Am I Damned With Faint Praise? No, I Am Praised With Faint Damnation. The Quiz Says...

[dr_pretentious]

take the WHAT BAD BOOK ARE YOU test.


and go to mewing.net. not as good as reading a good book, but way better than a bad one.



Oh, yeah? You can liken me to Tolkien anytime. Praise me with that faint damnation. Oh, wait. Wrong strategy. Ahem: please don't throw me in that briar patch, and no, you can't whitewash my fence.

Really, though, the questions on this quiz cracked me up. I'm not big on memes, but this one got me.

Comments

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

This person never really suffered. What they need to appreciate true suffering is to plough through Busconductor Hines. Oh, gods. It was 15 years ago and I still feel the agony. It's not that it was stream of consciousness or that it was written in Glaswegian dialect. It was just so bloody boring.

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

Hey, you did a lot better than I did: I ranked out as Beowulf, "the literary predecessor to action movies."

Or, as we all learned in school (via Maurice Sagoff):
Monster Grendel's tastes are plainish
Breakfast? Just a couple Danish.


And, continuing on this stream of consciousness, remember how a few years ago, when a certain country in Western Europe tried to run its own foreign policy, there was a movement to change the name of certain foodstuffs -- French fries and French toast needed new names? Well, ideas like that know no boundaries: in Tehran, some folks are trying to find a new name for breakfast pastry so that they won't support anything "Danish."

(No, I'm not making that up. Source: this past weekend's radio news quiz show on NPR, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.)

Impossible to understand

[tracyandrook.livejournal.com]

I'm _The Crying of Lot 49_! Which I tried to read but had to put down..no..that was_Gravity's Rainbow_...whatever is the difference.

[newroticgirl.livejournal.com]

Hey! I was the Hobbit, too! ;)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

It never occurred to me that they'd be eating danishes in Tehran. It doesn't occur to them to stop eating danishes, which are not overwhelmingly good for them--well, it's oddly reassuring that the US isn't alone in its intractably bad eating habits. Did it occur to the folks in the Congressional cafeteria that cutting the fries out of the menu would be better for everyone?

I mean, if it's part of the human condition to be beset by idiotic manifestations of nationalism, why can't we at least use it as an excuse to eat better?

Re: Impossible to understand

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'll admit, I was never able to finish either of them, but I have it on good authority that Gravity's Rainbow is the one in which the protagonist can tell where the Nazis are going to drop bombs because he gets an erection when he's standing within the future blast radius. His erectile patterns become a matter of national security. I suspect that premise is unique in the Anglophone literary tradition.

Re: Impossible to understand

[wombats.livejournal.com]

I get to be crying alot as well. I did finish "Gravity's Rainbow". I only started it because of the song by Laurie Anderson "Gravity's Angel". I finished it because that's what I did with books. I'm not really proud of that. Finishing "G R" has since allowed me to stop reading other bad books without guilt, although that's not many. Ugh, what trial, and your description of it is mild. I mostly found it to be a semi-paranoid, conspiracy nut-style rambling mixed with good dollops of whatever sexual perversion was on the author's mind at the time.

Re: Impossible to understand

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

You're kidding!

That sounds like a plot for a comedy-porn movie.

Was I spared this book by going into philosophy instead of comp lit?

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

You know what's more surprising than an Iranian eating a danish? An Iranian calling that nasty little pastry the same thing it's called by English speaking people.

The French don't call "Freedom frys" "French frys. They are sensible enough to call them the French equivalent of "Fried potatoes."

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Well, in Britain - and in France, when I was there - there's a difference between chips/pommes frites and french fries; french fries are the American thinly sliced things and chips/pommes frites are what you call home fries or steak fries.

Re: Impossible to understand

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know if mischievouspie ever had to read it, but Anthony did. I was spared, by virtue of being a poetry specialist. Ant claimed to like Gravity's Rainbow, but his attempts to praise it never moved me to pick it up.

I did like Pynchon's Vineland, though, which is much shorter. Vineland features, among other things, a lawn maintenance company called The Marquis de Sod, a blond Japanese character who's described so that it's obvious (but not stated) that he's an animee character who's stumbled accidentally into the novel, and a gigantic automated accupuncture device called the Punc-u-tron. Or was it Puncutron? No, I think it was hyphenated. It's one of the grad school books I don't plan to sell off.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

This is a GREAT book!

I loved this book!

And I love you!

oh. duh!