Umpologies that you never made it through

[DrMatt]

I was just going over in my mind some of the larger collections of giant works that everybody talks about like they're the cat's meow, where I've given up after the first phase or slept through major parts. Quite a list.

• After propping my eyes open for Rheingold, I've slept through Wagner's Ring, briefly awakening for the Ride of the Valkyries...
• After The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I gave up on CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia as hopelessly preachyweachy and inferior to Yellow Submarine in every way...
• I saw Star Wars late in the first run, and on overseas flights I've seen without sound a few scenes from some other films in the series, but never felt that I was missing anything.
• With the exception of Song of Songs, which is pretty good poetry, The Bible is a boring, sloppy excuse for a book--I certainly have never been interested in seeing any of the moive versions.

There are probably others, but I can't even remember 'em right now.

On the other hand,

• Though I disagreed with him about almost everything, I enjoyed reading just about everything Heinlein wrote.
• Assimov's fiction was nerdy, but his non-fiction was full of life, passion, and fascination, and as a kid I read it voraciously.
• Carl Sandburg's Lincoln Portrait went on and on and on but somehow held my interest.
• Beethoven's 9 symphonies, Mahler's 10 symphonies, all 96 movements of Bach's Welltempered Keyboard-... these are daily bread and butter for me.

I guess this just means that I'm sorry, but with limited years to live, I'd rather spend 'em investigating Haydn's hundred-odd string quartets and hundred-odd symphonies than see even just one more Star Wars film.

 

[Soapy Sam]

"Consider the Lilies of the Field. They toil not, neither do they spin: Yet even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed as one of these.."

Be fair. There is a lot of lovely writing in the King James Bible- all the more when you consider that it is a seventeenth century translation into English of several different Iron Age sources.

I suspect we fail to appreciate some works of the past because we lack the cultural background knowledge to do so, which was taken as universal among educated people of the time by the relevant composers.

I wonder what 23rd century readers / listeners / viewers will make of 20th century art.

 

[Zep]

Dr Matt, I like both Star Wars AND the Haydn works, plus lots of other stuff of all genres. But do I care if you don't like the former? Heh, of course not! Here's drinking to your proclivities!

The thing with Star Wars is that, even though the plot can be written comprehensively in the space round the outside of a small postage stamp, it's really just fun! I usually find that if I leave my brain in neutral and sit close to the screen, it's a wonderful moving comic book, and a relief from having to out-think Microsoft and Dell on an hourly basis.

Anyway, I've got it all on DVD and so I can get myself another fix whenever I want. And the same goes for Haydn too!

 

[DrMatt]

Almost nothing happens in Illiad--but it's told so well I devoured it (Graves translation). Same with Joyce's Ullyses, though I must admit to skimming large portions of it that I'm convinced are padding, the author reveling in his own "voice". Couldn't make it past the second page or so of any translations of Kalevala though. Sorry, Finns!

 

[Zep]

I did not like Seinfeld. Dull. Dull. Dull. If it was a "show about nothing" then it certainly lived up to that mark for me.

Give me Mahler instead, please. At least it gives me something to be critical of.

 

[DrMatt]

I did not like Seinfeld.

Never seen it. Was it any good dull? Any better than the King James Bible?

I think I detect a pattern here. The pattern is: There's no accounting for taste.

 

[Charlie Monoxide]

Almost nothing happens in Illiad--but it's told so well I devoured it (Graves translation). Same with Joyce's Ullyses, though I must admit to skimming large portions of it that I'm convinced are padding, the author reveling in his own "voice". Couldn't make it past the second page or so of any translations of Kalevala though. Sorry, Finns!

Sounds like a Stephen King technique. Take basically a short story and add 600 or 700 filler pages.

Charlie (I still like King though) Monoxide

 

[DrMatt]

Sounds like a Stephen King technique. Take basically a short story and add 600 or 700 filler pages.

Charlie (I still like King though) Monoxide

Actually--that's the basic structure of language: take basic deep structure sentences like "gimme!" "mine!" "Me hungry!" and add padding and compound words until you've got scholarly German...

 

[Chaos]

Actually--that's the basic structure of language: take basic deep structure sentences like "gimme!" "mine!" "Me hungry!" and add padding and compound words until you've got scholarly German...

I might be inclined to take that personal.

 

[DrMatt]

I might be inclined to take that personal.

's okay, Icelandic poetry, with its recursively expanded modifiers, which can bloat a sentence into a page and a page into a good hour's recitation, is usually given as the extreme example of that principle of transformational grammar converting the merest everyday thought into a unique and personal expression.

 

[Hexxenhammer]

Sounds like a Stephen King technique. Take basically a short story and add 600 or 700 filler pages.

Charlie (I still like King though) Monoxide

Yes, I read the first 3 Dark Tower books, but he took a 10 year break between books, and I probably won't pick up another one.

I ain't reading anymore Tolkein. LOTR and the Hobbit were enough.

I also tried to like Asimov, but it's really boring.

My friends in college really liked Pink Floyd, but I never did drugs so there goes that...

 

[Mr Manifesto]

I haven't managed to get through the 28 489-book "Mission: Earth" series by L Ron Hubbard. Only got to page one of, "The Invaders (sic) Plan" (didn't this guy have an editor?) before hurling the damn thing out my window, down a five-mile shaft, where it was buried in concrete, lost forever.

 

[Deviant Pixie]

I haven't managed to get through the 28 489-book "Mission: Earth" series by L Ron Hubbard. Only got to page one of, "The Invaders (sic) Plan" (didn't this guy have an editor?) before hurling the damn thing out my window, down a five-mile shaft, where it was buried in concrete, lost forever.

You could have nailed it to a frisbie, and flung it over a rainbow.
Like I did with War & Peace. I tried it order to feel slightly more intelligent.

Decided to wallow in my stupidity.

 

[epepke]

Beethoven's great, but Mahler's always sounded just like so many movie scores stuck together.

 

[DrMatt]

Re: Re: Umpologies that you never made it through

Beethoven's great, but Mahler's always sounded just like so many movie scores stuck together.

Or on the other hand, so many movie scores aspire to sound like Mahler...

 

[local weather]

I haven't managed to get through the 28 489-book "Mission: Earth" series by L Ron Hubbard. Only got to page one of, "The Invaders (sic) Plan" (didn't this guy have an editor?) before hurling the damn thing out my window, down a five-mile shaft, where it was buried in concrete, lost forever.

Ha! In high school I was reading those together with a friend, I think I got through book 3, he through book 4.

Then we both realized that they were terrible, terrible books with incoherent plots laced with Scientology crap.

 

[diddidit]

I ain't reading anymore Tolkein. LOTR and the Hobbit were enough.

Give The Silmarillion a go. Marvellous language, the best Tolkein created.

did

 

[Hexxenhammer]

Give The Silmarillion a go. Marvellous language, the best Tolkein created.

did

I don't doubt it, but I'm not a language hound, and I've got a feeling if I found LOTR mostly boring, that would only be worse. I can barely find time to read books I really WANT to read lately. Damn baby, hogging all my free time.

 

[diddidit]

Damn baby, hogging all my free time.

Ah, yes. Well, you could read it TO Hexx Jr.!

Little did, who is at this moment blowing bubbles from both ends in the bathtub, limits me to maybe 20 pages a night. He goes to bed, I get in bed and read until my eyes cross, which doesn't take long.

did

 

[kittynh]

I'm the only person I know that actually got through Marcel Proust. I mean, I loved each and every book. I read it during my lunch break when I was working. People would come into my office, and they would comment, "boy, I tried to get through that..."

I like Marcel Proust, but you have to accept his writing style as a style. Sort of like music, there are different types, rock, pop, R&B, hip-hop, rap, classical, baroque....

Did I zip through it, no! Marcel Proust is meant to be read and digested, it's not fast food fiction.