sandboox: anybody reading anything?

firbank is p silly

Always struggled with Firbank too. Well, struggled through about half of about three or four novella-length works. People who like him admire the various refinements of his humour, a sort of fin-de-siecle plus, (or minus if that equates an ironic refinement), but I always feel as if I'm handling a recalcitrant hoover when I'm reading.

Daniel Deronda and some way into Either/Or over Christmas. It was that sort of Christmas, internally anyway, the festivities were perfectly convivial.

Daniel Deronda is a very strange book, isn't it? Eliot is an extraordinary writer, such a control over the psychological motivations of her characters, and the bleakest most material ideas you can imagine all managed with great intellectual brilliance. You would fear her sympathy as being very little different in quality to her criticism. There are vast swaths of Victorian sentiment swaddling some her characters - there's so much work that goes on around some characters to indicate their goodness, and in general her sense of irony is too fine for this continual application of sentimental make-up to be at all convincing. If you attempt to clear off this sentimental mummy that surrounds some of the characters you find that there's hardly a single appealing character in the whole work. I've never read a novel where it's quite so clear that all the author is interested in is ideas. Eliot has absolutely no interest in the quotidian whatsoever - fashion is flippantly dismissed in a single short paragraph, and NO ONE EATS EVER. She mentions food once, and that dismissively (it's a pet theory I have that realist writers aren't interested in food, only genre and fantastic writers are - Eliot has given that rather wobbly idea a shot of amphetamines). Power and resistance, power and resistance, a vicious heath-robinson moral manufactory of a novel, with Deronda the most powerful of all - it takes a whole religion to take him down. And all so brilliantly done, too.

And then on top of this you've got these vast tracts of hectoring Old Testament blood and thunder + Romantic Nationalism, which cure Daniel Deronda of being a sanctimonious prick at which point he buggers off into the desert sunset.

Thoroughly enjoyable, but rather nasty as well.

Enjoying Either/Or... again, well I think again. I had a copy that had Fear and Trembling as well, but I think that must have been edited highlights, because this full version is two volumes. Especially enjoying it after the rather top-down controlling of Eliot in DD. To feel the existential struggles of a Romantic individual as, by all sorts of fragmentary means, it tries to find some sort of meaning or understanding of itself in the world is exactly what I need. Maybe I shall contract a brain fever.

there was a point this term where everyone at my college was going around reading 'either/or'; that was kind of weird.

eliot is someone i feel like i would like to read more of; these things sound like the sort of things i would be glad to find of her.

i am back on beckett, for the evening

yeah D Deronda sounds great

c.j. lines' "cold mirrors" like the 666th Pan book of horror stories edited by herbert van thal except written ever so well in a slightly will selfy style ( tho less verbose ) only thing that lets it down is that in place of self's unpleasant witty denouements we get rather "garth merenghi" endings to the stories. genre bound but showing promise.
reading sherlock holmeses, now, holmes.