81–90 of 137 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That book made me feel stupid and uneducated. There was hardly a paragraph without a word I had to look up or a reference I couldn't get. The translator utterly defeated me. I never finished it.
Which is the direst critique one can address to any book! It's the book's (and author's) failure, not your own, to be incomprehensible and pedantic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That book made me feel stupid and uneducated. There was hardly a paragraph without a word I had to look up or a reference I couldn't get. The translator utterly defeated me. I never finished it.
Which is the direst critique one can address to any book! It's the book's (and author's) failure, not your own, to be incomprehensible and pedantic.
Umberto Eco on operating systems and religion, in 1994: The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells th…
I didn't read any of his novels (yet), but this I consider one of the most important documents I'm aware of. http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini's fascism was based upon…
Normally I tell everyone to read The Name of the Rose first and be happy, but for you I think you should start with The Mysterious Flame of queen Loana , even though it's one of his less accessible works. Much of it is a fictionalized memoir on how fascism became embedded in the fabric of daily life during Mussolini's reign, although this concern with mass movements and the dangers they pose to thinking individuals i…
Umberto Eco on operating systems and religion, in 1994: The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells th…
What an utterly gratuitous comparison; that kind of thing could be said about almost anything (beef meat is Catholic, horse meat is Protestant! Reddit is Catholic, HN is Protestant! etc.)
Eco's journalistic pieces are quite short and he tends to take an everyday thing and run with it making its absurdity show up more with each paragraph.
There are collections in English of the newspaper articles available. Each piece can be quite entertaining but the books of collected articles were not intended to be read from beginning to end.
Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilib...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That book made me feel stupid and uneducated. There was hardly a paragraph without a word I had to look up or a reference I couldn't get. The translator utterly defeated me. I never finished it.
Which is the direst critique one can address to any book! It's the book's (and author's) failure, not your own, to be incomprehensible and pedantic.
Your comment however was arrogant and uncalled for.