I agree with Will,almost all the novels I read in my Spanish class were like that,boring and almost all tragedies,I especially remember La Charca,I never thought I could see so any adjectives in one single novel it was BORING.
Well it wasn’t all bad the novel I liked the most was La Dama Del Alba it was entertaining,and wasn’t a tragedy,too bad it’s so short.
Taking into account Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes, Plato, etc. your nation’s repuation is safe.
As for the porn books, the circumstances of the various erotic encounters is no crime, at least compared to the language in which they are told. Far more great works of fiction are owed to the not always consentual dynamics of sex. Merely the fact that these books sell so well as they do (Harold Bloom once wrote that Danielle Steel should be awarded the Nobel Prize if we’re to take popularity into consideration of a book’s merit) is evidence that women, perhaps not all, are rather turned on by these instances of what would immediately be called “sexual harassment” or assault or even rape nowadays. It’s rather sad that in the modern world, national governments have taken over the jurisdiction regarding who is to mate, or even attempt to mate, with whom. The progression of mating and procreation is the most irrational office known to man. To draw up one example, in the masterpiece of cinema, Blade Runner, how would Deckard and Rachel ever have done it if he just backed off at the first sign of resistance? This kind of powerful expression will soon be lost to our on-going robotization.
Sean Connery’s James Bond rapes women all the time. Go watch those old movies and tell me Bond’s not raping those women.
What the fuck happened to your avatar?
Reading about Weiila’s dilemma, I’ve got a flasback from another thread –
And suddenly an inspiration…
Oh dear Way-la, she wastes her precious time
reading dreck from some putz that knows bubkes
about real writing.
Well, one of these days Way-la is just going to snap,
and kick some poor schmo’s tuches.
Oy 
It got Trillified.
Yeah, but we need more. No resting on (quite old) laurels. We’ve got a poet who goes under a Roman nom de plume and he’ll be all the rage when he dies.
Wow, that’s exactly what I was going to say. 
It’s Powerpufftastic, you know.
It’s a horribly disproportionate plushy.:eek:
On a tangent, I would have to agree. People rely on the classics too much and don’t look at what’s around them.
Art is not progressive.
It is in the sense that most “great” works of art (painting, literature, music) are created from a different person than their inspiration. A different perspective being a different person. Picasso dealt with similar issues that other painters dealt with (war, sex, power) but he dealt with these very common and worldy themes with his own personal perspective, which every artist has the gift of owning. Not Picasso’s perspective but their own of course.
To say art is not progressive is to say that we are still doing cave paintings, writing “Beowulfs” and performing gregorian chants in modern concert halls. While these things are still around in their own special ways, there is an obvious growth and evolution in art. It’s like saying science does not progress.
It’s a cutesy The 984, and you damn well better recognize that.
Not to kill your discussion about The 984’s avatar, but I made it through the book. It just took me a few days to regain my composure enough to write about it.
Girl gets kidnapped by ex-lover and boy tracks them, listening as ex-lover admits to having killed Supposed Husband. Ex-lover then starts to try getting at girl, which may have resulted in the rape I expected, had boy not decided to intervene by kicking down the door and declaring “She’s mine, you hear? MY WOMAN!”. Not direct quote, but he took to saying that. A lot.
'Cause caveman talk is so hawt and all that.
Boy and girl gets married, boy impresses Blind Brother with being So Nice. In the meantime, ex-lover is blinded and castrated for his crimes. Girl decides to get revenge on boy for all he has done by making him drink a love potion, but by mistake she drinks it instead. OH THE HILARITY AND SUBTLE PLOT DEVICEMENT.
Boy does not have sex with girl on the wedding night, settling for groping her in his sleep.
She’s pissed as hell because due to the love potion (ho, ho, ho, why make things complicated?) she’s starting to fall in love with a man who’s bought her like a cow, taken all her land, her home, her possessions, herself, and commenders her around, threatens to beat her, burns her mother’s several hundred-year-old cookbook because he thinks there’s witchcraft in it (correct, but still).
And did I mention that everyone keeps telling her it’s all her fault for not making peace with herself and being happy that she has such a wonderfully manly man for a husband? The cardinal who wedded them even instructed her not to be too bothered with him taking mistresses as soon as she got pregnant. Which depressed her, because oh, she would not be his ONLY one!
I’d say something here, but… it’s hard formulating things when your eyes have rolled so much you’re staring at the ceiling and can’t stop.
Boy and girl finally have sex complete with howling on her side and descriptions like “it hit them like a summer storm”. She’s described as very, very loud because he’s oh so good with his hands and everything, unlike her ex-lover, so much that his every touch thrills her to the bone.
'Cause people tolly gets aroused when groped by people they don’t trust or like.
Oh right, the love potion. Silly me.
Boy and girl head off on a journey with a group of guards, two of her maidservants, her priest, and one of the king’s personal priests. There’s some plot about boy having to arrest a treacherous cardinal or something for the king.
Boy and girl have very loud sex again. On a rock. About, oh, twenty feet away from the rest of the group? I think it was something like that, but let’s just say descriptions of where people were tended to be spotty at best. All of a sudden they were in corridors and outside and on the road again and whatever without warning or explanation. It could not have been too far off, though.
Girl takes to screaming stuff like “take me right here!” and calling boy “braveheart, worshipped, beloved” etc in English, because she thinks that he only understands French.
I feel like I’m still missing out on some character development here, but I guess it’s just the love potion again. 'Coz she still hates him and doesn’t trust him and he’s a horrible, horrible man. Who’s very good with his hands and she can’t trust her body and yadayada.
A woman wrote this dreck? pinches bridge of nose
Of course, in the end it turns out that he DOES understand English, but pretends not to just because he gets his jollies from keeping her in the dark about most things.
Remember that she thought he was better than other men because he was “honest”? Well, she doesn’t complain much about this.
Boy’s brother has a long talk with girl about how wonderful and protective and sweet boy is to those he loves. Really?
Girl overhears a woman talking to boy and immediately assumes that he’s going to get his first mistress. She furiously confronts this woman who’s left stuttering and confused.
Girl’s priest arranges for boy to spy on girl as priest has a talk with girl. Girl then pours her heart out to priest and has a long speech about love and her emotions and yadayada. Neat plot resolvment 2.1.
When Madmartigan held his love-speech in <I>Willow</I>, under the influence of a love spell to boot, it was funny.
Boy confronts girl and finally lets her know that he knows English, and oh, by the way, not having a mistress - that woman was his FATHER’S old mistress, haha - because he loves girl so much because she has PERSONALITY and a sharp tongue and all that stuff.
And in the epilogue ex-lover gets married to a maid servant he made pregnant before getting castrated, Blind Brother and his best friend get married, but not with each other unfortunately (I would have had a good chuckle at that at least, but nooo), step-mom gets run over by a cart (no, seriously -_-), and boy and girl have three sons and live happily ever after since he won’t have to press her for an heir anymore.
I’ll go pay my respects to the porcelain god now, if you’ll excuse me. staggers off
You deserve a bloody medal for getting through that dreck alive. ::dekar!::
Then the large number of people who have literally gotten off on it must deserve the Nobel Prize.
My brain hurts now. It makes me want to quote a Raving Rabbid, and not just because I’ve been playing that lately.
Ah! I hate porcelain!