TPPM (9): "The First Great Epic of Modern Sloth"

[Dave Monroe]

"'Bartleby' is the first great epic of modern Sloth,
presently to be followed by work from the likes of
Kafka, Hemingway, Proust, Sartre, Musil and others --
take your own favorite list of writers after Melville
and you're bound sooner or later to run into a
character bearing a sorrow recognizable as peculiarly
of our own time."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/sloth.html

http://www.vheissu.org/bio/eng_sloth.htm


Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of
Wall-street" (1853)

http://www.bartleby.com/129/


Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung (1912)

http://www.kafka.org/transl/english/metamorphosis.htm

http://www.kafka.org/projekt/lebzeit/verwandlung.htm

http://www.kafka.org/verwissue.htm

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/introser/marxonkafka.htm


Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1938)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/heming.html

http://www.shortstories.computed.net/hemingwaysnows.html


Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27)

http://www.tempsperdu.com/

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/

http://www.geocities.com/fang_club/summarise_proust_competition.html


Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausee (1938)

http://www.geocities.com/sartresite/quotes1.html

http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/nausea.htm


Robert Musil, Der Mann Ohhe Eigenschaften (1930- )

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jikje/Texts/mwq1.html

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jikje/Texts/kaka.html

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jikje/Texts/mwq2.html


But how'd Pynchon miss ...

Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (1858)

http://www.eldritchpress.org/iag/oblomov.htm

http://www.eldritchpress.org/iag/oblomov.txt


"a sorrow recognizable as peculiarly of our own time"

For years, I've been meaning to put into practice my
Anatomy of Melancholy approach to directing. And now I
finally get to! Having already copied out on index
cards various descriptions of depression gleaned from
Burton's ancient tomes, as well as some 40 synonyms
for sadness culled from a thesaurus, I now start each
day by dealing out all 52 cards, face down, on the
breakfast table full of actors who are to work that
day. Each performer has a different, sometimes fuzzy
idea of a word's meaning—for instance, lugubrious or
throboxyc, which is sadder? Actors love restrictions,
and why not restrict them in the only fair way
possible: with a lottery windfall of commands drawn
randomly from a reference book?

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0319/maddin.php

The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

http://imdb.com/title/tt0366996/?fr=c2l0ZT1kZnxzZz0xfHR0PW9ufHBuPTB8cT1zYWRkZXN0IG11c2ljfG14PTIwfGxtPTIwMHxodG1sPTE_;fc=1;ft=1


Guest hosting whilst Tim's out of town ...

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