#pf kluge

[vimesbootstheory]

I looked back at my overdue books tag and wow I haven’t updated this since february. rough!

as a reminder, since it’s been ages: I’m reading along with a podcast called “overdue”, where they read one book per episode, and I rank the books and blog thoughts after each ten books.

I have been reading plenty since february, with occasional long stretches where I got stuck on this or that book. what held this post up specifically was how hard it was to get my hands on P.F. Kluge’s Eddie and the Cruisers, so I ended up reading farther ahead rather than delay things while I pursued Kluge’s book.

this is books 31-40. I am almost done 41-50 and might even be able to post thoughts later today, latest tomorrow, on books 41-50.

1. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

2. Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

3. You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers

4. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

5. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

6. The Crucible by Arthur Miller

7. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

8. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

9. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

10. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- I find Sherlock Holmes to be a very dependable kind of read. I know exactly what I'm getting into. It's never really going to surprise me, but it's also never going to be a chore. Love a whodunnit, especially when I don't know who, uh, dunnit. It's not necessarily ACD's fault that I'd already guessed most of the plot developments before they arrived (e.g. who the other person living on the moor was -- come ON, it's a sherlock holmes book! Of course he's around here somewhere), since it's one of the most adapted stories ever, so I probably picked up on that stuff unwittingly just because I haven't had my head under a rock for my entire life. I spent a lot of this book comparing it to adaptations, not of Hound specifically but of Holmes in general. OK, mostly the Moffat adaptation and House MD. Why did we have to decide as a society that Holmes is an unrepetent asshole, the real version wasn't half as bad as the 21st century versions, jeez Louise.

11. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

12. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

13. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde -- This is tricky because it's a well-crafted, well-written book about a lot of unpleasantness about unpleasant people. There aren't any likeable characters in Dorian Gray and I don't think there's meant to be, so it's hard to wield any objective criticism about that. Dorian is not someone I really wanted to spend much time with, and he doesn't really compensate by being exactly interesting. The opposite of most compelling lead characters, I kept hoping he would finally answer in some way for being such an awful brat, and then the universe kept arranging itself around him for it all to work out (the most egregious example being the accidental shooting of James Vane). Which is an implicit part of the premise, I suppose, so again, not like it's an objective fault. It was frustrating, though. I don't usually comment on the Overdue podcast episodes here, but I found it hilarious that the hosts talked about seeing the gay influence only with the knowledge of Wilde's own orientation -- what are you TALKING about, this is the gayest book I have EVER READ. Not always in an enjoyable way, though? I don't like m/m age gaps and the face that much of the "admiration" was directed from adult men to the 20-yo (or 20-yo-looking) Dorian Gray was not my favourite. Also must mention the epigrams -- so many epigrams! They were fun to start off with but I got tired of them, the way it seemed that Lord Henry only ever spoke in epigrams. This is not how people speak.

14. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J Gaines

15. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

16. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan -- This was definitely a weird read, and it took me ages to get through it. As in, even longer than it took me to get through Fifty Shades of Grey. That's not necessarily indicative of the amount of joy I ultimately got out of it, mind you. I was just initially very turned off by the concept -- I was into the book when I thought it was about a kleptomaniac record company assistant person, and then less enthused when the focus shifted to her boss (inexplicably addicted to stirring flakes of gold into his coffee to get his missing libido back), and then disoriented and annoyed when it shifted AGAIN to one of his acquaintances when they were in high school and mutually into the punk music scene. One, this disallowed any opportunity to grow attached to anybody, and two, I was pretty ready to add "music industry" to a list of novel backdrops that I don't give a fuck about. And that's honestly still true, and the head-hopping never stops throughout the book. It's an interesting gimmick, switching perspectives to a tertiary character in the last vignette's main character's story. A little Cloud Atlas-y, but without the embedded fictional status. But a gimmick is, at the end of the day, a gimmick, and ultimately the only benefit of the head hopping is that it allowed that old broken-clock-that's-right-twice-a-day phenomenon of happening to alternate chapters I didn't give a fuck about with some real gems. My favourite was the story about the aging pop star who, in one of the more larger-than-life chapters, is asked to be publicly seen with a genocidal dictator in order to improve his public image. I also enjoyed the homeless guy who gives his successful friend a fish gift to spite him and rich guy ways. And the two autistic siblings (the book says only one of them is autistic, but come on) who are obsessed with pauses in songs. And the whole chapter about the safari when somebody almost gets killed by a lion. All entertaining shit, if briefly. There's no emotional engagement to be had here, though.

17. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

18. World War Z by Max Brooks

19. Eddie and the Cruisers by P.F. Kluge -- The book that held everything tf up. I think I conceptualize this book more in terms of how hard it was to get my hands on versus any of the actual content, but that is in part because the content is pretty middle-of-the-road. It reads very much like a movie, and it’s trying so hard to evoke a certain era and a certain kind of cool that it’s easy to get a bit embarrassed on behalf of everyone involved. The dialogue is particularly movie-esque, especially at the beginning, before you get that Wordman’s whole shtick is that his words come out poetic without any real effort.  I liked its themes of the dangers of looking back on the past, and its embrace of the power of nostalgia. I did not care for its (era-appropriate, but still) homophobia and racism without in-text condemnation, and I didn’t like how it treated women like objects. There were a lot of “sexy lamp” woman characters in this. The central (... sorta?) mystery is very oddly handled, such that it took me ages to realize that the book was actually trying to portray a mystery and not just some guy exploring his past and reconnecting with old chums. I will say, part of the end was spoiled-but-not for me, to the book’s detriment, in that I saw the concept for the movie adaptation’s sequel (in which Eddie is not dead after all??) and thought it was just the sort of ridiculous premise for a straight-to-video sequel. And then the book started hinting that Eddie genuinely wasn’t actually dead, and I was so incredulous that it tainted my enjoyment even when it all turned out to be a purposeful misdirect.

20. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr & E.B. White

21. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

22. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre -- I love a play, and I'm such a sucker for a high-concept, dialogue-heavy play that gets across a thought-provoking idea in a relatively short amount of time. While reading this, I found myself most engaged with trying to test the validity of the concept as an effective form of hell. Where it falls down, I think, is with Inez -- Inez is the primary source of mental torture for the other two, but more notable to me is that she seems to have been let off easy in terms of her own torture. Her torture seems to be... the presence of straight romance? Which, as a fellow gay, I get it, but if the presence of straights is hell then that says some dark shit about day-to-day life.

23. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami -- This book was gripping but not particularly good. I think its biggest detractor for me is that it's very gory, to the extent that I wondered on several occasions whether the author might have a snuff fetish. That's what it read like, it read like the snuff fetishist fantasy of a teenage boy. The cast is way too big, with the bulk of the scenes far too easy to excise without impact on the rest of the story, simply by reducing the initial class size from 42 to something more manageable. This made it seem even more like the point of the book was to read about kids dying, because with most scenes, you know they're not a main character nor one of the main antagonists so you know the scene will probably end with them dying, with a lovingly phrased description of what their eyeball looks like when it's split open, or something. All the talk about schoolboy/girl crushes made it very tricky to relate to pretty much any of the characters, not only as a 30-yr-old aro but just because a lot of characters had crushes on other students that they'd never been seen to interact with, yet their primary emotional connection is often to this off-screen person that they think is good-looking. Very hard to give a shit about any of that. The use of rape as drama was awful, and the book is pretty homophobic -- my favourite (in that I hated it) detail in that vein is that the only openly gay character has the skill of being stealthy because he has experience in stalking all his unrequited crushes. Predatory gay trope, hoorah. Anyway, I did find this book entertaining but there was a lot wrong with it.

24. Dune by Frank Herbert

25. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum

26. Tiny Alice by Edward Albee

27. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

28. Medea by Euripides

29. Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

30. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

31. The War of The Worlds by HG Wells

32. Don't Go Back to School by Kio Stark -- This is the perfect example of why it can be silly, at times, to read through someone else's to-read list, as I am doing with this project. 'Don't Go Back to School' is not for me. I'm in healthcare, for which not going to school is not an option. To be a speech-language pathologist, you have to get a master's in speech-language pathology. That is in no way optional. So I spent the bulk of this book feeling very much like the author and the interviewees were talking to somebody else, and I just happened to be listening in. I got through it by thinking of my sister, who at the time of reading this was briefly considering going back to school; and of thinking of a tiny corner of my mind that admitted that I might not want to be a speech-language pathologist my entire life -- I could go into writing, or sound engineering, or something to do with computer hardware? Nothing immediate. Anyway, all of these interviews are all saying basically the same thing, all of which are summed up in the introduction, and the rest of the book is just kinda... proof? Like, here, look at these twenty or so people who made it without going back to school. You can do it too! Ironically the most useful part of the book is the only part I did not really read, i.e. the resource charts at the end.

33. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger -- Even though the short story 'Franny' and the novella 'Zooey' are very closely related -- about the same characters, with the latter closely following the former chronologically, so it reads like the very long cold open to a book with one relatively short chapter followed by one ridiculously long one -- I do kinda wish that I'd let myself rank the two parts separately. Franny, I enjoyed pretty OK. I was enjoying the criticism of Lane, with all his pretentious ways and his pointless cynicism, and Franny's inner turmoil was interesting even if I did not really understand the root of it. 'Zooey' has a lot of the same ideas but spread a lot thinner and with a lot of time spent with the truly unpleasant Zachary "Zooey" Glass. He's such a bully, he's awful to read. He couldn't hope to win any sympathy from me once he called his poor mum "Fatty". The characters are so wrapped up in academia and I could not give two fucks about academia now that I'm out of it. All the religion talk totally lost me. And of course, a classic Salinger complaint: nothing fucking HAPPENS.

34. The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett -- ... Huh? OK, so. Stream-of-consciousness really isn't my thing. I will say, I liked the rhythm of the writing in The Unnamable, and there were stretches of this where I was starting to form an idea of what was going on at the given moment and quite liking it -- I liked the whole part where the entity is living in a jar or pot or whatever and Madeline is the only person who knows it's there, it reminded it me of what it would be like if Small Gods by Terry Pratchett had a really directionless prequel. And then, of course, that plot is abandoned mid-thought. There are large chunks of this that I couldn't tell you anything about because they were so vague and so ill-defined that they really just went in one ear (... eyeball?) and out the other. This only ranks as high as it does because it's pretty short so it didn't take much just to power through it.

35. The Stand by Stephen King -- I've been waiting so long for the right opportunity to really, properly rant about this book that I'm a bit panicky now that the time has come around to do it. A huge factor in how this has been ranked hinges on how long it was -- it might (MIGHT) have ranked above Antony and Cleopatra if it were half the length. But as it is, I read the full-fledged 90s version (if you didn't know, there are two versions of The Stand, one that is set in the 70s and one that is set in the 90s and is about 400 pages longer) and it's just. It's so fucking long. It's two Harry Potter 5s end-to-end. It is inexcusably long, and the greatest argument I've ever seen for the necessity of editors in the publication process. More than that, it's the greatest argument I've seen for the necessity of a second draft, because honest to god, this monster reads like a first draft. All the other books I've read for this project before, whatever their faults, still feel like on the level of the writer's process, at the very least they've been through a couple of drafts. This does not, it truly doesn't. I was pretty embarrassed for King at multiple points reading this, with the sort of second-hand embarrassment I would get first-hand if someone dug out one of my old unfinished novels and published it. It's THAT unpolished. I'll list a couple of its sins to get them off my chest: - It's racist -- This has already been said by people much more informed than I, but yeah. Pretty dang racist. Mother Abigail is the epitome of the "magical negro" trope; the black junta sequence is a whole big barrel of YIKES so egregious that "big barrel of YIKES" doesn't really do it justice; too many pointless invocations of the N word to count; and what exactly is the fucking point of making Larry a guy who sings like a black guy but... is not a black guy? Just write a black character instead of bending into pretzels making the character white, what's wrong with you? - It's sexist -- I was pretty sure for most of the book that this is a novel that hates women -- oh Rita, you deserved so much better -- but what really clinched it was a) the fact that the story never checks in with Frannie and Lisa once while the arbitrary group of white dudes treks over to Nevada, and b) the fate of Nadine, whose whole character arc leads up to her being raped into catatonia and turned into essentially a walking womb. - Lazy plotting is wrapped up in incredibly clunky religious allegory -- And it's barely allegory, King just comes out and says "Mother Abigail represents good and talks to god, and Flagg represents evil and maybe he's a demon or the devil or something idk". There are multiple points in the story where King just explicitly tells the reader what plot points or characters "represent" according to the intended reading, and that's really embarrassing. Most of the plot does not seem have its own internal reality or logic, things just happen because King needs them to happen, and then he blames it on quasi-supernatural plot elements. I hope that if he had run through a couple more drafts this might have been a facet which was ironed out, but maybe not. And of course, this is all capped off by a pretty literal deus ex machina with God actually intervening and blowing up the bad guys. - It's also fatphobic (exhibit A: Harold and how his improving estimation in the eyes of the BFZ rises is paralleled by him losing weight) and homophobic (Harold may be a lot of things, but at least he isn't a queer, huh? Also Stu being a complete fucking moron about lesbians and the narrative/other characters entirely failing to set him straight on that.) It's nooooot gooooood, it's a really shitty book. I will say that I liked the first third (i.e. the progression of the epidemic) a lot more than I liked the rest of the book, but the good will built by the first third was completely lost several hundreds of thousands of words later. This was the first book where I started to question whether I really wanted to continue with this project, or at least whether I could rationalize a DNF when I really couldn't stand (oho) to continue reading. But I finished it anyway. And it sucked.

36. Grendel by John Gardner

37. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

38. Persuasion by Jane Austen

39. Beowulf by Unknown

40. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

[protoindoeuropean]

Mr. PIE, considering that Modern German has some words that begin with consonants "Pf" (Pflanze, Pferde), is is possible that the "Great Consonant Shift of Proto-Germanic", that inherited "*fader" from "pater", had an intermediate stage where ""pater" > ""pfader" > ""fader"?

The inherited words with /p͡f/ in German actually reflect PIE *b and its subsequent developments, so they’re the result of both Grimm’s Law (the “Great Consonant Shift” you’re talking about) and later specifically High German consonant shift. For illustration, here’s a scheme I made more than five years ago when I was trying to understand High German consonant shift:

I won’t translate all of it, nor is this really up to date, because I haven’t really gone back to it since then and Germanic is not really my area of interest, but I don’t think that much has changed since then. Anyway, this is Grimm’s Law (G), Verner’s Law (V) and later rhotacism in North and West Germanic (R), some West Germanic sound changes (x and gemination) and High German consonant shift (1, 2, y, 3, 4, s).

Grimm’s and Verner’s Law are usually listed in this order, but that relative chronology can be inverted as well. Actually, the picture is a bit more complex, since Grimm’s Law actually encompasses three processes and in the interpretations that want to explain Kluge’s Law as well (not everyone agrees that that law exists, though), the relative chronology is the following:

α) *T > *Tʰ : aspiration, 1st stage of Grimm’s Law *Tʰ > *Þ, *Dʰ > *Ð : fricativization, 2nd stage of Grimm’s Law (that’s how you get PIE *ptk̑kku̯ > *ɸþxxu̯ , *bʰdʰg̑ʰgʰgu̯h > *βðɣɣu̯) *V̀Þ > *V̀Ð : voicing after an unstressed syllable, Verner’s Law (*ÐnV́ >) *DnV́ > *DDV́ : (defricativization of the results of Verner’s Law) and assimilation, Kluge’s Law *D > *T (incl. *DD from Kluge’s Law) : devoicing, 3rd stage of Grimm’s Law (that’s how you get PIE *bdg̑ggu̯ > *ptkku̯)

or β) same *V̀Tʰ > *V̀Dʰ : voicing after an unstressed syllable, Verner’s Law * *Tʰ > *Þ, *Dʰ > *Ð : fricativization, 2nd stage of Grimm’s Law same same

i. e. just with the reversed chronological ordering of the 2nd stage of Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law.

TL;DR Grimm’s Law most likely progressed via aspiration (so the *p of *ph₂tḗr changed to *pʰ before ending up as f, as seen in the modern Germanic languages) and not affrication (which would be *p > *p͡f) – that development happened in a later High German period.

[howaminotinthestrokesyet]

Eddie and the Cruisers 1 and 2: Fascinating Film Facts

Eddie and the Cruisers

1. The music for the film was written by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown band. They exist as an actual rock and roll band with a few minor hits.

2. The film originally was a flop at the box office, but it became a cult classic after airing on cable TV. More specifically, the film gained success because it was shown on HBO, who had only been in existence for a couple of years. I remember seeing a picture of the film on the HBO guide one month when I was very young.

3. Rick Springfield lobbied to play the part of Eddie Wilson in the film. The director, who owned the rights, simply felt that Springfield could never play a musician in a film other than himself.

4. The Fender Stratocaster guitar that Michael Pare uses in the film belonged to John Lyon. He is better known as Southside Johnny, who had a band from New Jersey called the Asbury Jukes. He was a long time collaborator with Bruce Springsteen.

5. Arthur Rimbaud, the notable poet, became a key figure throughout the movie as Tom Berenger’s character recited poetry from him. Also, the band’s second album Season in Hell had a connection to him. The ironic thing about it came in the fact that actor Michael Pare in the film resembled the young Arthur Rimbaud a little bit.

Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives

1. All the concert scenes were filmed in a Las Vegas arena before a Bon Jovi show. Bon Jovi kept the stage set up as is when they performed that night.

2. Once again, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band wrote and sang all of the songs for this film. Unfortunately, there was not a breakout hit like “On The Darkside” in this one.

3. The producers of the film, the Scotti brothers, never put any effort into promoting and selling the film itself. They had made so much money from the soundtrack of the first film that this movie was pretty much made in order to sell the music. At the film premiere, they gave away a Fender Stratocaster guitar as part of a promotion.

4. Musician KD Lang makes a cameo in the film as she delivers a telegram to former Cruiser member, Sal near the end of the film.

5. The film was a box office flop that officially ended the franchise. Critics were very dismissive of the acting in the film, as well as aware that this movie only existed to sell soundtracks.

Bonus Cut...The original film was based on a book by PF Kluge. For a very long time, the book was out of print and very few libraries owned it. Also, a third soundtrack album was released a few years after the second movie. This album included audio from the movie and songs not on the original soundtracks.

[redfire-sad]

Redfire's Tagebucheintrag zur Bewältigung von Depressionen des 4 Aprils 2017 3:48 Uhr

Ich kann nicht mehr schlafen. Viele Nächte verliefen bis jetzt schlaflos. Dafür bin ich tagsüber müde. Hinzu kommt die antriebslosigkeit und die Übermüdung durch Menschen und dem Gewirr ihrer Leben in dem ich mich verfangen habe. Menschen machen mich fertig. Sie sind dumm und Ignorant und alles halten sie für eine selbstverständlichkeit. Sie sind wie Tiere und richten hin, was sie nicht verstehen. Wo wären wir heute, hätte Galileo sich nicht aufgelehnt und dem Tod der Wissenschaft zuliebe getrotzt? Ich werde zum Therapeuten müssen. Die menschliche Unkenntnis darüber dass sie so zurückgeblieben und anwidernd sind gibt mir den Rest. Ich könnte heulen wenn ich das Wort Religion nur höre. Soviel Idiotentum sich kniend etwas zu unterwerfen dass der Mensch nicht versteht ist so typisch. Unterwerft euch doch wenigstens der einzig wahren Religion des Satans. Es sollte die einzig geduldete Religion sein. Hier gibt es keine Frauenverachtenden zurückgebliebenen bärtigen die sich für ihren Ziegenfickenden aber Schweinefleisch verachtenden “Gott” in die Luft sprengen oder fanatische Christen die mit ihrem eigenen Leben unzufrieden sind und deshalb verdammen was sie nicht verstehen. Ich habe schon lange Begriffen dass Monster nicht im Schrank oder unter Betten leben… sie leben in uns. Der Satanismus wird oft missverstanden. Er unterstützt und fördert sogar die freie Liebe und wenn wir mal die Tatsache außer Acht lassen dass Satan in der christlichen Bibel “nur” 11 Menschen tötet im Vergleich der 11000 die “Gott” auf dem Gewissen hat, haben wir immernoch die Fakten vorliegen dass der Satanismus Freiheit des Menschen und Individualität fördert. Klar könnte msn meine Zeilen als Schrei nach Abstand zu dieser Gesellschaft auffassen … Pf. Und wenn? Solange es provoziert habe ich alles richtig gemacht. Ich hoffe sie erkennen irgendwann dass sie sich nichts auf ihre Schulbildung einbilden müssen. Schulen sibd keine Orte für kluge Menschen … Schulter an Schulter mit der anderen Versagern wehrlos einem faschistoiden “Erzieher” unterwerfen der dir sagt was richtig ist, dich anpasst wie sie es wollen und dir in der pause einen Zettel in die hand drückt auf dem steht dass du kacken darfst. Meine fresse. Was für ein Leben und fahrlässige verschwendung wertvoller Jugend…

[fuckyeahkenyonmemes-blog]

[sassygwaine]

Okay, expect this a lot in the next two weeks.

I'm at a writing camp right now and we will have a guest speaker every night. Tonight was Kenyon College's own P.F. Kluge (Clue - guh). He is the editor of Kenyon's newspaper and a successful author and journalist. His stories have inspired two major blockbusters. I have had the pleasure of listening to his wisdom and advice, as well as excerpts from his book. This man who I have just met, I wholly now admire.

More so, this man who is nearly seventy years old said this in his speech:

"Kenyon started out as an all boys school. A small one at that. It started out as one gender. And now we have many."

For some reason, this shook me. In the good way of course.

I urge you all to read some of his stuff: he is a truly talented man.

[fuckyeahkenyonmemes-blog]

[fuckyeahkenyonmemes-blog]