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Tuesday, April 26, 2005
What’s the Worst Book You’ve Ever Read?
The Valve hasn’t been around that long, and one of the most frequent criticisms we’ve received in our short, glorious era is that we focus almost exclusively on what is positive in the contemporary literary/critical scene. We write about trenchant concepts, elegantly expressed. We explain the subtleties of our professional discourse to an eager and avid generalist audience. It might not be going too far to suggest that we’ve established ourselves as a beacon on the hill of literary-type blogs. It is not enough to lead by example, however. There can also be no compromise with error.
Don’t be fooled by the post’s title. We’re only talking here about volumes of literary/cultural studies. Articles, reviews, etc. may also be suitable, depending on the argument advanced and the style adopted. As we know, attacking any major dude who has enemies is the easy way out. Your preferably pseudonymous comment should focus on the work of the not-so well known. “Poverty of historicism” and “port-induced stupor” may be abbreviated “POH” and “PIS,” respectively. Strive for emphatic assertion. Knead the group polarity.
Comments
Frazer, The Golden Bough. But this is to ask for just one among many.
Abridged works are not suitable.
Peyton Place, 1963. Tons of bad writing and a small amount of very soft porn. I was desperate.
One of my problems in life is that I’m unable to finish reading bad scholarly writing. I found Robertson’s “Preface to Chaucer” unbearable.
At least in small-town Minnesota, the pornography available in 1963 was less bold than ads in family newspapers are today.
John, did you read an abridged version, or the full version?
I have to say that Deleuze-Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was the most pernicious work of theory I’ve read.
It was not the worst in the sense of least sensible or most stupid. But I read it at an early age, and its passionate incoherence started a fire in me that took years to quell.
I abridged it myself down to about 20 pages. But to do that I had to read a lot of crap.
I tried to read Anti-Oedipus. That’s the kind of thing I was talking about.
Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit comes to mind, mostly because I reckon it is just a hypnotizing kind of empty word play that cannot be translated from the German, and therefor has no merit. “Being” just has far fewer meanings than “Sein”, for one.
Though I have to say, the book offers valuable sentences to train pomposity, should one want to:
“Auf dem Grunde der Seinsart, die durch das Existential des Entwurfs konstituiert wird, ist das Dasein ständig ‘mehr’, als es tatsächlich ist, wollte man es und könnte man es als Vorhandenes in einem Seinsbestand registrieren.” [page 145]
It is customary on the Valve to provide full citations for your quotes. I checked your home page to see if this was a habit on display there, but I saw only words in a strange language with far too many vowels.
I think I see about five German synonums for “existence” or “existing”, but it’s kinda impenetrable beyond that, and my deutsch ain’t all that bad. Regarding The Golden Bough, as the poster above put it, I abridged it myself.
I should also like to take this opportunity to remind commenters that giving detailed explanations of your answers, while in the Valve-spirit, is not recommended here.
This may be an easy answer, but I would say The Location of Culture by Homi K. Bhabha.
Unquestionably _The Location of Culture_.
I also want to remind Valve commenters not to forget their invective.
OK,I’ll play by the rules. No more Peyton Place.
“The Empire of the Text” is about the formation of literary culture around 200 AD during the San Guo Wei dynasty of the Cao family. This was a foundational period for the Chinese, and a very controversial one.
I believe that the book is part of the New Historicism. It tells us a tremendous amount about the politics and ideology of literature: “Textual Authority and Textual Practice”, “Social Texts”, and a piece about the social composition of the literati are the three main sections.
But in ~170 pp. it only talks about a single one of the literary works that made the age famous, while listing only the titles of about 20-30 more. It’s all context and no literature. The literature of that time is fascinating and important and deserves to be better known in English, and only has been translated so far in scattered and obscure publications.
Literature in China was a public function, and the poets of the time included two or three emperors, a failed heir-apparent, and a number of state officials. But the literature itself was just left out.
Sentence or clause omitted: “So the attention to the political context of literature is entirely appropriate”.
I don’ wunna pick on “the not-so-well-known,” I wunna pick on Waller Be’Michaelsh! ‘Coz he’sh pernicioush!
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen, 16e Auflage 1986 [1e Auflage 1927], seite 145.
The language with the many vowels is Dutch, coincidentally ranking high in the index of languages with the most different sounds [though still far behind the African click languages]
Ah, yes. Dutch. A tongue brought to prominence by the work of Sloterdijk, if I recall.
Alas, although he has a Dutch name [note the uniquely Dutch and Frisian vowel “ij"] Sloterdijk is as German as they come.
The Dutch are too superficial to excell in writing. Only Erasmus of Rotterdam is known elsewhere, but he wrote in Latin.
And there’s of course Anne Frank, who wrote in Dutch but was a stateless Jew from Germany.
No, the Dutch always have printed countless books that were considered too risqué in other countries. But, that was trade.
Is this the appropriate place to say that Harold Bloom can shove his Western Cannon where the sun don’t shine?
Here you guys are putting down “Anti-Oedipus,” but in what other book can you find a wonderful chart like this one?
(Please don’t ruin my enjoyment by attempting to explain it to me.)