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I read two other books this month:

Can’t Get There From Here by Lindsay Bachmann. Written by a friend of a friend of a friend (@iguferon), I thought it was pretty damn cool.

The premise is that it’s a road trip story, but also every building in the US (world?) has been randomly swapped around. It uses the “the mess inside is reflected in the outside world” kind of horror, and I thought it was pretty effective. Also maybe the horniest book I’ve enjoyed? That is to say, it’s pretty lite fare when it comes to Actual Horny Books, but it’s still more horny than the average thing I’d read. I think it helps that it’s like, Oops All Lesbians. Surprise, that’s better than hetero shit to me.

It’s also brave enough to not explain anything or have a neat ending, but it also didn’t feel like sequel bait. My favorite trick it pulls is having something fucked up happen at night with no explanation, then the next chapter is them back on the road not discussing it at all. Sometimes shit is just like that, and it’s a good device.

Anyway, I enjoyed it pretty well.

Also re-read Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which is probably my third favorite PKD novel (behind Scanner and Ubik). I don’t think I realized until this reading how much PKD seems to despise these characters. It should be obvious but I’ve only recently cottoned on to the idea that authors don’t have to agree with their protagonists. I know this is obvious, but I think having a diet of author-inserts as main characters (Stephen King, Dean Koontz, actually like most fuckin books by white dudes) as a kid really makes that hard for me to process at times.

He writes in such a plain, factual way as well that it’s easy to get caught up in the narrative voice as being authoritative. In fact, almost everything is colored by the main character being Just A Huge Fucking Piece Of Shit and I think that’s very funny. God, he’s so fucking awful.

I forgot that the last chapter is just like “hey here’s what happened to everyone” and it easily turns the rest of the story into a morality tale of how not to be.

The plot itself makes no sense whatsoever and is mostly a series of things happening to a guy for no reason and then he’s a piece of shit about it. Y’know, like real life.

Currently reading Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch thanks to this post and enjoying the, uh, first 10 pages or so. Extremely cynical, extremely funny already. I’m sure it gets more depressing.

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I started reading Tristram Shandy yesterday in little bits and pieces and so far it’s been very funny. I like Shandy’s high-flying imagination and skewed common sense, and I find his inability to stay on-topic and make a straightforward point very relatable. I’m still near the beginning, at the part where he dedicates the book for the second time after various digressions (third if you count the book’s actual dedication in the front matter), this time to the Moon (“Bright Goddess,” with timely well-wishes to Candide and Cunègonde), just after his dedication to a generic “My Lord” which he clarifies is “for no one Prince, Prelate, Pope, or Potentate” but rather up for “public sale” (after which he talks up its strengths in terms of the “painter’s scale” of points-out-of-20, rating favorably its expression and coloring and so on). It’s fun for me to see this kind of riffing on dedications in 18th-century novels since I’ve thought a lot about their strange resemblance to the sort of writing you end up doing to make a living online as an artist these days (except that it’s more directed at the general public now than some Earl of Wessex or whatever, which I guess is some kind of progress?). Anyway it’s all very entertaining—I’m barely capturing the true ridiculousness of its atmosphere (the stuff with the dedications comes at the tail end of a long bit about “hobby horses” which starts as a frank discussion about personal hobbies, but the hobby horses gradually become more and more actual horses in the discussion, until one appears in “dark strokes” as a background character in the “painting” of his dedication-for-sale, giving “great force to the principal lights” of the prospective dedicatee). Here’s the actual dedication-for-sale, since I’m talking around it so much:

My Lord,

I MAINTAIN this to be a dedication, notwithstanding its singularity in the three great essentials of matter, form and place: I beg, therefore, you will accept it as such, and that you will permit me to lay it, with the most respectful humility, at your Lordship’s feet—when you are upon them,—which you can be when you please;—and that is, my Lord, whenever there is occasion for it, and I will add, to the best purposes too. I have the honour to be,

My Lord,
Your Lordship’s most obedient,
and most devoted,
and most humble servant,
TRISTRAM SHANDY

There’s something about Shandy’s basic cadence, not necessarily here but just in general, that reminds me of Castle Rackrent’s Thady Quirk, which is kind of endlessly amusing to me since they seem like they have almost opposite goals as novels (outrageous Pythonesque silliness vs. lightly political social naturalism). Maybe the resemblance is only skin-deep, since they’re both “dialogic” novels by Anglo-Irish authors written only forty years or so apart etc. etc., but I wonder what more could be made of it, even if it is just a question of style in the end.

When you’re ready I’m definitely happy to read what you have to say & respond etc. I first read The Dispossessed when I was 14 and then again a few years ago; it’s been one of my favorite books since I first read it, and in a way I feel like it has something of special substance to say as a work of anarchist literature that something more utopian wouldn’t quite be capable of. I don’t want to say too much though since you’re still reading it. Definitely curious to hear your thoughts (even if they have nothing to do with that angle).

I tried to read Left Hand of Darkness some years back but for some reason it didn’t quite “grab me”—I think I only got maybe 10–20 pages in and kind of lost steam. I can’t really say why and maybe I should give it another go. Thinking it over, all of the books I’ve read that I feel like have really done a lot for the way I view gender aren’t fiction but more feminist/gender theory (Gender Trouble, Am I That Name?, The Second Sex, and A Room of One’s Own are the ones I think of most readily in the moment, in various different ways). I don’t think fiction is incapable of addressing those kinds of themes deeply or anything, maybe more just that a lot of fiction writers either don’t think very hard about these kinds of topics or do feel kind of unpleasantly didactic to me when they do try to handle them. In the case of Left Hand of Darkness I don’t feel like I got far enough in it to even say anything like that, though—I think what I was stuck on was something more in the vein of the base texture of the writing, again in a way I’m not quite sure how to express and feel a little suspicious of in retrospect. Who knows from what place such sentiments arise.

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kinda think its a disservice to Left Hand of Darkness to reduce it down to ‘feminist gender parable’ because while that is certainly an aspect of the book, it is a beautifully written novel in its own right and it would have become outmoded by now if it were just a book about a cishet patriarchal guy freaking out about gender variance in a different culture.

I avoided reading it for the longest time because I figured that it was something ground-breaking at release but no longer relevant to me, and I was wrong about that

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I’m definitely not trying to do that (if I’m the one you’re responding to)—I’ve barely read any of it so I don’t actually know what it’s really like. I was just trying responding to vodselbt’s comments about fluidity of identity and gender and so on, kind of musingly and such. If you enjoyed it deeply too it deepens my convictions that I should give it another go—the only reason I bounced off it was because of arguably-superficial things about the writing style (I don’t think the gendered aspects of the story had really come up at all yet iir). Sometimes I just have a hard time getting into books because of things like that, but there’s no clear logic to it or anything, and I might feel totally different this time around.

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I just got Shandy for Christmas, looking forward to putting it in my ‘formal literary experiments that are good reads actually’ library

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funny ass book

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Finished it. I liked it a lot. I don’t have much of intelligence to say about it, just thought it was Real Good

That’s four books in a month, might be a record for me

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anyone else using story graph?

https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/vastlecania

mostly using it as a place to track what i read and write brief reviews. would love to follow others if anyone is using it.

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nearing the end of Oblimov, im so slow at reading. protagonist is obsessed with the elbows of his landlady

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reading Coin Locker Babies again. tried to read Almost Transparent Blue again and got kind of bored, i’m not in a mindset for decadent literature i guess

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I didn’t want to fuss about this too much, so when I recently realized I would be interested in doing some actual reading about anarachism (philosophy, history) I picked a couple books off a booklist I found from a source that seemed serious enough and just started reading. I read one of those “A Very Short Introduction” series books on Anarchism, just to see if my adhoc education and experience with the philosophy cohered with reality. And then I started on a massive 1,300 page history called Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. Slow going and a bit too granular for what I need, but it’s also a neat way to fill in some global historical holes that I have as I go along. Still, it seems like the real deal history text for anyone who might be seriously interested in this kind of thing. It’s been interesting to read the early parts and see how the author locates sort of near-misses with historical movements almost inventing or aligning with anarchism before anyone had properly identified and enacted anarchist philosophy and action.

Nestor Makhno gets brought up every now and then, reminding me about Tulpa’s recommendation for Nestor Makhno–Anarchy’s Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine 1917-1921

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I started reading Mystic River as I picked up a cheap copy on a whim a decade or so back that I completely forgot about until… well this past week basically. Know nothing about it beyond that my dad said the movie was both good/something he’ll never watch again, about halfway through and it seems fine, not quite sure if it is supposed to be a mystery or not though.

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started reading Sam Delany’s Dhalgren and i’m really enjoying it, so far. on the one hand, one might think i’d be tired of post-apocalyptic survivalist stories by now, but Delany seems to get right what most get wrong. i’m around page 60, so i’m not even 1/7th of the way through the novel, yet, but the characters and places seem at once familiar and real, and strange. at the same time, many of these ideas now feel like tropes - it almost begs the question of why someone hasn’t adapted this into a prestige TV drama, yet. too queer, maybe?

all the hip people i know like to talk about Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, and wear the knowledge of it like a badge of pride upon themselves, and while it’s obvious why that is one of his best books and is super interesting, i can’t help but feel i rarely see people discussing his sci-fi.

anyway, book is cool. i was a little worried at it being over 700s pages (i’m more of a novella type of person), but i think it will carry me through.

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i remember gifting my lil brother a copy of dhalgren when he was still bookworming hard in his 20s and he thought i was punking him

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impossible to adapt to any format besides book

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I would say that all of his works (especially his non fiction) are sci fi, even the ones that boring hipsters are willing to touch because it doesn’t have the overwhelming stench of sci fi on it

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that rarely stops adaptations

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reading oliver twist and a lot of manga and feeling like i was cheated of enjoying charles dickens earlier in life but also excited about reading more charles dickens

also tried and gave up on The Iron Dragons Daughter which i shouldve known would be all-singing all-dancing crap garbge because the author gives the doom novelization guy a shoutout in the dedications

s c i e n c e f i c t i o n m u s t b e d e s t r o y e d

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Iron dragon’s daughter is really good though

Its about fantasy becoming commercialized, industrialized, destroyed

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did we read the same book

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