Language & Grammar discussion

No, just authors who became mentally deranged.

Hamsun (if Nazi sympathies count) and Ezra Pound come to mind.

And any reading of Faulkner has to make you wonder about HIS stability.

Okay. I would vote for Truman Capote. I would say mildly deranged, thoroughly alcoholic.

Marquis de Sade

Pound and Hamsun are who came to mind, too. Altho theirs may have been pschopoliticalism.

Didn't Robert Lowell and Ann Sexton come close?

I'm currently reading a bio of John Cheever. He came damn near to the edge by way of alcoholism.

Oh, if alcoholism is a factor, our lists will be very long indeed. It's considered artistic fuel in many quarters (don't light a match).

Dear sweet Edgar Allen all the drug infused macabre stories. Or was he just a genius. Some one I don't think is necessarily deranged but has strange tales to tell is Stephen King.

Edgar Allan Poe is bookended by the letter "e" but that's all, folks!

(I'm on this little-known committee to teach the world to spell his middle name correctly because I feel him cringe just a bit -- all the way from Baltimore -- every time it's messed up.)

Its good for his soul.Keeps you on your toes and him in the vault.

He always liked 'em (vaults, I mean).

Nalla,Nalla Nalla

Sticking out my tongue with my fingers in my ears.

Hmm I don't know. I guess he wasn't faithful to the elusive Lenore.

Booze kills the man again. See Thomas comma Dylan -- and so many others.

Ernest Hemingway

On page 121 of Blood Ninja, where I have learned that all ninjas are vampires (who knew!), but not all vampires are ninjas.

Hmn. Aren't syllogisms made of such stuff?

10 minutes into twilight, I had learned I was not gonna read any of the new vampire books. But maybe my verdict was premature?

Well, this is YA remember. For teens. All plot. Giddy-up, Samurai, and all that. Good fun, is all.

Hmm, I my daughter's 19, I guess that's all the YA I need.

#51 &52, can we get back to Maeve Brennan for a moment?She wrote for the New Yorker in the 40's & '50's, in the "Talk of the Town" section she used the pseud. "The long-Winded Lady." She came to the US from Irelandd in 1934 when her father was appointed the Irish ambassador to the US.
I have a book about her "Homesick at the New Yorker" by Angela Bourke. She did have a breakdown & ended up homeless - a really tragic story.

The other Maeve, Maeve Binchy is a favorite of mine, like watching soap operas on TV used to be. She tells a good story, tho. I have tried to read eveerything she's written, but still have some short story collections to go yet.

Young Adult.

Sarah Jane is forever young.

Gabi, Grebrim (et. al.), reading YA is part of my job, which is to get teenagers with better things to do (talk and text on cellie, play video games, watch TV, surf the Internet, etc.) to actually READ.

This means I have to spend a lot of my free time reading books written for their age group. Fortunately for me, I LIKE a lot of YA stuff (of course you all know how immature I can be), and a lot of the fare in that field is superior stuff compared to olden times (read: ours).

So, as a teacher, it's just another day's work: read YA, then sell it in class via a book talk.

If you really can get young people to read, feel free to befriend my daughter on facebook.

(Your approach is of course excellent, you are picking them up where they stand, as we say. I on the other hand, was forced to read Faust aged 16. That's not a good age to read Faust.)

Sorry, but I'm Facebookless. There's no appeal there.

And you're right -- kids are force marched into reading the classics (really, SparkNotes) at much too young of an age, at least in most of their cases (there are always a few classic-reading geeks like me as a teen running around).

Nice to meet you, too!

I'm not much into YA, I must admit. I do have a friend who's an enthusiast, and she's passed some of her favorites on to me. I really should try The Book Thief, though. I think I'd like that.

I'm reading Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms, which is fabulous. It's always like a gift to start a book you feel you fit into.

After 50 pages, I needed my first break from Friedrich Nietzsche's Zarathustra. It's interesting and the language is brilliant, but I'm not someone who can plough through 300 pages of aphorisms like that (Escriva, the founder of the Opus Dei, had at least the decency to reduce his "The Way" to 120 pages).

So, I thought I'd have an intermezzo with Dorian Gray, which for now I totally love.

Dorian Gray. My God, it's been since high school that I looked in that mirror (and I needn't look again because now I have my own -- mirror, I mean).

For whatever reason, I once bought a Nietzsche book, but I just cannot read much when it comes to philosophy, and it really doesn't matter who the philosopher is. Turgid stuff. My brain as much as their words, I guess.

Do you recall which one it was? In contrast to any other philosopher I've ever tried to read, Nietzsche has a wonderfully clear language and is reputed to be one of the greatest stylists of the German language. The effect might be mitigated by the translation, though.

(By "any other philosopher" I do not mean Sartre as a novelist or playwright, as that is great literature.)

Oh, I love Sartre and Camus (and the whole existential thing). For some reason, I really don't look at "existentialism" as a philosophy. More an outlook on life.

I like to teach both Sartre's short, "The Wall," and Camus', "The Guest." Nice stuff.

The Nietzsche text I own is the Modern Library's Basic Writings of Nietzsche. I think I was swimming in "The Birth of Tragedy" when I started to sink.

Bismarck. Another German. Das Boot.

I really don't look at "existentialism" as a philosophy. More an outlook on life.

That's how I see it, too.

It's funny, Sartre himself perceived existentialism as something for philosophers only; and in fact, I stopped "Being and Nothingness" after half a page,as I literally didn't understand a thing he was saying.

It wasn't before it became en vogue to call yourself an existentialist that he saw himself compelled to explain the most important traits of his philosophy in a short pamphlet, "Existentialism is a Humanism." It was here that he distilled his thinking into the famous "You are condemned to be free." What could possibly subsume contemporary western life better?

Das Boot, well, that was a great movie. And Bismarck was some twit.

Bismarck was also a boat with a sinking feeling.

Have you read the play No Exit? Fits your "condemned to be free" quote nicely.

My fiancé tells me weekly to finally read the damn thing. At least, I've already bought it, but I usually can hardly bring myself to read a play. We'll see...

Read it together, each taking a part. More fun that way (plus you call her bluff).

I still intent to marry her

No Exit is the perfect metaphor for marriage. Braveheart, lad, Braveheart!

As long as The Stranger or Nausea aren't...

Would The Agony and the Ecstasy be more fair?

grebrim wrote: "My fiancé tells me weekly to finally read the damn thing. At least, I've already bought it, but I usually can hardly bring myself to read a play. We'll see..."

Sorry to just pop into this conversation, but why don't you try reading the play aloud? (and give your fiancee a few parts :). It makes a difference when you hear a play. When I was a child, my mother and I used to read plays that way.

We're still In the Rose Garden, but I'll keep you informed.

Whoops. I just backed up a little and see that NE already made the same suggestion.

I'll just wander off now...:)

Wow. Great minds think alike. As for the Rose Garden... don't tell me your house is white, too.

No Ellen, please stay; another female perspective is always dear to us.
The house I live in is white I guess, but it's covered with ivy.

Right, Ellen. We need all the wimmins we can get. God (and Eve) knows they make more sense than most of us manunkinds.

I'm well into a hysterical historical fiction with an interesting premise. It's set in Leningrad during Fritz's siege. Some gruesome stuff, like cannibalism, but mostly funny stuff under dire circumstances.

Two Russkies -- one 17, one 19, get a reprieve for breaking incidental rules when a Red Star colonel commits them to finding 10 eggs in a starving city so he can make his daughter's wedding cake at the end of the week. If they fail? It's over.

When severity meets sublime, you get books like City of Thieves.

Sounds like something I could get my teeth into.

Is that a cannibal joke?

It does sound interesting to me, and yes it is a funny haha. But I did add it to my list. Thanks

I've been to the memorial to the Siege of Leningrad. Large plaza above, then you go into this big underground display and a bell tolls 900 times, slowly and monotonously, one bong for each of the days of the siege. Very, very moving.