I’m reading Dashiell Hammett’s first novel Red Harvest. 1. It’s fun, and funnier than I expected. The plot involves an out of town dick (lol) playing warring factions in this old mine town against each other as he buys time to investigate ways to put them all in jail. So he’ll play the side of the cops and then later on sell info he has on the cops to the crooks, and do shit while the two are shooting each other in car chases. It also truly does read like watching an old movie feels, with dudes in black and white suits with hats on in basic room sets talking witty and fast around each other.
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my guilty pleasure, one of my many guilty pleasures is old timey psychosexual pseudoscience
I want the second one on a shirt
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Hell yeah, the Amok journal! I have a copy too and I love it, but I love their 5th Dispatch even more. I can’t get enough of that 80’s counterculture nonfiction.
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OH YEAH YOURE TOTALLY RIGHT ive just been wanting a copy of this since i was like, 18. and now i can BUY WHATEVER I WANT (within reason)
totally worth every penny
i need to track down a copy of VIOLENCE IN OUR TIME, i had a dream about having it as a coffee table book next to a mother of pearl ashtray and i feel like im the perfect age for that to be a reality in
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for no discernible reason finding myself reading a lot of nonfiction these days
been reading the french translation of Gay Guerrilla, about Julius Eastman, fascinating read, the guy really did know everyone and was everywhere especially in the seventies, and basically did not exist in the history books for years save in the collective memories of those who knew him firsthand. it got to a point of vertigo where i was wondering how many other composers with similar stories are well and truly lost, only existing as names in leaflets for concerts decades ago, with little no recorded output and their entire catalogue of sheet music unpublished and lost or decaying in some random university’s archives. i’m now at the musical analysis chapters of the book where it’s getting difficult to parse for someone not good at this stuff but with some re-re-reading it’s doable. the recordings of his music i have heard so far have all been phenomenal, in very different ways sometimes, there’s a recording of a piano improvisation he played in Zurich and i badly need to get my hands on the cd
also been reading off and on this huge tome of Donald Judd’s writings on art and everything, cumbersome tome with small pages and even smaller print, but it’s like getting a deep dive into his thought process, the analytical articles in particular read like forensics reports sometimes, not in the way that they are particularly detached but they are aggressively detail-oriented and it puts his own works into perspective as a result. puts in mind how none of his sculptures are ever random, working as they are not as objects but as a scenes with the rest of the room, lighting and orientation in mind.
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M.R. James. The classics, right? I’m aware of the direction The Influence flows but it just leaves me wanting to read more Robert Aickman.
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“when gravity fails” by george alec effinger was a wild ride. good hard boiled detective fiction bones, orientalist (as in north african) cyberpunk flesh. better handling of transgender than you might expect from a novel published in 1986 and set in a red light district where nearly every character is a hustler and/or sex worker. the elaborate muslim manners are of a kind with the social roles imposed by patriarchy and desperate poverty as well as the cartridges that people plug in giving them temporary knowledge bases and fake personalities. seems to take the position that identity is like an onion, there’s no real core there, or if there is it’s just a kind of neurotic habit. i’m told that the sequels kind of suck, but it stands very well on its own
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three weeks later…
i need to get my hands on this
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Very fond of when gravity fails, feels like one of the purer strains of leftism in cyberpunk when so much of the genre is mired in thoughtless american-style libertarianism
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5th Dispatch is so good! Such a perfect snapshot of American and world counterculture circa 1999. You can flip to any random page and have your mind blown.
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Disagree.
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audiobooks don’t count as reading in my mind, but i like them and started listening to The Fellowship of the Ring on my flights to and from LA this last weekend
having only seen the Peter Jackson films. i was not prepared for:
- all the singing
- Tom Bombadil
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A few years ago my Harry Potter loving nephew borrowed my copy of Fellowship. He declined to continue on to Two Towers. I told him there was less singing as it goes on, but he wasn’t convinced.
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working thru Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023)
it’s more conversational and breezy than i expected
i also just started peeking at Myth and History in the Bible (2003) by Giovanni Garbini (translated from Italian by Chiara Peri), seems interesting. it’s exactly in the wheelhouse of stuff i find interesting, anyway
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I read Geoffrey of Monmouth and there’s no mention of Arthur cutting the genitals off the giant at Mont Saint Michel so I thought I’d somehow invented that detail but just now I found it in the Alliterative Morte Arthur so he does it, he cuts off the giant’s junk in A Source. I feel so much better now.
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I bounced off of his four seasons quartet after my struggle but I’m finally reading Knausgaard’s morning star and it’s excellent, missed his voice a lot
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for any fans of Darryl I highly recommend Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection
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for any fans of Rejection I highly recommend Jackie Ess’s Darryl
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this thought leads me to find a strange postmodernism book called The Privilege of Play, it’s like a hidden gate of hobby history and I also remind myself don’t jump the rabbit hole too deep.
It recalls that the most strange sense in Spike Lee’s Clockers, train model is an odd symbolized for a young black male but I do feel a little lonely and isolate for his hobby while I watched the movie.
I need dig more.
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