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sologdin

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  1. the original twitter referenced the US sales as being 3,000--not global sales. publisher's weekly has the explanation: not sure how to discover the global sales. ask his agent, i suppose.
  2. do they have some sort of policy or custom to avoid consecutive wins from adjacent states, or something?
  3. any recommendations on ngugi? I know only the river between.
  4. must've lost our minds because we just brought home a catahoula mix puppy for no apparent reason other than to annoy our geriatric bochi and cowardly blue lacy.
  5. You just know there was 'weird sex stuff' going down in those Istari cults that's one point of difference between tolkien and RSB that makes me appreciate both of them more. even if arda is not drenched in black semen, we know that there were sadean occurrences in tolkien's setting--the existence of half-orcs suggests mass rapes (though not necessarily traumatic insemination). tolkien's writing bears the imprint of swift's era--gulliver fucks all kinds of people on the voyages (including his own horse FFS), but it's all veiled by self-censorial editing, sous rature erotica. the RSB works over this textual lacuna in tolkien while creating others--NG as a doubly inverted dark lord, say.
  6. thank you kindly for the specifics. as for this-- --do we care if he intended it to be meaningless? his lack of imagination need not control our understanding. readers can take the poled head and use it in their own understandings. i personally never nailed that one down, but that doesn't mean there's nothing there--just that my understanding hasn't assimilated it yet. maybe it will develop for.me in rereadings or of new volumes emerge in the fullness of time. for now, we can file it as an exhibit in topics such as dismemberment and bodily horror, prophetic visions and dreams, phallic imagery, and other catalogs of thematic significance. i appreciated the encyclopedia errors--it comes across as written by a character in the setting, rather than an omniscient reference work. a primary text rather than a tertiary, say. part of the charm, maybe, fitting DA's equally fallible historical writings that preface various chapters. regarding authorial deliberate indifference, consider tolkien's recitation about the istari: isn't that just cool as all hell?
  7. dunno, kal. the series is named the second apocalypse. the narrative just caught up to the title, is all. post-apocalyptic stories usually suck, kinda the same way that dystopian stories usually suck--though at least the latter have interesting settings, which is their point. post-apocalypse normally lacks even setting--everything is an undifferentiated menace, as in the road, say. but the historical moment of actual apocalypse might retain enough setting and feature enough story to be interesting--but because the apocalyptic in its incipient moment is the political state of emergency in ontological terms, it occupies the exceptional state wherein prior rules are suspended, a narrative justitium, to be roman about it. that will be difficult for anyone to write, i think. i don't mind the narrative being suspended--that enacts in terms of literary form the significance of the content. if it remains unfinished, it'll mean that the suspension is indefinite. 'planting hints' means the expectation that chekhov's gun will be discharged? i suppose we can have a gun that is not chekhov's gun, though. this means we have a readerly interpretation that bore no fruit in terms of where the plot went--a known problem with the lengthy time between serial installments. readerly expectation generates doctrine that something textual was a hint of more development that never came into existence--i suppose an iceberg tip or something that ultimately lacked all the underwater parts--an extratextuality, similar in function to authorial intention, but here generated by readers in down time between books. idle phalluses are the inchoroi's workshop, maybe. this is still a matter of interpretation, and what one reader thought was a plot hint regarding things beyond the text might've turned out to be something simply regarding the setting or character or thematics or whatever. it's difficult to discuss abstractly, though, without knowing what you thought were the markers that got lost--it's not obvious to me what people think is a dead end, you know?
  8. kal-- it may well be prickish. i have an appreciation for his books that has nothing to do with who he is or what he purportedly intended--this cross-examination is complicated the fact that he is said to have misled readers about his intentions--which set of allegations are to be accepted? of course if others dislike him or his books because of his character or conduct, that's not for me to dispute. assuming that he did rickroll everyone, and as i've written somewhere at some point, it makes him the stravinsky of the tolkienian set--working within the generic conventions but then confronting them with a disruption that prevents the discharge that the inertia of the text has come to owe readers. that's hall of fame right there.
  9. kal, that position works with a vessel metaphor: the text is a container that can hold things, and that someone can put inside and another can take out. i don't accept that metaphor as descriptive of literacy. no doubt authors write specific words in lieu of other specific words, and there's likely an intention in doing so that is surplus beyond the actual words selected--but the knowability of intention is something i respectfully decline, as is the importance of that intention.
  10. To me this is somewhat like debating whether or not GRRM deliberately put in something that implied Jon's parentage. We know that this is the case. It's not something to be debated. the author interprets the text that way, but we need not. we can agree that the author believes that the text does this work, but whether it actually achieves this alleged goal is a different question.
  11. kal, sure, if we accept the notion that authors monopolize the meanings of their writings, which are containers filled intentionally with items to be discovered by clever readers. i don't accept that, and don't see any reason to do so, though i understand that reasonable persons disagree on the point. that said, is the thesis that RSB was fucking with readers--that it's all a tolkienian/sadean rickroll?
  12. eighth best novelist in France is that houellebecq, then? odds on murakami or rushdie?
  13. It is over-analyzing and the text simply doesn’t justify it. It isn’t there or not to the extent that people thought it were am doubting the viability of over-analysis as an grievance. under-analysis, maybe. it's a bit odd to claim that something isn't there when people are actively discussing it. the assumption is apparently that the text has things inside it, either inherently or placed therein by the author--and only those things may be there, which means that the reader has no creativity or agency--reading in this view is not a productive labor, but is merely consumptive. that strikes me as an erroneous linguistics, and a fairly docile theory of how literacy functions. i like the schopenhauer thesis. it works with the adorno epigraph in one of the books, as the frankfurt school is paradoxically a schopenhauerian marxism, pessimistic optimists, or so. crazy.
  14. was an incel dragon. That also sucked. i've forgotten, but what was the aesthetic objection to the inclusion of the perspective of aggressive internet virgins in the dialogue of a villain? in writing that, i realize it may be a rhetorical question.
  15. it does seem familiar, yes--we can be hegelian about it, or it could be a germanic preference for faustian metaphors drawn from goethe--two souls war within my breast, &c.. he's coming out of husserlian phenomenology. some essays here. husserl kinda loathed hegel, but that's not to say that he wasn't influenced by some of hegel's more enduring ideas. on reception theory, iser goes one direction--fixing the text with known gaps to be filled by variable readers, whereas someone like stanley fish places the variables in the text itself. good times.
  16. I think this is why the last two books were a bit of a disappointment around here. There was so much read into nuances that weren’t actually there. that's part of the experience of serial publication--the production of secondary commentary far outweighs the production of primary installments--because so much of this commentary is competitively predictive, almost all of it is 'false' when read against the primary materials, though obviously these secondary fictions have an existence that runs parallel to the primary continuity but need not be considered inferior or extinguished simply because they have not been anointed with auctoritas or lack the commercial imprint. we might consider the implications of this sort of monologic imperative that not at all insignificantly binds together theoretically untenable writerly authoritarianism with intellectual property rights when examining how the text's absences somehow overwrite the robust creativity that occurred here in between installments. this means that the nuances are there to the extent that readers created those significances--that the official narrative didn't follow up on those nuances may or may not be a weakness. that said, i felt appropriately crushed by the second series finale--this was foreseeable: it is in the name of the series, after all. am very likely still not recovered from it. this is also appropriate and foreseeable.
  17. yeah, none of asoiaf's intimacies work as well as locke and jean, who are themselves not necessarily achilles & patroklos or orestes & pylades--but maybe kirk & spock?
  18. dunno, scot. but his twitter is full of star wars talk, so no one should search there looking for ToE updates unless they have seen episode IX already. that said, the speculation descended very quickly to ewoks being the fremen of the SW setting: they will subjugate the universe. endor is a prison planet. yub-nub is a killing word. we are amused (though the latter point is disputed by learned professionals here).
  19. living in the shadow of former greatness is more compelling than being in the peak of that civilization. it makes the setting itself a mystery story, irrespective of the actual narrative; that allows the audience to indulge in speculation that need not be resolved by the principal plot, though the best plots arise directly out of settings that have definite characteristics, as in dune.
  20. i've read one kay, and out of that one, tigana is the worst. this review says it all: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/174413860?book_show_action=true&page=1
  21. oh good. i will send a memorandum to all of my as yet unused alts, directing them to post here first.
  22. couple potentially nifty ones here: SPOILER: the onecompare-- "The Cinnamon Wind was a swan ship out of Tall Trees Town on the Summer Isles, where men were black, women were wanton, and even the gods were strange" (penultimate Samwell chapter) with-- "I have crossed many mountains and many rivers, and trodden many plains, even into the far countries of Rhun and Harad where the stars are strange" (aragorn in LotR) curious. swan ships from the teleri, too? at least tolkien's casual racism doesn't seem to exist in martin, though strange things tend to be afoot when we're talking about some black folks in all these books. SPOILER: the otherbrienne's early companion shadrich, the mad mouse, is roughly the same type of unsavory hireling evident in mieville's shadrach of PSS, though the physical descriptions differ, and it would be more apt to associate that character with moths than with mouses. heh. perhaps tolkien's shadrach, of the tower of cirirth ungol is better? I know not. or is it more likely that all three draw on the similarly named character from the book of daniel? no idea. will have to wait until the martin character develops further, especially vis-a-vis furnaces.
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