What're you readin'

[Broco]

Cool thread on postwar Japanese sci-fi zines

Pulp Librarian

[nastypaul]

The only thing I remembered about S-F Magazine that it gives a very big attention to Project Itoh’s work.

[Tulpa]

I’m finally reading the Cyberiad (in translation, because despite finding Polish slightly intelligible with my atrophied ukrainian skills, reading is beyond me)

for some reason I never fathomed that it would be exactly as wonderful as all those who praised it said it was. Just astoundingly pleasing, clever comic stories that feel like an ad absurdum satire of asimov’s robot stories (one early story features a giant thinking machine going on a rampage because it refuses to acknowledge 2 + 2 equals anything but seven, the constructor of this machine is henceforth credited as the creator of the stupidest machine)

[Broco]

Reading Alex Branson’s Into The Hills, Young Master, about a young poster’s quest for the perfect opinion

The following is a deeply personal, highly intellectual narrative written from a place of great trauma - and strength. It was originally posted May 2015 on the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Community Forum - Off Topic.

Phase One Essays:
The Meditation of Strength Training

While I began my journey to peak physical ability on the bottom-feeding concept of becoming more physically attractive, what I discovered on the way was a sort of inner mind and calmness of the soul that can come from great confidence in one’s own personal strength. I remember being amidst a grove of trees on my uncle’s property, the light just gently wading in from the canopy, and taking a carnal and great satisfaction in the thought that if I wished I could uproot most of the trees I saw before me in the sparse third-growth forest. While I will acknowledge the thought as barbaric and, frankly, idiotic, there was a happiness it brought to the most lizard-oriented part of my brain. I had never felt like this before.

In my younger years, I was constantly bullied throughout school and was widely regarded as a wimp, called everything from a pussy to a fag. I’d like to think this hasn’t affected me as I have grown older, yet assertions of my now obvious physical superiority have caused me to believe otherwise, as I take great pleasure in running, lifting, and attacking. When exercising, I would often sprint as hard as I could until the point of failure, falling onto the grass, only to find myself digging my fingers into the dirt, squeezing, ripping up soil, feeling an ancient part of my brain scream. While I have in my past never quite understood the importance of calmness in Buddhism, the idea of inner peace seemed almost lazy and easily faked to me. In my experience, from thinking about things during my own workouts, inner ‘peace’, if you want to call it that, can almost be the opposite. That the brain rests best and thinks most clearly during ultimate distraction. With maximum sensory overload, something like running to the point of exhaustion, your brain enters an adrenaline fueled sharpness and clarity that simply can’t be matched by pedestrian breathing techniques. However, this does not mean any slack-jawed jock can self-actualize, what it means is that with the right truth-seeking thought patterns, a man can locate thoughts in his brain while at peak stress that a normal man could not find. It is like this. There are many levels of the brain. We have levels that handle simple biological functions, levels that handle social interactions, and others. What we do with the exercise is keep every stupid part of the brain occupied while the part capable of rational, logical and speculative thought gets to focus on something else entirely now that all of the plain rubbish work of the brain is overloaded.

This line of thought made me think back to a more primitive era of human history, of the idea of a Warrior Poet, which, briefly, I considered my kin as I spent many weeks lifting weights, running, and deeply thinking. What I found in the end was a simple idea tuned to perfection. That the body is part of the mind, a more rubbish part, which needs to be kept busy so as to not interfere.

[Tulpa]

I’ve had Water, Wasted on my to read list because I like the comedy podcast he does so much

[vodselbt]

I encountered one of those rare books that touch you in a really rare way, Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad by Alice Oswald. It is a poetry book where the author stripped all the plot from the original epic and focused entirely on the deaths. It begins, almost like the original, with an unending list of names of every character who dies. This comes across as meaningless, and it goes on forever. But as you read the book, every one of these names becomes a person, attention is paid to the story of their death and what lead to it. But even more moving is the other gimmick of this book, which is that every single death is accompanied by a eulogy that is twice repeated. We get to read the graphic, and often sad death of someone who thought they were heroic followed by a eulogy which relates their life story or their death or who they were through a poetic analogy about so many different things. I love the way that the deaths are so visceral and almost completely without metaphor but the eulogies always place such a great poetic distance between themselves and the literal thing. Out of the middle is where I think a lot of the moving work of imagining how someone’s life

EUCHENOR a kind of suicide
Carried the darkness inside him of a dud choice
Either he could die at home of sickness
Or at Troy of a spearwound
His mother was in tears
His father was in tears but
Cold as a coin he took the second option
Seeing as otherwise he’d have had to pay a fine
It was no surprise when an arrow pierced his neck
He recognized that prick of darkness

…is…

Like a stallion tugging at a rope breaks loose at last
And his gallop is a drumbeat shaking the valley
There he goes heading straight for the river
Longing to wash in that clattering rush of cold
When he holds his head high and runs like a king
under the wind-blown banner of his mane
Then he knows his knees are going to lift him forever
And a grassy cloth has been spread on the fields for his pleasure

Like a stallion tugging at a rope breaks loose at last
And his gallop is a drumbeat shaking the valley
There he goes heading straight for the river
Longing to wash in that clattering rush of cold
When he holds his head high and runs like a king
under the wind-blown banner of his mane
Then he knows his knees are going to lift him forever
And a grassy cloth has been spread on the fields for his pleasure

But what really fucks me up, frequently made me have to pause and hold back some tears, was imagining –someone— for whom these dead soldiers meant so much and in such specific ways… fuck

Edit: I am currently failing to hold back the tears

[Broco]

I read that last year! I signed up a seminar on translations of the Iliad and this was in the reading list along with several other offbeat takes (this one was by far the best of those). I unfortunately didn’t end up attending the seminar because I found I just couldn’t tolerate more Zoom calls in my life at that point, but I was glad it helped me discover that book.

The ending is truly incredible. I posted my favorite excerpt in the poetry thread at the time:

@Broco

Alice Oswald, Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad , 2011 (excerpt)

Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And the spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves

[vodselbt]

It’s so good!! I am in a translation class right now and it got mentioned, but it wasn’t part of the curriculum, I just read it on my own and have had no one to talk to about it. Glad someone here has read it.

And I don’t know if you remember how awesome the introduction is too. There is a line by Oswald, explaining “this version, trying to retrieve the poem’s ‘enargeia’, takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshipping.” Such a wildly powerful book.

[Broco]

That’s interesting, I didn’t remember that line. Much as I liked the result, it makes me want to argue a bit (probably an intended effect of the metaphor chosen – Oswald well knows churches have beautiful painted roofs for a reason). I think the more straightforward translations also retrieve its enargeia quite well, and in them I also adore all the heroic bluster and the great narrative arcs of battle (which never feel quite like meaningless butchery nor like a fully foreordained outcome).

Post-World Wars we have necessarily tended to privilege the Odyssey and taken a relatively ambivalent attitude toward the Iliad. Memorial attempts to rescue it by polishing and developing only the parts that seem to communicate an All Quiet On The Western Front-style viewpoint on war.

Remarkably, the result still feels like a true version of the Iliad rather than a bowdlerization of it. I wonder if a polar-opposite approach, which emphasized the heroism and only allowed the briefest glimpses of the sadness of it all to be read between the lines, might not also feel like a true version of the Iliad.

[vodselbt]

People really love it, but I am not a fan of Christopher Logue’s Gulf War-ening of The Iliad. Have you read any of those books? He didn’t finish the project, but he managed to do a lot of the Iliad.

[Broco]

Yeah that was also on the reading list but I also thought it was awful. I didn’t read more than 10 pages.

I already forgot what exactly was so bad about it but it had a lack of artistry basically orthogonal to the distinction I was trying to draw above.

[vodselbt]

Yes! Basically how I was thinking about what you were saying.

[captainlove]

Have been reading this too and cannot recommend enough. The absurd side of it reminds me of Douglas Adams at times. Love how implicitly horrific some of the stories are despite all the whimsical wordplay and simple structure of the problems they face.

There’s a story towards the end that allegedly inspired Sim City and it’s pretty grim. One of my favourites involves a machine that can deliver all the information in the world using the probabie state of air molecules. I also love how the main characters are just casually omnipotent.

[Broco]

I thought I was signing up for a biting parody when I started reading Into the Hills but it turned into a surprisingly wholesome story about people being kind to each other during times of hardship. The protagonist adamantly refuses to learn screamingly obvious lessons about being present for others, but I can’t help but come away feeling that some small part of him internalized them anyway. His behavior never actually matches the coldness of his ideas, and everyone around him senses that and keeps giving him another chance.

The novel ends on an ambiguous note. In my headcanon his future might go two ways:

• Member of some kind of transhumanist/biohacking cult who devotes himself to bringing on the Singularity. Dies at age 36 of a postoperative brain infection
• Middle-class guy with a loving marriage and several close friends. Continues to post screeds on the Elder Scrolls forums on weekends

[nastypaul]

I would like to recommend 2 books from Adam Tooze in these days

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of …

Crashed

I’m still reading A world at Arms.

[shelter]

dennis cooper, from i wished, 2021:

nagarjuna, from the mulamadhyamakakarika, c. 150:

r.d. laing, from knots, 1970:

[Mikey]

[vodselbt]

Chapters of The Hobbit read like a list of achievements for a Xbox 360 game. It’s just missing “The bigger they are…” followed by “…the harder they fall.”

I am just on Chapter 6. It’s really fun so far. I find it shocking how Tolkien in this first book, heck, by the first encounter with the trolls, just completely developed the fantasy of adventuring that RPGs have been emulating forever. It’s like the whole picture is present in just that second chapter.

[shelter]

some absolutely stunning opening epigraphs

[scratchmonkey]

It is boggling how much of Western fantasy (and by extension, fantasy role-playing, and videogames) derives from Tolkien as an ur-text. In this age of media overload, it can be difficult to grasp just how all-encompassing an old text could be (and as a comparison, I think the Beatles are going through the same sort of reassessment as Tolkien has).