That was km loaning me the books and I’m reading it right now too while traveling, please stop copying me
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I’m not but a few pages into Kalifornia when the plot introduces literal furries.
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Oh my god the fucking cops got Z-library.
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rereading the Demon Princes by Jack Vance, and I was surprised that he of all people said ACAB:
Message of Lord Jaiko Jaikoska, Chairman of the Executive Board, to the Valhalla General Legislative Assembly, Valhalla, Tau Gemini, August 9, 1028:
I urge you not to endorse this sinister measure. Humanity many times has had sad experience of super-powerful police forces. As soon as (the police) slip out from under the firm thumb of a suspicious local tribune, they become arbitrary, merciless, a law unto themselves. They think no more of justice, but only of establishing themselves as a privileged and envied elite. They mistake the attitude of natural caution and uncertainty of the civilian population as admiration and respect, and presently they start to swagger back and forth, jingling their weapons in megalomaniac euphoria. People thereupon become not masters, but servants. Such a police force becomes merely an aggregate of uniformed criminals, the more baneful in that their position is unchallenged and sanctioned by law. The police mentality cannot regard a human being in terms other than as an item or object to be processed as expeditiously as possible. Public convenience or dignity means nothing; police prerogatives assume the status of divine law. Submissiveness is demanded. If a police officer kills a civilian, it is a regrettable circumstance: the officer was possibly overzealous. If a civilian kills a police officer all hell breaks loose. The police foam at the mouth. All other business comes to a standstill until the perpetrator of this most dastardly act is found out. Inevitably, when apprehended, he is beaten or otherwise tortured for his intolerable presumption. The police complain that they cannot function efficiently, that criminals escape them. Better a hundred unchecked criminals than the despotism of one unbridled police force. Again I warn you, do not endorse this measure. If you do, I shall surely veto it.
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Finished reading Matrix by Lauren Groff. It’s a little bit like a Willa Cather novel mixed with lesbian nun smut. Like girls get laid in this book. Also the heroine of the novel wields a giant bronze quarterstaff like something out of a fantasy novel. Book owns.
Won’t deny I picked it up off a library end cap simply cause I thought the cover was cool.
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Picked up a cheap paperback of Goodbye To All That to accompany my attempt to re-read Im Westen nichts Neues.
“In 1912, we spent our Christmas holidays in Brussels. An Irish girl staying at the same pension made love to me in a way that, I see now, was really very sweet. It frightened me so much, I could have killed her.”
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Marc Laidlaw’s “Kalifornia” is very weird, the premise is based around a technology where anyone can be implanted with wires and tap into a huge network to receive first person experiences of basically anyone. It has a lot of trappings of 90’s cyberpunk novels alongside future-weird stuff.
Nearly finishing Borges’ “Labyrinths” as I finished with the short stories and I’m now onto the essays sections. I really like how most of the short stories have twists or shock endings to them, but a lot of the plots revolve around the mind, memories, and internal thoughts.
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Always nice to go back to a book that I’ve tried reading countless times to have it finally click. This is it, the year that I will really finish Gaddis’ J R!!
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A while back, I couldn’t remember which William Hope Hodgson story I was supposed to start with. So I read The House on the Borderland. And I liked it.
But recently I realized that it was actually The Night Land that sounded like exactly my type of book when (Tulpa? Shrug? Others?) talked about it in the past. I had the impression that it was just a short story or maybe a novella, but I’ve been happy to discover that it’s much longer. I’m probably about 2/3 through it now, and it’s impressed me at every turn. I adore the writing style, the weirdness, and even the slowness and repetition. It’s making me want to draw a map when I’m done.
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I think yes both of us talk about this book with some frequency
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Finished Marc Laidlaw’s “Kalifornia” and I feel like the subplot of the human/animal hybrids basically having zero rights is more interesting than everyone having their entire nervous system hooked up to one another so they can “experience” terrible sitcoms. It was alright imo.
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i am reading dennis cooper’s the sluts
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Okay the sluts was surprisingly great. not that i ever thought it was going to be bad, but i didn’t expect it to be interesting to think about and engaging in the way that it ended up being for me. there were a number of times where my willingness to read the book (or the comment threads that the story is told through) was nearly completely burned away, where I would think maybe I could just put the book down and be okay with never finishing it. But, surprisingly, it always made this tedium a part of its effect and a deliberate aspect of the online fandom discussions that it is representing. and most importantly, when things did get tedious, Cooper would draw attention to it with characters basically expressing my exact feelings about how the intrigue had faded, and then he would introduce a new twist and development in the plot just in time. Not only is the book interesting for the many things it places into conversation with each other, it’s also just a good mystery novel.
but the book is really interesting. it’s almost kind of on the nose or didactic about the comparisons its evoking between “sexual” fantasy and all other kinds of fantasy making (i think, and believe the book is also saying, there is no distinction between sexual fantasy and other kinds of fantasy making). it is a really affirming example of the power of fiction to affect and support the driving force that is personal and collective desire. it also so clearly illustrates the thing that moralists and fascists often forget about fiction and fantasy and desire, in that they aren’t real, and if they were to be realized they would terrify and disgust us. the point is the distance and we never want that distance to be closed.
and when fantasy and desire is actualized in this novel, even the perverts seem to feel dejected and have to admit that the real thing just isn’t doing it for them. i love love love the small intrusions throughout the book by the club of people who have formed online that like to fantasize about murdering Nick Carter; they are so funny, but they also really drive home that it’s actually healthy and positive to be a pervert artist, writing fiction or playing out a sexual fantasy in a safe way.
but, yes, this book fucking horrified me in ways I honestly didn’t think it could. some of the direct depictions of things that people purport to have done to other characters or heard about being done to them were just so evil seeming. but what’s worse is the implied tragedy in the background of people getting swept up in a fantasy and losing their lives or their humanity. my briefest summary observation is that the place this book leaves you is with the thought that inside evil acts, in the logic of fascism probably, there is always the error of turning a fantasy into a reality.
this book fucking owns. and now i’m reading a collection of critical essays about the situationists. i feel like im on a damn roll.
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Now I gotta read The Sluts!
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Thanks to my new commute I have two uninterrupted half-hour blocks of seated waiting time on the tube. As a result my reading progress rate has shot up and I get through about 200 pages a week and have finished a whole bunch of stuff. Normally it took me like 3 months to get through a medium-length book.
Introduction to Game Analysis by Clara Fernandez-Vara - Decent primer for students on textual analysis, mainly reading this for work but has some decent start points for students. Still advocates a component breakdown of games (games are a huge checklist of rules, graphics, text, narrative, audio etc ad nausea) a bit too heavily for me but still worth considering for someone to at least decide if they wanna take that approach.
Nuclear War in the UK by Taras Young - Interesting summary of the UK’s approach to nuclear war guidance for civilians (rather than the UK’s approach to nuclear war itself, although it gets discussed indirectly. Picked this up in an anarchist bookshop and was a nice little curio. Government advice about how to build your own shelter and how to stay upbeat in the wake of advanced fallout are predictably strange but the relatively half-hearted approach of the people producing the material was both weirdlyreassuring and very depressing. Lots of nice graphics from local councils and national info campaigns.
The Leaving by Tara Altenbrando - Ergodic YA fiction about 6 kids who go missing as 5 year olds and return after 11 years with no memory of what happened (but have procedural memories like how to drive). One of them doesn’t return though and the town left behind by them have gone through a collective local mourning undone by the whole return. Chapters are split between 3 perspectives, 2 of the kidnappees and the sister of the one who doesn’t come back. It’s a neat mystery premise but the writing is very YA and not in the most interesting way. There’s a lot of moody teen stuff despite the chewy ideas about memory and identity that are teased throughout. The kids come back to crappy families and it works well for intrigue but the eventual answers about what happens end up feeling a bit too neat/high concept and less interesting than small town ruined by trauma. The ergodic fiction aspect is also slightly overplayed, the text is just occasionally formatted differently regarding key memories.
Private Lives of the Pharaohs by Joyce Tyldesley - My Grandma died this year after a prolonged and bad bout of flu/old age. Shortly before she died she urged me to take whatever I wanted from the shelves and in a bit of a rush I opted for a bunch of history books and Ulysses. The books OK and laid out the archaeological arguments about the construction of the pyramids. They used big ramps basically. Also interesting to see the breakdown of the timeline for building them, why it’s very likely no slaves were used (this misunderstanding is attributed to an ancient Greek writer who just assumed they did), and how the Egyptians never had proper currency and would barter or provide labour directly for the good in question. Interesting stuff.
But then the rest of the book gets a bit too into the history of Egyptology itself when discussing how significant the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb was. The book does at least acknowledge how most artefacts are stolen for no good reason but also has some really lovely pictures of people’s corpses being ‘unwrapped’ for me to gawk at. The funniest fact I learned was that eventually there were so many royaltombs across Egypt and so many were getting robbed by thieves, the ancient Egyptian Government just gathered many of the sarcophagi in a central archive and did their best to keep records of who was there (which is why, in many cases, we know roughly which royal corpse is which). The archive wasn’t perfect though and had a bunch of labelling issues so we still don’t really know a lot of shit.
Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev with Sarah Whitfield - A biography of the surrealist painter Rene Magritte. I’m only a short way in but here are my takeaways so far:
- Magritte had a pretty horrible childhood.
- Magritte was very horny and loved wordplay, particularly swear/sex wordplay.
- Magritte’s paintings are more about objects than symbols but this will never stop the Freudian readings which Magritte hated.
- Half the stories in the book might be exaggerated myths encouraged by the artist but this extends to alleged spousal abuse, graverobbing and rape so…?
- Of the myths mentioned, CW: Suicide Magritte probably never actually saw his mother’s corpse dredged up from the river, famously with her face covered in the manner many of his paintings echo.
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I read this the year it came out while still in undergrad as when I was just starting to think of doing game studies in grad school, and it struck me as something that would be instructional only if you weren’t already immersed in the milieu of talking about games as more than just entertainment products. I bet it will be useful for an into game studies class! But I didn’t get much out of it either except for thinking about how you might begin to frame games as texts that can be analyzed to like groups of students at the junior level or something.
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Yeah it’s almost serving so many purposes it’s audience is a bit unclear. I think it’s better as a reference book than anything, so still of some use to the student. Saves me a lot of work in terms of preparing bespoke advice which is useful but I’d always advocate going beyond the games and game studies texts if possible.
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Just moving through this short novella by Peter Toms called Slapstick: A Tale of the Old West which is like a cartoon about a “Old Western” town (the idea of one from movies, not a real one) that’s hosting a contest to determine the champion of chuckles. It’s very funny and deranged. I actually sort of love it and it reminds me of a novella I wrote a couple years ago. Maybe I should just put that one out or something, I have no clue who would publish it, but I think this thing is self-published and I’m liking its example.
I’m not really sure where I heard about this book. Maybe @Felix retweeted it one time and I picked it up then? Seems like comedic writing you maybe would like.
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I think it’s fair to say that this post inspired me to read the same novella. It was pretty atmospheric and strange for a good part of it, but it had an unforgivable amount of description about hallucinations, slight movements, reflections about actions that were just done or would be done, and the passing of unknowable amounts of time, and so I just found it to be super monotonous. The eerie mystery with the pigs and the menacing nightly raids were great, so I would be willing to read something else by Hodgson that doesn’t involve a narrator witnessing the passing of aeons and fewer psychedelic passages about space.
It’s interesting to see this kind of mystery horror combined with actual monsters so early, it seems kind of innovative.
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