If you plan to move on to The Night Land like I did, I’ll have to warn you that it also drags in places, but in a very different way. Instead of the time and space stuff, it’s the “romance” part of the story that gets weird (and not in the sense of weird fiction) and tedious for a while. But despite that I think the book is great, overall.
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I bet I have more tolerance for romance than ramblings about what it was like to experience the dilation of time and the folding of space. I’ll keep The Night Land in mind when I go out looking for books sometime.
Has anybody read either of these Sir Arthur Conan Doyle books, The Lost World or The Poison Belt? They are the last books I didn’t read in an adventure fic class I took a year ago, and I still have them around. We read H R Haggard’s SHE and I kind of got a taste for imperial adventures and their pulpiness after that. I love to roll my eyes but also to enjoy. I was SHOCKED by how much I loved The Island of Dr. Moreau!
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The Lost World is nice and snappy and always perks up when the orc, Professor Challenger, shows up. I just picture him like
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If you don’t mind the abysmal politics of it (which you probably won’t given your desire for imperialist adventure), A Merritt’s the Moon Pool is quite entertaining once you hold your nose to get past the opening, very colonialist section.
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I will take both of your suggestions, and add I think that’s very funny busted. by the way, if any of you care for a website like goodreads but isn’t horrible, and isn’t affiliated with amazon, try out The StoryGraph. I’ve been using it for a while now and enjoy how lean it is in its feature set. It’s basically all I could want from a site like this, a simple way to look up books and log my reading.
Here’s my profile page.
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oh nice i can import my goodreads data to it too!
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Just made an account, will transfer goodreads data and see how it is. obviously eager to get away from amazon and goodreads fucken sucks anyway, but gotta say these genre tags under every book are already getting on my nerves lol
https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/dylans
edit: it didnt import the dates for most of my books, i think due to me technically doing it incorrectly on goodreads all these years, so now i have to manually enter the dates for each book :))))
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Finished up Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev with Sarah Whitfield. A good biography but also an excellent account of the surrealist philosophy. Danchev makes a good balance between reporting historical details and keeping the prose entertainingly floral given the subject matter. Magritte’s years in Nazi-occupied Belgium were cool for how much art forgery and plagiarism are brought to the fore as a way of survival but also a way to subvert revered works of the past.
Surrealists enjoyed making surveys on topics that interested them as part of their manifestoes and screeds in a response to one on the topic of love asking whether the ‘sordidness of life’ will prevail over love’s glory, Magritte responded:
Love cannot be destroyed. I believe in its victory.
Likewise the book reprints extracts of a lecture (‘Lifeline’) he gave on Surrealism in 1938. In it Magritte expounds on the revolutionary aims of Surrealism, particularly in opposition to the rise of fascism. In a more general sense, it is framed as redemptive ‘Surrealism claims for our waking life a freedom similar to that which we have in dreams’, and once again love is extolled.
[…] as we await the destruction of this mediocre reality, we must defend ourselves against it. […] The most powerful defensive weapon is love […]
I’ve been coming across love very often in stuff I’ve read recently. It’s a recurring theme I am consciously highlighting as a way to cling to some kind of guarantee that love is extremely important to fend off the worst parts of our present day situation.
The book is a good account of many of the works as well but sadly is not comprehensive.
The Invisible World
I also blasted through Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘Wind, Sand and Stars’. A short memoir/philosophical musing on his work delivering mail by plane in Africa in the 30s. The big draw was the story of how he survived a crash in the Libyan desert against ridiculous odds - surviving 4 days with basically a day’s worth of liquid. More frequently than the Magritte Biography, Saint-Exupéry’s philosophy also follows the line of finding the importance in human connection to stave off the worst parts of the modern world and what it does to us. Some of the writing is occasionally crude and colonial but there are some really excellent pieces of writing that evoke how the sheer remoteness of deserts reveals the truth about why we should value our connections to each other even when separated by lethal distances.
Old bureaucrat, my companion here present, no man ever opened an escape route for you Connor and you were not to blame. You build peace for yourself by blocking up every chink of light, as termites do. You rolled yourself into your ball of bourgeois security, your routines, the stifling rituals of your provincial existence, you built your humble rampart against winds and tides and stars. You have no wish to ponder great questions, you had enough trouble suppressing awareness of your human condition. You do not dwell on a wandering planet, you ask yourself no unanswerable questions; lower-middle-class Toulose, that’s you. No man ever grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay that formed you has dried and hard and, and no man could never awaken in you the dormant musician, the poet or the astronomer who perhaps once dwelt within you.
For we are accustomed to long waits between our meetings […] the earth is at once a desert and a store of riches. It is rich in those secret, hidden, remote gardens to which our work always brings us back someday. Life perhaps separates us from our comrades and keeps them largely from our thoughts, but they are out there somewhere, heaven knows where, silent and forgotten, but so faithful! And when our paths crossed there’s, they clapped their hands on our shoulders with a great surge of pleasure! Oh yes, we are accustomed to waiting…
When we work merely for material gain, we build our own prison. We enclose ourselves in isolation; Our coins turn to ashes and buy nothing worth living for.
If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me.
I can no longer understand those dense crowds on the suburban trains, those men who think they are men and get reduced like ants, by a pressure they do not feel, to the use that is made of them. When they’re free, on their absurd little Sundays, how do they fill their time?
In a world turned to desert, we thirsted for comradeship: the taste of bread broken among comrades made us accept the values of war. But we do not need war to feel the warmth of neighbouring shoulders as we head for the same goal. War deceives us, hatred adds nothing to the excitement of the journey.
Why hate one another? We stand together, carried along by the same planet, the crew of a single ship. If it is good that civilizations compete to promote new synthesis it is monstrous that they devour one another.
As progress in industrial machines works to further obscure their working parts from us, Saint-Exupéry argues that their mechanistic characteristics are instead taken up by the people and scoieties that use them. A reminder of what a human is, is what he strives for in his bleak and incredible aviation anecdotes where he visits distant rock mesas so vast and flat he can land a plane on them and be completely isolated from all living things.
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Enjoying the initial bits (120 pages) of Heretics of Dune so far because of how radically changed that universe has become in the 1,500 years that have passed since God Emperor of Dune.
I’m over here like, the Tleilaxu axolotl tanks can produce spice!?? a new force, the Ix, have risen to challenge the Spacing Guild with machines capable of doing the same work as a Guild Navigator!!?? and what impact does all this have on the balance of power in the universe, as well as the material life of people on the surface of Arrakis (now refered to as Rakis)!!!
Maybe I’m an easy mark for this stuff now, but this is honestly cool stuff.
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200 pages into Heretics of Dune and I think it’s losing me. There’s a lot of plot threads with their own protagonists that Herbert is jumping between, it feels like very little is moving along. And what with this being mostly a book about Bene Gesserit business, I think you can see Herbert straining against human will to not come across like a bafoon in the fifth, eighth, fourteenth chapter epigraph from some Bene Gesserit court transcript where someone is expounding a theory about Power with a metaphor about a balloon…
The outer surface of a balloon is always larger than the center of the damned thing! That’s the whole point of the Scattering. - Bene Gesserit response to an Ixian suggestion that new investigative probes be sent out among the Lost Ones
I just picture that woman from Lynch’s Dune worn down by court proceedings or debate, nonplussed and just saying this shit, cigar swilling opposite the podcast table at Joe Rogan’s.
Law always choses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: who has the clout?
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Yeah I’m dropping this book. It’s awful. I’ve barely reached the sex stuff, I think, and it all just sucks.
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I just read this short book. I don’t remember exactly where I heard about it, but I like bleak science fiction and that’s what it is.
Some of the characters were a little exaggerated for my taste, but I liked the premise.
But at least as interesting as the book itself was learning that the same writer wrote The Brave Little Toaster, and that his still-up LiveJournal account has entries up until the day before he took his own life in 2008.
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finished the first book in Dennis Cooper’s “George Miles Cycle” Closer and then started reading Anne of Green Gables and a book by the life partner of Guy Debord, Michel Bernstein, called All the Kings Horses
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now I’m onto W. G. Sebald’s travel memoir essay book thing (inexplicable) The Rings of Saturn
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yes yes yes! excited to read what you think. i tried to borrow a copy of the sluts off someone at work bc what you wrote about it, but alas
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Managing Incompetence: An Innovative Approach for Dealing with People, good book, not so many new ideas but a chance for self-examination, also get a better description about past management works when you on an interview, plus the author recommends many movies which is a better internalization on each topic.
a book telling you to go watch a movie… fucking epic
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mirror is very useful for the readers
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been very into Scott McClanahan lately. i was loaned The Book of Sarah a couple months ago and keep thinking about it. besides his style, which is direct and sparse but lush, i really like what i’ve learned about the dude. i just watched an interview where he’s sitting with a bottle of tito’s vodka and a tall boy and he’s giggling about losing his virginity while he had a uti. he’s got a big blocky head and a drawl that just, man. i want a drawl, it’s such a pretty way to talk imo.
the back of The Book of Sarah says calls him an Appalachian Bukowski, but that’s not right. He’s softer, not as misogynistic, and more poetic. there are sentences he repeats again and again and it really feels like he’s trying to communicate with you, reader.
i hate doing the writer comparison thing bc what does that tell someone who doesn’t know wtf you’re talking about, so here are some bits that I like:
I told her that I loved going inside after midnight and watching all of the people of the world shop. They were the people who the rest of the world didn’t want and they were the ones who didn’t belong anymore. They were the people with amputated arms and they were the people in wheelchairs and they were the people with face tattoos and scars. I was a scar too. I was a giant human scar. And then I felt serious and I said, “Walmart is more than a store. Walmart is a state of mind.”
This is a lie I was told as a child, but it’s still true. The New River is one of the only two rivers that flows directly north. The other one is a river called the Nile. Those rivers are inside of me. I have a river inside of my heart. There are diamonds inside of both of us. We are all flowing north.
I dreamed about Ruby and she was telling me it’s just one thing after another. Then she told me that some shit happens and then some more shit happens and then some more shit after that. There are floods, explosions, disasters, tornadoes and none of it makes any sense. It’s all just one big joke you have to laugh at. Are you laughing?
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before bed i read an essay or two outta Borges’ “Labyrinths” . Borges has poster energy
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