Finished it. At page 600, I thought that, surely, this could have been a few hundred pages shorter. Then I thought of a conversation I had with a buddy a few weeks back. He was halfway through Moby Dick and asked why it was mostly cetology chapters. I told him that, among other reasons, the book forces you to search its information for meaning as a thematic reflection of the characters who do the same thing. Impose your ethos upon the impenetrable fog, see if it lifts. Ellmann does not hit the prosaic ecstasy of Melville, but I do not think that is her aim. Sure, we can draw the line from her family to Penelope, which gives credence to housewife rambling, but I think that it's structure is more akin to Moby Dick. It is a book of obfuscation. People talk of hypnotism or submerging themselves in the voice of it-- a kind of eyes-glazed analysis, really, especially when there's a few interesting plots to puzzle out of the book. For example, if you read this, and I were to ask you about the daughter, you better have an answer or I'll know you let the book pass you by. I still believe it could be trimmed, and I prefer DOT, but it is a fine book, and, at least, more daring than most. I enjoyed it.
>>25082183Also, it cannot be denied that this is an iconic cover.
Sucks, not very short.
>>25082225>Look, guys! I said the joke we're supposed to say!1!1
>>25082232And it's still both true and funny.
>>25082255Imagine how lame an anon you'd have to be to go around posting puns that other people came up with. You couldn't think of your own, really? Jesus. Even Ellmann has a few hundred of her own in there
>>25082260Thanks to you we don't have to imagine how lame it is to seethe over a joke.
>waxes pretentious about the mundane ramblings of a menopausal upper middle-class libtard >instantly flabbergasted by a memeLol
>>25082313>waxes pretentious>flabbergastedSome jokes write themselves
>>25082183You're full of shit
>>25082344How
>>25082343Every time you sign your name.
>>25082225>>25082282>>25082349What kind of 6th grade burns are going on in this thread?
>>25082353You lost.
>pretentious fag who made a thread about Ducks, Newburyport (lol) has a meltie over a meme then hides behind being humorless/smug because he can't bantMaregasm, Montana
>>25082372I'm convinced this is one guy at this point or I severely overestimated the average age of this board
>>25082377>JRHNBRNo one cares about your estimation of anything, pseud.
here's a comparison of the frequency of periods appearing in the text and the frequency of the phrase "the fact that"
>>25082379Post selfie with teeth
>the books ending is the murder of the anon archetype by a little girl Kek
>>25082385Weird fetish but unsurprising given the level of faggotry you've thus far displayed.
>>25082346How are you not?
My favorite passage. Pure poetry.>the fact that another man fucked me in front of my husband and i liked it the fact that this is somehow considered a normal psychosexual phenomenon the fact that indisputably this is linked to my own self-loathing and the rotten underpinnings of my femininity, underpin, undercut, wave-cut-ledge, sea defenses and rock armour, the victorians built recurved walls, the fact that he was black, the fact that although i am not a racist, in fact, i am anti-racist, the fact that it was still definitely relevant that he was black, the fact that i probably do in fact think that a black man is more of a man than my husband, the fact that i wished he was more muscular, the fact that he was still stronger than him, the fact that his cock was as thick as a rolling pin, the fact that i got into an argument with a man who claimed that black men have larger penises and called him a bigot who credulously bought into 19th-century pseudoscientific notions of the sub-saharan black as brutish and inhuman, the fact that i do still in fact believe black men have larger penises, the fact that a dolphin's penis is like a corkscrew, and that they rape each other, the fact that ducks rape each other too, the fact that the whole of civilization seems to have been created to stop people getting away with rape...(p. 230)
>>25082411Kek, fucked grill. Your posts seem like they'd come from someone with rotten breath>>25082667One of the only pure thoughts in the book is her unwavering love for her husband. One of the most consistent thoughts in the book is her puritan avoidance of impure thoughts, so this joke works on no fronts
>>25082702If you're going to ask people to dox themselves on 4chan you should go first.
>>25082868>posting a close-up of your teeth is now considered doxxing yourselfkys
>>25082868>doxKek
No one engaged with the post at all and instead started seething
>>25085638OP had a meltie because someone posted a joke and ended up crashing his own thread.
>>25082183Explain the purpose of "the fact that."
>>25082667Forever vindicated that I don’t read these literary fiction proseslop degenerate nonsense rags
>>25087315It's a sad phrase, often used to justify a cynical outlook. I like this question, anon, because it, at least to me, is the central question of the novel. Why does this character specifically attach herself to this specific phrase? Why would Ellmann focus in on it? Before reading the book, I had never given much thought to the phrase. I suppose I relegated it to the hesitation marker, akin to "um" or "like" or "you know," but Ellmann is right, there's more to unpack in the phrase. It is extremely affirmative. It's almost like, "the truth is" in that it asserts the following statement is one of objectivity. Considering the protagonist is riddled with anxiety about tragedy, collapse, and large-scale gruesome acts, an argument forms in the novel about complacency in anxiety. We all know that shootings and terrorism and violence are rampant, and we're all at least subconsciously aware that, one day, we, or a loved one, might meet our premature end this way, and yet nothing is done about it. The phrase expresses the frustration with that reality, but if anyone here had read the book, they would know that the frustration amounts to nothing. She hammers it home how terrible it all is, and yet, during the climax, she is unable to act. >>25087520You feel vindicated because of a passage that is not in the book?
>>25087924You write like a pseud
>>25088048Kek. The new era of /lit/ is criticizing a post in one line so that there is as little ammunition as possible for someone to criticize you. Really exposes who the pseuds are
>>25082667is this actually in the book? good lord. this is why I don't read anything written after 1950.
>>25082313Dayem that yt boi got some moves
>>25088152>robs himself of The Name of a Rose, a peak medieval murder mystery, just because of a passage that was made up by a 4chan user Grim
>>250881674chan has nothing to do with my reading choices.
Does anyone remember that screen shot of a fat lesbian bitch masturbating while reading this book on OF
>>25088186I feel you're joking, but the post-1950's neglect is a sentiment I've seen expressed a lot lately. Baffles me. Maybe the anons are young and don't recognize that all of literary history, like everything else, is plagued by survivorship bias. For most every era, there are tons of known writers that scholars don't even bother with because they're shit. Pick any decade at random and find a list of the best selling authors from that time. Most will be stuff you've never heard of because it was of middling or poor quality that appealed to mass taste, and thus, did not live on. To think that our time is any different is so misguided that I can't help but think it stems from the ego. They probably have a general sense of what the current scene is like from their time in college and decide they hate it, missing the fact that there are hundreds of scenes happening simultaneously, some of which are probably very much appealing to their taste. I just can't imagine caring about literature and not wanting to know about all of it, the good and bad, old and new. My real hunch is that the people who write off post-1950s writing have not actually read any.
>>25088219Not reading any of that, or anything written after 1950.
>>25088238I will engage with this using the samples of writing that /lit/ loves the most, hopefully to drive my point>Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was first published in the United Kingdom as The Whale on October 18, 1851, and subsequently in the United States on November 14, 1851>In 1917, American author Carl Van Doren became the first of this period to proselytize about Melville's value in his 1921 study, The American Novel, calling Moby-Dick a pinnacle of American RomanticismI often think about how many anons browsing the board right now would read the first 50 pages of Moby Dick and declare it a waste of time if they were around in the 19th century.>James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in its entirety on February 2, 1922>Random House published Ulysses in 1934 after the US ban on publication was overturned the previous year. That marketed it to a bigger audience, but it was 20 years before writers began to "claim" Joyce, says John McCourt, professor of English at the University of Macerata in Italy.I wonder how many of you would've been part of the masses between '22 and '54, completely unaware of the titan emerging>John Keats died of tuberculosis at age 25 on February 23, 1821.>In 1848, twenty-seven years after Keats's death, Richard Monckton Milnes published the first full biography, which helped place Keats within the canon of English literature.My point is this. If you subscribe to the anon's point above, you are a sheep. The things you love were once rejected by people like you. You do not currently, and will never, have a foot print. You are essentially a blind man standing before a wall, proclaiming loudly that you have the best view in the house. It takes not only a poor grasp of modern writing, but an almost non-existent grasp of literary history to think that the old is good and the new is bad. That is exactly what the normies thought when they bailed on Moby Dick and said, " Eh, too much whale stuff."What strikes me most about this is that /lit/ poses as the beacon of literary discussion. There's an idea that if you can wade through the shit-posts, this is the best place on the internet for talking literature. You'd think that the elitism, the very thing that defines this place, would make it a priority to be on the cutting edge, the ones in the seams discovering the new and interesting, but it's not. It is a board, dying over the course of the last decade, grasping for breath, clutching the pearls that everyone, even the normies, already has.
