Gormenghast is so far just as beautifully written as the original, but already ten times more funny. I am enjoying myself immensely. The chapter that introduces the professors was hilarious.
“Or alternatively, you dream of stoats.”
Reading these books creates a stronger visual impression in my head than most literature does. I imagine so clearly a Don Bluth animated film like Secret of Nymh as I’m reading. I almost wish we could have had that in real life, but it would never capture what I see here in the end, I know.
A pretty hilarious amount of outlaws started out as lawmen but quit because the pay was lousy
A lot of these dudes who survived long enough in the latter days of the Wild West wound up starring in early Hollywood movies about themselves
A lot of the rootin’, tootin’ and shootin’ took place in Oklahoma. Honestly I always figured it was all like, Texas, the southwest, and California. Go figure! As such after reading this I know a lot more about the history of Oklahoma than I did before it which is a funny side effect.
Mervyn peake was an illustrator and I feel that he wrote as an illustrator: immaculate sense of space and a caricaturist’s instinct for characterization
It is a simple fact expressed throughout the history of american policing that the police are just another kind of gang that engages in all the exact same activities that define criminal gangs: protection rackets, blackmail, robbery, murder, might makes right as the only real law.
Early on, one of the most common cop hustles was fake burglaries: one of their buddies would rob someone, and the cop would show up and return the stolen item in exchange for a reward, but alas the criminal ‘couldn’t be caught’. Then they’d split the take with the robber.
I read Neuromancer.
It’s a seminal work in cyberpunk. I see a lot of Ghost in the Shell coming from Neuromancer and I love Ghost in the Shell.
I enjoyed it.
Reading it on an e-reader has re-sold me on the idea of e-readers. It’s an electronic book, it looks like paper, but it’s electronic, and it has good battery life. They don’t need updates every few years, we already got the tech right. It does what it’s supposed to do.
I downloaded a bunch of books to my e-reader while I was reading Neuromancer so I think I’m out of my non-reading funk, and I’m going to start reading more regularly again.
been reading the 33 1/3 book on rum sodomy and the lash and it keeps bouncing back and forth between the pogues existing in the 1800s on a boat and then anecdotes and interviews that describe the things that happened in the boat chapters but for real. its weird, i love it. theres like 15 or so books in this series that i have to get now. finally being super picky and annoying about music is paying off otherwise id have too much to read
I read Junky and Queer by William S. Burroughs
and On the Road by Jack Kerouac
They’re interesting glimpses into a different time.
A time when you could be broke and live in New York for one.
And for another a time when hitchhiking was common and there was something called the travel bureau to arrange rides for gas money.
Queer was probably the one that deviated the most from what I expected. I didn’t realize it was going to be an autobiography of being a sugar daddy. It was kind of interesting to read a book written from that prospective.
i read them all when i was younger and the perfect audience for them, and have moved away from them as i got older, but really appreciated this approach that is aware of the worst aspects of both his fans and his critics. was nice to think about them positively again.
I enjoyed it more on a second read. And watching the movie may help with developing a sense of what is the “plot” and what is autobiographical, which makes appreciating the blended experience a bit more fun I think.
I found lots of the book really funny or horrifyingly vivid.
The mentalist guides them to whatever the man
wishes to hide: a tube of vaseline, an enema, a hand-
kerchief with come on it, a weapon, unlicensed alcohol.
And they always submitted the suspect to the most
humiliating search of his naked person on which they
make sneering and derogatory comments. Many a latent
homosexual was carried out in a straitjacket when
they planted vaseline in his ass. Or they pounce on any
object. A pen wiper or a shoe tree.
“And what is this supposed to be for?”
“It’s a pen wiper.”
“A pen wiper, he says.”
“I’ve heard everything now.”
“I guess this is all we need. Come on, you.”
I really enjoy Burroughs as an author because, despite being a Beat, and his associations with the boring tripe Kerouac and Ginsberg are known for, he was always preoccupied with turning popular form into something unrecognizable. His books are works of atomic science-fiction, noir, imperial adventure-fantasy, all at once, and the reason he depicts them in such a seriously violent and incoherent way is because that is the actual texture and pattern of patriarchal fantasy in his era. Power and desire personified as a flitting, unfocused eyeball bulleting its way through stacks and stacks of serial adventure while in between it jerks itself off to climax while dreaming very vividly, erogenously about death. I see books like Naked Lunch and his cut-up trilogy as work by an author that made significant contributions to illuminating the underappreciated importance that genre fiction held in the 20th century American imagination, though I rarely here him spoken about like this.
Start to reading Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel, the first 2 parts are talking about how Jewish people shaped by the late Austrian Empire policy and hit as the refugees how Europe Jewish immigration reshape the education system in US on STEM.
Gödel as a mirror of whole generation includes Zweig and the most important part of US history, quite enjoyable reading so far.
