Principia Discordia

Principia Discordia => Literate Chaotic => Topic started by: LMNO on May 14, 2008, 04:00:07 PM

Title: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: LMNO on May 14, 2008, 04:00:07 PM
Would you happen to have a pdf of Tristram Shandy?

Just wondering.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cramulus on May 14, 2008, 04:17:27 PM
is this it?

http://www.gasl.org/refbib/Sterne__Shandy_Journey.pdf


Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: LMNO on May 14, 2008, 04:23:52 PM
Looks like it.

Thanks!

Just heard about it on NPR - something about a comedy whose theme is that life is too complicated to be contained in a normal story. A piece of postmodernism, before there was even modernism - it was written in 1760.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: e on May 14, 2008, 06:25:10 PM
Tristram Shandy is awesome.  Somebody made a movie out of it in recent years, BTW.   

QuoteThe book was adapted on film in 2006 as A Cock and Bull Story, directed by Michael Winterbottom, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce (credited as Martin Hardy, in a complicated metafictional twist), and starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Kelly Macdonald, Naomie Harris, and Gillian Anderson. The movie plays with metatextual levels, being a movie pretending to be a documentary about a movie adaptation of the book, with various actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves.

I'm pretty certain it's also on gutenberg.org (your one-stop shop for old books) http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1079

You may also enjoy "The Female Quixote", which is a silly little novel:

http://site.girlebooks.com/xs.php?page=ebooks_detail&siteid=223&lang=en&table=user_girlebooks&idx=0&iddetail=281  (for download in PDF, TXT, and LIT)
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cain on May 14, 2008, 11:38:15 PM
I've heard of it, but actually have not read it so far.

Of course, I have over 7000 books on my laptop currently, so this should not be too surprising.  I have reading material for the next decade.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: e on May 14, 2008, 11:40:18 PM
Packrat syndrome is a dangerous thing.  Which I also have.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cramulus on May 14, 2008, 11:41:29 PM
Quote from: Cain on May 14, 2008, 11:38:15 PM
I've heard of it, but actually have not read it so far.

Of course, I have over 7000 books on my laptop currently, so this should not be too surprising.  I have reading material for the next decade.

only a decade??

if you read 1.9 books per day it would last a decade

at the rate that I finish books, I'd be reading that collection until 2100, easy.  :p
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cain on May 14, 2008, 11:42:32 PM
I'm a quick reader.

I've also read about 6-800 of those.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Dido on May 15, 2008, 08:00:24 AM
Quote from: LMNO on May 14, 2008, 04:23:52 PM
Just heard about it on NPR - something about a comedy whose theme is that life is too complicated to be contained in a normal story. A piece of postmodernism, before there was even modernism - it was written in 1760.

sounds like the comments that made me read it. Reading it was one of the few things in my life that made me wonder if I shouldn't repent something or, more likely, everything.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cain on May 15, 2008, 11:54:53 AM
If I recall right, the story follows a day in the life of the central character, but documents absolutely everything happening around him, in maddening detail.

Right?
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Dido on May 15, 2008, 12:22:41 PM
Quote from: Cain on May 15, 2008, 11:54:53 AM
If I recall right, the story follows a day in the life of the central character, but documents absolutely everything happening around him, in maddening detail.

Right?


No.


Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cain on May 15, 2008, 12:26:00 PM
Oops.  Must've been another book then.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: e on May 15, 2008, 06:25:27 PM
Quote from: Cain on May 15, 2008, 11:54:53 AM
If I recall right, the story follows a day in the life of the central character, but documents absolutely everything happening around him, in maddening detail.

Right?

Sounds like something out of Borges.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cain on May 15, 2008, 06:29:13 PM
Quote from: TheStripèdOne on May 15, 2008, 06:25:27 PM
Quote from: Cain on May 15, 2008, 11:54:53 AM
If I recall right, the story follows a day in the life of the central character, but documents absolutely everything happening around him, in maddening detail.

Right?

Sounds like something out of Borges.

It does, and maybe it is, but I'm sure a book along that line was written much earlier.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: LMNO on May 15, 2008, 06:34:29 PM
Ulysses, perhaps?
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cain on May 15, 2008, 06:35:28 PM
Before that too.  I mean well before you would expect it.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: LMNO on May 15, 2008, 06:40:01 PM
The Tale of Genji?
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: e on May 15, 2008, 11:54:55 PM
the Instructions of Shuruppak?
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cain on May 16, 2008, 04:09:32 AM
Maybe not quite that old... :)
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Dido on May 16, 2008, 05:26:53 PM
You weren´t talking about Ulysses? Oops.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: DORADA on May 17, 2008, 07:15:32 AM
Ulyses is very difficult for me I'm not sure understand it
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cain on May 17, 2008, 09:08:16 AM
Quote from: Dido on May 16, 2008, 05:26:53 PM
You weren´t talking about Ulysses? Oops.


Nah, I've never read Ulysses.  I have an e-book somewhere, and probably will, one day....

It was something I saw while messing around on Wikipedia, following random links to strange and rarely seen entries.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cain on May 17, 2008, 02:36:08 PM
I think I conflated two different books.  The storyline I had in mind was a book by Georges Perec, but the book itself was something I read about on Wikipedia.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Iason Ouabache on May 18, 2008, 02:23:42 AM
Quote from: DORADA on May 17, 2008, 07:15:32 AM
Ulyses is very difficult for me I'm not sure understand it
No one understands James Joyce.  They only pretend like they do.

It's in Project Gutenberg, btw:  http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4300
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Dido on May 18, 2008, 11:34:21 AM
I know several English Lit students who believe (or not, I did not question them that closely) they understand Joyce and they must have understood something I did not because I find his books enormously entertaining (not that I ever finished one) and they don't.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Dido on May 18, 2008, 11:39:05 AM
Perec sounds quite frightfully artistic. So to say. Anything you would recommend for that (very very) distant future when I will again have time to read?
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Cain on May 18, 2008, 12:45:17 PM
I really haven't read much high literature lately - the last one I did read was The Count of Monte Cristo, which is admittedly pretty incredible.  But I do like Dumas.  His heroes have tendencies to be scoundrels, in one way or another, not below a certain level of trickery and ingenuity, which I like.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: e on May 20, 2008, 05:56:38 PM
Hooray for Dumas!  He remains to this day one of the reasons I want to re-learn my atrophied French.  But only so I can go around shouting things like "Sacré Foi!"

For reading, I recommend a collection of Borges stories if you haven't already read anything by him.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez is also quite entertaining.  Another good author is Milan Kundera, who's absolutely wonderful.  My favourite by him, I think, is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

(Can you tell that I like teh po-moz?)


I've always been pretty sure that the whole point of Ulysses was that it was largely incomprehensible.  Though I'm sure if you sit there and study it for 10 years and do nothing else you could understand it.  Lying and pretending to understand it is also probably fashionable in lit student circles.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on May 20, 2008, 06:19:02 PM
Quote from: Iason Ouabache on May 18, 2008, 02:23:42 AM
Quote from: DORADA on May 17, 2008, 07:15:32 AM
Ulyses is very difficult for me I'm not sure understand it
No one understands James Joyce.  They only pretend like they do.

Yeah! Books is sposed to have stories and stuff! Joyce makes my brain pan do work!
   \
:mullet:
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: Dido on May 20, 2008, 09:10:18 PM
I meant if there was anything by Perec you would recommend.

I liked Dumas, detested Kundera (I was young and excitable;-) and thought Borges interesting. Marquez? Yeah, I once bought "100 years of solitude" as after-break-up lecture for a friend.
Title: Re: Cain: Book Question.
Post by: e on May 20, 2008, 10:21:06 PM
Quote from: James JoyceSpurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell
you. I'll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her love
he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls
of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward
in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides,
Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations, the
dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps short
night in, rue de la Goutte-d'Or, damascened with flyblown faces of the
gone. Loveless, landless, wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy without her
outcast man, madame in rue Git-le-Coeur, canary and two buck lodgers.
Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing's. Spurned and
undespairing. Tell Pat you saw me, won't you? I wanted to get poor Pat a
job one time. MON FILS, soldier of France. I taught him to sing THE BOYS
OF KILKENNY ARE STOUT ROARING BLADES. Know that old lay? I taught Patrice
that. Old Kilkenny: saint Canice, Strongbow's castle on the Nore. Goes
like this. O, O. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by the hand.

Fuck, I just figured out where those "Lyrical spam e-mails" I get are taking it from.