gveranon
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If Quentin wrote a sequel, then it would be a . . . diptych? duology? . . . but that just wouldn't be right.
"Remember You're a One-Ball!"
- Thread starter qcrisp
- Start date
If Quentin wrote a sequel, then it would be a . . . diptych? duology? . . . but that just wouldn't be right.
qcrisp
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I've started a blog tour thing ('the One-Ball Tour'):
http://my.opera.com/JohnRenard/blog...-interview-or-why-isnt-this-book-about-hitler
http://my.opera.com/JohnRenard/blog...-interview-or-why-isnt-this-book-about-hitler
qcrisp
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The blog tour contnues here:
http://community.livejournal.com/darkling_tales/112879.html
http://community.livejournal.com/darkling_tales/
The Darkling Tales Live Journal is, for those of you who have not been there, a recommended read.
http://community.livejournal.com/darkling_tales/112879.html
http://community.livejournal.com/darkling_tales/
The Darkling Tales Live Journal is, for those of you who have not been there, a recommended read.
MadsPLP
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I just bought it (along with a few copies for the bookstore I work in - Shrike has sold a few copies and Ligotti sells well, as does Joel Lane, so I thought I'd be able to sell this as well), but haven't gotten around to reading it yet.
Though it's some time since I read All God's Angels, Beware!, I sympathise somewhat with Freyasfire's comments.
Though it's some time since I read All God's Angels, Beware!, I sympathise somewhat with Freyasfire's comments.
N
no one
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a preemptive apology for the somewhat vapid praise, but i felt this book needed to be brought up again. i rarely read novels any more, but having enjoyed quentin's stories so much i felt compelled to read this. absolutely one of the best books i have read in years, and a must read for anyone who scours this site looking for books of interest. profound, honest, full of pain, and deeply moving, even to the borderline anhedoniac. highest recommendations.
Wow this guy John has some views doesn't he?
IMO the author's voice (which I belive also carries what Quentin calls the unconscious aspect) in the text is somewhat different to the author himself as a person - and therefore his judgement of his own text. There is of course an authorial intent, but as soon as the text is published, it's connection with the actual author is cut, since it's not modificable anymore, and what matters is the reception by the reader. An author can only comment on intention in relation to him writing, not in relation to someone else reading what has been written. From what I understand, John seems to believe that the author has more controle over the process between writer-reader than he actually has. Holding the author intent higher than the reading in this process, seems to conclude that the actual reading isn't that important, as long as the author's intent is expressed explicitly (seperate from the text or what?) and understood by the reader. To me, this is a total misconception of what writing, and reading, is all about.
Nemonymous
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I agree with that generally - without specific mention of any book (relating to my interest in The Intentional Fallacy since the 1960s).
Hence the philosophy that hopefully lies behind the Nemonymous books (2001-2010)!
Meanwhile, I've been a huge fan of ONE BALL, whatever its authorial intent!
My original RTR of it: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/remember-youre-a-one-ball-by-quentin-s-crisp/des
gveranon
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I think I agree with the gist of that. What makes me slightly uncomfortable with the Intentional Fallacy is that sometimes I get the feeling its proponents want me to try to forget that a text was even authored at all, to read it as a linguistic object that just happens to exist, disconnected from any knowledge that someone intentionally wrote it . This is not how I read. Now, of course, after its composition a text is disconnected from its author and does exist as an independent artifact. What the author may have intended can't really be known by the reader, or even known fully by the author; and in any case we now have a text that is what it is, an object of a certain sort -- readers will make of it what they will. But when I read, I find that I'm inferring the intentions of the author, mentally modelling what I take to be the author's intentions, on the evidence of the text as my reading of it progresses. Inference of the author's intentions plays a major role in my interpretations. No doubt this inference, my rough model of the author's intentions, will always be faulty to some (unknown and unknowable) degree. But to me it would be an odd and maybe impossible way of reading, to refrain from inferring authorial intention as I am reading what is (to all appearances) an intentionally-written text. I'm not thinking of the author's intention as some Platonic thing hovering over the text; I'm just talking about a notion of the author's intention taking shape in the mind of the reader as he reads.
Am I falling into fallacious thinking here? Or misunderstanding the Intentional Fallacy? Or maybe understanding it well enough but saying something eye-rollingly obvious, that any proponent of the Intentional Fallacy already takes for granted?
Nemonymous
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gveranon, would you still be inferring the author's intentions, if the work were published anonymously (i.e. male or female, date of writing etc. all unknown)?
gveranon
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Answering quickly before going to bed (it's 3:00 a.m. here!): Yes. At least with most types of writing, a surmised sense of author-intention seems to me an almost unavoidable part of construing the meaning(s) of the work or even of experiencing it aesthetically. This surmised sense of intention arises naturally in the course of reading almost any piece of writing. It arises naturally from the text itself (unless it's extremely avant-garde or in a language I can't read); although of course if I (think I) know something about the author, this may influence my sense of the author's intention. But even in that case, the text itself is what I'm reading; it is what I'm experiencing and construing. Knowing something about the author may cause me to (think I) see more in the text than I would otherwise, but still my inference of author-intention arises from the writing itself in the course of my reading it. And I should say that my sense of author-intention may be vague and not easy to put into words.
Most pieces of writing are written in a rhetoric of at least implied intentionality (human language, in most of its uses, even in literary texts, seems to naturally imply some sort of intention). I don't understand how one can read a piece of writing that is written rhetorically as if someone wrote it intentionally, without reading it as if someone wrote it intentionally.
It's 3:30! I'm sure I'll wish I worded this differently when I look at it tomorrow.
Nemonymous
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That's all very fair, geveranon, and interesting food for thought.
I suggest that the inferences 'change' - and I think you bear this out - with one's degree of knowledge or (dare I say, even pre-judgement) regarding the author (known face to face or on facebook, or known by previous books, known by hearsay or biography or autobiography etc), i.e. 'change' one's whole system of interacting with that author's fiction (didactic or not). So the optimum is to know as little as possible about the author, hence my nemonymous approach. Not stipulating anything here, simply broaching possibilities...
I suggest that the inferences 'change' - and I think you bear this out - with one's degree of knowledge or (dare I say, even pre-judgement) regarding the author (known face to face or on facebook, or known by previous books, known by hearsay or biography or autobiography etc), i.e. 'change' one's whole system of interacting with that author's fiction (didactic or not). So the optimum is to know as little as possible about the author, hence my nemonymous approach. Not stipulating anything here, simply broaching possibilities...
ToALonelyPeace
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How can I describe my feelings for this work? At first, I thought the book would be similar to Steve Rasnic Tem “Ugly Behavior” but it proved me wrong and reached entire new height of brutality. Perhaps because I experienced some of the fictional events, certain passages made me dizzy with nausea and pain so much that I vomited and was forced to lie down. When I was six I was transferred into a foster home because my mother left the country to fulfill her grand plan of another life. My father (whom I did not live with) took me there himself despite everything. In my opaque mind, I knew he would leave me there but still I trusted him when he told me to wait while he would go inside and apologize to them. He didn’t come back of course. Just like Norman, I cried and peed everywhere and was unable to talk or eat. I didn’t notice the other kids or the nurses though they threatened to force fed me my vomit. There was a numbing rock in my brain all the time but I didn’t understand why-why every moment was painful. Then one night, I woke up in a nurse’s arm to the moon shining on the cement’s floor and for some reason I understood. I understood that if I die no one would know. For all my screams no one would hear. This truth was too much to bear, and it culminated in me starving myself almost to death.
Of course I am in a better place now, reunited with my mother in the heaven she had promised. I didn’t fit in the beginning and resented her, but time healed all wounds. And yet…I still carry the pain around uselessly. My mother, various counselor and psychologist alike have told me I need to move on to better things, to forgive the past, let bygone be bygone. I believe so too most of the time, as I understand the pain to be an echo of my past self, who is dead to the world now, and therefore the pain has no authentic ‘I’ attached to it. I can also sense how it distressed my mother, how she would prefer I put the past in a box and in her words “You suffered? I also suffered. That makes both of us.” I move on as they wish and if I sometimes randomly confess my past to strangers it is simply an indulgent. The truth is I am stuck, have been stuck in a corner since then and even long before, because I now have nowhere to go and don’t know what to do with this useless pain. The pain doesn’t interfere with my work, I do love my mother, and I don’t seek to give out vengeance, justice, or forgiveness because it is not mine to give and no such things really exist. By all account I should have nothing to do with the past, should just pull a Ramsey and accept the world’s happiness (especially mine in this moment) is built on (my past self) a child’s mutilated corpse. Yet I wonder why I cannot? The book has no answer for such a question and no such thing exists anyhow. Nonetheless, I have to thank the author for this book as it has clarified my thoughts, and also for the moments which console me more than all the words from anyone.
Justin Isis
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Still remember reading this when it was just a manuscript. Would have been 2007 or 2008 – so about ten years ago. Knew right away this book would wreck people, still proud to have been able to do the introduction for it.
It looks like I will have to get my hands on "All God's Angels Beware."