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[Captain_404]

Like this topic, but with words.

If a passage is particularly long, post an excerpt and link us to the rest if it's online!

--

Wallace Stevens, his poems are so dense and thick and I often do not understand them but I love the way they sound in my mind.

an excerpt from 13 ways of looking at a blackbird

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

Also awesome is Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

[george]

Cormac McCarthy

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

Jose Saramago

Now they are ready to leave. Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço contemplates the clear blue expanse above, cloudless and with a sun as brilliant as a glittering monstrance, then he looks at Baltasar, who is holding the rope with which they will close the sails, and then at Blimunda, and he dearly wishes that she could divine what the future holds for them, Let us commend ourselves to God, if there is a God, he murmured to himself, and then in strangled tones he said, Pull, Baltasar, but Baltasar did not react at once, for his hand was trembling, besides, this was like saying Fiat, no sooner said than done, one pull and we end up who knows where. Blimunda drew near and placed her two hands over that of Baltasar and, with a concerted gesture, as if this were the only way it could be done, both of them pulled the rope. The sail veered to one side, allowing the sun to shine directly on the amber balls, and now what will happen to us. The machine shuddered, then swayed as if trying to regain its balance, there was a loud creaking from the metal plates and the entwined canes, and suddenly, as if it were being sucked in by a luminous vortex, it went up making two complete turns, and no sooner had it risen above the walls of the coach-house than it recovered its balance, raised its head like a seagull, and soared like an arrow straight up into the sky.

Annie Proulx

Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence. Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life, counting on nothing. He ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds.

His jobs: distributor of vending machine candy, all-night clerk in a convenience store, a third-rate newspaperman. At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to Newfoundland, the rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he had never been nor thought to go.

[s0]

I heard that Shakespeare dude writes some pretty badass shit, bro.

Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
pow'r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?

I mean OMG, that shit is like way out, man. Dude musta been trippin balls on acid when he wrote that.

[Evan Balster]

Overly deliberate writing, it seems, can take proportionally great deliberation to read.

And it's hard to match the deliberation of a writer trying to cram as much meaning, analogy and action into as few words as he can.  Poetry evolves--or degenerates--into that, and it can get to be quite hard to read the product without a will to think it through.

[ezuk]

I like writing that is more plain-spoken.  My favourite poet of the past half-century is Philip Larkin:

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation:  yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

I’d put his “Church Going,” “Toads,” “This Be the Verse,” “High Windows,” and “Aubade” against most other short poems of the 20th century.

I’ve also been reading the aphorisms of E. M. Cioran lately.  He’s like Dostoevsky, telling truths that strike me as provocative and nearly unsayable:

The history of ideas is the history of the spite of certain solitaries.

How easy it is to be deep:  all you have to do is let yourself sink into your flaws.

Any and all water is the colour of drowning.

What makes a work last, what keeps it from dating, is its ferocity.

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

[Xion]

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                          A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

us folks are the peoples who look towards the sea
vision and memory past perfect futures are
strewn about our musics like sea weeds on the shore
our eyes hearts afired dancing on
limbs aghast and bedazzled caressing these sands
hand clappin spirits our souls are numberless

[...]

(this guy lives in my town, I see him around sometimes. He has the most eccentric mannerisms. He recites poetry in The Best Way.)

I have to admit I'm not feeling my best. Not that I'm doing so bad. Not that I really have anything to complain about. Not that I would actually verbally complain if I did have something to complain about. No. Because I'm Thinking Positive/Saying Positive. I'm sitting back on my haunches, waiting for people to poke in their heads. Although it's been thirteen days since anyone poked in their head and Janet's speaking English to me more and more, which is partly why I feel so, you know, crummy.

"Jeez," she says first thing this morning. "I'm so tired of roast goat I could scream."

What am I supposed to say to that? It puts me in a bad spot. She thinks I'm a goody-goody and that her speaking English makes me uncomfortable. And she's right. It does. Because we've got it good. Every morning, a new goat, just killed, sits in our Big Slot. In our Little Slot, a book of matches. That's better than some. Some are required to catch wild hares in snares. Some are required to wear pioneer garb while cutting the heads off chickens. But not us. I just have to haul the dead goat out of the Big Slot and skin it with a sharp flint. Janet just has to make the fire. So things are pretty good. Not as good as in the old days, but then again, not so bad.

[AlexDJones]

Flann O'Brien is a great Irish novellist. This is an extract from "At Swim-Two-Birds":

The third opening: Finn MacCool was a legendary hero of old Ireland. Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horse's belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was large enough to halt the march of men through a mountain-pass.

   I hurt a tooth in the corner of my jaw with a lump of the crust I was eating. This recalled me to the perception of my surroundings.
   It is a great pity, observed my uncle, that you don't apply yourself more to your studies. The dear knows your father worked hard enough for the money he is laying out on your education. Tell me this, do you ever open a book at all?
   I surveyed my uncle in a sullen manner. He speared a portion of cooked rasher against a crust on the prongs of his fork and poised the whole at the opening of his mouth in a token of continued interrogation.

Description of my uncle: Red-faced, bead-eyed, ball-bellied. Fleshy about the shoulders with long swinging arms giving ape-like effect to gait. Large moustache. Holder of Guinness clerkship the third class.

   I do, I replied.
   He put the point of his fork into the interior of his mouth and withdrew it again, chewing in a coarse manner.

Quality of rasher in use in household: Inferior, one and two the pound.

   Well faith, he said, I never see you at it, I never see you at your studies at all.
   I work in my bedroom, I answered.

[Evan Balster]

I prefer the styles posted after my previous post better than the ones before.  Easier to grasp without lingering over too long.  I genuinely think that's a superior approach.

I got nothing out of the first pages of "Rubaiyat", but then it's been some years and I'm probably a bit better equipped for it now.  (If I can find my old copy it has a nine-leafed clover pressed in it, on a bizarrely irrelevant note.)

[RCIX]

I heard that Shakespeare dude writes some pretty badass shit, bro.

Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
pow'r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?

I mean OMG, that shit is like way out, man. Dude musta been trippin balls on acid when he wrote that.

I'll be honest -- the only thing i think that is is dense, and at the risk of being the same, i'd rather not have to spend more effort reading something than i do swimming through molasses.

[Alec S.]

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

    But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
    Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
    A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
    As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
    By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
    And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
    As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
    A mighty fountain momently was forced :
    Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
    Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
    Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
    And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
    It flung up momently the sacred river.
    Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
    Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
    Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
    And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
    And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
    Ancestral voices prophesying war !

    The shadow of the dome of pleasure
    Floated midway on the waves ;
    Where was heard the mingled measure
    From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
    A damsel with a dulcimer
    In a vision once I saw :
    It was an Abyssinian maid,
    And on her dulcimer she played,
    Singing of Mount Abora.
    Could I revive within me
    Her symphony and song,
    To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

[Seth]

I heard that Shakespeare dude writes some pretty badass shit, bro.

Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
pow'r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?

I mean OMG, that shit is like way out, man. Dude musta been trippin balls on acid when he wrote that.

I'll be honest -- the only thing i think that is is dense, and at the risk of being the same, i'd rather not have to spend more effort reading something than i do swimming through molasses.

Shakespeare's not so bad after you read 6 or 7 of his plays in succession.

[Evan Balster]

...And there are far "denser" writers out there.

[JaJitsu]

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of flying:
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
    The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
    Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it.
    The first part is easy.
    All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.
    That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground.
    Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
    Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
    One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
    It is notoriously difficult to prise your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people's failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.
If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal inclination) or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above it in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner.
    This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration.
    Bob and float, float and bob.
    Ignore all considerations of your own weight and simply let yourself waft higher.
    Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful.
    They are most likely to say something along the lines of, 'Good God, you can't possibly be flying!'
    It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right.
    Waft higher and higher.
    Try a few swoops, gentle ones at first, then drift above the treetops breathing regularly.
    DO NOT WAVE AT ANYBODY.
    When you have done this a few times you will find the moment of distraction rapidly becomes easier and easier to achieve.
    You will then learn all sorts of things about how to control your flight, your speed, your manoeuvrability, and the trick usually lies in not thinking too hard about whatever you want to do, but just allowing it to happen as if it was going to anyway.
    You will also learn about how to land properly, which is something you will almost certainly cock up, and cock up badly, on your first attempt.
There are private flying clubs you can join which help you achieve the all-important moment of distraction. They hire people with surprising bodies or opinions to leap out from behind bushes and exhibit and/or explain them at the critical moments. Few genuine hitch-hikers will be able to afford to join these clubs, but some may be able to get temporary employment at them.

[Xion]

yes, yes, but of course. I really ought to read that.

[Glyph]

I hear The House Of Leaves was written in a really weird nonlinear way, but haven't had a chance to read it yet because it's on loan. I like books that aren't written in the conventional way generally, so it should make a good read.

[Sir Raptor]

The Fan Man has a completely screwed up style that is ridiculously awesome, man.

[Dustin Smith]

I read way too much Tim Rogers, for what its worth.

When I'm reading I'll keep this thread in mind.

[s0]

Shakespeare's not so bad after you read 6 or 7 of his plays in succession.

One of the reasons Shakespeare is difficult to read for modern audiences is that he uses outdated language, having lived in the 16th century and stuff. Also, don't forget that Shakespeare wrote plays. They're not supposed to be read like prose or even poetry but performed by  actors on stage.

Which is why it's pretty retarded that schools usually force students to read them. Thankfully my literature teacher was smart enough to show us recorded performances, or in the case of Hamlet, that one one movie adaption that's 4 hours long and has all the original text.

[Taiko]

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has a very rapid-fire, humorous prose style that I think would be well suited to video games.  If you're not into sci-fi, I'd also advise checking out his more mainstream Zodiac.  Both are excellent books.

[JaJitsu]

in the case of Hamlet, that one one movie adaption that's 4 hours long and has all the original text.

I personally own this, haha