The two year old's guide to Dostoevsky

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.