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On October 01 2013 14:02 123Gurke wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2013 05:02 Prog455 wrote: Can anyone recommend any easy-read German litterature? Preferably juveniele books such as Michael Ende. I need the books to improve my German in order to study for a semester in Germany, and at this point nothing is too easy. a) ![[image loading]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/510h7zisZQL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_SX385_SY500_CR,0,0,385,500_SH20_OU03_.jpg) Read more Michael Ende. He has written lots of books and most of them are good. He is really one of the very few contemporary children's books authors that come to my mind and that I would recommend. And in particular the Jim Knopf books (there are two of them) are very fun. Just be aware that those books were in the center of a recent discussion about racism in children's books because of the word "Neger" (which was still quite common when I was a kid but is now considered offensive). So don't use that word when you come to Germany  My childhood...
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Finished Ready Player One. Really light bubblegum YA sci-fi, like a nerd fantasy. Really effective though because the story is just super fun and its like the reading equivalent of playing a brand new addictive video game. Lots of little annoyances with the material but doesn't stop the effectiveness for me.
I think I'll undertake 2666 by Roberto Bolaño next. Don't really know what I'm in for but it'll be an adventure.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/wbex0mB.jpg?1) Need that intense cover art of the first volume.
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I really enjoyed Bolano's _The Third Reich_. He paints a picture of a narcissistic introverted gamer pretty well.
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The Dresden Files are amazingly good.
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Canada5565 Posts
On October 02 2013 14:18 Blisse wrote: The Dresden Files are amazingly good.
Which book are you on?
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On October 02 2013 14:19 Xxio wrote:Which book are you on?
Either the 7th or 8th. I'm leaning on 8. I don't mind literary styles too, too much so I don't really comment on those, but I enjoy a good story and writing styles that don't push me out of that zone (unless that was the intent of the novel). I love the humour, mystery and general fantasy vibe of the book.
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reading a pile of steaming nonsense for one of my seminars. how do people have jobs to write this bullcrap? in particular this garrett stewart person is maybe the worst writer i have ever had the misfortune to read. this shit is literally just a bunch of words they hope you don't understand so you will think they are smarter than you are. only i know all the words and its a fucking word salad. like some derrida madlib or something. is it too late for me to become a Scientist?
edit: someday, just someday, I'd like to read somebody citing deleuze who wasn't a pretentious fuck. do they exist?
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The Third Reich was fantastic.
I have Savage Detectives lying around, I'll get around to it at some point @@
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On October 03 2013 05:34 sam!zdat wrote: reading a pile of steaming nonsense for one of my seminars. how do people have jobs to write this bullcrap? in particular this garrett stewart person is maybe the worst writer i have ever had the misfortune to read. this shit is literally just a bunch of words they hope you don't understand so you will think they are smarter than you are. only i know all the words and its a fucking word salad. like some derrida madlib or something. is it too late for me to become a Scientist?
edit: someday, just someday, I'd like to read somebody citing deleuze who wasn't a pretentious fuck. do they exist?
Delanda.
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do you know andrew piper? he's a pretentious fuck
he made some stupid program that makes diagrams out of Goethe and then drones on for pages and pages about how it explodes hierarchies and etc bullshit. no it doesn't, it just makes some picture that you don't even explain how to use to understand anything.
my field is so embarrassing
sometimes i think all you have to do to be a deleuzian is repeat the word "repetition" as many times as possible and make claims about what your argument does without actually making an argument
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On October 03 2013 05:49 sam!zdat wrote: do you know andrew piper? he's a pretentious fuck
he made some stupid program that makes diagrams out of Goethe and then drones on for pages and pages about how it explodes hierarchies and etc bullshit. no it doesn't, it just makes some picture that you don't even explain how to use to understand anything.
my field is so embarrassing
sometimes i think all you have to do to be a deleuzian is repeat the word "repetition" as many times as possible and make claims about what your argument does without actually making an argument I totally agree. Fuck deleuzians
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On October 03 2013 05:49 sam!zdat wrote: do you know andrew piper? he's a pretentious fuck
he made some stupid program that makes diagrams out of Goethe and then drones on for pages and pages about how it explodes hierarchies and etc bullshit. no it doesn't, it just makes some picture that you don't even explain how to use to understand anything.
my field is so embarrassing
I sympathize. Its mainly an issue of Deleuze being quite difficult, and people try an engage with his work by attempting to be difficult rather than actually get something productive out of his work.
He's very easy to ape. I've heard many people try Deleuze-speak by randomly cycling obscure words in cryptic ways while throwing the odd 'zone' and 'imminent' in there and its hard to distinguish unless you know your stuff. The travesty is that Deleuze's work is remarkably pertinent and productive.
One guy I met a conference was using his concept of a plateau to understand the way in which individual issues of a periodical comics series can be understood together, was kind of a re-joiner to Eco's treatment of superman in Role of the Reader. Which also connected to another speaker I met at the conference that was applying Bahktin's chronotope to the series, but that's another story...
I do know of one academic that works really well with Deleuze in relation to the English working class poet John Clare, let me find the copy of his journal...
The abstract needs to be explained, as they say.
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I am halfway through Anti-Oedipus and I think it is mostly worthless. I will still give Difference and Repetition a shot though. but not for a while, I have some hegel and badiou to read first
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Currently reading :
![[image loading]](http://ca.pbsstatic.com/xl/88/3288/9780195373288.jpg) Aeschylus' complete plays. Nice stuff, my favorite is 7 against Thebes so far, still need to go through the Oresteia. I also picked up the gay Science, but it seems like I'm not at all in a nietzsche mood, so I'll try something else. Also a girl problem means I reread Plato's Symposium at 5 in the morning. Great time
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One of my old lecturers Simon Kovesi wrote a great article for the John Clare Society Journal called 'Beyond the Language Wars: Towards a Green Edition of John Clare', towards the end he makes great use of 'the rhizome.'
You may be able to get it here:
http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2124/searchFulltext.do?id=R04012507&divLevel=0&area=abell&forward=critref_ft
Otherwise: John Clare Society Journal. Birmingham: Jul 2007. Vol. 26 pg. 61, 16 pgs
Difference and Repetition definitely, but more so Dialogues I and II. Also What is Philosophy? and Pure Iminence too. But he and Guatari's Kafka: Towards and Minor Literature is one of my personal favorites and is much more forgiving than the (much) longer works of that era. I never got more out of A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus than I did Kafka.
I hate it when only the controversial texts make it on to the reading lists!
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it's not a reading list. it's just something I picked up.
thanks for the references!
@corum: I feel bad for you son.
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On October 03 2013 05:34 sam!zdat wrote: reading a pile of steaming nonsense for one of my seminars. how do people have jobs to write this bullcrap? in particular this garrett stewart person is maybe the worst writer i have ever had the misfortune to read. this shit is literally just a bunch of words they hope you don't understand so you will think they are smarter than you are. only i know all the words and its a fucking word salad. like some derrida madlib or something. is it too late for me to become a Scientist?
edit: someday, just someday, I'd like to read somebody citing deleuze who wasn't a pretentious fuck. do they exist?
Let's not be hasty here; you've read Hegel.
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Ah sorry! I though it was part of the 'pile of steaming nonsense'!
Zizek's dialectical materialism and Deleuze's transcendental empiricism are fundamentally at odds however.
I see Deleuze as Bakunin to Zizek's Marx.
So you are not destined to get along I think
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garrett stewart is worse than hegel. he's even worse than lacan.
edit: D&G is not part of the reading list, the other essays are.
edit: I'm willing to take deleuze seriously in kinda the same way that I am willing to take foucault seriously. which is to say, foucault is wrong, but wrong in an interesting way (and his analysis is interesting even if you discard his conclusions). we'll see if deleuze can measure up to this
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Yikes. I'd give his work a look to assess your claim, but if you're right that sounds like torture.
edit: To extend, I'm reading this right now for fun:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ZM7TPlr.jpg)
And I find even Priest quite unclear sometimes (though the subject matter is about as hard to be clear about as possible). My sensibilities can't handle something worse than Hegel/Lacan/Derrida.
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