Seth Largo
35.7K posts
Seth Largo
@SethLargo
California supremacist. Climber. English prof. Urbit: pasmul-hopnel. Author of "Excavating the Memory Palace" and "The Last Mixtape." Blog at link below.
SoCal and High Plains Katılım Kasım 2012
1K Takip Edilen2K Takipçiler
@Empty_America When I stayed you could request the room with the blood splatter stains
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I can strongly recommend the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas NM.
Real Keys, extremely old school, a nice old bar.
Filming set for many movies, including "No Country for Old Men," many stars have stayed there.
O.W. Root@owroot
I used a couple real keys like this at some old not-modernized hotels last summer. It was pretty sweet.
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@Empty_America Boomer hack: if you show them you can "make it work" by getting a job, moving if need be, etc., they start giving you money.
English
What is the purpose of this?
I suppose it's an attempt to get money from the boomer.
But I bet they would give you more money if you just asked them for it, without the struggle session seeking verbal "acknowledgement" of your suffering.
Leigh Beadon@leighbeadon
If you trap a boomer in a one-on-one argument for an entire afternoon you can eventually get them to acknowledge how crazy the cost of housing is now. However the effects only last for ~12 hours and the next morning they will text you "why don't you just find a cheap apartment?"
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Edgar Rice Burroughs was the Gold Standard of fantasy fiction from the Great War to the 1960s; then JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was ‘discovered,’ and he became the Gold Standard.
But, I think that Burroughs just might’ve been the exponentially better writer…
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On one hand, I'm sad she decided to start eating just one lettuce wedge a day. On other hand, I'm glad she has avoided the plastic surgeon's knife. So good for you, JC!
Marlin, Esq@nostalgiafkninc
nostalgia inc.
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@Empty_America It's the same people but now filtered for the people who didn't get married yet. Worse situation!
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Yeah, I did marry her and we have 4 kids.
What is the logical reason for thinking that someone you meet at 25 or 30 would be better or worse than someone you meet at 20?
It's all the same people, just older.
Aella@Aella_Girl
If you could go back in time, would you recommend your ~20 year old self to have kids with whoever you were dating around that time?
English
@ChrisExpTheNews This will be going away soon. Dual Enrollment transfer agreements have to get renewed every 5 years with 4-year universities. Pretty sure my uni system will be revoking those agreements next Fall from all community colleges in the state.
English
AP is stuck in the same arms race. High school kids can take online 101 courses at community college and chatgpt their way to an A. At some point you have to be able to sell kids and parents on "take the harder class and not guaranteed credit", and you can only make it so hard
Bryan Caplan@bryan_caplan
APs are getting easier, but they are still highly meritocratic compared to not just high school grades but college grades. Most students who get an A in a college class would be lucky to get a 3 on the corresponding AP.
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The "carry the fire" motif emerges in each of his Westerns: just a flicker at the end of BM and only in a dream in NCFOM. The physical presence of "the son" is, you're right, the most hopeful manifestation of it (McCarthy had just had a child himself, but the religious connotation is strong). It emerges just as hopefully in The Border Trilogy but you gotta read all three books to get to. His Southern novels are much more bleak because they lack this motif entirely.
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If you read Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road in that order, it's like the life cycle of civilization: its bloody birth out of chaos, its violent decline, and its apocalyptic death in flames. I think that's why I found The Road so special. It's characteristically bleak and pessimistic McCarthy, but there is a kernel of superhuman hope at its heart that makes it one of the darkest things I have ever read, but also the most tender. "He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."
Kristen Rudd@kristenrudd
About to start Blood Meridian for the first time. Give me all your best advice.
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@Empty_America A bare midriff is like "squirrel," that's all that's happening there.
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A lot of men do in fact check out every single female they see.
So these women are actually correct.
But don't let it go to your head, there isn't much signal there.
𝓜𝓻𝓼. 𝓢@smalltown_wife
I had a roommate in college who CONSTANTLY thought everyone was staring at her (in a way like they were wowed by her) and that every man she encountered was checking her out. she wasn’t unattractive, just totally average looking. this phenomenon should be studied.
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@EricRichards22 Glad I started with the border trilogy instead of BM.
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Cormac McCarthy is basically designed to one-shot the Sensitive Young Man when he reads it at a time of despair and ennui sometime between sixteen and twenty-five
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️@christopherrufo
I read the first hundred pages of The Road last year, and read the first hundred pages of Blood Meridian this year, and in both instances, gave up, because the books never clicked. Lyrical writing, but the characters are reduced to way down Maslow's hierarchy, and the tone is so relentlessly bleak, with almost no humanity breaking through, it was difficult to feel anything besides the flint clicking against the cold steel in the overwhelming darkness. I know many of you love it, but to me, it's overwrought, overstylized, and overhyped.
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@christopherrufo @jarvis_best If you make it to page 200, you'll even get a love story.
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@jarvis_best Maybe I’ll try the first hundred pages
English
I read the first hundred pages of The Road last year, and read the first hundred pages of Blood Meridian this year, and in both instances, gave up, because the books never clicked. Lyrical writing, but the characters are reduced to way down Maslow's hierarchy, and the tone is so relentlessly bleak, with almost no humanity breaking through, it was difficult to feel anything besides the flint clicking against the cold steel in the overwhelming darkness. I know many of you love it, but to me, it's overwrought, overstylized, and overhyped.
Kristen Rudd@kristenrudd
About to start Blood Meridian for the first time. Give me all your best advice.
English
Seth Largo retweetledi
We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch. We had an AI super cycle. We had deflationary growth. You could've shut your mouth, grifted, and made as much money as you ever needed. It was perfect. But no. You just had to blow it up. You. And your pride and your ego.
English
Seth Largo retweetledi
@ranman_the @BretVDB It comes down to your opinion on art that calls attention to its own existence as a medium. McLuhan went so far as to say that all art must explode its own medium if it is to be called art at all.
English
She was right. It’s true she was right in an ugly and off-putting way, but she was still right.
The core of her rightness was that Joyce’s craft is too visible in his work, as boastful & self-satisfied as a trick shot on a snooker table. This makes his books instructive for writers, but jarring and dull to read. More a compendium of literary flourishes than a work of art
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“In writing about the many books she loved, Virginia Woolf could be a good Johnsonian critic. On Joyce’s Ulysses, she is at her rare worst: snobbish, resentful, a touch frightened. And wrong, absolutely wrong. The Jesuit-trained James Joyce was erudite beyond measure and so gifted as to be almost the fusion of Dante and Shakespeare. That was his vaunting ambition. It was beyond reach.”
—Harold Bloom, Bright Book of Life
Bret van den Brink@BretVDB
Virginia Woolf’s diary entries on James Joyce’s Ulysses: “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. … I finished ‘Ulysses’ and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.”
English
Virginia Woolf’s diary entries on James Joyce’s Ulysses:
“An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. …
I finished ‘Ulysses’ and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.”
English
Camille Paglia on Emily Dickinson’s style:
“The primary qualities of Dickinson's style are high condensation and riddling ellipsis. Protestant hymn-measure is warped and deformed by a stupefying energy. Words are rammed into lines with such force that syntax shatters and collapses into itself. The relation of form to content is aggressive and draconian. The structure cramps and pinches the words like a vise. The poems shudder with a huge tremor of contraction. Dickinson's poetry is like the shrinking room of Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum, a torture chamber and arena of extremity. We are in the womb-tomb of Decadent closure.”
English
Penny dreadfuls and dime novels were a distinct genre from what, e.g., Al Erskine was publishing at Random House (Faulkner and McCarthy), who never made a lot of money despite, yes, the hope that some of their work would eventually cross over, since the taste of the literati could persuade the mass market back then. Faulkner made little from his novels at first but they were enjoyed by the right people, so he had enough clout to go make money for hollywood for a while (which he hated). But you are right that these older novelists worked in a world of widespread reading, so they had a general audience in mind.
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Most of the great modern novels, when written, were closer to Mass Market fiction than to what we call "Literary Fiction."
They were designed to sell large numbers, written by guys who lived by the pen.
Not professors/grad students writing for each other.
thus spake zara thirst trap@philiptraylen
"literary fiction" is a good name for bad American writing from the 1990s, DFW or whoever, since that particular kind of bad fiction stopped existing literally not one person thinks "literary fiction," means anything, or rather, what they mean by it is the specific difference between bad American writing from 1990, and terrible American writing from 2020
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