Brain Pain discussion

This thread is for discussing ideas about "Western" culture, the "Western Canon" and similar categories of "Eastern Culture" and so on. Are these categories clearly defined? Are they important? Exclusionary? Illusionary? Relevant? In this 21st century of the global village and the intercultural exchanges and ties established thru the internet, are these categories going to last much longer?

Share your thoughts here...

Stop it, I'm trying to finish my review of "1Q84".

It's important! Exclusionary! Illusionary! Relevant!

Ian wrote: "Stop it, I'm trying to finish my review of "1Q84".

It's important! Exclusionary! Illusionary! Relevant!"

I finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last night and know exactly what you mean!

Carry on, sir...

Carry on, luggage. (Sorry, I've been thinking, I mean drinking.)

Ian wrote: "Carry on, luggage. (Sorry, I've been thinking, I mean drinking.)"

That sounds like Terry Pratchett! *luggage*

Can we start up a Terry Pratchett discussion. I haven't read any and I need to know where to start.

Ian wrote: "Can we start up a Terry Pratchett discussion. I haven't read any and I need to know where to start."

I second this motion.

Ian wrote: "Can we start up a Terry Pratchett discussion. I haven't read any and I need to know where to start."

As long as we get free sapient pearwood luggage as part of the deal...

Ian wrote: "Can we start up a Terry Pratchett discussion. I haven't read any and I need to know where to start."

Start here:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/topic...

Jim wrote: "Ian wrote: "Can we start up a Terry Pratchett discussion. I haven't read any and I need to know where to start."

Start here:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/topic..."

and

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/3...

Andreea,

Okay -- where were we?

You were speaking of Eastern Europe as being not part of the Western literary tradition. The Russian Empire was large and complex, but the writers we look to were Western. Tolstoy was Christian until he became essentially Tolstoyan. :-) His eye is on the West. He wrote and spoke Western languages and wrote in them. What one could call Asian in his great novels is somewhat difficult to find. Tolstoy is the writer the West typically regards as the greatest Russian. To look at the writer the Russians typically regard as the greatest Russian, there's Pushkin and I find it difficult to think of him as "Eastern."

While the west is far from uniform -- even individual countries are far from uniform -- I have a hard time seeing how lumping them with the East either clarifies or problematizes them in an interesting way.

Jim wrote: "Start here:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/topic..."

Thanks, Jim, I will investigate.

Here is one possible window into Japanese authors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akutagaw...

I learned of it by spotting Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "Hell Screen" in a Great Books catalog. I know there have been efforts to extend GB's concerns globally, although the selections still seem limited. If you are interested in browsing the catalog a bit, the PDF is here:

http://www.greatbooks.org/fileadmin/p...

I'll make a few notes tonight and perhaps be back another time.

Lily wrote: "Here is one possible window into Japanese authors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akutagaw...

I learned of it by spotting Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "Hell Screen" in a Great Books catalog. I know t..."

Definitely going to be checking this list out for TBR additions.

Aubrey wrote: "Lily wrote: 'Here is one possible window into Japanese authors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akutagaw... ...'

Definitely going to be checking this list out for TBR additions."

Would love to hear what your screening selects, Aubrey! Soon or weeks or months (or even years?) from now.

Jim wrote: "This thread is for discussing ideas about "Western" culture, the "Western Canon" and similar categories of "Eastern Culture" and so on. Are these categories clearly defined? Are they important? Ex..."

Since we're going to read some of this juicy post-modern stuff, I'm going to get my non-dualism on and say that a strict distinction between Western/Eastern, or between any particular categories, is not brain-painful enough. I like to visualize works emerging from (or in dialogue with) different literary traditions as clustering around nodes, with varying gradations and cross-fertilizations between them.

And this place seems like a good home for works that are challenging in form and theme from the whole tangled web.

Lily wrote: "Here is one possible window into Japanese authors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akutagaw...

I learned of it by spotting Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "Hell Screen" in a Great Books catalog. I know t..."

Coincidentally, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa will be making an appearance in our first 'Cluster Headache' read this spring.

Thanks Lily!

Rachel wrote: "Since we're going to read some of this juicy post-modern stuff, I'm going to get my non-dualism on and say that a strict distinction between Western/Eastern, or between any particular categories, is not brain-painful enough. I like to visualize works emerging from (or in dialogue with) different literary traditions as clustering around nodes, with varying gradations and cross-fertilizations between them.

And this place seems like a good home for works that are challenging in form and theme from the whole tangled web..."

Right there with ya Rachel. Post-WW2, East/West looses it's clear meaning. I'm much more interested in formal challenges for BP. East/West discussion is more about whether or not and/or how east/west culture differences manifest in form, if at all.

I just finished my first Murakami novel. If you anglicize proper names in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I think it would be near impossible to determine what country the author is from.

Jim wrote: "I just finished my first Murakami novel. If you anglicize proper names in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I think it would be near impossible to determine what country the author is from. "

That's definitely not what quite a lot of Japanese readers thought. The reason why when he wrote The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Murakami had been living in the US for four years and why before that he spent almost ten years in Europe was because the Japanese literary establishment had (and to a large extent still does) considered him a traitor who gave up Japanese literary forms and topics in order to write Western style literature. Murakami himself admitted that his main influences are all Western writers and that he doesn't know much about Japanese literature. Growing up he read next to no Japanese literature because his father was a Japanese literature teacher, instead he read European classics (Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, etc) and later on American ones (Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, etc).

Rachel, I'm also against dualism, it seems sometimes just a competition with arguments with no relation with a tangible reality.

Andreea, good you brought that up. It's fairly easy to get into dualistic argumentation and conceptual discussions and in the end just to get all too liberal: everything is art, every text is literature, is their even differences about this and that? Aren't we all the one and the same?! So, most of us come from non-culturally restrictive countries but some who are or were can see easily the differences between the side that is liberal and the one which isn't. Then we come to another topic: how much should we invest in literary cross-polinization? how protective and/or enthusiastic we should be with traditional forms (without calling anyone who goes another way a traitor)?

Filipe,

Okay, so I think "analysis" by definition means breaking things apart. The question then becomes how useful is any particular analysis -- where does it lead.

If you're going to categorize, how is it helpful.

Jim,

You of course know the expression "herding cats."

I think it's going to be difficult to keep people -- particularly those focused on a new work -- to talk only about how the form impacts the work.

I think it's one thing to look at work that are formally challenging, but I think trying to limit conversation to formal challenges will be off-putting if there are aspects about the work that call to be discussed, either because they're attractive or off-putting or simply front and center.

And in some works simply trying to understand what's happening will be of interest. :-)

It's your group, but I'm just saying...

Bill wrote: "Jim,

You of course know the expression "herding cats."

I think it's going to be difficult to keep people -- particularly those focused on a new work -- to talk only about how the form impacts the..."

My father's version is "You can't push a chain"

The formal elements are a point of departure for these discussions. They will take on a life of their own, I'm sure...

Bill,

as Jim stated in the message to we, BP members difficulty here in the first round of Spine is being categorized as Alternative/Non-Traditional Forms in the original context when the book was first published disregarding its possible posterior integration to today's literary normality.

If the focus is the debating itself, them let everyone use the terms they feel most confortable with and let's just admire the conceptual fight in Coliseum while the lurkers and/or audience eat popcorn.

I feel like you want to take the pragmatic approach or want me to take it. Either way, extensive and intesive analysis would bring as to: certain differences are only applied to restricted time/cultural/geographic zones, further specification in the literary world would bring to the every case is a different case and should be treated as such.
After we break stuff apart and we understand its basic compounds we realize the BOOK IN ITSELF is made of matter organized in symbols organized in the order the author intended to. But the author is not your brother, the words he used had a meaning, even multiple, in his days that do not relates perfectly with the today's usage, even more if there are thousand of years in between and the different cultures and languages and his own preferences (since he could have approach the word based in his favorite meaning of it). And I've seen I jumped the East vc. West central theme and got in a abstract and later on very specific part of it.

The utility of categorization; first the most important: if everything was treated as uniquely as it is we wouldn't have enough one of a kind words to speak about them to anybody, so we need reduction to universal terms to allow dialogue/communication. The second one: different stuff is happening all around we although we can't have infinite terms we are always integrating them and creating new to encompass the diversity and the fixation of one of a kind events/perspective/ideias/feelings/whatever. But before categorizing one should define most precisely the definition with which one desires to categorize something, them this one makes groups based for each category, and even more groups to stuff that have more categories in commom, in this way we can see how similiar stuff is by their smallers parts in an abstract sense. But then again the book or something or anything is more than it's smaller parts, anything is the emerging state of some very specific organization of all the smaller parts its composed of. It helps create statistics and better solutions to car traffic and disease control but in literature I don't quite get the pratical utility if there is any, humanities are very hobbyish. I think the real utility in the humanities is in the understanding.

Filipe wrote: "It helps create statistics and better solutions to car traffic and disease control but in literature I don't quite get the pratical utility if there is any, humanities are very hobbyish. I think the real utility in the humanities is in the understanding. .."

Good points, Filipe. I'm going to drink some beer with the popcorn...

Ultimately, literature and art are about exploring and trying to understand human existence. In the visual arts, the two main components for critiquing a given work are the formal elements and the thematic content - or - what is it made of and what topic is it about. With literature, these elements also exist, but of course, there is much more to talk about than that, because literature is a much more complex art form.

The reason I chose these books, and the reason I keep emphasizing issues of form, is because some of the most common complaints and barriers to comprehension revolve around the formal choices made by the authors. Ulysses, for example, uses a very complex narrative style (form) to tell its story (theme). These complaints and perceived barriers are worth exploring and discussing. Once we get past the formal examination, we can hopefully better appreciate Joyce's themes and ideas about life that he chose to explore in Ulysses.

Jim wrote: "...because literature is a much more complex art form...."

Not sure all of us would agree with you on that one? (Although Proust certainly attempts to demonstrate the truth of the statement!)

Lily, what art forms do you think are even a match?
I would love to read Proust trying to convince me about that.

I think you're missing my point, Filipe -- or maybe I'm missing your point. Either way.

I'm saying only that categorization needs to have value. I could categorize different literary works by the number of times they used different letters of the alphabet or the square root of the weight of the first edition -- but I don't know that would be helpful. That's all I mean.

Similarly with categories like East and West. Either they illuminate in some way or not. If they are illuminating, use them. If not, who cares?

Filipe wrote: "Lily, what art forms do you think are even a match?
I would love to read Proust trying to convince me about that."

Paintings, and sculpture, and music can each be as complex and rich as literature, albeit in very different ways and perhaps with different scope. The "although" was intended to signal that Proust at least tends to support Jim's statement -- in part by incorporating references and his memories of art works into his text. But it is amazing what adding viewing or listening to those works does to the story, even though I must admit then that his novel is in some sense or another "bigger" than any one of those art works.

Bill, I just tried to capture the whole of categorization from its very fundamental beginning to lets say personalized usage. I think the Oulipo is here (in the community main page) only because of its mathematical value that forced the writer to write about things in a restricted way, much like classical poetry, if you ask me. Then I linked the categorization if the translation issue we had previously in BP Forum. Then I said categorization only works outside a personalized usage if it has a very precise definition for its terms, because if not that way is just the Coliseum scene again and again. And I also stated that categorization is analysis and it cuts things out and put the ones with the same shape (or any arbitrarity you may conceive) in the same category. I have this vision that the Oulipo Books seem hard to make but easy to read, which makes us come back again to the difficulty topic, but then I think we already established a mutual consensus that difficulty here in the BP is assuming the value of original/rare/uncommum form in the context the book was conceived.

I didn't show the practical means or values why should be a East and West categories in our discussions, I said more about the origins, usages of categorization that applies to even the East and West discussion. I showed that if the categories are been used in a personal way -my opinion, my idea of west- without precise definition by the two parties of the dialogue it tends to shadow the matter.
But then again the books which are here are only here because of a certain categorization which states all they "should" or "had to" fit together by a commom term.

Bill, how would you attribute value to the categories? The discussion earlier was confused and dissonant because the "meaning" were very different and even non-related to each other in the several comments. (still about the East and West)

When I say something, I say all I think is pertinent to the matter, I see there is a lot of branchwork and abstraction and exemplification that gets in the way, I'm also writing these lines directly in the box of goodreads. I dind't intend to promote over-categorization or useless ones, I just wanted to illuminate the matter of categorization itselves in all the contexts I could imagine specially the ones found in the forum.

Lily, so as whole you don't think literature is fundamentally the most complex and rich art form but that in a giving context if you compare certain art works from different media you apprehend a distinct specialness in one and not the other. Is that it?

Filipe,

I agree that arguments can go around in circles because people are using words differently. Lily and I went in around in circles a bit when we were using a word in different ways.

I think words need to be defined to the extent that they prevent confusion. To take an extreme example, I can say "Wear red - it's Valentine's Day" without specifying the precise range of wave lengths under consideration.

As for value, it won't be objective. I ask if it adds to our understanding in a relevant and useful way. And I expect someone to be able to answer how it does. Now there will be disagreements -- but sometimes not.

Filipe wrote: "...in a giving context if you compare certain art works from different media you apprehend a distinct specialness in one and not the other. Is that it? ..."

I don't understand what you are saying, Filipe.

All I was trying to say was that I'm not convinced that literature should be privileged as "a much more complex art form", at least, not without expanding on the intended meaning of "much more complex".

For example, what makes the most complex piece of literature more or less complex than David's "The Coronation of Napoleon" or than Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel? Or, from a very different direction, is an opera a piece of literature or another art form? If another art form, how does it compare in complexity? Certainly one can say literature is a very complex art form; it seems to me quite a different assertion to say that it is "much more complex than other art forms". But, all in all, I think we are beating a nit into the ground at this point.

Lily,

When I first started thinking about categorizing art I tried to go to the basics of perception: 1. image (2d image - painting, 3d image - sculpture, architecture is basicly a huge sculpture), 2. sound (music), 3. smell (perfume), 4. Texture (fabrics? modern technology surfaces?!) 5. Taste (culinary). Them I conceived hybrids: Cinema (sound and alternating images). If if you stop to think literature doens't even enter here not as pure nor hybrid, literature is not a hybrid of image and sound, is something else more related to mimesis and abstract thoughts than with images and sounds.
I would say that literature has more relation with humanity as whole than "The Coronation of Napoleon", most specially the great philosophers works and poets.

I thought you had a sensation of one being different from the other, in some kind of weird predilection not based in pure reason.

Lily wrote: "Filipe wrote: "...in a giving context if you compare certain art works from different media you apprehend a distinct specialness in one and not the other. Is that it? ..."

I don't understand what ..."

Go back to my post and you'll see I mentioned specifically "visual arts", which would be static art like paintings, photographs, and prints.

Music, opera, cinema, drama, are more complex than visual arts in their formal elements in part because they are dynamic, performance arts.

Literature, specifically fiction, is more complex than the static visual arts. Literature demands a different type of involvement with the audience than a painting on a wall. So there is more to discuss. That's not about privileging one type of art over another. That's an observation about the relative complexity of the different types of art.

Good point, Jim.

LOL! Pass the beer and the popcorn, please!

In some posts in this thread, a thread called "Cluster Headaches" is mentioned, but I can't find this thread. Has it been posted yet?

Also, in addition to the books listed in "The Spine," what's the best way of keeping track of the "side reads"???

The BP Poetry thread is clear, but I've noticed a Derrida reading going on, and it looks as though Portrait of the Artist was read at some point. Can there be a "side reads" or "outside the spine" thread (or just a "locked" list of the current reads outside the spine?)

I wasn't sure where to post this question, but since the cluster headaches was mentioned in this thread AND since "other dubious categories" is part of this thread's title, I thought this would be a good place for my questions.

THANKS!!! (and I apologize if I'm "off topic.")

Barbara wrote: "In some posts in this thread, a thread called "Cluster Headaches" mentioned, but I can't find this thread. Has it been posted yet?

Also, in addition to the books listed in "The Spine," what's the ..."

I haven't posted the Cluster Headache yet. Will do so around mid-March as I finalize scheduling.

I realize the need for a "Master Schedule" topic so members don't have to hunt around for what's coming up. For today, scroll down to the very bottom of the group home page and you'll see the "Upcoming Reads" section. There you will see the start dates, but if you click on "view" for each of the books, you will also find the end dates. The group bookshelf includes all the titles scheduled, as well as a few "reference" books which we won't formally be reading, but which I consider to be useful for our overall project here.

Thank you, Jim! The list of books you've chosen is amazing. I wish I could participate in ALL of the reading and discussions, but I would have to give up my freelance work to find the time for all that reading!! (and after being out of work for a couple of years, I'm making up for it be working 7 days a week, sometimes 14 hour days. This doesn't leave a lot of room for reading, so I will have to pick and choose which of these books to read. But what a great selection to choose from!!!)

You mentioned much earlier in this thread that you recently read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. The Eastern/Western categories become so hard to define when it comes to many contemporary Asian writers, Murakami being one of them.

Did you like the book? Do you find it to be a "Brain Pain" book?

As I mentioned in the thread for 2013 suggestions, I find that a well-written Magical Realism book is always worthy of a good discussion, and I could be wrong but I believe there's plenty to discuss on both form and theme in Murakami's works.

Did you feel that way about The Wind Up Bird Chronicle? And, based on your comments and other comments earlier in this thread, I think we all agree that Murakami's work really doesn't fall into an "Eastern Lit" category, especially in terms of theme.

Barbara wrote: "Thank you, Jim! The list of books you've chosen is amazing. I wish I could participate in the reading and discussions, but I would have to give up my freelance work to find the time for all that re..."

One possibility for next year is a themed-read of magical realism. My initial thought was to stay mainly within Romance languages - Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian - because there seems to be a huge amount of magical realism/surrealism novels in these languages. It wouldn't be a stretch to include Murakami in the mix since he tends to lean heavily towards Western culture. Wind-Up Bird could easily blend with these Romance language writers - like Allende, Calvino, Garcia Marquez, and so on.

Jim wrote: "I realize the need for a "Master Schedule" topic so members don't have to hunt around for what's coming up. For today, scroll down to the very bottom of the group home page and you'll see the "Upcoming Reads" section. There you will see the start dates, but if you click on "view" for each of the books, you will also find the end dates...."

I thought the master schedule was already posted?

Liz M wrote: "I thought the master schedule was already posted?"

Yes, it's already posted in that announcement and the dates listed are correct. Since that time though, H.D.'s Helen in Egypt has been added, and more poetry will be added as the year goes on, so I want to create a post titled "Master Schedule" that I can update as things are added.

I agree generally with the comments about east-west post WWII changing quite a bit, but older eastern thought is something I've spent most of my life with, and if you had to press me on a work which this group COULD read, I'd suggest Outlaws of the Marsh. Doesn't mean I think we should read it, just if I had to pick something. It's a traditional form, and thus for us somewhat non-traditional form, has oodles of characters, and contains lots of places for western readers to get lost, bored, confused or at least misunderstood. Downsides would be FINDING a copy for many readers.