The two year old's guide to Dostoevsky

Total future ILMer. Last night she also 1) threw a tantrum in the car because she wanted to hear "Random" instead of "Love Me Or Hate Me", and 2) settled for "I Turned Into A Martian" by The Misfits when Mommy couldn't find Gal Costa's "Baby".

It's kind of like when a kid keeps insisting he wants coffee - you just let him taste it and you never have that problem again.

Edward, I love your daughter.

Plus, not letting her read it now will make it more sinfully delicious for her when she finally can.

the idea of making dostoevsky sinfully delicious amuses me very much.

http://photos-171.ak.facebook.com/ip006/v36/148/47/3900255/n3900255_30313171_8222.jpg

E5 just turned 4. here is the track listing to her birthday party cd. yes these are her favorite songs. my only contribution was "ymca", since that's where her party was, duh. I added "I wanna be like you" from the jungle book to the cd but she made me take it off. not slamming enough, I guess.

(the titles in quotes are yoda dialogue snippets, since she runs around imitating him all the time.)

01. "hard to see darkside..."
02. Banana Splits - The Tra La La Song
03. yoda laugh
04. The Ramones - Sheena Is A Punk Rocker
05. "900 years..."
06. Squirrel Nut Zippers - Got My Own Thing Now
07. "help you I will"
08. Jojo's Circus - Brush Your Teeth
09. "slimy? mudhole?"
10. The Stray Cats - Stray Cat Strut
11. Queen - Another One Bites The Dust
12. LL Cool J - Jack the Ripper
13. Wiggles - Hot Potato
14. The Cramps - Goo Goo Muck
15. "a jedi's strength..."
16. Burl Ives - Jingle Jingle Jingle
17. "looking for someone?"
18. The Coasters - Along Came Jones
19. "strong am I..."
20. Lil' Romeo Ft. Master P - Lil' Romeo's B House
21. "mmmm donuts!"
22. Village People - YMCA (radio edit)
23. "remember your failure..."
24. Jorge Ben - Taj Mahal
25. "an agent of evil..."
26. The Misfits - I Turned Into a Martian
27. "fear leads to hate..."
28. David Seville - Witch Doctor
29. "try not..."
30. Tom Ze - Jimmy Renda Se
31. "a jedi craves not..."
32. David Bowie - Modern Love
33. "I'm not afraid..."
34. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
35. "judge me by my size..."
36. Gal Costa & Caetano Veloso - Baby
37. "help..."
38. Gene Autry - You Are My Sunshine
39. "patience!"
40. The Dickies - Banana Splits

aw. happy birthday to her! does she still like Dostoevsky?

shit, I wish I could find that book she had me buy her at a library sale a couple of weeks ago. it was some 19th century play about ancient greece. it didn't even have a picture on the cover, it was just little, old, and green. she kept calling it her dictionary. I love kids, they're so weird.

"little, old, and green" hmmm kinda like yoda

Oh my god. I haven't read Notes From Underground in a very long time.

love this all

"Sad Man in Him Room" is the best summary of existentialism I've ever encountered.

particularly in practice.

But this thread made me happy. :)

ILX: a source of light underground

E5: Him sad in his room?
E3: Yeah, pretty much.
E5: Where him friends?
E3: They went away because he was mean to them.
E5: Him get mad?
E3: Yes, sometimes he gets mad.
E5: (thinks for a moment) Read to me?

this is more or less the conversation i had w/ the professor who taught the "nietzsche & heidegger" seminar i took last year

OH MY GOD BURL IVES SONG ON THERE

Edward your daughter is the best and this thread had filled my lungs with glee.

it makes me want to have cuet kids, but it makes me worried that there's no guranantee they'll have special insight on existentialism or anything. i'd end up with the kid that just repeats all the profanities i accidentally let slip from time to time.

That's pretty awesome too though.

today...

E5: what do you think the goo goo muck looks like?
E4: I dunno, a basilisk?

tehresa I was once anti-reproduction but luckily somebody talked me out of it

oh i still want to have kids, but yours make me want to have CUET kids!

I love kids, they're so weird.

^^^ this was the best part about hanging with 3.5-5 year olds all day. if you sort of pretend that they're adults some of the time, their behavior gets a lot more interesting, if only because it's so bizarro and erratic.

okay, it was an ancient roman writing plays about the greeks. the little old green book is a 1929 edition of the 3 comedies of terence: andria, adelphi, and phormio. literally translated.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-comedies-Terence-translated-introduction/dp/B0013HNMFO

E5: what do you think the goo goo muck looks like?
E4: I dunno, a basilisk?

― Edward III, Monday, April 7, 2008 8:37 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol!

there are so many bizarro exchanges that go on in my household on a daily basis, I feel derelict in not being a better documentor of them

i love this thread.

i have taken to calling Dostoevsky "dusty-dusty" in my head.

This is awesome!

last saturday, cleaning her room, found 4 of the 5 scooby doo action figures...
E3: where's daphne?
E5: I threw her out.
E3: why?
E5: because all she cares about is her hair and not about other people.
E3: and what about velma?
E5: velma can stay.

Wisdom!

Thanks e5!

favorite thread

my fave thread. your kid is awesome. :-)

Recently:

Ophelia *coughs*
Me: Put your hand in front of your mouth when you cough, Ophelia.
O turns around, looks at me seriously and replies:"But I don't have anymore coughs!"
Grrrrr. :-)

When I play my music: "STOP PLAYING THAT MUSIC. NOT FUN! STOP DANCING!"

I get yelled at if I put on anything too slow or quiet... "THIS IS NOT ROCK N ROLL, PUT ON ROCK N ROLL"

Wise words!

Phew! Glad I saw this thread, I started reading "Notes from the Underground", now I don't have to.

^^^ don't even have to read the Cliff's Notes now

haha this thread is awesome. not least because i have the same copy of notes from underground!

Dusty Dusty!

Stop playing that music!

I <3 this thread.

E5 sounded out and wrote down her first word today

no, it wasn't cat, or moo, or run

'poop'

OMG, she's better than most of the posters here already! :-)

http://tinyartdirector.blogspot.com/

haha that's awesome

this is my favourite thread to revive. I think of it whenever I'm/her sad in her room.

awww, the 24th was her birthday

this morning...

E5: I can't get married. because one, I'm not growed up, and two, I'm craaaazzzzeeeee

You did actually name her E5, yes?

yes. I anticipate a dystopian future state and the name will help her fit in at school.

http://bp3.blogger.com/_TcFdN5N0RWc/R2NKcHnOrKI/AAAAAAAAAeY/0Gl3cVfx3B0/s320/fiveintro257.jpg

THX-11E5

dystopian future, just like in WE by Zamyatin! I actually managed to finish that one.

Would you be kind enough to summarize it for us two year olds, please?

Him sad in his glass room

Woo! Thx :-)

Ned, don't forget, lady make his pee pee feel funny, go bye bye in big machine.

Dear Santa,

Am I on the good or naughty list? Because I was wondering if I am good or bad.

sounds like an 1p3'er in training to me.

Ha! This thread reminded me of the mini-reviews two children gave the work of Bridget Riley:

One wrote: “Very interesting and I like it. But there is a bit too much lines to look at in one day.” The other wrote: “Could be boring. Very stripey.”

"could be boring" def. needs to find its way into more criticism.

was thinking the same about 'very stripey'

Not to be confused with "very Stipe-y," which is a criticism for a lot of late 80s indie bands.

Not to be confused with "very Stipe-y," which is a criticism for a lot of late 80s indie bands.

Or "very White Stripe-y," which is a criticism for a lot of 00s indie bands.

i literally cried laughing whilst thinking about the children's book title of 'Story of the Eye.'

This thread's is one of my favorite opening posts

cosign

Because I was wondering if I am good or bad.

Dear E5, this is the question that never ever goes away. But you are good, at least this year.

Ho ho ho ho ho ho!

i was looking for a dostoyevsky thread and obviously this one is the best, omg. presumably now that she's 7 she can recommend me a eugene onegin translation.

anyway i am rereading c+p after years of post-high-school nabokov-induced snobbery and one thing that is definitely getting me more into it than before is that now i owe people money.

the line on dostoyevsky i always think of is the one from the essay at the front of whatever cheap paperback i used to have: "'Suddenly' is one of the most frequently used words in Crime and Punishment."

anyone read demons? (or devils or the possessed or whatever your copy calls it?) farcical politics-and-love entanglements in a small russian town escalate veeeeeeeeeery slowly until half the town burns down while the now-near-insane provincial governor shouts THE FIRE ISN'T ON THE ROOFTOPS! THE FIRE IS IN THEIR MINDS! the demons are Ideas, see. big set pieces besides the fire include a secret meeting of revolutionaries who spend a few pages fighting over whether the meeting is or is not a meeting; a society party whose guests watch in stunned confusion while four dancers directed by a pompous trend-chasing writer dance an incomprehensibly symbolic "literary quadrille"; and a totally agonizing drawn-out confrontation between an apparent psychopath and the depressed nihilist he's trying to talk into committing suicide after taking written responsibility for all the psychopath's crimes. easily the funniest dostoevsky; also the scariest. i wanna adapt it.

also there's a minor unnamed character where the joke is that she's an intense revolutionary but all she cares about is "the plight of the students", which, heh.

Demons has been one of my favorites for a while now but now you are making me really want to revisit it. iirc I have two copies of it in storage--one the P&V translation, and another translated by Garnett I believe called The Devils...

when i was a kid the living room bookshelf for some reason had three copies, all with different titles (the possessed is the only really wrong one). the p/v one is the one i just read; i'd read half of the (totally serviceable) david magarshack translation before i lost it, appropriately, at the occupy portland camp.

the last ~200 pages of this were insanely tense. could not put down.

yah I remember being almost shaken by Shatov's murder. I was just talking on the main reading site about how I wanted to read the Magarshack translation sometime in the near future.

As wrong as The Possessed is, its probably my own personal favorite of the translated titles

i like DEMONS just cuz it's so stark. also attracts attention; i was reading it alone over lunch at a place and ended up describing half the plot to an inquiring waitress and that's the end of this story.

shatov's murder is brutal yeah especially since dostoevsky's sure to make him beatifically happy on his clueless way to his death.

big thing for me tho was the verkhovensky/kirillov scene, where you and verkhovensky both aren't sure whether kirillov's going to kill himself as planned or if v's gonna have to kill him himself. there's a part during their hilariously long and tense conversation about god and other things that don't interest verkhovensky where he takes a revolver out of his pocket to make some friendly point and then leaves it on his lap to make a less friendly one.

yeah that scene was amazing too

actually upon further research the Garnett translation might actually be by Magarshack so ^_^

I still might by another copy for myself for Christmas

one last thing: I remember Kirillov being one of my favorite characters throughout most of the novel (shades of Alyosha? am I remembering it right?) so the little maniacal/manic speech he gives just before he kills himself being quite upsetting as well.

it's been a really long time since i read bros k but yeah there's a little of alyosha's curious mildness in him? he doesn't find a philosophical exit like alyosha does, tho. or rather, he does, but it's shooting himself. (i guess alyosha's isn't an exit, it's an entrance; i guess that's the point.) he's affecting tho because he's in the background for most of the book but he's still a constant quiet presence because it's repeatedly mentioned that stavrogin, the guy verkhovensky is trying to make into some kind of revolutionary figurehead and who doesn't appear to think much of anyone, spends a lot of time hanging out w kirillov and asking him questions about the absence of god. it hit me hard when he killed himself because (unlike w shatov) i wasn't sure whether he would, and it's just such a thriller setup: first the conversation where verkhovensky is trying really carefully to navigate through the philosophy talk without accidentally convincing kirillov to live; then the manic speech; then kirillov flees into his dark bedroom and verkhovensky has to creep in with gun drawn unsure of where kirillov is or what he intends to do; then he tries to bite verkhovensky's fingers off, the only injury verkhovensky sustains in the whole book.

oh yeah the biting the fingers off! oh man!

I really want to read this, but I keep telling myself I need to read it in the original. However, reading Dostoevsky is much, much harder than chatting about work and blokes and stuff which is all I get to do in Russian these days. As a result I never finished it, which is silly. But it also feels silly to read it in English when I could tackle it in Russian if only I had either endless patience and capacity for filling in from context, or the dictionary by my bed and endless time.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1243205.ece

this was not really 'about' dostoevsky but it's a really really good read though long

So this is where the ILB borad description came from. Who knew?

E5 is now reading notes from underground, and also plans to write a parody entitled notes from underpound by fydo dogstoevsky

oh yeah the biting the fingers off! oh man!

― send Lawyers (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, December 6, 2012 11:57 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

UGH STILL THIS SCENE. it's like the scene in the basement bar in inglourious basterds but with god.

Lol, just coming to this thread now. I'm ready to go back and belatedly read and re-read Dostoevsky (I had the same post-high school Nabokov induced snobbery noted above).

I was talking with my wife about reading more about the historical context in which he wrote alongside the novels. Has anyone read any of Joseph Frank's books on him? Or the abridged, one-volume version? The consensus seems to be that they're the best - English language, at least - on D and his world.

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/8976.html

E5 is now reading notes from underground, and also plans to write a parody entitled notes from underpound by fydo dogstoevsky

― unprepared guitar (Edward III), Saturday, May 4, 2013 3:47 PM (five years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

underrated update

holy shit this kid must be in high school now

I've read most of the abridged version. It's a combination of biography and literary analysis. The bio stuff is great, he had a wild life. The lit crit stuff is slower going and bogged me down a bit.

oh so THIS is where "Dusty Dusty Him Sad" comes from!

classic

Nice, thanks Moodles, think I'll pick it up.

oh so THIS is where "Dusty Dusty Him Sad" comes from!

― Οὖτις

!!!

been wondering for a while ...

Just started Demons the other day. First time. Majorly important writer to me on the basis of The Bros K alone, but it's been a few years since I've read any FD and I'm very much enjoying it.

sad man in him room is now an injoke between me and some of my record collector friends, used to describe a certain style of singer-songwriter music.

omg i did not know either, and now i do. but it so long past, so even now, the remembering is a kind of shame for me

Anyone read the new Katz Brothers K translation?

Demons an absolutely stunning book

My injoke with friends on singer-songwriters is saying “someone shoulda bought this bloke/lass a diary” halfway through the song. I’d say the same for dusty dusty, but he didn’t even spare us from his diary (diary of a writer, also great, well worth reading if you like dusty)

all time classic thread