What're you readin'

[Tulpa]

When I watch Marvel movies, I definitely feel like my eyes and ears shat themselves

[vodselbt]

Reading 140 pages of the account of one illegitimate Spanish royal vanished into a life of monasticism in Melmoth the Wanderer, much less scary, much more monotonous. Mine eyes do wish they could shit by this point.

[scratchmonkey]

I’m picking up Name of the Rose again. It’s such a fucking good book and it’s like a god-tier D&D adventure setup.

[vikram]

I love Dick’s non-fiction more than the fiction (which I do also love). his essays “Man, Android and Machine” and “If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” and “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” are phenomenal. fuck heidegger or whoever, the Exegesis is the most important work of philosophy of the 20th (& 21st) century imo.

[shrug]

I should probably listen to her.

[vodselbt]

Read “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood, and, WOAH!, that’s a creepy story.

[u_u]

it’s so good! i want there to be a very avant garde themepark that has like a splash mountain style ride based on it.

[scratchmonkey]

Yeah The Willows, and Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, are what Lovecraft wishes he had been doing.

[u_u]

I have spent a bit of time reading Blackwood and other Lovecraft-adjacent folks, and have found that while a lot of them do certain things much better than Lovecraft did, esp. Clark Ashton Smith who was quite close w/ him, there is still something kind of uniquely unsettling about the best Lovecraft stories. I think for all his faults he was still kind of on a different wavelength when it comes to writing about stuff that was truly otherworldly. Where other authors of the genre excel is in creating stuff that is kind of creepy and unsettling, but still feels really grounded in folklore and mythology and stuff. Like, things that feel like they could come out of centuries old storytelling tradition, or based on local legends and superstitions, but were actually mostly just made up.

Ultimately I think I personally find this style a lot more intriguing, especially because I am really interested in those deeper roots of fantasy and supernatural tales in premodern literary traditions. But when you go back to Lovecraft after reading this stuff it really feels like he is deliberately reacting against it, and trying to create a new mythology based around phenomena that have no connection to our own world that isn’t just relentlessly hostile. It comes out the clearest when you read CA Smith stories that are more like proto-sci fi than fantasy, even though they are entertaining and charming in their own way they still have this kind of corny aspect to them, the other worlds feel sort of like … painted stage backdrops rather than actual alien spaces? I don’t know, I can’t really explain it that well.

So yeah even though I have come to appreciate a lot of Lovecraft’s peers and predecessors more than him, in the process I feel like I am also able to understand why he is the one everyone remembers as kind of a pioneer or at least outlier. I guess it’s more forward thinking in a weird way, which is funny for such a deeply conservative curmudgeon. I appreciate the progressiveness even if I don’t necessarily like where he was going with it.

[vodselbt]

Found this surrealist informed definition of games that I like a lot. It comes late in the book Surrealism at Play by Susan Laxton. The reference is to Joan Miró 's mass produced imagery, but the definition is clear without knowing much about that. When I play a game like Pathologic 2, which is one of the most effecting games I’ve played, my delight is in appreciating the state of disorder itself and not actually in the tidying it up. I couldn’t really care that much for a perfect run where everybody lives, though I’ve done that, I just accept that goal as a motivation to see how many ways I can fall short of that and witness things get away from me.

[thecatamites]

reading has been incredibly garbled of late, mostly no attention for fiction so just downloading a bunch of reference texts and miscellanea and leafing through.

the animator’s survival kit by richard williams - a weird book, a lot of useful stuff relayed through this anecdotal structure of encounters between naif-young-man narrator and the venerable studio artisans who correct his mistakes and act as founts of all knowledge. the occasional feeling of a disney-themed reskin of Davey & Goliath prompts you to read against the grain, especially when it starts veering into men-are-triangles-women-are-hourglasses shit (or a weird anecdote about being able to tell someone on the street was gay solely from his walk cycle?) but does have some good details of some of the weirder perceptual ways animation works.

get in the van by henry rollins - some endearing black flag tour diary back and forths between “life is war” and “a girl was nice to me today… maybe life isn’t ALL war”, the parts about touring the UK are great because it always comes across as just this hellish freezing parking lot filled with oi! bands and nothing else with the only other hint of musical life being when members of ultravox appear in the dressing room to make fun of you.

the simpsons unauthorized history - oral histories for tv shows can be kind of weird because the people involved with a successful thing are always talked up as having this mythic stature by the time they get to be written about. “and then there was cuchulainn, with arms the length of two good sized hurley fields… and then there was al jean, who wrote for snl…” also half the time you look up the same people afterwards and it turns out their other major credit is like ‘cop rock’ or something.

hellfire by nick tosches - jerry lee lewis is perhaps the original victim of cancel culture in that he had to cancel a bunch of tour dates after people found out he married his 13 year old cousin but then went on to make millions from a successful country music career a few years later and also probably kill at least one of his wives. this biography softballs at least a few of those details but does end up evoking such a sense of horror and misery by the end that whatever bits and pieces of the faust myth have hovered around lewis across his life end up feeling fully justified.

otaku, japan’s database animals by hiroki azuma:

2666 by roberto bolano: “nazi literature of the americas” still my favourite of his i’ve read. sometimes the longer ones can slip into a kind of broadly reaching sprawl that feels habitual rather than specific but when it does tap into an uncanny mood in the process it still feels worth it.

the absolute bourgeois by tj clark: i keep reading the title in the same voice as when people in the uk say “the absolute boy”. good art history about the many horrible corpse-shaped voids that make up art history and the effort to be able to say something about them from looking at the more ragged and unsettled edges of whatever did manage to survive.

[VastleCania]

The Night Lands fucking rules and has absolutely no idea what pacing is. Super inventive, scary, imaginative and romantic book so far, and spends lots of time on weird shit, like the burial grounds for babies where some ancient person made a device that has soothing…baby noises? Or the ominously laughing mountain, or the mountain sized creature that moves so slowly it must be observed over generations, or the glowing dome that grew from the ground to halt it’s progress after 20000 years.

Or the specifics of what their telescopes look like, but only after they had been mentioned about 30 times prior.

Or the feeling of being a person who has memories of the future, or the feeling of those memories awakening in you suddenly and granting you a split life, or accidentally awakening the same for someone else via psychic transmission.

Also cannot believe I have 300 more pages of this

[shrug]

fucked up that you didn’t try to unthaw any of the specifically Night Lands Creature chambers in my Twee Reference Room smdh

[Broco]

Gradually getting through the 1970s translation of Natsume Soseki’s I Am A Cat as a palate cleanser between other reading. In the first couple of chapters, it was not so much funny as “I can imagine why readers in 1905 Japan might’ve found this funny” but I find myself laughing out loud more and more often as Soseki gets better at the formula

From Book 2, Chapter 4, behold the only time in the entire novel where the humans in the household deliberately interact with the cat instead of totally ignoring him

My master pecked in silence at the fish, but soon put down his chopsticks as if to say that he didn’t much like the taste. His wife, seated directly opposite him in matching silence, is anxiously watching how his chopsticks move up and down and whether my master’s jaws are opening and closing.

“I say,” he suddenly asked her, “give that cat a whack on the head.”

“What happens if I whack it?”

“Never you mind what happens: just whack it.”

“Like this?” asks his wife, tapping my head with the palm of her hand.

It didn’t hurt at all.

“Well, look at that! It didn’t give the least miaow.”

“No,” she says, “it didn’t.”

“Then whack it again.”

“It’ll be just the same, however often I try.” She gave me another tap on the head.

Since I still felt nothing, I naturally kept quiet. But what could be the point of these peculiar orders? As a prudent and intelligent cat, I find my master’s behavior utterly incomprehensible. Any person who could understand what he’s driving at, would then know how to react, but it’s not that easy. His wife is simply told to “whack it,” but she, the whacker, is self-statedly at a loss to know why she should whack; I, the unfortunate whackee, am no less lost to understand what it’s all about. My master is becoming a little edgily impatient, for twice already his instructions have failed to produce the result which he only knows that he desires. It is therefore almost sharply that he says, “Whack it so that it miaows.”

His wife assumed a resigned sort of expression and wearily asking, “Why on earth should you want to make the wretched thing miaow?” gave me another, slightly harder, slap. Now that I know what he wants, it’s all absurdly easy. I can satisfy my master with a mere miaow, but it’s really rather depressing, not just to witness but actually to participate in, yet another demonstration of his addlepated conduct. If he wanted me to miaow, he should have said so. His wife would have been spared two or three totally unnecessary efforts, and I would not have needed to endure more than a single whack. An order to whack should only be given when only a whack is wanted, but in this case what was wanted was simply a miaow. Now whacking may indeed fall within his sphere of responsibility, but miaowing lies in mine. It’s a damned impertinence that he should dare to assume that an instruction to whack includes, or implies, an instruction to miaow, which is a matter totally within my discretion. If he is taking my miaows for granted, indeed he presumes too far. Such failure to respect another person’s personality, a deadly insult to any cat, is the sort of crude insensitivity which one must expect from creatures like my master’s own particular pet aversion, the nauseous Mr. Goldfield. But the same behavior on the part of my master, a man so confident of his open-heartedness that he struts about stark-naked, can only be seen as an act of unwonted weakness. Yet, as I know, my master is not mean. From which it follows that his venture into whacking was not motivated by any deviousness or malice. In my opinion, his orders were hatched in a brain as guileless and dim as that of a mosquito larva. If one gobbles rice, one’s stomach becomes full. If one is cut, one bleeds. If one is killed, one dies. Therefore, such reasoning runs, if one is whacked, one must perforce miaow. Though I have done my best to justify my master’s ways toward me, I regret to be bound to point out the clottish absurdity of such a style of logic. For if one were to concur in that logic, it would follow that if one falls in a river, one is required to drown; that if one eats fried fish, one must then get the squatters; that if one gets a salary, one must turn up for work; and that if one studies books, one cannot fail to make oneself a great name in the world. If that were the way things worked, there’d be some a bit embarrassed. I, for instance, would find it annoying to be obliged to miaow when whacked. What, I ask, would be the point of being born a cat if, like the bell-clock at Mejiro, one is expected to give off sounds every time one’s struck? Having thus mentally reprimanded my presumptuous master, then and then only I obliged him with a mew.

As soon as I miaowed, my master turned to his wife. “Hear that?” he said. “Now tell me, is a miaow an interjection or an adverb?”

[VastleCania]

Have never felt more helpless reading a book than this story about a guy dreaming about a future where he’s watching a group of youths being bewitched by an evil house in the endless night despite the intervention of their weak God, all from the safety and distance of a 6 mile tall pyramid containing the last remnants of humanity.

[VastleCania]

Sorry to continue gushing but I just love this

Then, as I kneeled upward among the moss-bushes, and made to lay a true course unto the fire-hole, I perceived that there came a Being along
the Road unto my right; and I went low into the bushes, and moved not; for truly I had seen that there drew nigh one of the Silent Ones.

And I made a little place that should let me to see; and I spied out, with an utter caution; and lo! the Being came on very quiet, and with no hurry. And in a time, it went by me on the road, and did take no heed to me; yet did I feel that it had knowledge that I stoopt there among the moss-bushes. And it made no sound as it went; and was a Dreadful thing; yet, it did seem unto my heart, as that it had no trouble of Wanton Malice to work needless Destruction to any. And this, I crave strangely that you to understand; for it was so to me that I had a quiet and great respect for that thing; and did feel no hatred; yet was very dreadly in fear of it. And it was Huge in size, and was shrouded unto its feet, and seemed, maybe ten feet high. Yet, presently, it was gone onward down the Road, and I was no more troubled by it.

[username]

Out of curiosity I looked up The Night Land and am confused as apparently there are two versions, an original one and a rewritten version by a different author from about a century later. The odder part is that the rewritten version seems to be comfortably rated higher which doesn’t seem to ever be the case.

Anyways this is me asking which version you are reading.

[Tulpa]

there’s a rewritten version?

Actually there’s another version, called the Story of X, also written by WHH

The version I recommend is actually the hilo books release which just cuts out the first chapter

[VastleCania]

I liked the first chapter because I think it adds a layer of romance but it is fairly pointless if you’re not into flowery writing about meeting, failing to woo, then later succeeding in wooing a woman. There is crossdressing though

[VastleCania]

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Night Land

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson