u/A_BURLAP_THONG

I think that when a band is known for having really strong closing tracks and they end and with a weak closer it makes the rest of the album seem worse by comparison.

Two immediate examples that come to mind: Radiohead and The Shins. They've given us albums that ended with ""The Tourist" / "Motion Picture Soundtrack," / "Videotape" and "The Past and Pending" / "A Comet Appears," respectively. Standout songs in their own rights, which work especially well as closing tracks. Then Hail to the Thief ends with "A Wolf at the Door" and Port of Morrow ends with "Port of Morrow," which are just these very nothing songs. The album stops playing and I say "That's it?"

Coming from artists that know how to do a final track, these specific examples give the impression of just limping across the finish line. These are albums I almost never listen to all the way through because they end on such a blah note.

project whale mary

There, I just made the top comment for Whalefall, once that goes into wide release.

I think the ice cream metaphor is Bolano musing that even though he wrote us a dense, 900 page expression of his entire worldview, ultimately he won’t get to determine his legacy. We’ll remember him however we feel like it.

Thanks for this. When I got to the end I was like "In a book full of rambling digressions that's the one we're gonna end this 900 page book on? A travel writer who is the namesake for an ice cream dish?" But that interpretation makes sense. Bolano will be remembered for whatever he ends up being remembered for, he doesn't get a say in it. That's a pretty well-thought out message for a dying man to end his book on.

Thanks for hosting! Reading it over six weeks with a discussion every week definitely helped me get through it.

I think I would rank the sections

1. Fate

2. Critics

3. Archimboldi

4. Crimes

5. Amalfitano

But the first three are pretty close.

What caused Reiter’s anti-Nazi views and actions (killing Sammer, insulting the ex-Nazis he goes out drinking with)? I think it might have been reading Ansky’s papers and then having dreams that he personally murdered Ansky, but I’m not totally sure.

So if you tried to sum it up, what is 2666 about? I’ve seen people (both here and from doing searches on JSTOR) mention that it’s really about neoliberalism and the violence that it causes, because the murders came to Santa Teresa after the maquiladoras. But the text never mentions NAFTA or neoliberalism. You have to know about that stuff outside the text to connect those dots.

I think a more surface-level (but still hardly explicit) theme might be the heritability of violence? Ingeborg tells Reiter about the Aztecs performing human sacrifice, then (chronologically, not sequentially in the book) the descendents of Aztecs are murdering women in Santa Teresa. Reiter strangles Sammer in the POW camp (and maybe kills Ingeborg), then his nephew sexually assaults a woman in Europe and gets accused of murdering women in Mexico.

Something I was thinking about: Could we have had 2666 without all of the digressions and side plots? What would it have looked like? Things like the story about the gaucho, the O’Higgins book, Barry Seaman’s sermon,the invention of the snuff film, etc. etc. etc. Were they necessary for the story?

Something my dad says is that if Moby-Dick were a short story or novella that was somewhere between 40 and 100 pages and just about Ahab and the whale it would be the greatest thing ever written. All the other stuff makes it too long to be considered the Great American Novel (in his opinion). But all the chapters about how to turn blubber into oil, surveys of different types of knots, whale biology, the waxing poetic about the color white, all that stuff is what makes Moby-Dick Moby-Dick.

So if you’ll excuse the tautology, someone (either Bolaño or an editor) could make a version of 2666 that’s just the “important” stuff, but then it wouldn’t be 2666.

More like what I don't want, but I want an end to Extremely Online authors writing about being Extremely Online. Take Yesteryear for example. It was the "hot book" of the summer, but I will never read it. It's a book by a podcaster about a tradwife influencer. That's all I need to hear to know that the author has internet brain poisoning and it will be present in every part of the writing. I've read enough books like that by authors like that and I always end up hating myself after.

If you want to be a good writer, you have to read a lot. And if all you read is twitter (or bluesky, more likely) you'll never be a good writer.

A teenage girl throwing herself at twenty-something guy and then talking his ear off about the Aztecs sounded like something from a Haruki Murakami book lol

Theory: Karl Haas is Reiter’s son (or perhaps nephew). They both have the same tall height and piercing blue eyes. Archemboldi travels to Santa Teresa, checks into a hotel under his birth name, and spends his days working with the Mexican authorities/German consulate trying to free Karl. The “giant” that Haas alludes to is Reiter.

I found the twenty-page segment about Sammer’s experience with the Jews and impromptu execution squad more disturbing than the entirety of the 300-some-odd pages of The Part About the Crimes. While reading this part, I felt sick (even though the killings are never detailed). I spent a lot of time thinking about just why I found 20 pages of 400 murdered Jews more disturbing than 300 pages of dozens of murdered Mexican women.

So I’ve done some thinking and this is the best I can articulate it:

We’ve talked about this in the discussions before, how the descriptions of the crimes were so detached and clinical. Sure, the deaths are disturbing and some of the cases are incredibly sad, but the newspaper-style writing lacks humanity. After a while, they all start to run together. And the crimes themselves are broken up by the misadventures of Lalo, Juan de Dios Martinez, Florita, Haas, and the rest. Meanwhile, Zammer’s part was told in first person, which gives it humanity. There’s this creeping dread: you know something bad will happen, but you don’t know just how bad it’s going to get. You start thinking about “what choices does this guy have? What would I do in that situation?”

So to sum it up, I think it’s the “first person humanity” (as opposed to “detached observer”) that made that interlude so disturbing.

We’ve talked a lot about how parts of the book feel like they would be at home in a David Lynch movie or show. So far, I found the most Lynchian part of this chapter to be the Polish kids who get drunk, play soccer, and kick the shit out of each other.

Bolaño did the same literary stunt he did at the end of parts 1 and 3, where there are some jumbled timelines.

Part 1 ended with Espinoza and Peltier hanging out at the hotel for days interspliced with Norton's "Dear John" letter. Part 3 ended with Fate's meeting with Haas insterspliced with his safe return to the US. And in this section, Haas gives his press conference, the congresswoman tells Sergio her life story, and the murders continue over the course of months all at the same time.

You would think of all the people who would use the "POV" meme correctly it would be gamers.

the indifference and apathy we have for suffering when it’s written in a dry, factual manner, a blurb that comes across the newspaper in the daily edition and then fades away.

There was that whole part in Fate's section where he overhears the guy in the diner talking about how a high-profile murder shocked society while nobody even heard about all the people who died in the Transatlantic slave trade. I think it can all be summed up as the Stalin quote "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic."

Thanks

This section was a welcome change of pace. And it’s not that I didn’t like books 1 & 2, it's just that I was ready for a change of pace.

It lacked the sense of “creeping dread” that was present in the previous two. However, there was one part that I found absolutely chilling: When Fate is at a restaurant looking at the hills off in the distance, and the cook tells him in broken English “they’re not pretty, they’re a garbage can” and we know that off in the distance is where the murdered women’s bodies get dumped…

I read a lot of nonfiction and the part about all the journalists reminded me about how some of my favorite nonfiction authors are or were journalists (Jon Krakauer, Chuck Klosterman, Bill Bryson, Eric Schlosser). Their writing isn’t beautiful, but they know how to set up a scene and keep you reading.

The part about all the sportswriters reminded me of an essay from Chuck Klosterman (who wrote for the newspapers in Fargo, ND and Akron, OH) wrote that appeared in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. He urges people to never get into sports journalism, because all sportswriters are miserable guys with daddy issues. Athletes have nothing of value to say and you have to get a quote from them that proves it. Your girlfriend’s dad will ask you oddly specific questions about the New York Rangers. Eventually, you’ll wish you had a sniper rifle with you in the press box.

I see that Bolaño worked as a journalist in Mexico. I wonder if he ever worked the sports (especially boxing) beat?

I’m splitting the read of this about 50-50 between the audiobook and text. Here are my thoughts about the audiobook narration:

Each section has a different narrator. The first section is narrated by John Lee, who has a very proper English accent. (He did a great job narrating Laurent Binet’s HHhH.) The second part is narrated by Armando Durán, who has a slight but proper-sounding Spanish accent. I can’t tell if the accent is supposed to be Chilean-Spanish, Spanish-Spanish, or something else. (I’ve never listened to anything he’s narrated, but he did narrate Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.) These two give a very matter-of-fact narration.

This section was narrated by G. Valmont Thomas, another narrator I’ve never heard before. He is…definetly trying to have more fun with the narration than the other two. He uses goofy voices and accents for most of the characters. But his voice for Fate sounds like Tom DuBois from The Boondocks, or Twofer from 30 Rock. Maybe that’s what he was going for, a nerdy white-sounding black guy. But I thought Fate, a black guy from Harlem, needed to have a more rough-and-tumble voice.

In regards to the Santa Teresa murders, I found Guerra's mention of maquiladoras especially interesting (the page numbering on my Spanish edition is different from the English translation, but it happens at the bar shortly after Guerra and Amalfitano arrive. I'm also not sure if the word "maquiladora" is translated or left as is).

In the English edition its "maquiladora," untranslated. It's also unitalicized, most of the Spanish words are written in italics.

And the only reason my white ass didn't have to look up the word was because last week someone here mentioned that the At The Drive In song "Invalid Letter Department" is about the Juarez femicides, and in reading about that I learned about the maquiladoras.

507 years old? And it grows a new ring on its shell every year? That thing must have been huge.

The size of the clam was 87 mm × 73 mm (3.4 in × 2.9 in).

Oh.

Reading/translating/conferences/vacations at the drop of a hat. We don't see them teaching classes, grading papers, attending faculty meetings, and navigating the academic/literary bureaucracy.

A "fun" life, and they also seem to have a lot of money for scholars? I assume their universities are paying for travel and lodging when there's a conference, but outside conferences they're flying between London, Paris, Madrid, and Turin on a whim and spending what feels like weeks at hotels in Mexico. I don't know how much these things would have cost in the 90s, but I can't imagine it would be this inexpensive thing for young academics to do regularly.

How long were Espinoza and Pelletier hanging out in Santa Teresa for? When they bring Norton to the airport they say unless there's a big break on the case they'll be back within three days, but it feels like so much longer. Lots of describing a routine the men fall into. By the end of the chapter they're still there, just hanging out at the hotel.

Between the nightmares and the murders/disappearences there is some dark energy eminating from Santa Teresa. I think Norton had the right idea to get out early.

What did you make of the parallel between the Pakistani cab driver attack and the doormen vs cab driver warfare?

I just finished re-reading A Confederacy of Dunces and one of the funniest things I forgot was how much everyone in the world of the book is prejudiced against hot dog vendors. So that's what I was thinking about with this book: being a hot dog vendor in Confederacy of Dunces means that people will abuse you and your family will be ashamed of you, and being a taxi driver in 2666 means that people will kick the shit of you, and that's just the way it is.

In last week's thread, some people were talking about how Bolaño's works have a subtext about globalization and how economic forces cause people to react in unnatural ways. There's this idea that cab drivers are immigrants at the mercy of economic forces (the "in my country I was a surgeon, I immigrated here and now I drive a cab" thing that pops up in media and real life). So cabbies are getting brutalized twice, first by global economic forces and then by people who savagely beat them. But the Mexican cab driver is presumably Mexican, and not an immigrant. Maybe economic realities forced him to move from the countryside to the city?

Did they even want success?

The book Trouble Boys by Bob Mehr goes into this. Essentially they were a bunch of fuck-ups from horrible backgrounds who were really into self-sabotage. If they were playing for cool kids and/or industry types in New York or Los Angeles they would play covers of shit-kicking country music (if they weren't too drunk to stand up). If they were playing for their buddies in Minneapolis they would actually try. The closest they ever got to the mainstream was opening for Tom Petty and the Heartbeakers in the early 90s. It was after Paul Westerberg got sober and he just didn't know what to do with himself, so they would play 30-minute covers of "Walk on the Wild Side" until they got booed off stage.

It's a great book, but it's also really sad. A bunch of industry insiders are quoted as saying they "could have been as big as R.E.M." (R.E.M. in the 80s, not in the 90s, mind you) but they never made it because of the chaotic live shows, drinking, and self sabotage. Also, original guitarist Bob Stinson was physically and sexually abused by his stepfather, developed PTSD, turned to alcohol, and died young.

I work in a library. Here are two common occurrences:

• A kid (usually from around the ages of 3 to 8) points at shelf or cart of DVDs and says "WHAT ARE THOOOOOOSE?!?" Parent says "They're movies." Kid says "Can we get one?" Parent says "No, we don't have anything to play it on."

• Person walks up to the desk and says "I just got a new car and it doesn't have a CD player. How can I still listen to audiobooks?"

And actually, the second one was happening 5, 10 years ago, not so much these days, because CD players have been phased out for that long.

Honestly, I think that format-related changes in listening habits ("I got a new car and it doesn't have a CD player," or "Since I got Spotify I stopped listening to CDs," or "My DVD player crapped out and I realized I don't really need a DVD player anymore") are approximately one million times more likely than any of the reasons OP suggested.

The thing I kept on thinking about during the gaucho story, was that we (the readers) are hearing a story within a story within a story. (That is, the woman's story, in the Swabian's story, in the story 2666.) The Swabian is recalling something that happened 40 years earlier, and the woman is recalling something that happened 30 years before that. How much have they misremembered, forgotten, omitted? How much of the truth are we (or the Archimboldians) getting?

Now, my reading might be totally wrong. First, the people recounting the stories seemed so sure about these memories and they recounted them in such a vivid way. Second, nothing else in the book (so far) has seemed to suggest there is a theme of misremembered or misconstrued memories or experiences running through the book.

So I might have taken the wrong thing away from that passage, but I still wonder: How much of what the Archimboldians think they know, do they really know?

Is anybody doing the audiobook?

I sometimes will start a book on audio to "jumpstart" the story. After about an hour and a half of listening (to when Pelletier and Espinoza finish their meeting with Mrs. Bubis) I was shocked that only gets to about page 24. Reading the text goes by much faster, which surprised me. What's happening on the page is rarely exciting, but it's written in a very propulsive way that I finished much faster than I would have by listening.

Also, I was surprised to find out that Liz's last name is "Norton," the way the narrator pronounced it I thought it was "Naughton."

It's like the Shakeweight wasn't suggestive enough so they pivoted to microphones.

I really was ready to give it a chance, maybe ask what exactly you mean by "low-effort." (For example, does this thread, which is just a collage of posters with no text in the body or participation from OP count as low effort?) Then I saw gifs in the comments and I knew there was going back. Unsubscribed.

You had a good run, /r/flicks. Enjoy being the next /r/moviecritic, I guess.

I've noticed this happens if I write more than like, six sentences. Or if I type out multiple paragraphs using paragraph breaks.

And if you look at the post histories of people accusing you AI-generated writing, it always comes from people incapable of stringing together more than five or six words.

Never. A discussion about Gattaca isn't enhanced by seeing a thumbnail of the poster. A question asking is Kagemusha is worth a watch gains nothing by including a film poster.. I suspect that reddit's algorithm prioritizes image posts over text posts, which results in spammers and bots posting images for engagement bait. Quality nosedives when this happens.

If there’s any other thing you would like to see implemented on the sub leave a comment.

While were at it, no more posts about TV shows. The new first page of the new queue contains the threads What's the best TV series you've watched this year? and What TV role is so iconic that you cannot see the actor as anyone else? There's more if you go back further. (The last one isn't even a self post, it's a link to a news story masquerading as a self post, that was cross-posted from another sub.)

This is a sub for movies. If people want to discuss TV shows, they can do it on a TV sub.

One of my favorite bits in America (The Book)) was in the introduction that was "written" by Thomas Jefferson and said something like

Back then, anyone could be an inventor. "What if we put the rubbish in a receptacle?" "Good Lord! You've invented the sanitation system!"

An ancient Greek walks into a tailor shop, puts a torn toga on the counter.

Tailor says "Euripides?"

Customer says "Yeah. Eumenides?"