Cô Gái Văn Chương Và Thiên Thần Sa Ngã - Tập 4 tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Simsim Lam simsimlam — GoodReads Memorial Plot Summary (Pages 1 - 30) (Warning: Contains Spoilers) (Sponsor: Grove Press) We are living (view spoiler)/(view spoiler)/(view spoiler). We walk down streets where (view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler) lived. The cancer of (view spoiler)/(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler) is eating us away. The atmosphere is saturated with (view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler). (view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler) discovers his room is plagued by (view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler). He asks me to (view spoiler)(view spoiler) his armpits. This (view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler) is a prolonged (view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler). You, (view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler) are my (view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler). I am (view spoiler)(view spoiler). I know how to (view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler) your (view spoiler) with my (view spoiler)(view spoiler)(view spoiler). The Pornographic Imagination Henry Miller wrote "Tropic of Cancer" between 1930 and 1934. It was published in France in 1934, though it wasn't published in the United States until 27 years later in 1961. The importation of the French edition was immediately banned. Only when it was published locally did the Supreme Court determine (in 1964, before the 60’s had truly begun to swing) that the work was not obscene. The Right Sexual Proportions The definition of obscenity requires a work to have an undue emphasis on or exploitation of sex. The word "undue" implies that there is an appropriate level of emphasis or exploitation. "Tropic of Cancer" is littered with words that, in order not to offend, I will paraphrase as "cocque", "qunt" and "fucque". Let’s assume that life is 80% tedium (e.g., work) and 20% sex. Should there be a criminal law that says that 20% sex is OK, but 80% will send you to jail? Is it wrong that "Tropic of Cancer" might be much closer to the life of the imagination? I think any subject matter should be fair game in fiction written by adults for adults. However, regardless, I think "Tropic of Cancer" deserves its place as one of the master works of the twentieth century. The Truth Told Truly "Tropic of Cancer" recounts the narrator’s first two years in Paris after leaving New York in 1930. Nothing is to be gained by denying that the novel is autobiographical. It contains the following epigraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences and how to record truth truly." It’s implicit that Henry Miller’s quest was to tell the truth about his own life "truly". There is no attempt to self-censor or to beautify. Everything is revealed. A Fucquing Catalogue The male characters in "Tropic of Cancer" are largely American expatriates, would be writers or artists, living in Paris, not necessarily gainfully employed, close to destitute, hungry for food and life experience, but with plenty of time on their hands. Understandably, they spend a lot of their time whoring and fucquing. It’s arguable that the amount of fucquing in the novel reflects what males would hope to do in similar circumstances. (In my younger days, we called it “college life”.) From a feminist point of view, the female characters are not presented in the same manner. None of them is portrayed as financially or emotionally independent. Most of them are the whores who are pursued by the males. Some transform from sex objects to love objects, but only in the short-term. The closest we get is Macha, an ostensible Russian Princess, who avoids sex by claiming to have the clap. To be fair to Miller, he isn’t the only one doing the fucquing. The chapters are essentially vignettes of the males, complete with the females who surround them. While research has identified Miller’s real life inspiration, there is still a possibility that Miller explores some of the options available to him, through these characters. Miller’s character still expects his wife Mona (June) to join him from New York. While he indulges in his fair share of whoring, he doesn’t form any close attachments, apart from those to the whore Germaine (who treats him “nobly”) and Tania, who is married to Sylvester (based on the real life characters Bertha Schrank and Joseph Schrank). Tania Despite her marital status, Tania is closest to replacing Mona in Miller’s heart and is the true inspiration for the account in the novel: "It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough." Tania’s appeal seems to be that she accepts him as he is. In return, Miller must accept her for what she is, married, but available. Miller’s financial circumstances hardly diminish his sexual braggadocio (for he is an artist): "O Tania, where now is that warm qunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your qunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a qunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent...I am fucquing you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucqued." Henry knows or asserts that he is better for Tania than her husband, because of his sexual prowess and his superior writing skills. Well, it’s his story after all and he’s sticking to it. Miller asks us to judge him by his performance, and his novel, his story-telling, is just as much a part of his performance as his fucquing ability. This is the most sexually explicit and declamatory that Miller gets in relation to his own affairs. If you can handle this passage, you will have no problem with the rest of the novel. This Dry, Fucqued Out, Lucked Out World in Which We’re Living Miller was writing at a time when the First World War had just occurred and the Second World War was fast approaching. Miller was not a particularly political person, in the sense of party political or ideological commitment to Left or Right. In 1936, he would tell George Orwell that to go to Spain at the time of the Spanish Civil War, would be "the act of an idiot". However, Miller believed that there were problems affecting the roots of civilization. The West was in decline. It was gazing into an abyss. In Miller’s words, it was "fucqued out". Initially, he realises this while whoring: "When I look down into this fucqued-out qunt of a whore, I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper’s skull... "The world is pooped out: there isn't a dry fart left. Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the slightest regard for these existent governments, laws, codes, principles, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos? "If anyone knew what it meant to read the riddle of that thing which today is called a "crack" or a "hole," if anyone had the least feeling of mystery about the phenomena which are labeled "obscene," this world would crack asunder. "It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater." The Topic of Cancer Miller describes the eschatological in terms of the scatological and then in terms of cancer: "No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon. "The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away… "[It] grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it." Miller even explained the name of the novel in these terms: "It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch." The Estrangement of the Machine At the heart of Miller’s diagnosis are industrialization and the machine. At a personal level, his machine was his typewriter, with which he had a harmonious relationship: "I am a writing machine. The last screw has been added. The thing flows. Between me and the machine there is no estrangement. I am the machine…" In contrast, he refers to a "world which is peculiar to the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine – the martyrs of modern progress…a mass of bones and collar buttons…" Industrialisation relies on the division of labour and conformity. Citing Walt Whitman, he asserts: "The future belongs to the machine, to the robots." We have been deprived of our humanity by mechanization. Paradoxically, Miller associates the word "human" with this new de-humanised human being: "Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity." "I Am Inhuman!" Something new is required, what Miller calls "inhuman". Miller doesn’t recognise any obligation to define himself or his vision in traditional liberal, humanist terms. Again, he embraces imagery that recalls "Hamlet" and William Blake: "I belong to the earth! ... I am inhuman! "I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on. "Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. "And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness; my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. "All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race." Miller is content to join (Blakean) ecstasy with shit and slime and vomit and madness. Creative Spirits and Mothers of the Race Miller believes that civilization has become a "crater", a "great yawning gulf of nothingness": "The dry, fucqued-out crater is obscene. More obscene than anything is inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis." Nothingness must be confronted by something vital, dynamic and exuberant. This is the role of sex and of creativity, but it is also the role of womanhood in Miller’s vision. The problem of, and the response to, nothingness is carried between the legs of "the creative spirits and mothers of the race," the latter being the "tenderest parts" of womanhood. "The Inhuman Ones" The "inhuman ones" are "artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song." It is the role of artists to transcend life and lifelessness by: "…ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals..." "The Womb of Time" The other response to nothingness is womanhood. Miller has a complicated relationship with womanhood, which needs to be approached with some skepticism, because that was the response of his contemporaries. Womanhood for Miller represents the womb, the origin of life and a comfort zone and a source of sustenance during gestation (as in George Orwell’s essay, the experience of being "inside the whale"). Womanhood represents a contrast to the order of industrialization and mechanization. It represents chaos: "When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn, chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. "You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing. "It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon." Miller’s Boner Fides Obviously, the womb or uterus is a discrete part of a female’s genitalia from which males derive pleasure. Miller seeks to exalt or deify a woman’s vagina or qunt, by virtue of its association with the metaphorical significance of the womb. This is the foundation upon which Miller builds an entire sexual and worldly philosophy. The question is: is this philosophy sincere or authentic, or is he simply dressing up his sexual appetite into something that is ostensibly more profound? Lust for Life For Miller, sex is the measure of the man, right down, in his case at least (or at most), to his length in inches. However, his sexual exuberance is symbolic, in turn, of his lust or zest for life. This zest necessarily takes him, a male, into the arms and womb of womanhood. What Miller seeks from the relationship between male and female is joy, "the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns": "Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips…Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy." Feel Flows Miller incorporates this vitality into a theory about the flow of life from birth to death, from womb to tomb: "I love everything that flows…rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag... "I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco… "I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund." Again, Miller’s vision incorporates both positive and negative, semen and menstrual blood, fecund and unfecund. In language that adverts to Proust, Miller continues: "I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. "The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now." The positive and the negative are the yin and the yang, two sides of the same coin, parts of a cyclical continuum from birth to death to rebirth in some lesser or higher form. Miller felt unable to write literature like Proust, as if it had ceased to be relevant to the time, as if Proust was a force that needed an equal and opposite reaction: "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive... "I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me… "This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…what you will." The Body Electric Perhaps the greatest literary influence on Miller was Walt Whitman. In many ways, Miller is a personification of Whitman’s worldview, which cannot be found in Europe: "Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN… Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning." What appeals to Miller about Whitman was his emphasis on the body, sex and vitality: "Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living..." Equally, Miller’s life and work must be authentic and true: "I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing… "To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing. It is to you, Tania, that I am singing." Anais Nin Anais Nin said that "Tropic of Cancer" was "a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium. A continual oscillation between extremes…it is blood and flesh which are given us. "Drink, food, laughter, desire, passion, curiosity, the simple realities which nourish the roots of our highest and vaguest creations." It is to her enormous credit that, not only did she provide this preface for Miller’s work, but that she borrowed a substantial amount of money to fund its publishing costs. For much of the time that Miller was writing the novel, she also had a passionate sexual relationship with him. There is even some suspicion that aspects of their relationship are reflected in the character of Tania, even though there is evidence of the primary inspiration for that character. Regardless of whether she features in the novel, we must be grateful to Nin that "Tropic of Cancer", a work of unrivalled sexual exuberance and exaltation, survives today in a world that is often unimaginative, uninspired, mundane and tedious.

Vidit Sachdeva vidit08 — Habitat destruction, rash greed and concumerism: Dr. Seuss was ahead of his time. But thneeds are cool.

Nathaniel Shodunke _abszzz — This was an AMAZING book and I just could not put it down. It follows two stories for the first half of the book - Sarah Starzynski, a young Jewish girl living in Paris in 1942 and Julia Jarmond, an American woman living in Paris with her French husband and daughter in 2002. Their two stories begin to intertwine when Julia begins to research the Vel' d'Hiv', a Jewish roundup that took place in Paris on July 16, 1942. The more Julia learns about this horrific event the more compelled she is to find out what happened to Sarah after that fateful day. An amazing book that explores a hidden part of France's history during WWII. I would highly recommend this one!

Huang Rain huangrain — Dempsey Durwood, one of Sidra Smart’s first clients, approaches her to take the case of Boo Murphy who has been accused of murdering her second cousin Sasha’s husband Zeke. Boo swears she shot at him but did it just to scare him but she didn’t kill him. She does claim that she saw a pirate ship, the Hotspur, half-buried in the Texas swamp. Sidra Smart has been operating the detective agency, The Third Eye, left to her by her brother Warren. She has run into a few mishaps along the way including the fact that her office burned to the ground. Things are looking up now though. Sidra has just received her Private Investigator License as well as an insurance check to rebuild her office. Sidra has been working out of the home of her Aunt Annie but is more than ready to get back in her own office. She is anxious for some paying clients and not too excited about taking on a client with no money but many wild tales. In spite of the way, she feels about the case Sidra decides to do some investigation. She also spots the pirate ship or at least she thinks she does. Between Sidra’s visions, Boo’s tales and Annie insisting on getting into the act Dead Wreckoning is a very interesting book with lots of history thrown in the mix. Some people have the idea that Boo actually boarded the pirate ship and came away with treasure. Sidra has her hands full trying to clear Boo of the charges and protect her at the same time. George Leger, Sidra’s trusted mentor, is acting very strangely too and Sidra is worried George has gotten himself involved in some trouble. Sidra’s dog Slider gets into the act as well as Aunt Annie. Dead Wreckoning is well worth reading. This is the third book in the Sidra Smart series but can be read as a stand-alone.

Arcangelo Fiore fiorearcangelodesign — Fairy Bad Day was the perfect light, amusing, paranormal read. It's similar to the Paranormalcy, Hex Hall, and Demon Princess books. The key difference though is that Fairy Bad Day isn't part of a series. It's a standalone. That's right; a paranormal standalone which will appeal to many readers. The story is about Emma Jobes, student at Burtonwood which is a special school for students who have the sight. These students train to become slayers of an elemental. Emma is furious when she's given the job of slaying fairies instead of dragons. What harm could these mall-obsessed, skittle-addicted, donut-stealing creatures do? Then she discovers a killer fairy and as the first ever fairy slayer, it's her job to take care of it. Emma is 15 and you can tell. She's stubborn, hot headed, and self absorbed in the way people can be when they don't notice anyone but themselves. I loved her! She was flawed but funny. Her interactions with her friends were always fun to read about. Emma's life had it's good parts and bad parts which made for a unique character. She acted like a real teenager. What I loved about this book was how light it was. There was danger and serious stuff but I wasn't drowning in angst and tears. Fairy Bad Day is the kind of book you read while smiling. The kind of book you read for entertaining fun. There were parts that were not realistic but that was part of the fun. The world is one I'd love to be able to explore more, but one I have a good understanding of the way it is. Not everything is fully fleshed out but that's probably because this is a standalone which focuses more on the story than the setting. I feel like I should briefly mention the romance. Which was nice. I didn't really feel like it was needed or it was anything too special but it didn't take away from the book. Pretty cute overall. All in all, a wonderful escape full of romance, Fairy Bad Day is full of fun. It's the kind of feel good story that is a nice variation in paranormal YA. 4 stars, ****

Jon Lipp jonny_ipps — I figured out the twist about half-way through, but I love these characters.