Alright limpdicks and saggypussies, I bet not a single soul on this board has read this. Yes I’m ragebaiting because I want to discuss this with anyone. Only a third of the way through and I need to know I’m not the only person on earth reading this book. It’s grueling to read but at the same time I can’t help but be in wonder at the sheer size of this. Yes, I agree, length for the sake of length is kind of dumb. But when it’s at this magnitude, it does become something to appreciate, at the very least for the endurance of Young to keep it up. The argument that it is repetitive is valid, to a point, but the repetitions are still so riddled with variety in word usage that it becomes amazing.
>>25039550You're right, I haven't read it. I bought the Dalkey reprint of it though, along with Barth's Sot-Weed Factor. No, I haven't read that one either.I may read them one day.
>>25039571I’ll be lurking waiting for the day you post about it so I can talk to someone about it. It might be three years from now when when you’re halfway and I’m three quarters there but so be it
>>25039679In the meantime, please consider Leaf by Leafhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS6mXhwQW58
>>25039703I watched that. Pretty superficial if you ask me. He didn’t really have anything interesting to say- just reiterating what reviews said and long quotes from the book without any elaboration from his point of view. Makes me want to become a booktuber if it’s that stupidly easy
>>25039717Go ahead. Just get a good mic so people can actually hear you.
>>25039550It's not saggy. It's Ozempic™
>>25039727I would consider it if I didn’t have a well paying full time job with two kids and a wife to provide for. I’m afraid to pursue my dreams. Too much at stake
Some anon (you?) recommended me this as a book with highly musical prose, but that's not true at all
>>25039751I did recommend it. I didn’t fully read your post if I’m being honest. You were the one looking for word drunk books right? It wasn’t til after I posted that you wanted word drunk books with a musical prose. So I am sorry for that chief. I’m assuming you hate it?
>>25039550I posted about this book yesterday, what a coincidence. Havent read it but I plan to. Is it worth it?
>>25039771I’m currently reading it. It’s frustratingly long and repetitive but there is a meditative, hypnotic beauty to it when you read. The actual plot is fairly straightforward but it is meandering so it’s easy to take it in drips and drabs because of that repetition. So you can really take your time with it
>>25039769No that's what I mean. It's not worddrunk at all. Worddrunk doesn't mean a book with a lot of words. This is worddrunk:>And the shrill girls giggle and master around him and squeal as they clutch and thrash, and he blubbers away downhill with his patched pants falling, and his tear-splashed blush burns all the way as the triumphant bird-like sisters scream with buttons in their claws and the bully brothers hoot after him his little nickname and his mother’s shame and his father’s wickedness with the loose wild barefoot women of the hovels of the hills. It all means nothing at all, and, howling for his milky mum, for her cawl and buttermilk and cowbreath and welshcakes and the fat birth-smelling bed and moonlit kitchen of her arms, he’ll never forget as he paddles blind home through the weeping end of the world. Then his tormentors tussle and run to the Cockle Street sweet-shop, their pennies sticky as honey, to buy from Miss Myfanwy Price, who is cocky and neat as a puff-bosomed robin and her small round buttocks tight as ticks, gobstoppers big as wens that rainbow as you suck, brandyballs, winegums, hundreds and thousands, liquorice sweet as sick, nougat to tug and ribbon out like another red rubbery tongue, gum to glue in girls’ curls, crimson coughdrops to spit blood, ice-cream cornets, dandelion-and-burdock, raspberry and cherryade, pop goes the weasel and the windWhile Miss Macintosh is like this:>She had wished to overthrow man, both as to the marital state of which ideally, as she had never been married or given to her true love, she knew nothing in actuality, and as to paternal domination, the regnancy of the past and of the future, and even though one’s father should be dead, though he should be only some old ghost with hollow eyes and burning hair, a formless face, a dream retreating at cockcrow, a dream receding into nocturnal depths at the light of the wavering dawn, though he should be less than a breath, a flame in a doorway, a burned feather in the wind, a shadow on a wall, though he should be less than Cousin Hannah now was become. And yet she had been real, no mere chimera like the others, those who oscillated between two fixed points or states of mind, never escaping these limitations. For she had been flesh and blood and bone, one whom my mother had thought she had known as well as she knew herself who was not easily mystified. Cousin Hannah’s life had been well known, not shrouded in mystery as was my mother’s life when she remembered herself, these ladies like phantoms of the undying past, these many, beautiful, waxen ladies parading in a room of mirrors and phantoms, each but the partial portrait of the other so that each was incomplete.I haven't read it enough to pass any judgment. The style is certainly good but it is not what I was looking for in that thread.
>>25039797Help me understand the difference between the two. I see a lot of alliteration and other aspects that feel “musical” in your example but is there something else that you can point out to so I can see what you mean?
>>25039826Those + coinages. And something I have been colloquially referring to as being songlike. Just the density as well. Lots of coinages and atypical words bunched together. The 2nd excerpt is very eloquent as well but the lexicon is more "normal" and the density is uniform throughout.
>>25039835What’s that example from? That seems like something I could get behind
>>25039851Under the milkwood by Dylan Thomas. It's a play cum novel
>>25039826Here's Henry James from The Golden bowl. An example of worddrunk but not noticeably musical prose:>He felt therefore, just at present, as if his papers were in order, as if his accounts so balanced as they had never done in his life before and he might close the portfolio with a snap. It would open again, doubtless, of itself, with the arrival of the Romans; it would even perhaps open with his dining to-night in Portland Place, where Mr. Verver had pitched a tent suggesting that of Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius. But what meanwhile marked his crisis, as I have said, was his sense of the immediate two or three hours. He paused on corners, at crossings; there kept rising for him, in waves, that consciousness, sharp as to its source while vague as to its end, which I began by speaking of--the consciousness of an appeal to do something or other, before it was too late, for himself. By any friend to whom he might have mentioned it the appeal could have been turned to frank derision. For what, for whom indeed but himself and the high advantages attached, was he about to marry an extraordinarily charming girl, whose "prospects," of the solid sort, were as guaranteed as her amiability? He wasn't to do it, assuredly, all for her. The Prince, as happened, however, was so free to feel and yet not to formulate that there rose before him after a little, definitely, the image of a friend whom he had often found ironic. He withheld the tribute of attention from passing faces only to let his impulse accumulate. Youth and beauty made him scarcely turn, but the image of Mrs. Assingham made him presently stop a hansom. HER youth, her beauty were things more or less of the past, but to find her at home, as he possibly might, would be "doing" what he still had time for, would put something of a reason into his restlessness and thereby probably soothe it. To recognise the propriety of this particular pilgrimage--she lived far enough off, in long Cadogan Place--was already in fact to work it off a little. A perception of the propriety of formally thanking her, and of timing the act just as he happened to be doing--this, he made out as he went, was obviously all that had been the matter with him. It was true that he had mistaken the mood of the moment, misread it rather, superficially, as an impulse to look the other way--the other way from where his pledges had accumulated. Mrs. Assingham, precisely, represented, embodied his pledges--was, in her pleasant person, the force that had set them successively in motion. She had MADE his marriage, quite as truly as his papal ancestor had made his family--though he could scarce see what she had made it for unless because she too was perversely romantic. He had neither bribed nor persuaded her, had given her nothing-- scarce even till now articulate thanks; so that her profit-to think of it vulgarly--must have all had to come from the Ververs.
>>25039867Imagine getting filtered by The Golden Bowl...
You say length for lengt's sake is dumb, but you mention nothing else notable about this book.
>>25039877Sometimes late James makes less sense than Joyce at his craziest.
>>25039890Give me a quick guide to Henry James while you're at it, you seem like a knowledgable chap.
>>25039882Book really plays on illusion and it does it in a subtle way leading you to slowly fall into that same feeling of disbelief at what is real and what isn’t. There are characters who I’m not sure are dead or alive, real or unreal. There’s beautiful imagery that is constantly reiterated in different ways. You’d think describing an ocean shoreline can only be done so many times until this bitch finds a pile of new ways to do so. It feels like an endless fever dream to read. How’s that?
>>25039867I want to like James. A lot of writers I admire adore James. But his fucking writing's impenetrable to me. It all sounds like this>Holding his penis, as it was, small, in his hands, not a little tilted toward the other side that was not what it was before foreknowing of itself; to say nothing, that is, at all of what did not come by itself when alone, clenched tightly, removing in itself something it might have done otherwise, but be that as it may and that being said when he was formerly disposed to speak of it in the terms that did not occur to him when he was not indisposed to say them, that, itself its own way of saying which did not occur when it was occurring immediately, was itself, a small penis.How do I get into him?
>>25039918>>25040140Thirded
>>25040140>>25040219Skill issue. Simple as.
>>25039550It's by a woman, so I have not read it, nor will I.
>>25039918>>25040140>>25040219You guys can start with his short stories. He has an anthologized collection of horror stories that still feature his trademark psychological style. After that you can start with early James. Portrait of a lady is a relatively accessible novel. James' indecipherable phase really only spanned his last 3-4 books.
