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The meaning of literature is to be an anti-social reclusive loon who rejects personal hygiene? Howard Hughes is the meaning of literature!

I have another talent, sarcasm, which seems to have run out of stock around here ;)

I think granting a dead man's last wish is far more important than saving art for our selfish gratification :D Who knows if Kafka ever wanted the people who enjoy reading him to enjoy reading him at all? Obviously he didn't. Sure, some people love his stuff, but does anyone stop to consider...

Oh yes, I love everything Joyce wrote until the end of the 4th chapter of The Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man. Afterwards, he's no longer interesting to me :D But the 3rd chapter, containing the two sermons about Hell, is still one of the most haunting things I've ever read! Someone...

When I read The Trial I never had the impression the novel was incomplete. K is executed in the end, how more conclusive could it be? I don't have any particular affection for Kafka, to be honest. I like this novel, I consider The Metamorphosis one of the finest literary texts ever written...

I finished a few days ago Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity: it was a pretty cold view of evolution, comparing people to machines whose only purpose is to reproduce :rolleyes: Now I'm reading Mary Midgley's Beast and Man, which is a kind of rebuttal to Monod and everyone else (Dawkins)...

I knew someone would say that. What can I do, I must save José Saramago. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself :D

I'm pretty conservative: I despise anything that doesn't conform to sentence-building grammar rules. So I have little interest in reading some works by James Joyce, William Burroughs or Samuel Beckett. I'm not so put off by inadequate use of punctuation. I definitely have very little interest...

I see I should read The Mating Mind. For our conversation, I would define higher level thinking as any type of thinking that non-human species can't process. So even a rather dumb person has higher level thinking abilities. This level of thinking, unique in the animal kingdom, surely has...

Slow month: The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann The Double, José Saramago Daisy Miller, Henry James The Night of the Hunter, Davis Grubb After Mann's lenghty novel, which took me around two weeks to finish, I felt drained up :D

Sexual ornaments? Interesting. I always thought art was Man's way of convincing himself of his importance. "Well, we committed the Holocaust, but we've written Don Quixote too, so it evens out," kind of mentality :D

A is not a reality external to Man's consciousness, it's an arbitrary man-made linguistic symbol. The symbol used to define a sound known as 'ei' could be any other. In fact, other alphabets have different symbols for that sound. Trees, rocks, mountains, lakes, stars, are external to Man's...

Funny, reminds me of O'Brien in 1984 saying how they can make people believe 2 + 4 = 5. I can see why Raynd upsets the post-modernists, who think everything is a social construction created by while male imperialist westerners. Can't really disagree with her that reality is external to...

What does 'A is A' mean?

Crazy cover, AquaBlue. Got myself a bargain: a hardcover edition of Günter Grass' Crabwalk, for 5 euro! Still, I wouldn't have paid more for a book written by a Nazi :D

Curiouser and curiouser: Travels in the Scriptorium mysteriously travelled back in time and landed in my hands just yesterday. But before, it must have made a quick stop at 1929, because the price tag was straight from the Depression.

I had not yet met someone who hated Alice in Wonderland :eek: Just for your information, since you're clearly wrong!, it's the greatest book ever written!!! :)

Good vs. Evil I understand, but... Paranoia vs. Nihilism? Since when are those two opposites?

The advent of new media (if you can still call the internet 'new') will always cause some alarmists to panic: everyone thought radio would kill newspapers; everyone thought photography would kill painting; everyone thought cinema would kill literature; everyone thought TV would kill cinema...

Synchronicity. I was just thinking about Mahfouz today. I was shopping today with my mom, and while at the bookstore a certain book picked her interest. I ask her the title, and she shows me the cover. It's Mahfouz' Wedding Song. My mom liked it and it's cheap: I think I know what to give her...