Comments for The Ambiguities http://ambiguities.wordpress.com Diving flukes-up into literature Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:22:02 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 Comment on “Closing Time” and the Truth of the Story by José http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/closing-time-and-the-truth-of-the-story/#comment-477 José Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:22:02 +0000 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/?p=133#comment-477 I assumed that the story was about child abuse and the lost of innocence. We have three boys (brothers, if I am not mistaken) entering a house their father told them not to go but built for some unespecific reason; I thought the house may represent the idyllic childhood days and the inside something dark that lies beneath, like child molestation and how they spent their whole life trying to forget about it. I assumed that the story was about child abuse and the lost of innocence. We have three boys (brothers, if I am not mistaken) entering a house their father told them not to go but built for some unespecific reason; I thought the house may represent the idyllic childhood days and the inside something dark that lies beneath, like child molestation and how they spent their whole life trying to forget about it.

]]> Comment on Blogging about Flogging by The Mysterious Muslim Babes of Spain « The Ambiguities http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/blogging-about-flogging/#comment-462 The Mysterious Muslim Babes of Spain « The Ambiguities Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:22:06 +0000 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/?p=350#comment-462 [...] attempt to drum up some misguided traffic (in the grand tradition of my previous posts  “Blogging About Flogging” and “Tales of Ribaldry”), but it’s actually a fairly accurate representation of [...] [...] attempt to drum up some misguided traffic (in the grand tradition of my previous posts  “Blogging About Flogging” and “Tales of Ribaldry”), but it’s actually a fairly accurate representation of [...]

]]> Comment on Tales of Ribaldry: The Third Day by The Mysterious Muslim Babes of Spain « The Ambiguities http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/tales-of-ribaldry-the-third-day/#comment-461 The Mysterious Muslim Babes of Spain « The Ambiguities Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:29:05 +0000 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/?p=61#comment-461 [...] traffic (in the grand tradition of my previous posts  “Blogging About Flogging” and “Tales of Ribaldry”), but it’s actually a fairly accurate representation of the key to the action in the framing [...] [...] traffic (in the grand tradition of my previous posts  “Blogging About Flogging” and “Tales of Ribaldry”), but it’s actually a fairly accurate representation of the key to the action in the framing [...]

]]> Comment on Adventures in the Shadow World by willhansen2 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2008/08/02/adventures-in-the-shadow-world/#comment-459 willhansen2 Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:21:11 +0000 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/?p=92#comment-459 Hmm. Wish I had an answer, but I don't think I really made the connection at the time. I mean, it makes sense that Frenesi would be the one they'd visit, since everyone in the book is so obsessed with her; and it makes sense that Pynchon would include this, as Frenesi Gates = the gateway to frenzy, to being taken up and out of yourself. But the metaphysics in the book can be so intentionally goofy, satirical, and New-Agey that it may just be an example of that, too (especially for Zoyd). Hmm. Wish I had an answer, but I don’t think I really made the connection at the time. I mean, it makes sense that Frenesi would be the one they’d visit, since everyone in the book is so obsessed with her; and it makes sense that Pynchon would include this, as Frenesi Gates = the gateway to frenzy, to being taken up and out of yourself. But the metaphysics in the book can be so intentionally goofy, satirical, and New-Agey that it may just be an example of that, too (especially for Zoyd).

]]> Comment on God and Ghost in the Machine by *jaime http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/god-and-ghost-in-the-machine/#comment-458 *jaime Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:13:11 +0000 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/?p=82#comment-458 Justin has that other good TV moment: (351) "The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. 'Pretend there's a frame around 'em like the Tube, pretend they're a show you're watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch, and <i>not</i> go into it.'" Justin has that other good TV moment: (351) “The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom. ‘Pretend there’s a frame around ‘em like the Tube, pretend they’re a show you’re watching. You can go into it if you want, or you can just watch, and not go into it.’”

]]> Comment on Adventures in the Shadow World by *jaime http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2008/08/02/adventures-in-the-shadow-world/#comment-457 *jaime Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:08:15 +0000 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/?p=92#comment-457 what do you think of the fact that both Zoyd and Weed profess to having out-of-body experiences where they visit (stalk, haunt) Frenesi? Weed (365) "Sometimes I lose it, sure, go out in the night, malevolent, mean, and I find your mom and mess with her. She cries, she gets into fights with her husband." Zoyd (39) "Now and ten, when moon tides, and planetary magnetism were all in tune, he went venturing out, straight up through the third eye in his forehead, into an extraordinary system of transport whereby he could go gliding straight to wherever she was, and incompletely unseen, sensed just enough to be troublesome, he then would haunt her, for as long as he could, enjoying every squeezed-out minute." what do you think of the fact that both Zoyd and Weed profess to having out-of-body experiences where they visit (stalk, haunt) Frenesi? Weed (365) “Sometimes I lose it, sure, go out in the night, malevolent, mean, and I find your mom and mess with her. She cries, she gets into fights with her husband.” Zoyd (39) “Now and ten, when moon tides, and planetary magnetism were all in tune, he went venturing out, straight up through the third eye in his forehead, into an extraordinary system of transport whereby he could go gliding straight to wherever she was, and incompletely unseen, sensed just enough to be troublesome, he then would haunt her, for as long as he could, enjoying every squeezed-out minute.”

]]> Comment on God and Ghost in the Machine by *jaime http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/god-and-ghost-in-the-machine/#comment-456 *jaime Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:51:31 +0000 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/?p=82#comment-456 <blockquote>I have this strange feeling that TP started out trying to write a different kind of book but it sucked him in and he let it take him, his obsessions with Calvinism, systems, technology.</blockquote> That lighter book Vineland starts out to be finally came out this year. Inherent Vice is Vineland before the post-'60s Fall. (It's at the beginning of the Fall, but everyone's still having lotsa fun.)

I have this strange feeling that TP started out trying to write a different kind of book but it sucked him in and he let it take him, his obsessions with Calvinism, systems, technology.

That lighter book Vineland starts out to be finally came out this year. Inherent Vice is Vineland before the post-’60s Fall. (It’s at the beginning of the Fall, but everyone’s still having lotsa fun.)

]]> Comment on Fun with Accent Marks and Brackets by *jaime http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/fun-with-accent-marks-and-brackets/#comment-455 *jaime Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:49:14 +0000 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/?p=78#comment-455 w/r/t movies in the book: there were several points where I was taken aback by Pynchon's pop-cultural fluency. The implicit admission that he's hooked on the Tube, too. My fave is Pee Wee Herman in <i>The Robert Musil Story</i>. w/r/t movies in the book: there were several points where I was taken aback by Pynchon’s pop-cultural fluency. The implicit admission that he’s hooked on the Tube, too. My fave is Pee Wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story.

]]> Comment on The Great White Shark of Pain by Response to a Response About DFW « Marmalade http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/the-great-white-shark-of-pain/#comment-453 Response to a Response About DFW « Marmalade Sun, 13 Sep 2009 02:28:45 +0000 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/?p=181#comment-453 [...] A quote of David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (p. 695-6) from willhansen2’s blog The Ambiguities: Hal isn’t old enough yet to know that… numb emptiness isn’t the worst kind of depression.  That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain.  Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria.  Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul…. Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.   It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it.  It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence.  It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels.  It is a nausea of the cells and soul.  It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself…. Its emotional character… is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.   It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed….  Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution.  It is a hell for one….   The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square.  And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.  The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise…. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. [...] [...] A quote of David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (p. 695-6) from willhansen2’s blog The Ambiguities: Hal isn’t old enough yet to know that… numb emptiness isn’t the worst kind of depression.  That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain.  Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria.  Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul…. Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.   It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it.  It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence.  It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels.  It is a nausea of the cells and soul.  It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself…. Its emotional character… is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.   It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed….  Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution.  It is a hell for one….   The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square.  And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.  The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise…. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. [...]

]]> Comment on Teaching the Seventh Grade by Tiffany Fehr http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/teaching-the-seventh-grade/#comment-444 Tiffany Fehr Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:00:07 +0000 http://ambiguities.wordpress.com/?p=342#comment-444 Willie, you might consider setting up an Amazon referral code and link to the books you read in your reviews. That way you get credit/cash for people buying books when they find your posts overwhelmingly compelling, like this one. Willie, you might consider setting up an Amazon referral code and link to the books you read in your reviews. That way you get credit/cash for people buying books when they find your posts overwhelmingly compelling, like this one.

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