The clothing nerdouts are some of my favorite parts of Gibson!
oh no
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Wasn’t that all of the Pattern trilogy tho
Recalling Death is not the End from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and its deluge of inconsequential details left me wondering if DFW was describing a corpse by the end
Finished Life after People which I picked up because it was part of the bibliography of The Last of Us’s environmental design? It’s the normal rush of disjointed descriptions that journalists love to mush together and call a book.
Trying to finish Riverworld where I gave up on book three when not-Philip José Farmer took on a more central role. The casual racism jars with the repeated sexual equality messaging.
Not-PJF was also a science fiction writer, which lead to this:
Burton isn’t buying it, and I propose this definition instead: science fiction is stories which mention when characters take a piss/shit
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I’m about halfway through Pale Fire. I…have a lot of feelings/things to say about it; I’m gonna leave those for when I actually finish it.
I want to go back and read more Wolfe, I should probably pick something new other than re-reading New Sun (which I enjoyed greatly). I’m really looking forward to the new Gibson as well.
I reached the end of Peace earlier today and took the chance to try re-reading the opening of the book a second time and I feel like I’ve developed no new insights or “aha, now I see what he’s doing” moments which makes me feel like I’ve failed in some manner. Like certain things are even more obviously odd but they felt odd the first time round.
I’m a bad reader 
currently listening to an audiobook of Fear City on Libby. named after the NYPD propaganda pamphlet that was handed out to tourists in the 70s, it’s an incredibly-detailed account of New York City in the 20th century and the underlying causes of its gradual shift from a city that had incredible social programs and public spaces to its most current iteration of being a utopia for the extremely wealthy.
it’s both fascinating and super irritating!
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I started reading The Accursed Share along with The Bataille Reader a few days ago but it’s gonna need more attention than I thought that I don’t really want to give atm cause there’s a lot I want to get through, so I’m slowly making myself finish just The Accursed Share
My brain started to hurt so I picked up The Myth of Sisyphus to take a break from it(is that really a better alternative?) and… is Camus indirectly referencing Sartre here lol?
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I finished book four of Riverworld with its “““conclusion”””. Books 3 & 4 had a massive change in tone & vision to the first two, and it’s not worth continuing on past The Fabulous Riverboat.
PJF was quite good at writing ensemble stories & character dialogue, and terrible at plotting out story arcs & entertaining info dumps. New, boring characters randomly arrive, and existing 2nd-tier characters I’d developed a familiarity & fondness for are perfunctory killed. It’s almost like he was making it up as he went along!
In conclusion, ideal prestige TV series coming to you in 2020 from HBO 2010 from the SciFi Channel.
I read Tears of the Truffle-Pig over about six hours while at my Mom’s house in Minnesota. It’s a debut novel and it kind of feels like it – I don’t mean that in a pejorative way, more in the sense that the pacing of the novel is extremely brisk (at times verging on break-neck) and the world-building is a little too overt, it feels like the author wanting to show off their creation, rather than discovering the world through the experiences of the characters.
If you’re into the idea of a near-future South Texas/North Mexico magical realist/absurdist novel, I’d say it’s worth checking out – a few capsule reviews that I’ve skimmed compared it to Bolaño, and it’s not on that level (which I would say is where the work is affecting/disturbing), this is much more of a breezy read.
Okay, I finished Pale Fire on the subway ride to work today, most of what I’ve got to say needs to be under a spoiler tag. What I can say out in the open is that similar to other Nabokov novels, the writing is fucking amazing at points, on several commutes I was reading it and was tempted to just start reading aloud to the rest of the subway car just because that particular passage was that engaging/mirthsome/jaw-dropping (I didn’t though, because I’m not that horrible of a person).
So, about the actual book, (MAJOR FUCKING SPOILERS, do not read if you're going to read the book)
First of all, this shit is a hypertext. Basically, the novel consists of an introduction by a (fictional) editor, then a poem by (another fictional) author, then footnotes by the editor (this is the bulk of the novel and where the actual story takes place), then ending with an Index by the editor. The footnotes reference the line numbers of the poem and then the Index cross-references people/places/things mentioned in the footnotes. You can read the book in a near-infinite number of ways, including the usual reading sequence and how I read it, which was skipping the fictional Introduction, reading the poem, then getting a bit into the footnotes, then going back and reading the fictional Introduction, then finishing the footnotes, then jumping between the Index and the footnotes. If I read it again (which I probably will), there will be a lot more jumping around from the poem to the footnotes to the Index and back again. There’s a lot there, including some deliberate mysteries/hints at mysteries that Nabokov plays around with pretty heavily.
(This is your second warning to stop reading if you don’t want to have the delicious experience of reading and figuring out this stuff on your own.)
Second, the book goes all-in on the unreliable narrator in the form of the editor, Charles Kinbote. SPOILER: Kinbote is not really an “editor” so much as a weirdo who moved next door to a famous poet, attempts to ingratiate himself into his life so that he can influence the poet to write a poem about Kinbote and his personal interests, and when the poem being finished coincides with the poet getting shot, essentially absconds with the manuscript and then produces the nominal “novel” in its form presented to the reader. SPOILER: Charles Kinbote is not actually Charles Kinbote, he is, in fact, the escaped King of Zembla. SPOILER: There is ample evidence in the text that he is also not actually Charles Kinbote OR the King and instead is a lunatic making all of this shit up (and in fact, there is a passage where Kinbote writes, paraphrased, “What shall I do next? Maybe I will pretend to be a heterosexual (more on that bit later) Russian immigrant scholar who writes a story about a couple lunatics and a poet”…nice self-insert, dude). The fact that there’s a fictional story about people creating fiction that has spawned all sorts of theories about which of the fictional characters might have actually created the other fictional characters in this fiction…you can tell that Nabokov was very amused by the whole thing.
One difference I had with the person who wrote the Actual Introduction and with many people who have read the book is that while they apparently found Kinbote initially charming and interesting, before the worm slowly turns – I thought he was pretty obviously a creep right from the off and frankly, I feel that Nabokov overcooks this aspect a bit as Kinbote is practically crawling all over the pages he writes, writhing and wriggling with delight in his decrepitude, to a degree where it seems unlikely that somebody as sociopathic as the actions described would not be able to disguise their crapulence a little more artfully in textual form.
Okay, and to one of the potential issues a modern reader might have with the book: Kinbote/King Charles is also very obviously homosexual and often obliquely (and not-so-obliquely, at points) references dalliances with young, probably not-of-age, boys. A large part of this is that life in Zembla is fantastical to a ridiculous degree, so in a sense this is an Extremely Gay Scheherazade. Still, it’s off-putting, especially since Kinbote is a Monster in the vein of Humbert Humbert, so having him also be a Pederastical Gay is a Not Cool, Vlad.
Anyway, Pale Fire, not as difficult to read as it’s advertised, the actual poem (in four cantos) is worth the price of admission on its own, and it’s got so many dense cross-references that you can probably re-read it a dozen times and continually find something new, while still enjoying the prose every time.
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Some further commentary on the above Spoilers
After further discussion directly with Tulpa, I felt that it would be good to respond to my above commentary – it’s crucial here to cast further light on something that I referred to in the other post – that Kinbote himself is also a fiction. There’s a an Index entry for a one V Botkin (a near-anagram of ‘Kinbote’) and a series of references in the footnotes (including one that is “missed” in the Index entry) that, while taken with a bunch of other references in the text and the knowledge that Nabokov particularly loved word-games (a trait shared by multiple characters in the text), indicates that Kinbote (and thus, King Charles) are a fictional construct of V Botkin, who is himself a fictional construct of Nabokov’s.
Given this conceit, Kinbote’s self-characterization in his commentary, which comes across as glaringly artless and unsubtle given Nabokov’s writing ability in other contexts, switches from weakness to strength if we now understand this self-characterization to be the result of the authorship of one V Botkin! And indeed, this could be viewed as a further hint of Nabokov’s as to Botkin’s existence.
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I done read another book, in this case: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. In the afterward, Chabon mentions that the working title for this book was Jews With Swords and dammit, he should have kept that. (His explanation for why he changed it is that nobody reads that and properly envisions the various armed Jews throughout history and instead some modern schmuck with coke-bottle glasses and suspendered pants waving a cutlass around – to which I say, fine, and you’re not going to challenge people’s perceptions by backing out of this sort of thing.)
Anyway, this is a love letter to Fritz Leiber in that it is the story of two men who share a partnership that is extremely intimate and whose main profession is wandering the world without any major goals beyond the ones that are likely impossible and getting into incredible adventures as a result.
The deviation from Leiber is that while Fritz dealt mainly in pulp-fantasy, Chabon grounds his story in the realism of the ninth century. The biggest upshot of this for the reader is that there’s a lot of fairly realistic violence and also a lot of rape. It’s not like Chabon spends a lot of time describing the act or anything gross like that, it’s more the grossness of it constantly coming up…which, is probably realistic. The ninth century was a rough time, especially if you were a lady.
That said, it being a fact of life for the characters in the novel doesn’t make it a fact of life for the reader, and while I appreciate that Chabon is going for historical accuracy in his paean to the murderhobo genre, it doesn’t make for a relaxing read, which, yanno, I hardly read Pale Fire to relax; however, this is a book whose very existence is in relation to a genre that is explicitly for having a chill time.
Sidenote, I’ve been playing D&D and other murderhobo games for just about three decades at this point and at no point in any of the games I’ve played, either as player or GM, has there been an incident of rape, explicit or implied. On one hand, this is wildly unrealistic, considering the faux-cultures involved. On the other hand, we are all there to have fun! Now, I concede that there may be a properly vetted, completely informed game where that sort of thing can be included and it will create an ultimately positive experience for the people involved; it ain’t me.
Anyway, good book, well-written, probably not going to reread it, be forewarned.
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I’ve been trying to work through a very deep backlog of “weird fiction” and western mythology type stuff as my bedtime stories
I finally finished this collection of Algernon Blackwood stories I bought years ago. I still really like the way he writes, and of all the writers in this vague category I’ve encountered I feel like his stories are the ones that are most worth spending more time thinking about. They are of course pretty racist, not in the very disturbing Lovecraftian way, but more in the “it is literally impossible for me to imagine something that doesn’t have a white dude at the center of the story” way and this is particularly weird in the stories he writes about Egypt. I am not trying to say Algernon Blackwood is cancelled or whatever, I still like reading them, but it’s hard to ignore. Plus it is interesting to see how issues I’ve read about egyptology from an academic / critical theory perspective are also present in popular literature.
Anyway, the reason I like them is because of how many of the stories are about death, and in particular about deaths being foretold through omens and things like that. It is a pretty specific fixation and it’s amazing that he is able to do so much with it, from very simple ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ type stories to those about reaching a kind of enlightenment by accepting fate.
Now I have moved on to a collection of Clark Ashton Smith stories. I have always been interested in him because he was a Californian, and spent a lot of his time in north/central CA where I’m from. This story has an (unintentionally?) hilarious story about how Auburn CA is home to a nexus of pure evil, seems pretty accurate IMO. In general his style appeals to me in the same way that Lovecraft does, and the two corresponded a lot. But Smith just seems a lot more self-aware of how purple his prose can get, it seems a lot wittier than Lovecraft to me, but less imaginative. He also seems to indulge in a lot more low-brow pulp stuff, lots of lusty maidens being bedded and so on. But that kind of adds to the charm in a weird way. It’s cool to see high fantasy tropes “under construction” I guess.
He has one truly wild story about a 12th century French monk who exposes a priest as a demon worshipper, and ends up being sent back in time to the 5th century where he narrowly avoids being sacrificed by druids thanks to the intervention of a lusty sorceress, who of course instantly falls in love with him. It is such a great combination of Lovecraft-ish mythos (the first few pages are riddled with referneces to “pre-Satanic” inter-dimensional demons that the devil worshipping priest has communed with) and dork sex fantasy. The ending is disappointing wish fulfillment, but the idea of time travel between two eras that are already in the distant past for readers in the present really ignites my imagination. I love that concept.
After this I will probably turn to this Lord Dunsany book I have also neglected. But I also picked up a copy of the Mabinogion itself so maybe I should just read that first.
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I think Clark Ashton Smith is way more imaginative than HPL but you gotta go to the Zothique stories to see the full scope of his imagination
If you like the Mabinogion itself, I highly recommend reading Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogi tetralogy
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tulpa and I are always psychically communing through an opalescent hyperborean mind-splaying disc
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I think Clark Ashton Smith’s prose poems and poetry are much stronger than the short stories, which often don’t have the forward drive of the Lovecraft stories he’s working around; he’s amused by the far potentials more than terrified and as much as he tries to sell it through the protagonist’s concerns, you can tell he’d love to jump in himself.
A lot of the prose poems read like an early Invisible Cities – sketching places as though they were allegory is probably my favorite thing.
And every time I get to the poems, I hit the opening lines of The Hashish Eater:
Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for the vestment when I soar
he’s just diving through adjectives and I usually read snippets nonlinearly and leave full and satisfied
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his poetry is pretty directly indebted to George Sterling, especially “A Wine of Wizardry”
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