TIL if you google to see if they ever made an audiobook for the sea of fertility tetraology this is on page 2.
he got really into mishima upon learning mishima was a fascist
Finished Bullshit Jobs. There’s some points in it that I think don’t get discussed as much as the central idea of jobs in which the employee secretly thinks the job is pointless.
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The idea that all [meaningful] labour is a form of caring resonated with me, not sure if it’s expressed much by other authors. Graeber argues it is essentially what defines meaningful labour and that the types of labour that involve caring (as in, you do something that broadly aims to benefit another) are paid less because of moral reasons. Caring is enjoyable and connects you with other people and it would sully the idea of caring to ask to great a paycheck for it. He also goes further to hypothesise that the working class are generally more empathetic even to their oppressors because their natural inclination is to care professionally which sadly leads them to be ripe for exploitation sort of explaining why nursing pay rises are so shit [even directly after covid]. I think it’s a bit too sweeping but an interesting idea.
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Graeber argues a major motivation for doing anything (denied by bullshit jobs) is the pleasure of having an effect on the world - originally coined by Karl Groos as ‘the pleasure at being the cause’. It’s a term from psychology to explain children’s enjoyment from early play and action that sticks with us for the rest of our life as the intrinsic pleasure we get from doing things we love and having them impact the world in even minor ways.
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To explain why having a bullshit job is a particularly lonely experience, Graber appeals to ‘Scriptlessness’ - culturally there is no guide on how to feel about being forced into a job you hate and where you have no choice but to do nothing or cause harm in a mundane job. The same phenomenon he observes happens in the case where there is abundant fiction about being a lover unrequited, but not for people who reject said unrequited lovers who are similarly scriptless about what to do with this situation.
One methodological problem of the entire book is the fact that Graeber cannot solicit the thoughts of people that would deny they might have a bullshit job but almost certainly do. His definition relies quite heavily on the bearer of the job both knowing their job is bullshit but also pretending that it is not in their workplace. This gives him a bit of an easy out when confronting the natural gap in the data and relies a lot on assumptions about [the kind of] people who take high-paying finance and executive roles. These assumptions are often warranted but without their perspective the project feels a little unfinished. The book, I think, wisely pivots to making a case for universal basic income as a way of addressing the problems bullshit jobs raises and more.
Graeber is the rare writer where his endnotes are as enjoyable to read as the central text, to the extent it feels like they shouldn’t so often be relegated as such.
How to Write a Novel - Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark
A comic how-to book. Very fun to read just to have generic literary criticism laid out in a way that makes you laugh. The thesis is it’s easier to identify what an unpublishable novel is than what to do to make a publishable novel.
A lot of the example snippets are quite bawdy, usually concerning the size of breasts. Like the perverts make the best writers essay, the book makes clear it is not the perversion that is the issue but when the unpublished writer is trying to avoid or align themselves with societies moral judgments of sex.
A lot of the explanations of bad writing are clearly having a lot of fun mocking amateur writing but occasionally it takes a more sincere tone that pulls back the curtain on where novel writing comes from and what it means for [generally] good writing.
It is not just the characters taking stock of themselves that bogs down the work of beginning novelists. A very common characteristic of unpublished manuscripts is a wildly disproportionate ratio of inner contemplation to action… The beginning novelists, being the sort of person who wants to write a novel, tends to come to the job with a backlog of thoughts and feelings, years and years of minute observations, exegeses of Conan novels, elaborate and detailed scenarios of how things should be. For years the unpublished novelist has kept these things to himself, knowing from experience that friends and co-workers are much more interested in discussing things that happened, were about to happen, or who they happened to and less what the novelist thinks about contemporary decline in thinking.
And so, it all pours out, page after page, finally being expressed because nobody is wandering away to get another drink in the middle of the sentence. The unpublished novelist should remember that his potential readers are people just like the friends and co-workers who didn’t want to hear this stuff in person. This is why published novels tend to begin with action, continue with action, and provide a steady supply of action, through which relevant inner monologue is gracefully threaded.
You can feel the burden of having to assess so many unpublished drafts
bullshit jobs is like a 75% good book that I am always wary of getting into because it feels like a lot of people are mostly in it for the other 25%
masters of atlantis by charles portis: a farce about a marginal secret society through the 20th century. i laughed out loud at parts but i’m also haunted, it tuned me into shabbiness, delusion, and mental laziness and thereby started some soul-searching: how much like these guys am i? then there’s how the american government is shown interfering with this type of guy’s operations, but they have since exploded in number and totally overwhelmed the government and culture, they’re seeing their day in the sun only a few decades after this book was published. a novel about cranks and bullshitters failing their way through life lands differently these days, now that cranks and bullshitters are ecstatically pushing every aspect of society past the breaking point, it almost reads like a wish fulfillment fantasy, these scenarios where this behavior leads to bad outcomes on a personal level
masters of atlantis rules but now you need to continue hurting your brain by reading like super cannes by jg ballard, libra/running dog/the names/white noise/mao ii/underworld by don delillo, 2666/nazi literature in the americas by roberto bolaño, the public burning by robert coover, foucault’s pendulum/the prague cemetery/numero zero by umberto eco. maybe ellroy’s underworld usa trilogy and some tim powers for a bit of levity
all those books rule
Don’t even get me started on the non fiction that exists in this realm of discussion
Oh man I just thought of another good one. JR by William Gaddis. I think that one would make you lol
The bolano books especially
tim powers tier list (only the ones I’ve read)
S tier: The Anubis Gates, The Stress of Her Regard
A tier: On Stranger Tides, Dinner at Deviant’s Place
B tier: The Drawing of the Dark, Last Call
C tier: Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather
D tier: Declare, Three Days to Never
one of my fav dumb guy with an encyclopedia pulp writers
I was thinking of Last Call
I like that he maims all of his protagonists, psychically and physically. His books wouldn’t work if he didn’t inflict terrible violence upon them
started reading Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom as a break from all the SF i’ve been reading, only to find out it is more SF. having a good time with it, but can’t quite tell if there’s a big variance in quality of the stories or if it’s a big variance in the quality of translations, as each one is handled by someone else.
i’d throw some william (billy) t vollman on that list too. I’ve only actually read the rainbow stories in it’s entirety, but I pick up his short stuff every once in a while. Picked up an advance copy of No Good Alternative: vol 2 of carbon ideologies at a used bookstore but I was reading Cadillac Desert at the same time and it was a lot
i’ve only read last call, declare, and three days to never, so maybe i have an unfairly negative impression of the guy. last call was pretty good
Yeah he’s not a great writer but he is great junk food, the literary equivalent of a Darin Morgan X Files episode. his whole pareidolic history thing is most appealing when it doesn’t overly constrain the narrative, 3 days to never binds itself up with the wrong kind of time travel plot and declare doesn’t construct an interesting enough secret history to justify the third rate lecarre plotting
Surprised to find myself reading a SCP novel: There Is No Antimimetics Division by qntm. It’s a good horror novel. Lots of scary and intense chapters that haven’t really come together to form a cohesive plot, more the background of a group or a director character. I remember reading SCP in High School and it’s kind of the closest to fan-fic culture I’ve ever got, so this is actually novel to me. I like it so far. Has anyone else read anything by qntm? I first encountered them through that short fiction piece about the first authentic artificial intelligence.
Edit: looks like this is getting published by Penguin soon, I’m just reading the self-published version There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm: 9780593983751 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
I have always wanted to make an SCP entry about someone trying to get rid of their couch, so they keep forging anomalous entity readings or radiation levels hoping no one notices, and then having to make up more and more fake entries after multiple audits
Antimimetics Division is the best of his novels, I really like it and I’m curious to see how the new version reads. Supposedly a fair amount of the new version is rewritten, partially for his own editing (the original is like 10+ years old I think) and partially it has to remove all SCP references, I imagine that will improve it. The SCP stuff isn’t really necessary, the overarching concept of antimimetics is more than enough to hinge a novel on.
Ra is pretty fun. The best way I can describe that one is it’s like an anime version of an early Greg Egan book, if that makes any sense - high concept but goofier and dumber. His most recent short story collection is good too (also very Egan-esque and more mature).