My Bible
>>24115479Try reading serious literature for a change.
Why does midwits like this book so much?
>>24115863Everything is midwit literature according to this board y'all niggas are the worst
>>24115479>40 page digressions are deep and not boring and pointless in the slightest
>>24115479mine too, convinced everyone potshotting hasn't read it
>>24115479Get thee to a whale oil fishery.
How does this correlates to Bible by any chance? It's just whale novel full of hidden meanings to the details anyways.
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, for me.>dedicated it to his pipeComfy.
>>24115479Melville would want the bible to be that for you, but I agree that it’s great.>>24115863It’s the opposite, this book is the ultimate midwit repellent, they literally cannot into it because it’s impossible to enjoy this book if you read Literature only for plot (this is what midwits do because they have the intellectual capacity to understand language more complex than genre fiction but not enough to actually interpret anything from it non-literally) rather than for beauty/form and theme. Because it works in symbol and metaphor it’s also poison for autists, despite being filled with Melville’s own autism.It’s the perfect filter because it’s not that challenging a read, so most adults who read any books have the capacity to get through it, but in order to actually enjoy it you can’t have an iq below 120.Reminder that if you read literature for only plot you should stick to pulp fiction and chicklit.>>24115874There aren’t even any chapters that long>they are deep and not boringCorrect they are also beautiful and enlightening
>>24117745Also I should add that the short chapters help to make it an early filter, nobody is struggling with Moby Dick because of a short attention span. It’s only going to be because of spiritual or intellectual incapacity.
>>24117745>reading STORIES for the PLOT means you are a midwitYou and the fellow Dick-lovers are so retarded you can't even find the section of the library commensurate with your interests. Instead, you demand ham and egg attempts at philosophy to be dropped into everything else before it may become a classic.Moby Dick's frequent digressions are a weakness and a hindrance. Yes, a weakness. They show Melville has literally no competence when it comes to characterisation.Homer didn't force Achilles to start speaking to the reader and lecture us on what pride means to him. Characters should be revealed, not explained. Achilles dealt with circumstances, desires and ideals in his own manner as they came. His moments of reflection are poignant reiterations of himself that led him to new impulses, not dull, remote expositions. They happen in real time - in the chronology of the story. Not some weird alternative dimension inside the narrator's daydreams.Stop thinking that you at least have the intellectual high ground in this debate. You are just a boring moron with poor taste.
>>24117791Reading stories purely for plot does make you a midwit>there are no digressions in the IliadHave you even read it, it contains the most famous extended digression in literature?>reddit spacingOh I guess not, just a wannabe-trad midwit
>>24117793Plot encompasses the deliberations of the characters. Characters make decisions. This is when they must weigh up options, having regard for their outlook on things. This is something Melville does not do. He just writes dozens of pages of bland, intermitting nonsense. Ishmael wants to go on a boat on page 1. On page 100, he finally gets on one. There are no relevant thoughts in between, just pointless additions.If you are referring to the list of boats, it's got nothing to do with the point we are discussing.Someone can help you with the reddit spacing jpeg
>>24117791I didn’t say that plot didn’t matter, I said that MD filters midwits because midwits only care about plot and not actually about anything else. His digressions work with his style but I agree that it wouldn’t work everywhere, it’s not something he employs in all his fiction because it wouldn’t be appropriate everywhere. I dont think Melville peaked this form of digression either, Joyce did so better, but that doesn’t change that this book is beautiful>melville spells out all the themes with philosophy and nothing is left unsaidThis is a very poor and frankly lazy reading of Moby-dick, Ishmael might spell out his ideas, but that would be part of the point, the book about the varied and often mutual incompatible perspectives people have on reality is still stuck within the supposed author’s perspective. Ishmael is himself not totally reliable as a source of truth, he goes along with the hunt too. >comparison with an orally composed poem that was written in an entirely different contextThis kind of comparison is a little pseudy, and again, has to miss the point in order to attack Melville by comparison.At any rate, to see the effect this book has on midwits you only need to read the goodreads reviews of it. >claiming intellectual high groundLike you’re doing over Nabokov or Borges?>>24117793Don’t be immature
>>24117800The guy you’re replying to here is intellectually dishonest and clearly shitposting but you’re either doing the same or you really are a midwit > This is something Melville does not do. He just writes dozens of pages of bland, intermitting nonsense. Ishmael wants to go on a boat on page 1. On page 100, he finally gets on one. There are no relevant thoughts in between, just pointless additionsHave you even read the book? It’s not a pointless addition that Ishmael goes on a specific (eventually doomed) voyage because the pagan idol of his newly made savage friend (itself strange and demonstrative of ishmael’s unusual behaviour) tells them to pick that one. You really sound like a midwit too and do the exact same thing that over confident midwits do when they get upset by this book, they declare a void of meaning or significance in a space rich with it because they lacked the will or capacity to see what was there.
>>24117829>It’s not a pointless addition that Ishmael goes on a specific (eventually doomed) voyage because the pagan idol of his newly made savage friend (itself strange and demonstrative of ishmael’s unusual behaviour) tells them to pick that one.Great, so?
>>24117840This doesn’t indicate anything to you about ishmael’s character? His susceptibility to outside influences that would perhaps not be shared by others? It doesn’t give you pause to compare with other characters in the book, particularly Starbuck’s attempts at resistance to Ahab’s will?This is without getting into the wider point Melville may be making about the relative safety of Christianity to pagan faiths and just focusing on the character stuff you want to address. Again, you seem, like so many people who deride this book, not to have actually read it or attempted to engage with it at all, but have decided that it must be bad anyway because of broadstroke descriptions of its contents and style. Either you are doing this out of spite, which is very immature, or you’re doing it because you read the book but couldn’t understand any implication or subtext, which would mean that you really are a midwit (at best). The necessity for you to bring up the Iliad speaks to it being the former, because precocious teenage boys love to invoke classical literature at any opportunity, so there is at least hope that you’ll grow out of this attitude like the rest of us did.
>>24117902You mean, something is revealed when Melville doesn't digress?
>>24117910Anon, you just admitted that you were lying here >>24117800. Which makes it seem even more like you haven’t read the book. Much is revealed by the digressions as well about Ishmael’s character, his own monomanias. Maybe you find it too tendentious, a quibble that would ultimately be stylistic rather than substantive, but trying to claim that there’s nothing there is pathetic. You could also be upset that the book isn’t just 100% character study, which is an insane dogma of what literature “should be”, and I have no idea where it would stem from.Arguing in bad faith is one thing but it’s pretty embarrassing to essentially admit that you’re a liar as a gotcha. You want to substitute some basic pithy wit for depth and it doesn’t work here like it does in your English classroom.
My bible>>24119168Sell me on this
>>24119236It's often called the Brazilian Ulysses. The current available english translation is trash though, and the book is very specific in it's use of slang. They're working on a new translation now, working title Vastlands: The Crossing, by Alison Entrekin due to release in 2026. Maybe if it's good some foreigners will actually get to read it.here's an article with an excerpt https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2016-07/july-2016-brazil-beyond-rio-grande-sertaeo-veredas-joao-guimaraes-rosa/I'll copy paste it in the following posts:>Nonought. Shots you heard weren’t a shootout, God be. I was training sights on trees in the backyard, at the bottom of the creek. Keeps my aim good. Do it every day, I enjoy it; have since the tendrest age. Anyhow, folks came a calling. Bout a calf: white one, strayling, eyes like no thing ever seen and a dog’s mask. They told me; I didn’t want to see. Seems it was defective from birth, lips curled back, and looked to be laughing, person-like. Human face, hound face: they decided—it was the devil. Oafenine bunch. They killed it. Nought a clue bout the owner. They came to beg my guns, I let em. I’m not superstitious. You got a way of laughing, sir . . . Look: when shots are for real, first the dogs set up barking that instant—then you go see if anyone’s dead. Don’t mind, sir, this is the sertão. Some reckon it in’t: the backlands are further off, they say, the campos-gerais inside and out, back-o-beyond, high plains, far side of the Urucúia. Lottarot. To folks in Corinto and Curvelo, in’t this here the sertão? Ah, and that’s not all! The sertão makes itself known: it’s where pastures have no fences, they say; where a man can go fifteen, twenty miles without coming to a single house; where outlaws live out their hallelujah, in the yonder beyond the law. The Urucúia comes from the highlands in the west. But nowadays, all long the riverrun, there’s everything—walloping great farms, lushlands bordering banks, the floodplains; crops that go from wood to wood, thickset trees, even some virgin forest. All round is Minas Gerais. These gerais have no bounds. Anyway, you know how it is, sir, to each his own: cows or kine, depends on your eyen . . . The backlands are everywhere.
>>24119257>The devil? Nought to say. Ask round, sir. Out of false propriety, folks in these parts skirt his name—they just say: the Whatsit. Heavens! No . . . The more a man fights shy, the closer he gets. So avouches a certain Aristides—in the palm thicket over on my right here, called the Gentle-Cow-of-Santa-Rita-Way—they all believe: he can’t set foot in three specific places, cause when he does there comes a weeping, behind, and a tiny voice, like a warning, “Here I come! Here I come . . .”—it’s the old goat, the Whatsit . . . And a José Simpilício—anyone here’ll tell you he keeps a demon captive in his home, a wee little Satan, forced to assist in all his greedy schemes; which is why Simpilício is well long on the road to richness. Heck, they also say it’s why his mule skitters, spooks when he tries to mount . . . Folklore. Any rate, José Simpilício and Aristides are fattening up, hearing or not-hearing. And consider this, sir: right now, in this day and age, there’s folks out there avowering that the Devil himself stopped off on his way through Andrequicé. Seems a young stranger showed up there bragging he could get here—usually a day and a half on horseback—in just twenty minutes . . . cause he rounded the headwaters of the Old Chico! Or—noffense—could it, for example, have been you, sir, who nounced yourself like that as you were passing through, just for a little larksome shenaniganry? Course, don’t grudge me, I know it wasn’t. No harm intended. It’s just that, nown then, a timely question can peace the mind. But you understand, sir, that the young man, if he exists, was just pulling legs. Cause, you see, to detour round the headwaters would be like doubling back through the interior of this state of ours, some three months in the doing . . . Whatsit? Madness. Figmentation. And as for hiding him behind fancy names, well now that’s just asking him to take form, to entify!
>>24119262>Don’t. I’ve all but ceased to give him credence myself, by the grace of God; that’s just between us, sir. I know he’s well stabled, and he’s rife in the Holy Scriptures. I once met a young seminarian; he looked the part, glancing in his prayer book, draped in robes, switch of maria-preta in his hand—claimed he was going to help the priest evict the Beast from the body of an old woman in Cachoeira-dos-Bois. He was going with the vicar of Campo-Redondo . . . Good Lord. Are you like me, sir? I didn’t buy a word. What it is, cording to my pal Quelemém, is inferior, disincarnated spirits, lowest of the low, running muck in the murkiest underworld, yearning for contact with the living—they latch on. My pal Quelemém comforts me a lot—Quelemém from Góis. But he has to live a long way away, in Jijujã, Brown Buriti Way . . . But hey, I’d wager that—bedevilled or with latchons—you’ve happened cross all sorts yourself, sir, men, women—no? For my part, I’ve seen so many I’ve learned. Mama-Neigh, Blood-Sucker, Lippy, Slit-Beneath, Cold-Blade, Goat-Boy, a certain Treciziano, Azinhavre . . . Hermógenes . . . Whole bunch. If only I could forget all the names . . . I’m no horse wrangler! Sides, if thoughts of outlawry a man entertains, it’s that the devil’s already wangled his way in. Wouldn’t you say?
I wonder why American literature turned into Tom Clancy and Steven King before dying?
>>24119257>>24119262>>24119264Intriguing, I like that so far, I’ll make a note to keep an eye out for the new translation, sorry but I doubt I’d ever learn Portuguese, let alone do it well enough to read literature like this in it.>>24119266That era of literature you’re describing was literature turning into Phillip Roth and cormac mccarthy, then briefly David Foster Wallace, before dying. Which seems to me to be a combination of the rise of suburbia in the American consciousness and the reexamination of its prior myths.King and Clancy were genre writers, what you’re doing is like characterising literature of the interwar period as being Howard and Lovecraft rather than Fitzgerald and Faulkner. American literature and western literature in general got killed by television and then the internet, plus the mass marketing of worse and worse kinds of books.
>>24115479my uncle left me that exact Easton Press version. the picture doesn't at all convey how ridiculously large and heavy it is. it's so unwieldy it makes it almost unreadable, i actually ended up checking out a cheap paperback copy from the library to read it. Easton Press makes big gaudy ornaments more than books, which is a shame because the quality is impeccable. if they would just do the same thing in a normal size they'd be great.
>>24119368For anons who want a portable copy id reccomend the macmillan hardback, it’s decently durable and cheap but small enough to fit into a trouser back pocket, unfortunately 0 commentaries/notes etc but the beta stuff for that is probably in a readers guide or companion book anyway
