a cynical story as Maboagrain and his lady are eventually saved from their fate, and in doing you could perhaps even say Erec has resolved his dedication to others alongside his dedication to his Enide, bringing both sides of himself together in harmony.

34. Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Audiobook, between 1607 and early 1608, George Wilkins & William Shakespeare*) - Yeah this doesn't quite work. Everything from the weird incest riddle nonsense that causes Pericles to initially flee his country is strange, to being shipwrecked and winning the hand of a princess in marriage, to her apparently dying in childbirth at sea and Pericles' crew of sailors demanding that he throw her body overboard, to her not actually having died, to the 14 year timeskip in Act IV, to Pericles' daughter Marina being sold into a brothel and all of that nonsense etc. Like there's a lot going on here for a play that still somehow feels so very slight. The only part that really lands for me is the reunion between Pericles and Marina, but even that doesn't quite seem worth the rest of how messy this is for a two hour play.

It seems like in Shakespeare's own day this was the most popular of his plays and I'm not really sure why. Maybe its the sense of adventure with all the sailing and the taboo topics of incest and sex trafficking combined with the strangely happy ending but sheesh.

*The extent of Wilkins' involvement in the writing of this play seems to be debated. From what I can tell online its generally agreed that Wilkins did Acts 1 & 2 whereas Shakespeare did 3 to 5.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2020: "It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy

Post by Raxivace »

Lot of Greeks today.

35. Transformation (Audiobook, 1831, Mary Shelley) - Some asshole guy fails to win a girl's hand in marriage. Later, he notices a shipwreck and going to investigate it finds a strange creature floating to the beach on a treasure chest of sorts. The creature offers the guy the treasure in exchange for magically trading bodies with him for three days. Dude agrees, floats around for longer than three days, and then finds that the creature married the girl the dude was interested in, then they fight or something and switch bodies again. Of the three Shelley stories I've gone through (This, Frankenstein, and The Mortal Immortal) this was easily my least favorite to be honest. Something about it just never grabbed me.

36. Hippolytus (428 BC, Euripides) - Oh boy. Basically the story is about Phaedra being horny for her stepson Hippolytus. He rejects her advances, and instead of just going to horny jail she commits suicide, leaving behind a note falsely accusing Hippolytus of rape. Her husband Theseus (A hero in a lot of myths in his own right) finds her dead body, believes the note and exiles Hippolytus despite multiple people claiming his innocence. While leaving, Hippolytus is mortally injured. Theseus celebrates this fact, and then the gods come down, tell Theseus that there was no rape and he basically had his son killed for no reason, and the dying Hippolytus is dragged in and he makes peace with and forgives his father before dying.

Yeah this is nowhere near as good as Medea. Phaedra is a potentially interesting character with her internal conflict about wanting to boink her stepson, but she leaves halfway through this very short play in favor of the much more straightforward misunderstanding narrative between Theseus and Hippolytus. It's not the worst writing ever or anything, but I liked Medea better if only because of that play did actually manage to generate a lot of understandable sympathy for Medea herself even if she does go on to do arguably the worst thing that someone can.

37. Metamorphoses (Audiobook, 8, Ovid) - This roughly tries to tell the whole history of Greco-Roman mythology, from the creation of the universe until the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. In practice a lot of stuff is elided over and merely alluded, but still. There's still around 250 Greek and Roman myths and stories adapted here, which uh is a hell of a lot for a single narrative. That's a hefty task in its own right, but Ovid brings in the added challenge in specifically focusing on stories of transformation (Hence the name)- usually featuring some or other god getting and mad and spiting someone by changing their form. The way the audiobook version weaves in and out of terribly violent and sexual stories kind of reminds me of INLAND EMPIRE or something like that, in how surreal it feels to experience.

I can also never tell in these Greek and Roman stories just how the people writing them feel about the gods. Like its tough to hear the story of Medusa for example, and to think that the gods aren't the horrible shitheads here, and that Perseus isn't a dickhead himself for beheading her etc. Of course that could just be me bring my modern values onto a version of this story from the year 8, but it really does read like "Yeah for real Medusa got horribly, tragically screwed by those in power through no fault of her own and deserves our full sympathy".

Another weirdly modern part story comes toward the end, with Pythagoras (You may have heard of the Theorem named after him). In the audiobook version at least, I swear to god, he goes on like at least a full 30 minute rant (I didn't actually time it, this may be off slightly) about how vegetarianism is the correct way to live which is just not the kind of thing you expect from old stories like this because holy crap. That's a lot.

Some of this plays like modern dark humor too. Like there's a section during the Trojan War where Ajax and Ulysses have a debate to a panel of judges about who should be rewarded the armor of the dead Achilles. Ajax gives an okay speech about how good a warrior he is, how Ulysses is a coward etc., whereas Ulysses gives a much more elaborate speech about how he's the only reason Achilles was even at Troy to begin with, basically says Ajax is a moron, talks up his strategic accomplishments etc. Its honestly a pleasure to listen to.

The section immediately after Ulysses' speech is finished is titled "Ajax Commits Suicide". That's how savage Ulysses' speech was. [laugh] I guess offing yourself is a transformation in a way too. [laugh]

But yeah this is a hell of an accomplishment even 2000 years later, though one that's tough to interpret as a whole for me. I'd be curious to know if anyone else here has gone through this.

38. Olalla (Audiobook, 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson) - A Scottish soldier recovers from his wounds with a family Spanish former nobles that he befriends. He even falls in love with the daughter Olalla, except they're all vampires? Maybe? Again, another one that just didn't connect with me really.

39. Cligès (Around 1176, Chrétien de Troyes) - Another Arthurian story, this one kind of bifurcated. The first half focuses on Alexander, the son of a Greek emperor who becomes one of King Arthur's knights. He falls in love, gets married etc., but then has to take back the Greek throne from his brother Alis. They actually resolve this peacefully, with Alis allowed to have the throne as long as he has no children and that the throne be guaranteed to eventually go to Alexander's newborn son Cligès.

Anyways years later Alexander dies, Cligès grows up, also becomes a knight under King Arthur, falls in love with a woman named Fenice, has adventures etc. The thing is, Alis is married to Fenice. A plot is hatched to have using cooky potions and magic and such to have Fenice never actually consummate the marriage to Alis, and then she ultimately uses more potions to fake her death (Hence her name) so Cligès can ultimately save and run away with her. Their plot is successful, Alis dies of natural causes, and then Cligès ultimately becomes emperor of Greece.

Fairly straightforward story, fun for what it is (Though not quite as interesting to me as Erec and Enide). Probably the most interesting here are that there are a lot of Greek mythology references (Fenice has a nurse who knows a lot of magic that draws some comparison to Medea for example). The other big point of reference is the Tristan & Iseult story (Interestingly, before these character were directly incorporated into the Arthurian mythos from what I can tell)- some commentary I've read suggests that this is de Troyes "correcting" that story to be more virtuous and happy, while others say those references are meant to cast doubt on how moral and chivalrous these characters really are (Though I'm not sure how such interpretations account for the earlier portions about Alexander).

Kind of wish I had read or seen the Wagner version of Tristan before this now, as it might have clarified this point some contention. From my own ignorant perspective the story read as a straightforward romance, but that may be nothing more than my ignorance after all.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2020: "It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy

Post by Raxivace »

I actually finished these a while back, but when I went to post about these it was that day Pitters' went down and I got annoyed at myself for not copying this into a Word document first. Hopefully this conveys most of my thoughts about these a I remember them.

40. Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution (Audiobook, 1921, Rafael Sabatini) - Andre-Louis Moreau is a conservative lawyer "born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad" in Paris, slightly before the Revolution. His friend Philippe de Vilmorin is an idealist that wants to bring about change in France, and goes to challenge the Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr over his allowing the murder of a peasant. The Marquis, recognizing Philippe as having "“a very dangerous gift of eloquence" that could be used into bringing about Revolution (Which Philippe was probably looking to bring about in some fashion anyways, as he often ranted to Andre-Louis about abuses of power by the aristocracy and such), provokes him into a duel and murders him.* Andre-Louis swears revenge and despite not personally sharing Philippe's values knows enough of his talking points from friendly debates with him and incites a riot, calling himself "Omnes Omnibus", and then flees the city to escape the law.

While fleeing , Andre-Louis has various adventures, becoming a play-write, an actor, a master swordsman, and when he finally returns to Paris he even becomes a politician so he can enact his revenge. He starts turning the aristocracy's perchance for dueling opponents (In reality their political enemies) that had no chance to win against, as he is now a master swordsman. He starts going through several opponents like this until he finally makes his way once again to the Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr. Thing is, Andre-Louis finds out this same Marquis is also his missing biological father in something of a proto-Darth Vader twist.

I say only "something" because its not like these kinds of plot developments were unheard of before this book (I.e. Telegonus and Odysseus, Connla and Cu Chulainn etc.), though against the backdrop of a political revolution does make it more Star Wars-y than Greek or Celtic mythology. I don't know for sure if George Lucas was inspired by this specific novel or by any existing film adaptations of it when creating Star Wars, but I wouldn't be surprised since he did cite a film adaptation of a different Sabatini novel in Captain Blood at some point.
Anyways this plot development leaves our boy Andre-Louis in a bind- he's now caught between his now genuine belief in Revolution and hatred of the ruling class as his once conservative beliefs have now eroded away, and the possibility of committing patricide, and bringing sorrow to his mother who is also still living.

Its a fun adventure story and while I do wish the dilemma I've tried to spoiler tag over was introduced a little earlier, its still a pretty solid. I will say it is perhaps a bit ridiculous how Andre-Louis gets so good at fencing so quickly (He literally just befriends a guy with a library of fencing books and not only quickly masters, and not only quickly melds them all into his own style, but also quickly starts beating fencing masters himself), it does make me wonder how much value there is in criticisms about these kinds of implausibilities of skill. Its not like there aren't other similarly implausible characters we just accept (I.e. Sherlock Holmes and his amazing deductive abilities, postmodern deconstructions of his methods and rationality be damned), and perhaps its to be expected for a story whose premise relies on a single (Fictional) character being the spark that finally sets off the French Revolution.

There seems to be a sequel written sometime later that seems to complicate the fairly romantic view of the Revolution presented here if what I've read online in an accurate indication. One day I'd like to get to it.

*The Marquis offers more justification later on for this murder, saying something along the lines of "Hey if the Revolutionaries were planning to eventually overthrow the aristocrats and kill us all, I'd be a fool not to strike first against anyone who is a direct threat to me and my way of life, putting us on equivalent moral ground". Make of that argument what you will.

41. The Unnameable (Audiobook, 1923, H.P. Lovecraft)
42. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Audiobook, 1927/1943, H.P. Lovecraft)
43. The Silver Key (Audiobook, 1929, H.P. Lovecraft)
44. Through the Gates of the Silver Key (Audiobook, 1934, H.P. Lovecraft & Hoffman Price) - Pretty mixed on these on these Randolph Carter stories. Unnameable seems like the same story as "Statement of Randolph Carter" more or less despite being a sequel of sorts, but written in a way to address general criticisms of Lovecraft's writing.

Dream-Quest just reads like nonsense to me. While ostensibly its a straightforward quest narrative again about Carter, its filled with just so much nonsense jargon that it doesn't really resonate with me in anyway. Instead of feeling mysterious, it just makes the story feel fairly dull to be honest. I appreciate that Lovecraft is trying to demonstrate he can do something other than "OMG SO SCARY I CAN'T EVEN DESCRIBE IT" after poking fun at the criticism in The Unnameable, but he kind of falls flat on his face here IMHO.

Silver Key is about Carter basically being bored with his life after his previous three adventures, as he can no longer use his "Silver Key" to go to Dream Worlds and such. This was probably my favorite of the entire bunch and probably my favorite Lovecraft in general since the melancholy tone comes through well here, but at same time its probably the closest to a general insight on Lovecraft that you can get (If you buy idea that Carter is his "self-insert" anyways) and I think if true that paints the dude in a fairly negative light (Ignoring well-founded racism accusations for a moment). Basically this story really makes me think that Lovecraft's whole notion of cosmic horror wasn't really a sincere endorsement of that "lolz humanity is insignificant in grand scheme of cosmos" talk really, but rather just a retroactive justification for his own dispassion, apathy, and refusal to participate much in society. Like its telling that the basic plot here is Carter leaving his humdrum job for wacky space dream adventures, and its hard to read that as anything but general escapism- the antithesis of Evangelion's "You must not run away" mantra.

Through the Gates of the Silver Key was kind of blah, and more about Carter just doing goofy Dream shit and getting possessed by an alien or something, and didn't leave nearly as much impression on me as the first Silver Key story.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2020: "It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy

Post by Raxivace »

45. The Oval Portrait (1850, Edgar Allan Poe) - A neat little Poe short story. Not much to really say about it, but its a pretty quick read anyways.

46. Dracula (1897, Bram Stoker) - This is the most maddeningly uneven classic novel I have ever read. While I may have thought something like Frankenstein was not quite the story some have suggested, it was at least pretty consistent in the actual story being told even if reasonable people could disagree on how to interpret it. Dracula is a whole different beast (Pun totally intended).

The first 60 or so pages are honestly pretty great. Jonathan Harker is invited to Dracula's Castle, gets weirded out by him, and ends up trapped there as Dracula heads out to England. Classic stuff, sort of spooky still even though the mystery of Dracula is no longer really a thing. And then we switch perspectives.

Once we're done with Harker's adventure we switch to drama about his girlfriend Mina, her friend Lucy, and Lucy's suitors in Arthur Holmwood (Just some generic rich guy, who later becomes Lord Godalming after his father passes away), Quincey Morris (A fucking cowboy from Texas. Seriously.), and Dr. John Seward (A guy who runs an insane asylum, treating a patient there named Renfield who seems to have some connection to Count Dracula). The thing is that long stretches of the novel from this point on are just so god damned boring. We just get long stretches of like fucking nothing happening, as people try to woo Lucy, as Mina wonders where Jonathan is etc. Eventually Lucy gets turned into a vampire herself, and Seward calls in his old professor Van Helsing to deal with this, but everything about this section is just drawn out.

You see the big thing about Dracula is that its written in an "epistolary" style- every chapter is contained of journal entries, letters, telegrams, newspaper articles, transcriptions of phonograph recordings etc. that have been "compiled" together into a narrative. I think this also means we get a lot of kind of pointless fluff though in an attempt to simulate realism. Like Lucy can't just die before becoming vampire, no, we get pages and pages about multiple blood transfusions given to Lucy in a vain attempt to save her, and then her eventual death, and then reaction to her death, and then we finally get reports of children being murdered in town etc. Things do pick up eventually when Lucy becomes this "Bloofer Lady" (Lmao) and is eventually hunted down, but this takes something like 150 pages or so in its own right- over twice as long as Harker section and its already retreading ground from that.

This is also where "epistolary" style really hurts things because a lot of this book feels like "filler" to me- characters writing to each other to explain what they're doing, journal entries having to go "back in time" to explain what characters are doing at different parts, characters having to come up with some bullshit explanation about why or how they're even recording their thoughts (Which makes interesting comparison at least to the "problem" in found footage movies about why characters are even recording everything) etc. This is compounded by additional problem of the fact that this all follows after the initial Harker section, and we essentially have to read characters figure out again that supernatural nonsense is afoot and that vampires are running about, that Dracula is up to no good etc. (Some have defended this by saying the basic idea of a vampire would have been unknown to 1890's audience but I don't buy that, considering we had vampire stories before this like The Vampyre, Carmilla etc. Even in The Count of Monte Cristo its a recurring thing that people think that the title character is suspected of being some kind of vampire.) Except this time Dracula ceases to even be a character for most of the novel that he's named after. Now we only see after-effects of Dracula's deeds, or infer that he must be doing something, or infer that he's shape-shifted into some animal, or characters discuss some strange fellow in town they think was him etc. He has, no joke, maybe 5 lines of dialogue in the entire novel after the initial section and feels like much less of a character.

Even that would be okay though if the actual characters we follow weren't bland as fuck without like any personality. We gets pages and pages of tedious drawn out explanations about basic things from Van Helsing, pages and pages of characters saying how much they like each other, pages and pages of hearing about Mina's purity. Its torturous. And all of the characters read the same too, except for Van Helsing who has broken English to spice things up I guess.

The rants from Renfield are a little better since they're about just some bizarre shit, but his whole character is kind of superfluous in the end. You have to wonder if he wouldn't have been cut out from the novel altogether if more revision had occurred.

There are moments that work (Some of the "Bloofer lady" stuff, the last voyage of the Demeter etc.), but man the book really never matches how consistently good that first part is again. Even the actual killing of Dracula is pretty anticlimatic and done over course of like three pages.

I had high hopes for this but it was pretty disappointing overall.

47. Dracula's Guest (Audiobook, 1914, Bram Stoker) - Probably the deleted first chapter of some form of the original Dracula novel, this is a posthumously published short story about an unidentified Englishman (Wikipedia says he's presumed to be Jonathan Harker though I think the Coppola film adaptation uses this as backstory for Renfield) traveling to visit Dracula, getting caught by a wolf, and saved by a group of hunters sent by Count Dracula. If this was cut its not hard to see why as it doesn't quite add a whole lot to the story- still, it's a fun little bit and kind of keeps the mood of that first 60 pages or so of the proper novel.

Its worth nothing that this supposedly expunged chapter is not the only weirdness surrounding Dracula. as there seems to be other versions of the novel floating around out there. Supposedly the Icelandic version is pretty crazy, and there's also some "pirated" Turkish version of the novel that, among other things, seems to have been the first version to just make straight-up say Dracula is the historical Vlad the Impaler. Despite not being terribly impressed by the "true" version of Stoker's tale I am kind of interested to see these other literary takes on the character.

48. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Audiobook, 1818, Washington Irving) - Pretty brief and fun. Not much to really say about this one either though the Headless Horseman was in this way less than I expected.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2020: "It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy

Post by Raxivace »

49. Insufficient Direction (2002-2004, Moyoco Anno) - A cute autobiographical one-volume manga about the author's marired life with her husband Hideaki Anno of Evangelion fame. Its pretty cute, mostly little comedic bits about what dorks both of them are.

50. The Bottle Imp (Audiobook, 1891, Robert Louis Stevenson) - A sort of Monkey's Paw story about a mysterious bottle with some kind of imp in it. Basically, if you happen to come about someone who owns it, you can buy it off them and the bottle will grant most any wish you have. The catch is that as long as you own the Bottle, your soul is guaranteed to go to hell and to get rid of it you have to sell the bottle for less than you paid for it.

The basic story follows a guy getting the Bottle, selling it off quickly, and then having to buy it back to use its magic to cure his leprosy. The thing is by time he buys it back from a guy, the guy had bought the Bottle for two cents, meaning it can only bought for one cent now. Our hero buys it, and then he and his lover have to use clever economics to find another country with currency of lesser value than America's, as that's the only way they can possibly sell the Bottle for a lower value than a single penny. Eventually they find someone dumb enough to buy the Bottle, and its ultimately a happy ending.

This is probably my second favorite Stevenson story now next to Jekyll & Hyde. I do think its kind of funny to see one of these stories use rules lawyer-y bullshit to get out of these "deal with the devil" type of, uh, deals, though I do have to wonder if relying on exchange rates goes against the purpose of the stories somewhat.

The Wikipedia article for this story also questions if there's an inherent paradox in the premise...
Wikipedia wrote:The premise of the story creates a logical paradox similar to the unexpected hanging paradox. Clearly no rational person would buy it for one cent as this would make it impossible for it to be sold at a loss. However, it follows that no rational person would buy it for two cents either if it is later to be sold only to a rational person for a loss. By backward induction, the bottle cannot be sold for any price in a perfectly rational world. And yet, the actions of the people in the story do not seem particularly unwise.[11]

The story shows that the paradox could be resolved by the existence of certain characters:

Someone who loves the bottle's current owner enough to sacrifice his or her own soul for that person.
Someone who believes he or she is inevitably destined for Hell already.
Someone who believes he or she will never die.
Someone who believes there is someone else willing to make an irrational decision to purchase the bottle.

Since the exchange rates of different currencies can fluctuate with respect to one another, it is also possible that the value of the bottle could increase from one transaction to the next even if the stated price decreases. This leads to an endless staircase-type paradox which would make it possible, in theory, for the bottle to keep getting sold infinitely many times. However, this might be forbidden depending on how the bottle imp interprets the idea of "selling at a loss".
I think the last paragraph in particular here shows the issue with getting too caught up in clever solutions to these kinds of problems, with what is supposed to be a fable to some extent becomes more like a weird riddle or math problem to be solved or something, and not a story.

51. The Song of Roland (Audiobook, Between 1040 and 1115, Author Unknown) - The oldest surviving major work of French literature, this is an epic poem about Charlemagne's paladin Roland (Called "Orlando" in future tales of these goobers) fighting to his death at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. Its mostly Roland getting tricked into doing stupid things, and then a lot of fighting and fighting and Roland going on about how cool his sword Durandal is before getting totally owned in battle and Charlemagne himself having to come in and clean the mess up.

It's interesting to contrast to with something like Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian stories since this puts so much emphasis on a large scale battle (As opposed to Arthur's knights mostly just wandering around and questing and such), and also religion. Not that there isn't a lot of religious talk in Arthurian stories too, but here the fact that Christian paladins are fighting heathens and Muslims and so on feels like it gives the story a more directly propagandist aspect than, say, the Lancelot story I mention below where any religious elements feels almost a secondary part of the setting where the emphasis is on broader themes and emotions.

52. Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart (Around 1177, Chrétien de Troyes & Godefroy de Lagny) - Supposedly this is the first story about Lancelot, though he does get a mention in Erec and Enide and is a minor character in Cligès. Basically Queen Guinevere gets kidnapped, so as a good knight Lancelot goes to save her from this asshole prince Maleagant in another kingdom. Along the way he helps some other people, crosses dangerous bridges, fights in a tournaments, gets kidnapped himself etc. Good stuff, but probably the most straightforward of these de Troyes romances.

You can kind of see the earliest elements of Lancelot's character being, uh, questioned here already. Like early in the story (Well before he's even revealed as Lancelot, which takes a long ass time) he has to ride on a traveling cart into a town. Thing is, "The Cart" is only meant for criminals and such, so him being "The Knight of the Cart" is a huge blow to his reputation and honor for a while and something people hold against him, though its slowly restored through some of the adventuring mentioned above. The other major point to mention here is that he and Guinevere seem really into each other. Later versions of the story mark him having a love affair with Guinevere as the beginning of the end of Camelot (This supposedly the first story to mention Arthur's kingdom as Camelot btw), but this doesn't quite get that far.

Now supposedly de Troyes actually got annoyed with how the Lancelot story was developing as he wrote it (Why exactly is up for debate, though I see people suggest that he found the idea of Lancelot and Guinevere being in love too problematic. Its also worth mentioning here that this seemed to have been a work commissioned for a Marie de Champagne), and this may be why we're told that the the story was finished by some mysterious fellow named Godefroi de Leigni, of whom not much seems to be known.

53. A Christmas Carol (Audiobook, 1843, Charles Dickens) - I think this is my first proper Dickens story. Anyways it seems super close to all of the various film adaptations and such floating out there (Perhaps because the source material is pretty short. This audiobook version for example was only about 3 hours long, which is short enough for a film to straightly adapt without actually losing much if anything), but its an enjoyable Christmas story none the less. Pour one out for alternate timeline Tiny Tim.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
Faustus5
Super Poster
Posts: 246
Joined: Sat Jan 10, 2015 3:08 pm

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2020: "It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy

Post by Faustus5 »

Raxivace wrote:51. The Song of Roland (Audiobook, Between 1040 and 1115, Author Unknown) - The oldest surviving major work of French literature, this is an epic poem about Charlemagne's paladin Roland (Called "Orlando" in future tales of these goobers) fighting to his death at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. Its mostly Roland getting tricked into doing stupid things, and then a lot of fighting and fighting and Roland going on about how cool his sword Durandal is before getting totally owned in battle and Charlemagne himself having to come in and clean the mess up.

It's interesting to contrast to with something like Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian stories since this puts so much emphasis on a large scale battle (As opposed to Arthur's knights mostly just wandering around and questing and such), and also religion. Not that there isn't a lot of religious talk in Arthurian stories too, but here the fact that Christian paladins are fighting heathens and Muslims and so on feels like it gives the story a more directly propagandist aspect than, say, the Lancelot story I mention below where any religious elements feels almost a secondary part of the setting where the emphasis is on broader themes and emotions.
I remember reading this in college around the same time I was eagerly devouring the awesome The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

If it seems like some kind of random non sequitur to even mention this, bear with me.

Jaynes' thesis is that the human race only gradually achieved consciousness (as we understand it) over time, and that persons in older civilizations, even literate ones, were not truly conscious because their brains were not fully integrated. They would interpret many of their own thoughts and ideas as messages from the gods telling them what to do. Part of his evidence for this is that when you read ancient texts like The Iliad, much of the time the gods are openly ordering the characters around and they don't seem to have much of their own personal agency--but this changes over time as the gods "recede" and the consciousness of characters in various stories approaches what we have in modernity.

So when I read The Song of Roland, I was reading it with this filter firmly in mind and it really did strike me at the time that Roland didn't seem to have the kind of consciousness you would encounter in modern writing. I don't recall if he saw himself as being directed by the voices of Yahweh or anything like that, but he did seem more like a marionette or a tumbleweed being pushed along by impersonal forces rather than a man thinking about and calculating his own choices.

You have the story fresher in mind, obviously, and you weren't reading it with this kind of filter. Nonetheless, how did Roland's agency strike you? Did his psychology seem any different than that of a hero being written by a more modern author?
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2020: "It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy

Post by Raxivace »

Interesting question. I'm not familiar with Jaynes' work (I think it got referenced on an episode of Westworld once?), so I dunno how much value my thoughts here will have. I tried to do some brief reading on Wikipedia about it beforehand, but anything I have to say here should be taken with grain of salt obviously.
Faustus5 wrote: Jaynes' thesis is that the human race only gradually achieved consciousness (as we understand it) over time, and that persons in older civilizations, even literate ones, were not truly conscious because their brains were not fully integrated. They would interpret many of their own thoughts and ideas as messages from the gods telling them what to do. Part of his evidence for this is that when you read ancient texts like The Iliad, much of the time the gods are openly ordering the characters around and they don't seem to have much of their own personal agency--but this changes over time as the gods "recede" and the consciousness of characters in various stories approaches what we have in modernity.
I don't think I buy this from this Jaynes fella, at least as far as I understand it. For starters you still have people today that believe some kind of deity (Or vaguely "the universe" or "nature" and so on) tell them what to do or give them "signs" or whatever, and while I personally think their beliefs are silly I don't think its right, factually and morally, to say they're literally less evolved than atheists or whatever. So from the outset I'm suspicious of these claims that even a belief I think is false or incorrect is an indicator of a lack of evolution.

I'd also have to be convinced that even ancient societies (Literate or otherwise, its worth remembering stories like the Iliad originated in oral traditions) thought their own thoughts and ideas literally came from the gods and that stories of divine inspiration or whatever weren't just metaphoric literary device (Much how like how today we can call someone a "lunatic" without literally thinking the Moon drove them crazy). Even if we accepted that ancient epics reflected this belief on how ancient people thought about their own thinking (I'm not sure I accept this to begin with), it still wouldn't follow that therefore that you could generalize how entire peoples were actually thinking (Which really to me seems to be the basis of one of Edward Said's arguments about western views on Orientalism. Of course he was talking about how the West viewed "the East" specifically (And talked about how by flawed Western beliefs like literally every thought a Muslim could potentially have is based on The Quran), but same logic applies here I think). At best, you could maybe say that perhaps its how Homer or any other ancient poet thought, but again what we call "Homer" are stories passed down from who knows how many years of oral tradition anyways before they were written down.

That being said, it sounds like this Jaynes author has misread The Iliad anyways. That entire story revolves around Achilles making a personal decision, which is arguably not only turning point in war itself but by beliefs on classical antiquity perhaps human history as a whole (I.e. Roman beliefs that they were descended from the Aeneas and fleeing Trojans, who eventually lead to birth of Romulus and Remus and so on etc). Does he continue to fight the Trojan War, avenging Patroclus and killing Hektor, dying young in the process but gaining eternal glory? Or does he flee home and live a normal life, but ultimately ending up forgotten? Really a large portion of that story revolves around Achilles sulking in his tent, deciding what to do, which I don't think follows from the notion of an author that literally doesn't think their thoughts are their own. This doesn't sound like "bicameral" mind to me, it sounds like normal introspection. Maybe not to literary depth of like, Hamlet, but its there (And Hamlet invites comparison to stories of Trojan War anyways through various literary allusions).

The gods are such literal entities in The Iliad too that I don't think the view holds up. In the world of those stories, the gods are people you literally go and fight from time to time. If anything, they're representative of a kind of ultimate authority, or perhaps human limitations and the inevitability of death or supremacy of nature (I.e. storms and whatnot) over man given physical form. Just look at Iliad's sister text The Odyssey, where Odysseus struggles against Poseidon's wrath for that entire book, and even after "beating" him and finally returning to Ithaca and saving Penelope from the suitors, the audience still should have it in the back of their mind that his death is prophesied to come "from the sea" (Though specifics of what "Homer" was intending this "death" to be here are likely lost to history. Still, considering what a threat the sea has been to Odysseus through his whole journey I doubt a parallel to Poseidon being a god of the sea a coincidence).

You see similar notion in an even older story like Epic of Gilgamesh, where demi-god Gilgamesh rebels against Babylonian gods like Ishtar/Inanna. He finds his success not in obtaining the plant of immortality and becoming more god-like (After agonizing over not only Enkidu's death, but the fact that he too will die one day. This isn't that far off from similar agonizing of Achilles even if specifics differ and relationship and circumstances between Gil/Enkidu and Achilles/Patroclus are different), but in embracing his human half by recognizing his city of Uruk, the development of mankind's achievement of civilization is his ultimate legacy and a far greater form of "immortality" than what the plant could provide. And I don't think that's the kind of story you write, about humanity's triumph over death not being godlike immortality but enduring human culture and civilization, if bicameral mind hypothesis is true.
So when I read The Song of Roland, I was reading it with this filter firmly in mind and it really did strike me at the time that Roland didn't seem to have the kind of consciousness you would encounter in modern writing. I don't recall if he saw himself as being directed by the voices of Yahweh or anything like that, but he did seem more like a marionette or a tumbleweed being pushed along by impersonal forces rather than a man thinking about and calculating his own choices.

You have the story fresher in mind, obviously, and you weren't reading it with this kind of filter. Nonetheless, how did Roland's agency strike you? Did his psychology seem any different than that of a hero being written by a more modern author?
Since so much of Song of Roland is based around action during a single specific battle, I think the point of comparison would be to modern action stories and not more introspective stories (Even something like Iliad only actually covers a short length of the Trojan War, and spends a lot of time on events other than fighting and battles). Like what it reminds me more of is, I dunno, Saving Private Ryan or something that's also fictionalized telling of an event people believe to be real and also likely serves similar propaganda purposes. There's no great amount of psychological depth in Saving Private Ryan either but I don't think you would therefore take argument that modern humanity is literally only semi-conscious as a result. They're stories that just do not naturally lead to much thought or whatever from the characters.

When I consider Roland as a character, I just see a guy not that different than any kind of other warrior character. He's proud (I.e. his boasting about Durandal. Its worth noting btw that Durandal is often believed to have been forged from the spear used by Hektor of Troy during the Trojan War, which is perhaps foreshadowing for his upcoming death.), but also kind of an idiot as a result. Like I don't think you write something like his tragic flaw of refuse to blow the horn to request assistance of Charlemagne if you're trying to argue "Damn I can't believe God just didn't zap correct thoughts into his head. Thanks for nothing, Big G." (I don't think Christians or theists view things this way). I think point of his not blowing the horn, being tricked by evil stepfather etc., is therefore meant to be read as human flaw of Roland, and not flaw of God or whatever (It wouldn't even make since for Christian propaganda to want to highlight perceived flaws of God or Yahweh or whatever you want to call him).

Like if I were to make any argument about what lack of nuanced psychology in Song of Roland leads to, it would just be thought that whoever wrote this thing just wasn't that interesting in making particularly complex characters. I think he was making action story for propaganda purposes, and I'm not sure much more about literal nature of mankind at the time can be drawn from that.

This is kind of rambly but I hope it answers your question.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2020: "It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy

Post by Raxivace »

54. Whose Body? (Audiobook, 1923, Dorothy L. Sayers) - A pleasant little mystery novel. The actual plot is a bit whatever, but Lord Peter Wimsey is an interesting detective character in not only how self referential he is to mystery genre (I.e. lots of references to Sherlock Holmes, comparing culprit to Moriarty etc.), but also in being a World War I veteran that suffers from PTSD which is kind of a neat spin on these kinds of characters. Like this is almost the backstory for a character that a hardboiled writer like Hammett or Chandler would have a come up with (I'm sure Chandler is rolling over in his grave at this comparison).

Apparently Sayers did a whole host of Wimsey mysteries. Will be interested in checking out more in the future.

55. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Audiobook, 1869-1870, Jules Verne) - A mysterious advanced submarine called the Nautilus is going around the world sinking naval vessels. Three survivors of one such wreck (Having believed themselves to be chasing a sea monster), are taken prisoner aboard the Nautilus. They get roped into the world of the mysterious Captain Nemo of the Nautilus and his many ocean adventures, but eventually plan their escape.

Gotta say I was a bit disappointed in this one. The initial set-up and concluding chapters are good, and I like that the book tries to maintain mystery about Nemo and his motives (Though apparently the sequel novel The Mysterious Island gives more information on his character), but there are long stretches of this book that are just kind of boring. Like a lot of this is just the main trio of main character Arronax, his manservant Conseil, and raging Canadian harpooner Ned Land (lol at everything about this last guy) just kind of dorking around underwater, arguing about sealife, or arguing about when to escape from Nemo. And unfortunately those four are the only real characters in the novel for like 95% of it. Arronax's Stockholm Syndrome about Nemo and life on the Nautilus is kind of interesting and makes enough sense for the character (Since his background is of a natural scientist who studies the sea, and an advanced submarine like the Nautilus gives him access to untold mountains of information), but he's also the only guy that rises to two dimensions of a character. Conseil really is just a manservant with no real desires of his own, Ned Land is a bizarre caricature, and well Nemo is intentionally written as a cipher of sorts it seems. Between that and the long stretches of nothing really happening, this was a bit of a struggle at times.

Honestly Anno pulled more out of this story for his loose adaptation in his anime Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water than I really anticipated (And did it better IMO, even with the weakness of the Island/Africa arcs thrown in). Sure, he did change a fair amount (And seemed to use Miyazaki's film Castle in the Sky as his other main inspiration particularly with Jean and Nadia being main characters instead of Verne's novel trio of Arronax, Conseil, and Ned Land), but even stuff like Atlantis and the visit to the Antarctic have actual basis here. The Atlantis thing gets used for waaaaayyyyy different reason in Nadia, but still. Anno also gives crew of Nautilus far more characterization than Verne too, which kind of surprised me. I suspect Anno is also pulling from sequel novel Mysterious Island as well, but I need to read that one day still.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2021

Post by Raxivace »

Since this thread doesn't get a huge amount of traffic, I'll just keep posting in this one for time being. Also bah, it took me too long to really get this going so again I'm not giving some of these attention they may deserve (Particularly Gatsby).

1. The Reluctant Dragon (Audiobook, 1898, Kenneth Graham) - A dragon is in a cave just kind of chilling out, and dragonslayer St. George is tasked with dealing with him. The dragon is a nice dude that just wants to do poetry and such though, meaning St. George can't just kill him to deal with the town's fear of him.

Its a cute little children's short story. I had seen the animated Disney adaptation before, though Disney changes St. George into a old man knight character named Sir Giles- I'm guessing this is to remove any kind of religious connotations from the story.

2. Notes (1999, Kinoko Nasu) - A weird short story about a post-apocalyptic Earth and Angels and such on it. This seems to be the genesis of some of the ideas Nasu would use in his later visual novels, though I think those are way more developed than this.

3. The Great Gatsby (1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald) - I feel like this is one of those books that everybody except me read this in high school (Catcher in the Rye perhaps being another major one). I'm glad I took the time to finally read it myself since it really is an excellent little drama (Love the whole kind of sad nostalgia thing it has going), though I'm not sure I have anything to really add to discussions about it.

4. The Overcoat (Audiobook, 1842, Nikolai Gogol) - A poor schmuck named Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin just wants to do his job as a copyist, but some assholes at work make fun of him for having a shitty overcoat. He decides to get a new one and through a bonus from work is eventually able to get a nice one made for himself. On the way home one night the coat is stolen from him, and none of the authorities, including a general, help him for various reasons. Akaky dies cursing this general, and then comes back as a ghost and haunts him while demanding an overcoat.

Its an interesting little story, though really this kind of depressing thing is what I've imagined most Russian fiction is like.

5. Electra (Mid-410's B.C., Euripides) - I really wish I had read Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy before this, because this not only assumes some general backstory that the Oresteia apparently dramatizes, academics also argue that Electra may something of a parody of part of that trilogy.

Anyways Wikipedia does of a pretty decent summary of the relevant backstory here from what I can tell:
Wikipedia wrote:Years before the start of the play, near the start of the Trojan War, the Greek general Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia in order to appease the goddess Artemis. While his sacrifice allowed the Greek army to set sail for Troy, it led to a deep resentment in his wife, Clytemnestra. Upon Agamemnon's return from the Trojan War ten years later, Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus murdered him.
This sets the stage for this play, where Electra and her newly-returned brother Orestes seek revenge against their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. I'm assuming this basic story (Whether Euripides' telling or someone else's) is where the "Electra complex" finds its etymological origins, since you can sort of see the subtext here with basic idea of daughter seeking revenge against her mother for the murder of her father (Even if Agamemnon, from not only that backstory but what I remember of the Iliad and such, was not exactly the greatest of dudes to begin with). Its decent story on par with Hippolytus but I don't really find it quite as evocative as Medea. I think Jimbo said Medea was probably Euripides' best or only masterpiece, and I can kind of see what he means since neither Hippolytus or Electra quite as the punch or moral complexity that Medea did- ending of Electra after the murder of the mother finally happens is a bit whatever.

Probably the weirdest part of Electra worth mentioning though is that in the ending there's some kind of weird aside from the Dioscuri about how Helen of Troy wasn't really kidnapped by the Trojans, but what the Trojans really took was uh, some kind of clone or "image of Helen" sent by Zeus who wanted "to cause strife and killing around mortals" as a part of some troll job? And that the real Helen was hidden somewhere else in Egypt?

Its odd for a lot of reasons- I'm not sure how relevant it is to the actual story of Electra (Unless you want to argue point of the story is how events that shape us go back far in complicated ways. If Zeus doesn't create fake Helen, Agamemnon doesn't have to sail to Troy and sacrifice his daughter, meaning he doesn't get murdered by Clytemnestra, meaning Electra doesn't have to seek revenge etc.), but that's such a strange way to express that. The last of these Euripides plays that I have in this collection I bought seems to straight be called "Helen" and about her, so hopefully that expands on this kind of odd interpretation of the Trojan War whenever I get to that.

6. The Queen of Spades (Audiobook, 1833/1834, Alexander Pushkin) - Some weird fable about gambling with (Maybe?) a ghost trolling a guy at the end. I didn't quite get what this was going for, but from now on this is how I presume all of Jimbo's gambling happens. I'd like to revisit this at some point in the future at least.

7. God Sees the Truth, but Waits (Audiobook, 1872, Leo Tolstoy) - A man Aksyonov is falsely accused of a murder, and sits in a Siberian prison for 26 years as a result. He finds religion while waiting those 26 years (Where's he beaten and so on.), until eventually the man who framed him is sent to the prison for an unrelated crime. The man tries to escape the prison, and Aksyonov does not report him to the authorities. The man returns, and begs forgiveness for framing him for murder. Akysonov does so, and then soon dies in prison.

It's a decent short story and I think my first Tolstoy, but the Christian moralism was a bit much for me, even compared to some of this other stuff I've been reading.

Also what's with these Russian stories having weird supernatural elements? Even Askyonov forgiving the guy and immediately having his wish for death granted comes off fantastical- plus his wife earlier in the story basically has a prophecy of him having gray hair matches his hair going gray in prison.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2021

Post by Raxivace »

8. The Phantom of the Opera (Audiobook,1909-1910, Gaston Leroux) - Yeah I wasn't super captivated by this one, and can't help but feel that the 1925 silent film did this story better. Leroux's actual novel just seems to drag on and on and on, as they have to establish the mystery of the "O.G." (lol) and Christine's relationship to this figure, to then the Phantom's actual character and the more thriller elements and so on. In a way its similar to the "problem" of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde being a mystery that basically everyone knows the answer to (In addition to also being a shorter, snappier novel), so I dunno that I can say its an objective flaw with the book really because its not like its Leroux's fault I watched the movie adaptation that released 15ish years after his novel.

Me not being super into Phantom of the Opera does make me wonder how much the reverence of a lot of these gothic horror novels isn't because of film adaptations keeping the characters in the public consciousness (Frankenstein perhaps being the exception to this theory since its still nearly a century older than the novels it gets often grouped with). Like it really makes me wonder what a world where Dracula didn't get even a single film version would look like. Would it still be loved? Would our collective understanding of the "vampire mythos" be different? Would people be more critical of the novel?

In the case of Phantom specifically, there is also the actual opera adaptation that people to like too, and I'm not personally familiar with it. Perhaps that is also better than the novel.

9. Yvain: The Knight With the Lion (Around 1180, Chrétien de Troyes) - The basic story here revolves around Yvain, a knight who kills some other asshole knight and then falls in love with his widow. Yvain eventually gets the widow to marry him, and then goes off adventuring for a while- for too long in fact. The new wife rightfully gets pissed that her new husband essentially abandoned her. Yvain feels bad about this, succumbs to grief but ultimately is cured of it, and then goes on more adventures to figure out what to do next. He rescues a lion from a dragon and gains a new lion buddy who fights with him, fights a giant at point, saves some maidens, and even battles a pair of demons. Yvain eventually meets up with his wife again and they make up.

Its similar to the Lancelot story in being more straightforward than either Cliges or the Erec story, though I think this one ends up being really more focused than any of the previous stories and is probably the best of them as a result (Though I think Erec still had the best examination of conflict between chivalry and love and such of the bunch).
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2021

Post by Raxivace »

10. Helen (412 B.C.E., Euripides) – I thought this have more information on Euripides’ weird take on Helen of Troy (What with the weird ghostly crisis actor thing), but it doesn’t really. Basically, this play features Helen as a prisoner in Egypt, her husband Menelaus happens to crash land there, and together they plot Helen’s escape. And by “together” I mean its mostly Helen plotting her escape and Menelaus helps a bit. They succeed. It’s pretty straightforward, but it did make me want to go back and read the entirety of The Iliad.

11. To Sharks (2021, Stephen Fishbach) – A former reality show winner named Kent Duvall makes an ass of himself at a charity event featuring other reality stars, and gets photographed making out with another former reality show contestant. He gets blackmailed by a fan over these photographs, as in all great stories, into a game of Wii Boxing. The story ends with Duvall's wife finding out anyways that he cheated on her and Duvall plans to cheat again.

It's a nice little story about ephemerality of fame in world of reality television, and how without proper expectations it can go to your head. Writer Fishbach himself is a former Survivor contestant (Though unlike his fictional character Kent winning a season and trying to recapture the glory years later, Fishbach failed in a legendarily spectacular fashion right at the finish line of his first season.), and I have little doubt To Sharks is inspired by more than a few people he's known over the years (And honestly the nature of the story doesn't at all sound far off from how other reality contestants have described these charity auction events over the years). I really enjoyed it.

12. The Iliad (Approximately 8th century B.C.E, Homer) – So I read the entirety of The Iliad. For a class in college, we read most of an abridged version (Which was based on Stanley Lomdardo's translation), but this was my first time through the whole thing (I used the Robert Fagles translation this time for those wondering about that). Not that one of the foundational texts of Western civilization sing its praises like a muse, but man its cool and good. This is easily a superior war story than stuff like Song of Roland or Tain Bo Cualinge, as much as I enjoyed the latter.

I think what really makes the story work is honestly the ambivalent tone from "Homer", that from what I can tell emerges from both exciting battles that are also undercut and tempered by sad or ignoble details. Dudes don't just die (And often in ignoble ways like a spear through a buttock), they're also the son of so-and-so, a father still waiting to pass their wealth onto an only child that now will never return home. And like christ, every rando's death is like this.

Hector returning to Troy in book 6 to see his wife and child and wondering just what the hell is going to happen to them once Troy falls is particularly one of the sadder, more human things I've seen in an ancient story like this. The actual end of the epic too where Priam begs Achilles for the corpse of slain Hector too is just rending stuff.

What also I think contributes to this is how no one side is really completely glamorized or demonized (Which perhaps stands in contrast to The Aeneid). As much as Hector is painted as a tragic hero or whatever, he makes several foolish decisions through the book (Ignoring warning from the gods with the whole "Are you going to fight for fucking birds or fight for your city?" thing, that he even went out to fight Achilles at the end etc.), and I gotta wonder if him being described as "no man in mercy, not in the horror of battle" in Book 24 isn't meant as an ironic contrast to what finally humanizes Achilles being able to show empathy to his enemy Priam (Itself a kind of mercy, I guess).

Of course even the Greeks themselves are complicated. I think the violence of their side is genuinely discussed at this point (The book where Odysseus and Diomedes go on their night raid being a great example. And really that whole book is just a fantastic little short story in its own right) and certainly demonized in stories like The Aeneid or Dante's Inferno, and there's something to be said about whether taking back Helen is really all that noble of a collective motive (Though its often forgotten that Paris stole a lot of treasure alongside her as well). Still its hard not to feel for individual soldiers as they're killed off but "shining" Hector, and honestly even Achilles initial conflict with Agamemnon might be less whiny and carry different significance with modern news stories about exploited labor and such on the mind.

Also the gods in The Iliad are hilariously petty. Like just awful people. That leads me to thinking that in stuff like this and in Ovid's Metamorphoses that they really are intended to read as assholes you probably need to appease at times to get anything done in life, and not entities to worship because they're like perfect or whatever. Ovid may push the negative qualities even further by more or less making them outright villainous but its not like basis isn't there in Homer already (Though knowing that Poseidon supported the Greeks during the Trojan War makes me wonder if The Odyssey will read differently to me now).
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2021

Post by Raxivace »

13. Works and Days (700ish B.C.E., Hesiod) - Hesiod's account of basically how his brother is a lazy asshole that doesn't work. The whole thing really is Hesiod trying to convince this guy of the virtues of farming, how to farm, how contributing to his community who contributes to him helps everyone co-exist etc. We should all become farmers really, and change the name of this website to Farmer's Place: A Place for Farmers to Hangout Online (And discuss farming).

14. Theogony (700ish B.C.E., Hesiod) - Hesiod's account of the creation of the universe and the gods and such in Greek mythology. Its neat of course and was probably main influence on beginning portion of Ovid's Metamorphoses, but tbh I feel like Ovid did it better.

15. The Shield of Herakles (650ish B.C.E.?, Hesiod?) - This is the weirdest of the three stories attributed to Hesiod (There's some debate about whether he actually wrote this or not though) since its the closest to being an action/adventure tale. Ostensibly this is about Heracles fighting some asshole son of Ares, but really most of the focus seems to be on the elaborate design on Heracles' shield that depicts various historical events and characters of Greek mythology. Its very similar to the section in The Iliad about Achilles' shield, but well the Achilles one seems much more mysterious to me. Heracles' seems to be pretty straightforward since it describes more recognizable events.

16. The Invisible Man (Audiobook, 1897, H.G. Wells) - Really solid little story, that holds up better than Dracula from the same year I think. Ray Bradbury described Wells' writing style as "paranoid" once and I can't really think of a better description.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2021

Post by Raxivace »

17. Fahrenheit 451 (1953, Ray Bradbury) - Pretty interesting book. For a while now I've heard the debates about whether this is really a book about censorship (Stories about Bradbury insisting it isn't to a group of college students or something are common online), but having read the novel I sort of see why Bradbury might have insisted it wasn't- or at least felt that censorship was only part of the point. I really do think he was trying to go after anti-intellectualism in general, of which censorship only plays a part in. Like in the world of Bradbury's novel, the book burning is less something that the government imposes from the top down but something people themselves bring about through their totally apathy and disdain toward challenging or potentially offensive ideas. Which is, you know, probably not a good thing for any society to have.

The stuff in the novel about how complaints from "minority groups" leading to self-censorship of ideas and such which eventually paved way for dictatorship I think can seem a bit slippery slope-ish when applied to the real world, but it helps to remember that what Bradbury was responding to was McCarthyism where simply being suspected of Communism in certain industries such as Hollywood was enough to ruin lives (Not that actually being a Communist or having sympathies with Communism should have been a death knell against someone living in a supposedly free society that values free thought to begin with, mind you).
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
User avatar
Raxivace
Ultimate Poster
Posts: 2829
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:35 am

Re: Raxivace Reads in 2021

Post by Raxivace »

18. Perceval: The Story of the Grail (Sometime between 1180's and 1190's, Chrétien de Troyes) - The last of these Arthurian stories by de Troyes. This seems to be the model for the "Holy Grail" quest of later King Arthur stories would use, though interestingly the "Grail" of the title is not actually referred to as the Holy Grail here. Same with the "bleeding lance"- later stories would make this the "Lance of Longinus" (Which makes a curious sort of connection with Evangelion come to think of it), but in this original story its just a weird lance that eternally bleeds from its tip. Both the Lance and the Grail are a part of the mysterious episode with the Fisher King here, though apparently there are arguments that while these later elements were Christianized, and perhaps they actually originate from Irish mythology (Curious how Irish/Celtic mythology keeps coming up with these King Arthur stories. The tension between pagan and Christian seems like a key aspect of these stories, really).

The actual plot largely follows Perceval being a wild forest child who wanders around a bunch and kills people until he more or less bullies his way into being one of King Arthur's knights, though the main drama of this piece seems to revolve that Fisher King episode. While staying in his abode, Perceval sees the Grail and Lance being carried about but does not ask what the heck they are. This is apparently terrible, as doing so would have somehow cured the Fisher King of some injuries he suffered (????), but honestly I'm kind of lost of what exactly this whole the great sin here is supposed to be. Like its not exactly hard to imagine it being against knightly virtue or whatever to just fucking pry into other people's business for no reason. Christianizing these objects provides somewhat of an explanation I guess, but its really mysterious here in the original.

There's also a parallel plot about Gawain fighting to restore his honor and getting trolled by some woman. Its kind of amusing in its own right but its an awfully large digression away from Perceval and his woes about the Grail and such.

This story is also unfinished by the way (Despite being the longest of these Arthurian stories de Troyes wrote even in its uncompleted form IIRC), which only makes the strange aspects even stranger without any real conclusion.

19. The Three Musketeers (1844, Alexandre Dumas) - Dumas' classic tale of four Musketeers. I do kind of wish I had read this before The Count of Monte Cristo because I do think that is easily the better novel. Three Musketeers is a very fun book, however I feel like its comparatively lacking not only in character/theme, but honestly the general plotting I feel like was more engaging with TCoMC with its slowburn revenge-fest.

Still, its not to say Three Musketeers was bad or anything. I particularly like the beginning of the novel which almost feels like a parody of swashbuckling stories- for real, these characters are almost looking for excuses to draw swords on each other. A guy said my ugly horse was in fact ugly? It's time to duel. Oh man that dude bumped into me in the hallway? Better fight him. Some fiend cheated at tennis????!!!!!!!??? That bastard better be ready to die. Really all these dudes are hotheated jackasses and that's the best part of seeing them dick around in 17th century France.

That's all good fun, but still once the story becomes a much more serious hunt for Milady de Winter...I dunno. It doesn't seem to have quite the same energy as the opening bits. Milady is a fun villain (Particularly in the long section of the book about her escape culminating in the assassination of Buckingham by some schmuck she's seduced. This whole sequence is easily highlight of second half or so of the novel), and its interesting to see a proto-femme fatale in action, but the middle portion between that and the beginning of the book doesn't quite have as much interest. Also the actual defeat of her really reminded me of Dracula's ending tbh- everyone just finally tracks her down and, without anyone to manipulate into killing her, easily captures and executes her in just a few pages. Its not quite as anti-climatic as Dracula's ending but the comparison I thought was interesting.

I'm still really curious about various sequels and such to Three Musketeers. From how it sounds, those books complicate the characters/politics as the characters are aged an additional thirty years across the later books, and I'm definitely interested to see what exactly the long term story does to affect these them (And honestly it might address some issues I had here if Three Musketeers is more setup than anything).

Fun book, fun archetypes, but Monte Cristo is still Dumas' masterpiece in my eyes.

20. Pride and Prejudice (Audiobook, 1813, Jane Austen) - I know very little about classical romance literature but stepping into it with this, I enjoyed it quite a bit- particularly any of the scenes between Lizzy and Darcy. Their bickering and such was quite fun, especially because (And I suspect most great romance is written this way) the real meat of the story becomes about the obstacle of the romance as this is where the themes tend to really be buried, excavated, and explored. Here what's explored are issues of class differences and snobbery that results, gender expectations, jumping to conclusions and bias (Well that's kind of in the title of the book I guess) etc. Even on just a superficial level though its an entertaining story.

Really my only complaint about the book is that I went with the audiobook version. The various family members and dynamics are just complicated enough that I feel like reading a regular pages where you can easily go back and forth would have made that easier to follow. In audiobook format anyways it was hard for me to sometimes make sense of which of Lizzie's sisters was which and so on, and that kind of matters when the drama of the book's ending revolves around one of them getting married off to that asshole Wickham. I definitely wanted to revisit this story at some point anyways, but when I do it will likely be in paperback form so I can really dig into it properly.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
Post Reply