Trurl
Shoutbox Elitist 
Posts: 7,482
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Post by Trurl on Feb 20, 2016 9:25:39 GMT -5
"Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" are two of my all-time favourite books. He was one of the very few authors I ever thought I'd like to hang out with; smart, funny, and with wide ranging interests (the man wrote "The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas" and "The Narrative Structure in Ian Fleming").
Now I'm sad.
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Post by Douay-Rheims-Challoner on Feb 20, 2016 9:30:27 GMT -5
Umberto Eco was a towering intellect with a deep love of multiple subject matters who was also very bloody funny and a great writer and I'm going to go sit over here, thanks.
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Trurl
Shoutbox Elitist
Posts: 7,482
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Post by Trurl on Feb 20, 2016 10:12:05 GMT -5
Umberto Eco was a towering intellect with a deep love of multiple subject matters who was also very bloody funny and a great writer and I'm going to go sit over here, thanks. To my mind he is the epitome of the public intellectual. He could be dry and academic but he wasn't an ivory-tower intellectual - he engaged with the culture and politics of the world around him. And not only funny, but a strong believer of the *importance* of comedy. "The Name of the Rose" is entirely about the power of humour, "Foucault's Pendulum's" philosophy can be summed up with the repeated refrain "ma gavte la nata". If I recall Italo Calvino wrote a newspaper article once about how he murdered Umberto Eco. I wish that this news was just a piece of postmodern literature. |
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Post by Douay-Rheims-Challoner on Feb 20, 2016 10:13:20 GMT -5
And Baudolino mixes the nonsense history and geography that fanciful classicists and historians made of the world past Europe - everything from Herodotus to Prester John - to a more 'grounded' look at medieval Europe and the brutality of the Fourth Crusade.
And a lot of sex.
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Post by Powerthirteen on Feb 20, 2016 20:32:55 GMT -5
Hearing that Eco had died felt epochal, like being told "One of the five smartest people alive died, and we aren't sure there's a replacement."
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Post by Lord Lucan on Feb 20, 2016 21:50:35 GMT -5
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Post by Lord Lucan on Feb 22, 2016 13:51:47 GMT -5
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