felis_ultharus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
felis_ultharus) wrote2007-10-30 12:16 pm
felis_ultharus) wrote2007-10-30 12:16 pm
(no subject)
Not much to say, except that I'm more than four-fifths finished the final edit. I wanted to be farther, but I procrastinated too much yesterday.
I'm also really enjoying Place d'Armes, by Scott Symons. It was once considered one of the two most influential English-language Canadian novels of the 1960s, but because of the cowardice among the Canadian literary set, the other influential novel -- Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers -- remained read and in print, while Place d'Armes got forgotten.
That's a shame because so far, Place d'Armes is a much better book -- it's much more restrained with the stream-of-consciousness stuff, so it's much more readable. And unlike Beautiful Losers, it's not just going for shock value.
(Somewhere between the vibrator-that-achieves-sentience and the threesome with Adolph Hitler, Beautiful Losers started to bore me. Nothing can shock you anymore by the time you're halfway through that book, and since its only appeal is shock value, it destroys its own audience.)
Even less than a quarter into the book, I can tell that Place d'Armes really deserves the place Beautiful Losers has in the Canadian canon, but because it's homosexually explicit -- whereas Beautiful Losers is mostly heterosexually so -- it's unlikely to take that place any time soon.
I'm also really enjoying Place d'Armes, by Scott Symons. It was once considered one of the two most influential English-language Canadian novels of the 1960s, but because of the cowardice among the Canadian literary set, the other influential novel -- Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers -- remained read and in print, while Place d'Armes got forgotten.
That's a shame because so far, Place d'Armes is a much better book -- it's much more restrained with the stream-of-consciousness stuff, so it's much more readable. And unlike Beautiful Losers, it's not just going for shock value.
(Somewhere between the vibrator-that-achieves-sentience and the threesome with Adolph Hitler, Beautiful Losers started to bore me. Nothing can shock you anymore by the time you're halfway through that book, and since its only appeal is shock value, it destroys its own audience.)
Even less than a quarter into the book, I can tell that Place d'Armes really deserves the place Beautiful Losers has in the Canadian canon, but because it's homosexually explicit -- whereas Beautiful Losers is mostly heterosexually so -- it's unlikely to take that place any time soon.