The Gamer's Quarter

[Harveyjames]

Maybe I'm just speaking from my own experiences, since I was into Alan Moore and Pink Floyd for about the same amount of time of the same period of my life (from about ages 15-21). I do hear that about Pink Floyd a lot, though- that you grow out of them after your teenage years.

I was pretty big into Pink Floyd actually, in a very nerdy way. I compiled quite a convincing dossier of evidence that Pink Floyd did actually write their music to soundtrack films, without telling anybody. The Wizard of Oz thing is ok, but the best example of this is when you watch the last chapter of 2001: A Space Odyssey ("Jupiter and Beyond The Infinite") with either The Atom Heart Mother Suite or Echoes, two different Floyd tracks on two seperate albums which both last the exact same amount of time, something like 21:27- exactly the length from the title card of the last chapter to Stanley Kubrick's director's credit. It's great, too. In fact, Pink Floyd makes more sense as film soundtrack music.

[dhex]

so lately i have been pouring through gun control stats and whatnot. i find gary kleck quite convincing, since he's a little more middle of the road and has been peer reviewed out the ass. john lott, not so much since his larger arguments are overshadowed by his silly personal behavior. my policy proposal (for a class) is on creating a class of concealed carry laws for nyc as well as streamlining the existing licensing procedures. the second half is a persuasive argument about the nature of self-defense and a moral defense for lethal force.

what i am actually really interested in now is why suicide rates in certain countries, like finland, are so incredibly high. this helps my project about 0%, of course. that's not entirely true, as clearly suicide is not reliant on having strict or loose handgun regulations, but outside of arguing with morons like michael moore, it's not nearly as useful as state by state crime levels.

also, this weekend i had the misfortune of reading parts of daniel pinchbeck's book on 2012. there are some real good back and forths on youtube between him and doug rushkoff where rushkoff slaps his snapperhead face a few times, rhetorically. there are many hilarious things about the whole 2012 thing, but pinchbeck's popularization is as good a place to start as any. (2012 is not the end of the mayan calendar, as pinchbeck and others have commented, but something the mckenna brothers picked as a form of future materialization - i.e. if you get enough people to believe it is important, especially people who want to believe in an end of the world but cannot quite ride the pax christus train, then something of importance will materialize, or so the theory goes. i think the theory is flawed if only because much of the world believed that the year 2000 was important and virtually nothing happened.

if anything, it's a far more interesting commentary on how people view the end of the world, especially materialists or otherwise traditionally irreligious people - who may or may not end up receiving "wisdom" from a long dead god who was exiled for being tricked into getting drunk and banging his sister by tezcatlipoca, or so the olmec version of the story of the plumed serpent goes - who don't necessarily have a unified mythology to explain any kind of cosmic cycle. which may be the function of ecomysticism in this case, as it provides an impetus for action - or at least stress - while still providing an emotional backdrop through which to understand the world.

just fyi for dropping random bits at parties or whatever: the actual calendar doesn't end but flips back to the beginning in the year 4770 or around abouts there. which is far less dramatic, of course. why we would care about mayan cosmology when their culture fell apart years before imperial encroachment by the aztecs is beyond me and my understanding, but i am notoriously uncreative in my thinking.

edit: this is beyond the utter weirdness of mashing up a mayan and an aztec concept under what is otherwise traditional malthusian/anti-modernism spiels. i could talk about this for several hours as to some theories as to why dead cultures make for good grave robbing (and, more curiously, why they're persuasive) and how it ties into the treatment of jews in europe before and after the crusades, but that goes better with beer.
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[Sync Swim]

I am halfway through the third installment of Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist series. It's typically fantastic, if a bit short, even for a Wolfe story. The mythological/metaphysical elements are back with a vengeance after taking a bit of a break for most of Soldier of Arete, the previous volume.

The greatest thing is that Wolfe, like Moorcock, Ballard, Ellison, Spinrad and (arguably) Delaney, hasn't dipped in any respect with time. Of course, i'm highly biased in my raving. I identify with and read more New Wave SF than anything else and have a tooth-gnashing aversion to most Hard SF except a few things by Niven (Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex).

New Wave tends to grow better or at least remain at a consistent level of quality with age, while Hard, being intrinsically tied to the technologies it applies in-depth, tends to ripen in a poor way, especially when then-legitimate theories espoused as a priori plot elements are later debunked. Recall the hundreds of MIT physics dweebs charging Niven's table at a SF expo in the 80s holding up their calculation ledgers, chanting, "THE RINGWORLD IS UNSTABLE"
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[TheRumblefish]

I have finished The Great Gatsby, consider me stunned. That ending was, perfect.

Now to work my way towards Invisible Man and Junky. I scanned through a rather large book on the Beat generation and a favorable critic gave a rather nice comparison between Naked Lunch and Invisible Man. I'll have to see for myself.
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[GSL]

[boojiboy7]

[dhex]

junky is a straight up hard boiled style novel with some weirdness in it. it's a good page turner, but it's nothing like naked lunch.
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[helicopterp]

So I still don't have time to read anything outside of class (I'm looking at you, Anna Karenina) but we're working our way through Faulkner's Go Down, Moses as a capstone to the course. It is a collection of 8(?) somewhat interrelated short stories. "The Bear" is the central piece, and the longest at 140-ish pages. I'm reading through it right now and it is fucking amazing. There is so much that has to do with documentation, and the way official documents get crossed up with more personal histories and I had better go ahead a finish it before I write more. It is a great piece of fiction, though, to be sure.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[seryogin]

I'm trying to read War of the World, but it seems kind of pointless and wrong that an author tries to write a thousand page history of WWII all in the name of stretching out a simile about WWII being close to Wells' War of the Worlds.

Hey, dhex, my job at B&N allows me to lend hardcover books, so what would you recommend as far as "new stuff" is concerned.
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[TheRumblefish]

[Wall of Beef]

The Dog Fighter

Its about an up and coming Dog Fighter in Cancion Mexico in like the 50's. The guy gets jealous easily, does not say much, and wants to kick the shit out of everything. Dog Fighter meaning a human man who fights against Dogs, not a guy who owns fighting dogs.

[dhex]

[Neal]

I picked up David Sedaris' Naked today when I swung by the bookstore for the new issue of Edge. I'm looking forward to reading it, it's my first Sedaris book.
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........

[baron patsy]

[seryogin]

[dhex]

not even v ?

v is good stuff.
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[Dracko]

Liverpool, 1913. Adolf Hitler is living with his half-brother's family for a spell, while being plagued by an hallucination of a lewd, vulgar John Bull and his diarrhoea-laden dog is (Not to mention Morrissey singing to him from his wardrobe).

Needless to say, both Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell got into a lot of trouble for this odd art-house bit of comica. Probably didn't help that the year before, Morrison's Saint Swithin's Day made a direct attack on Margaret Thatcher, envisaging a teenagers attempting to murder here.

It's highly doubtful that this intriguing 1990 comic will ever see republish, so you can download The New Adventures of Hitler here.

Now if only I could find the The Avengers story he wrote.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

that was weird, dude. thanks!

more free texts from the von mises folk: albert jay nock's "our enemy, the state."
http://www.mises.org/etexts/ourenemy.pdf
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[a_plus]

i just stayed up all night and read the time travelers wife! my neck hurts now.
i'm a sucker for time travel of any sort, and i really like the way it's handled in this book. it's also very touching in some parts. i'm kind of a sap, though, and it's a nice twist on a love story.
unfortunately it ends a bit clumsily and there's a kind of corny section about a historical event (guess which one!) but all in all i really liked it.

[dessgeega]

a+, have you ever heard the queen song '39?
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[Dracko]

I really didn't like that book. It was sappy at best, offensive at worst (It's okay that he's never there for her because he can't help travelling in time! Thankfully, she learns the art of patience!).

I know it's a moot point, but is Broken Saints worth the "read"?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[a_plus]

dess, i haven;t. should i?

[a_plus]

oh, don't get me wrong dracko, it's definitely light summer reading type stuff, but as far as this sort of chick lit (or whatever) goes, i give it my username.

[dhex]

i got the valis trilogy for xmas (terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible covers) and damned if it still isn't one of the saddest things to read.
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[TheRumblefish]

I finished Junky. It was straight up, short, and a damn good read.

I started Invisble Man, almost half-way through so far. Excellent.

Afterwards, A Prayer for Owen Meany? Speed/Kentucky Ham?

Who knows what the future holds.
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[Dracko]

[dhex]

valis is a strange book to read because while it is sorrowful, it's also a map of the ridiculous. it's this portrait of an entire age trying to come to terms with a tremendous amount of social upheval. more than just burn-out from drug use; a certain kind of drug use, a kind of sexual exploration, a kind of social destruction, a kind of spiritual yearning for something above and beyond whatever it is they thought they were in. it's a very strange kind of escapism, to think the spirit can conquer the body, but oh so terribly human at the same time. doing a lot of drugs will, of course, help speed this process along, as does extended sexual or particularly intense sexual activity (emotionally, physically or both) but sometimes you go a bit too far in any one direction and things get complicated.

the easiest people to manipulate are those who think they own themselves. that's where megalomania comes from. nothing wrong with a bout of megalomania now and again, mind you, but it's still a good hobby and a bad god.

dick's mind/body split is an attempt to escape this escapism in one sense; it helps tremendously to split off the part of yourself that's losing its shit like that, at least for a while. some things must be dealt with conceptually before they can be dealt with in actuality, especially when dealing with the pre-rational. it either becomes a tool or a crutch, and sometimes it seems to become psychosis regardless. to see things as interconnected can be great; to see everything as interconnected leads to an utter loss of focus. potheads*, to pick an easy example, suffer from this, as they're lost in the floating of the body and sometimes lose track of simple things like responsibility and care and trust. a great way to kill time, however, and maybe that's the point.

the cyclical nature of these meta-forms is what pits my rational and pre-rational selves against one another; bush as nixon, et al, everyone running on autopilot with a plotline from an earlier age. i go to shows and see earnest young men in beards and women in gentle flowing peasant skirts, in some sense trying to recreate what it was that came before. it is a very strange thing, even if it is natural. similar to people in a group attempting to claim an old lineage, because old = legitimate = real, etc. wicca isn't a religion invented by a dirty old british man who wanted to tie up young women (i've heard worse reasons for founding a religion, mind you); it's a tradition that's thousands of years old, and therefore very legitimate and very real. (and victimized, which for whatever reason is a sign of genuine worth in our age, the sign of the hanged god.) there's some evidence to regard gardnerian wicca as just another one of crowley's magickal children to boot. right place and right time.

christ is a descendent of the house of david and fulfills the scriptures, oddly enough, whatever and whomever he was.

dick thinks christ was a pure logoform, a being of information turned into words, or at least he did part of the time. i don't know if he was a charlatan or not (christ or dick, actually) but i'd hesitate to put too many modern glosses on his purported character. whatever dick experience, i think part of the effect on me is that i pity how deep he actually got, and at some point in my life i would have been perhaps even jealous. even at my most far gone i was never that far gone, holding it together etc, and there's a kind of horrible freedom in a break like that. it's horrible, of course, and irreversible, and that's where the sorrow comes in, especially as such things are borne of sadness (his friends dying, the abusive cancer-ridden sherri, his wife leaving him) and all he had to hang onto was this incredible experience that continually morphed into even more incredible experiences. an utter loss of grounding, which is where charlatans do come from, i am convinced. the effective ones have had some kind of break, and from this break they discovered power over others. i often find it hard to hate them, if only because they seem to be giving people what they want and in some sense what they need. that they use them in turn, well, it often seems people desire that kind of relationship and seek it out. who am i to scorn their destiny?

daniel pinchbeck is another story entirely. again, i find it hard to fault setting oneself up as a guru so you can nail sweet young things and feel important, but a few minutes with a decent book on mayan cosmology pretty much puts him half a step above hobo. (the drug book he wrote i have not read beyond a few pages in a barnes and noble; it was not amusing.) of course, we all must do what we must do and sure people like a nice straussian noble lie (i don't know if i can actually call him the most important philosopher of the 20th century, he certainly has been one of the most influential.) mostly i hate cheese-heads like pinchbeck not because they are deceitful, but because people are so ready to believe any asshole who comes along with a solid line of nonsense because of a desire to believe. that's a tragedy right there, though it also produces much good, even in the process. and i guess we all have to do something or other, and unless he's crossing the line from mental rape to otherwise physically violating the sovereignty of another (i have heard unsavory stories with varying degrees of reliability) there's really not that much to object to. but still i object.

but i am very curious as to what the magick of the mckenna brothers will bring. i will not be surprised if the milennial expectations produce both wonders and horrors. that sort of hope can turn to bitterness very quickly and violently sometimes.

shaper, i'm sorry i wasn't much help when you were reading valis a while back. some things require time to percolate. maybe this helps a bit, or not.

and that's my book report on valis.

*a certain type of smoker for whom the act is both their identity and chief pursuit. some of the most successful people i know smoke stupid amounts of weed. so did some of the dumbest fucking assholes i ever met. good hobby, stupid god.
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[Scratchmonkey]

[helicopterp]

My project for the winter break has been L.N. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

I never really dug into until today, so I thought I'd offer some thoughts at the 172-page mark (of a little over 800 in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation). The only Tolstoy I have read before is his novella "The Death of Ivan Ilych." Anna Karenina is a wholly different book. Whereas "Death" is artificial, tightly focused, and depends on hints of endless repetition, Anna Karenina is fleshed out, and seems almost to write itself as I am reading it, not working itself toward any discernible destination. I am surprised at how enjoyable a read it is; if it weren't so immense in size and revered in reputation, I would almost call it light reading. Tolstoy's language is simple and his style is direct--it reads like a less self-aware Jane Austen novel. I also find appealing Tolstoy's ability (almost a tic) to present plenty of conflicting perspectives about his characters, often in adjacent paragraphs, as if he has not yet made up his mind how he feels about them and perhaps never will.

I initially approached this in terms of its being a book that I ought to read. So far, though, Anna Karenina has demanded that I treat it neither reverentially nor laboriously, and for that I am thankful.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[ryan]

I've been slowly making my way through Demon-Haunted World for a while now but it's recently taken a back seat to The Agricola and The Germania. Difficult to choose what to read next what with christmas bringing so many new titles into my tiny library.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[dhex]

i finished the valis trilogy tonight. the second book isn't as good as the first, and the third outshines them both. but it's also the right kind of progression.
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[simplicio]

I'm in the middle of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which is pretty amazing. His Ned Kelly manages to be a totally commanding narrator while being remarkably unsympathetic at times.

[Dracko]

Comic books from a Christian sex cult!
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dessgeega]

i read v for vendetta the other day.

it's a lot less overwrought than alan moore's other work. it avoids the common cliche of portraying the dystopian state as superhuman. these fascists are thugs. the protagonist on the other hand is a force of nature, really. the story is less about this character than it is about the ways in which other characters are touched and changed by him.
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[GSL]

[simplicio]

Dess, have you read From Hell yet?

I finished Kelly Gang. It's amazing. I don't have much else to say except that if you've got time to read a book this one's worth reading.

[Dracko]

V for Vendetta is definitely one of Moore's superior works. I prefer it over The Watchmen in any case.

The movie couldn't understand its source material even if it had bothered to try.

My favourite, and his best, is still From Hell, however.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Harveyjames]

Someone did me a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: the audiobook as read by Stephen Fry. I'm listening to it while I work.

Quidditch as a sport doesn't make any sense. Since the goals are worth 10 points but catching the golden snitch (which can occur at any point during the match, and ends the game) is worth 150 points, the goals are essentially meaningless. For them to have any impact on the game at all you would need to have a 16-goal lead. This would be fine if quidditch scores ran to, say, in the region of 500-600 before the snitch is caught, but in the matches descibed in the books they don't- they run to about 180-200. So the chasers are basically pissing in the wind, since the only players who have any sway over the outcome of the match are the two seekers.

As every match written about theoretically has to end with the snitch being caught, drama is usually provided by having the opposing team get an inexplicable 14-goal lead- oh no! But then Harry catches the snitch, hooray! Wait, but Harry's team conceded 14 goals without scoring one? Tell me why they deserve to win, again?

Either that, or something completely extraneous will interrupt play (usually that one of the balls or the broomsticks has been cursed), as if J.K Rowling has realized the whole game is bunk and the only way to make it exciting is to have Harry fall off his broom.

So I just listened to a match from the Quidditch world cup. Ireland had a (surprise surprise) 16 goal lead against Bulgaria, but then superstar Bulgarian seeker Victor Krum caught the golden snitch. Final score: Bulgaria 150 - 160 Ireland. Even though he knew it would cost them the match, Krum caught the snitch because he wanted the game to end 'on his terms'. He is hailed as a hero. Nice going, dipshit, why didn't you just wait 'til the difference was only 140 points? Maybe because his team inexplicably hadn't scored any goals yet, next to Ireland's whopping 16. Presumably they just weren't trying.

So not only does the game not make any sense, the way she chooses to dramatize it doesn't make any sense. IT'S SO DUMB.

[Scratchmonkey]

Not coincidentally, that's the last bit of any Harry Potter book that I read. It's a pretty good indication that Rowling doesn't understand sport, which is fine as many people don't, it's just not a good idea to write about it in that case.

And it makes EA's Quidditch games even more inexplicable.

[Nana Komatsu]

Please keep in mind that it's a book written for children.

[Scratchmonkey]

[Nana Komatsu]

I'm not saying it needs to intentionally be dumb. But think of it this way:

You've already got a sport that has a number of unconventional rules compared to most modern popular sports. She has to write such that the reader can follow at least two separate things simultaneously (the main ball/bludgers and the keepers following the snitch). Moreover there's usually only one match per book and they've never been the main focus of any of the stories so far (well I haven't read Half-Blood Prince so I can't say for sure).

That said, I'm not surprised there isn't a lot more strategy involved in the quidditch matches that do appear in the books.

[Harveyjames]

[Nana Komatsu]

I understand that, but I also think Quidditch is an interesting concept for a sport and just because the example games in the books aren't as interesting you should not write it off as nonsense.

Moreover I was interested in seeing if the video games made could expand on it, but from what I understand they weren't very playable.

[Scratchmonkey]

There's no problem with the basic concept of the sport, the scoring system just needs to be revised.

If you could make it so that "goals" were worth 50 or even 30 points, there would be a lot more strategy involved. As it is, it winds up being extremely anticlimactic because whoever catches the snitch wins the game and even in the lone example where this isn't the case, it's only not the case because somebody acts against the object of winning the game.

[Shapermc]

[dhex]

[Shapermc]

I liked that the second book was Sci-Fi, so... yeah. Anyways, you didn't do a good job convincing me to read Tim Archer's book.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dessgeega]

reading from hell.

each page is composed to stand on its own, and i like that. thematically it makes me uneasy! good times ahead, i guess?
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[dhex]