What are your favorites of the coombrained books which are also actual good lit? So no harem trash etc. unless you legitimately think it works as great lit too. Pic related, Crash is a majorly coombrained book and enjoyable such even though I'm not into car crashes at all (just read it because it can't be described).
>What are your favorites of the coombrained books which are also actual good lit?
The bible.
Crash filtered me. I loved Highrise, but Crash was just so deliberately disgusting that it felt like it lost any artistic merit.
it's definitely weird, potentially offputting. but i don't think it ever descends super far into the edgelord territory.
From what I remember, and it was some years ago now, I eventually had to stop because of the bombardment of descriptions of brainmatter with cum and shit on it and the piss stains on the car seats and so on and so on. It felt relentless. I have a strong stomach but got close to sick.
but isn't something like naked lunch much more disgusting too? but i know what you mean, it's the skillful repetitiveness i think that does it, the fact that its not complete cut-up stuff but obsessive circular repetitions.
Don't know, haven't read Naked Lunch. I won't contest that it's skillful, considering it's Ballard. However, the only way Crash is coombrained is in that there's literal cum on literal brains and skull fragments.
I jerked off at minimum 8 times while reading Crash, all in my Uni’s library
Venus in Furs but I'm into femdom so I can't really claim objectivity here
femdom is cool stuff, i actually started it but didnt finish it for whatever reason, thanks for reminding me of it
idk it gives a coomer vibe cause its like porn novel phrases juxtaposed with technological and product-like vocabulary over and over.
>idk it gives a coomer vibe cause its like porn novel phrases juxtaposed with technological and product-like vocabulary over and over.
Idk I when I think of coombrained lit, I think of literature that's there to sexually stimulate the reader, or has injected a lot of the author's desires in. If you're sexually aroused by Crash, god help you.
well i mean, im not looking for lit to jerk off to, but like actual lit that includes elemtns of those coombrained tendencies and i dont think you can argue against the idea that crash is still a novel that heavily and obsessively features sex.
>idk it gives a coomer vibe cause its like porn novel phrases juxtaposed with technological and product-like vocabulary over and over.
Yeah, it definitely has appeal and merit. I picked it up initially for much of the same reasons. I just couldn't stomach it.
>Venus in Furs but
>"That woman, as nature has created her, and man at present is educating her, is man's enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion."
So Severin is the 19th century equivalent of a butthurt beta reject who couldn't get his Chaturbate findom to marry him.
lame philosophy imo but might be a good book anyway
I liked the book more for its aesthetic sensibility than for Severian's takes about women. Not because they're offensive or anything but because they're rather pedestrian.
The whole point is that he was a pathetic individual who let his obsession dominate him and it ended with nothing but disappointment. His dominatrix is disgusted with him for a lot of the story, When she found someone who she felt could actually fulfill her wants, she dumped Severin.
I recommend everyone who's interested in Venus in Furs read the 'Adventure with Ludwig II' appendix from Deleuze's 'Masochism' book (available in pdf form from [somewhere]), because it's only like 13 pages and an extremely funny description of 19th-century bourgeois aesthete life.
Ballard starter pack:
Chromium
Aluminised
Binnacle
Flyover
Cine-camera
Crash is fantastic. It’s so elegant conceptually, just teasing the overt fetishisation of consumption to its logical conclusions and then describing them to you in meticulous detail. A car advert is selling speed, power and sex; and the ultimate marriage of these is an orgasm during a fatal crash. All of Ballard’s writing is excellent. Again just the simple elegant concept of examining the new urban, industrial, post-war world and finding the thin places in it where the depravity he saw in the internment camp is hidden underneath. Ballard should have been the great British 20th century writer not Orwell Orwell is garbage.
>The wounds on my knees and chest were beacons tuned to a series of beckoning transmitters, carrying the signals, unknown to myself, which would unlock this immense stasis and free these drivers for the real destinations set for their vehicles, the paradises of the electric highway.
Ballard has great strengths, but he just seems like a cold fish. Everything is shrouded in this clinical, abstracted tone while his characters don't quite come to life. And fiction without actual characters works as an intellectual excercise (see Borges) but can never really capture the human experience.
I like how his characters are alienated as result of his specific prose style.
He might be the first (and still one of the few) SF writer that actually came up with unique SF language and prose, instead of using conventional narration to tell SF stories. Gibson was obviously heavily inspired by him when he perfected SF writing in cyberpunk subgenre, whatever we might think of the quality of actual cyberpunk stories.