The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

i'm really not totally sure what to make of it. i know i'm still kind of pissed at most of the characters in the book.
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[Shapermc]

Inform me about The Magus. It has a cool name.
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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!"

[dhex]

read "the collector" by john fowles first. then read this. then read the french lieutenant's woman. don't ever see movies based on his books, btw, as they all apparently suck to greater or lesser degrees.

i really don't know how to sum it up other than a young man loses his parents and enters a kind of hyperreality - if you liked the end of the first book of the valis trilogy, you get a whole heaping dose of that (from a purely materialistic standpoint) in the magus. it's long, however.
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[Harveyjames]

I remember I read it because someone said it dealt with similar themes as in The Beach. One big criticism of The Beach was that the ending lacked teeth and balls, so I was interested to find that Alex Garland's film treatment of The Beach pretty much has the ending to The Magus shoved in there.

[Scratchmonkey]

If I read the Magus before the Collector, am I fucked?

[dhex]

no, they're unrelated. the collector is superior as a piece of literature, but both are very successful mindfucks.
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[Nana Komatsu]

[dark steve]

And there are panel-for-frame direct rips out of the invisibles!


Those Wachowskis have a lot to answer for!
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[Harveyjames]

[Mister Toups]

And that part where everything slows down and the camera pans around the bullets is lifted straight out of that time Quake 2 glitched out on me and I could walk around a railgun shot as it was being fired.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[dhex]

and every college sophomore who ever got high and wondered if we really were, like, brains in a big vat or something.
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[Ethoscapade]

[Dracko]

Man, have you ever, like, looked at your hand, like, for real, you know?

It's like, woah, man.

Dude.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

[Dracko]

William Gibson has handed in corrected proofs of new book, Spook Country, last week. Still planned for an August release. Not much is known about the book, though he has posted excerpts on his blog and the general rumour is that it's a contemporary setting like his last one.

Speaking of: Is Pattern Recognition worth a yay or nay?

Bought stuff on Saturday I'll read and talk about later when I'm not exhausted. Got Joyce's Ulysses, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man for £3 in all, and after a friend made me read a chapter of it while browsing, treated myself to Brian Lumley's Necroscope. Also, the first issue of Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows' The Chronicles of Wormwood.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[helicopterp]

In addition to my considerable reading for class (Ulysses is great so far!) I checked out Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy. A few chapters in, I am impressed. It's in episodes like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Tom Jones, but the writing style is vaguely reminiscent of Faulkner, and the whole affair is ultraultraultra violent. Eighty pages in, the protagonist is still just named "the kid" displays a sense of detachment the likes of which I have never seen. Anyway, it's interesting. I hope it stays this good.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[simplicio]

No, it doesn't.

It gets tremendously, wonderfully better. Have fun, and welcome to something grand. I also recommend Suttree and The Road in particular.

[GSL]

[simplicio]

Marc Bojanowski's The Dog Fighter presents, for its first quarter, an arresting narrator in a young guy who's striving for reputation and dominance through physical superiority.

But then he falls in love and the rest of the book is just mired in some pseudo-ideological non-thriller nonsense, because he (author and narrator both) refuses to actually engage with anything in favor of some hiding behind some gauzy veil labeled "She".

[Dracko]

[GSL]

[Scratchmonkey]

I always thought of Gibson as primarily a writer's writer with Stephenson really being the "ideas man", for better or for worse.

I'm really enjoying The Magus so far.

[Nana Komatsu]

[Scratchmonkey]

[Dracko]

Do tell.

Seriously though, I'd like to know if it's generally worth my while picking up recent material of old sci-fi classic writers.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Nana Komatsu]

[Bulkor]

Re: Pattern Recognition, I've heard that it's actually closer to the kind of thing Gibson's always wanted to write. I thought that was pretty depressing to hear, myself, but some people really dig the change in style. If you've read Gibson, you should read it, if only because you won't believe it's actually him.

[seryogin]

I'm reading Lawrence Sutin's biography of PKD.

That poor, poor man.

Anyway, this thread's been around for a year now. I think it's about time it was stickied.
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[nICO]

pattern recognition didn't hold my interest personally, but i'm not going to speak out against it. i just thought, why read this, when now we've got china meiville? not exactly the same, i know, but i don't read a whole lot of scifi/fantasy.


my newest kick has been robert anton wilson. so far mostly audio files from slsk (lectures, interviews, "philosophical stand-up comedy"), but i've started schrödinger's cat as well.

other than that, i've been really getting into early modern history of science-ish stuff. at least somewhat broadly speaking. i've been reading the usual 17th century "scientific revolution" material, but i'm more interested in the influences of alchemy, renaissance occultism, and other dark corners that our standard education tends to downplay. frances yates, (a little) terence mckenna, steve shapin, and so on. anyone else here into this?

[dhex]

mckenna, like the rest of them, liked to play a little fast and loose with certain things. (i.e. the whole 2012 thing, which i'm firmly going to blame on him, ill of the dead or not) cultural trappings are hard to track, but when people point out various proto figures of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and say "see, they were part of [secret society xyz]! this proves [secret society xyz] is a [benevolent conspiracy / satanic one world government] that is responsible for [good/evil outcome]" i generally put my bullshit shields to max. everyone who was anyone was involved in some kind of secret society, of varying degrees of secretiveness, and depending on one's point of view, varying degrees of immorality and/or sinister plots.

francis bacon comes to mind. so does john dee (there aren't many good books about john dee, though it is interesting to note he used a scrying mirror that was polished obsidian and made by the mexica. the polished mirror being the symbol of tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, he who plays us like flutes, etc; a fun example of cross cultural influence that can be read in a number of directions depending on your predilictions.)

on the other hand, having talked now - if one can call it such - with several presumably intelligent people who have been sucked into the whole daniel pinchbeck memeblender, i kind of think that maybe the new world order - of some kind - is inevitable.

oh, anyway, i would recommend on this topic...hmmm, i don't know. the role of alchemy as a proto-science is generally played up by people with ulterior motives - i.e. selling monatomic particles for hundreds of bucks, magnets, expensive water purifiers and other nonsense like that - and a lot of them suffer from the issues that people like frances yates in ascribing too much of a hidden hand to pattern what was otherwise a very complex arrangement of influences, accidents and the general forces of history. (War famine disease birth rates death rates farming technology etc) it's easy to romanticize a "what if" scenario - much like the the people who have latched onto the magdalenean heresy - which no doubt helps keep people interested.

this kind of reasoning is generally rejected when the end result seems less than romantic or outright vile (read infowars.com sometime, or david icke, zog save his soul). a prominent example is somethine like "marxism was jewish plot by supported by the jewish bankers to keep the world enslaved in perpetual revolution and misery and destroy christianity." it's fairly easy to support using what ifs and circumstantial evidence.

sorry this doesn't answer your question one bit, eh?
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[nICO]

yeah, it's hard to find good writing about alchemy. science historian types ridiculously tend to focus on alchemists as proto-chemists doing experiments on metals, jungians perhaps a bit more accurately but still reductively focus on purely spiritual transformation, while the new agey spew whatever bull comes to mind.

i like what i've read of frances yates so far. i think she would concede that she's trying to pry open new angles rather than expound an overarching system. she constantly reminds the reader that she is merely providing new perspectives from a narrow theme and should not be taken alone or without skepticism. her style could be improved, but the connections are interesting. i have a suspicion that she reads too much into john dee in her elizabethan age book, but i can't really make a call on that since i know so little.

in fairness, i think it's difficult to write interesting and worthwhile history without at least implicitly suggesting a hidden hand. even marx held that history as actually lived is highly random and circumstantial (he gave the example of european colonists finding gold in america), but we all know how strong his hand was. for economic historians such as douglass north the hand is constructed of capital, famine is it for many social historians, war for war historians, etc. even foucault can't really escape this in his disjunctive histories. i understand the distinction that needs to be made between teleological and non-teleological histories, but might contend that even in non-teleological histories the hand remains even if it doesn't know where it's going. it's simply the force that is focused on in any given analysis.

the best attempt at a non-hidden hand history i'm aware of is fernand braudel's work on the mediterranean, where he devoted basically an entire book to the geology of the region, then he zoomed into the history of the civilizations , then going in further to philip ii, all the while emphasizing how complex historical development is.


mckenna was an odd one. he was not always rigorous with his facts (one that comes to mind is when he said purgatory was created by francis of assisi), but he was just loaded with fascinating ideas and if he was on that night could be brilliantly poetic (see his discussion of the www with ralph abraham, easily available online). i tend to give mckenna much more credit and respect than he might deserve, but i view him more as an inspiration or as intellectual entertainment than a towering intellect or authority.

his views on 2012 were far more sophisticated than his followers...especially that opportunist joker pinchbeck. he would always concede that no mindblowing event was likely to occur and it would probably be something we would not even recognize until later. he was fond of speaking about artificial intelligence, for example. i personally think it's interesting how people who have no connection with the burning man scene (but have similar millenarian fantasies) such as ray kurzweil and hans moravec predict that 2012 is the year theoretical computing power will reach the ability of the human brain.

all this is just interesting to me, though. i'm not gonna sell my stocks right before the mayan cycle shifts. transformation is inevitable, of course, but as eery as the evidence can appear if you read into it enough, i find it naive to believe we can deduce exactly when, how, and what will occur.

[dhex]

from what i can tell, some alchemists were hermetic or cabalistic occultists; some were cross cultural frontiersmen; some were proto-chemists; some were just idiots; many seem to have been engaging in a long, poetic kind of sex magick hidden in a bunch of real and imagined paranoid layers of nonsense. (for both very real and very imagined dangers)

i think it's important to note that the 2012 date was basically plucked after their attempts to make the novelty wave end on terrence's birthday failed. of course, it's also a good experiment on the power of memes, the human belief in their importance of our existance (and more importantly, that something special will happen during our lifetimes) and things of that nature as well. it's interesting anthropology, even if it makes for irritating conversations.

i have a bunch of mp3 dumps of bob wilson's eight tape set that was released a few years back - if you want i can probably up some of it, or most of it, this weekend. i may also have some lectures on alchemy in history by a few folks i know, but i'll have to check to see what's in my mindrot directory.
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[nICO]

is that set "raw explains everything"? if so i've downloaded much of that already (have 11 45 minute tracks...so 5.5 tapes). i know i don't have the whole thing since who makes only half a tape. i would love the rest or, if you have something else, even better. i'd be very interested in the lectures as well if you find them. i really enjoy listening to lectures and audio books while playing ds and while at work.

do you soulseek?
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Brauner: Damn you, humans... You selfishly start wars and despoil the earth. Perhaps justice wasn't on my side but I will never admit that it was on yours.

[dhex]

if you tell me which raw tapes you already have, i can zip and upload the rest. soulseek is rather shitty for me most of the time, since i use it for boots and looking for samples of songs (i'm a dick about buying stuff, personally, though i do admit to banning people who don't share as well) i don't bother with it that much.

i'll see what else i have. i have a few lectures by a friend of mine who's involved with the temple of set on various issues of initiation if you're interested as well. you can shoot me an email at dhex23REMOVEgmail.com.
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[Dracko]

Guilty Pleasures of Literary Greats

A Dictionary of Common Sci-Fi Metaphors

Pitch 'n' Putt with Joyce 'n' Beckett
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[helicopterp]

Nabokov's doubts there are not entirely unfounded. Dennis is a fucking bastard.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Dracko]

Every time I lend a copy of the Labyrinths collection of Jorge Luis Borges shorts to someone, I end up letting them keep it.

This will be my fourth copy purchased so far.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

i randomly grabbed the borges short story collection this morning off the shelf instead of something i should be reading for class.

good call by me, btw.
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[Dracko]

Good man. Which collection exactly?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

"collected fictions" from penguin classics. about 500 something pages.
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[Dracko]

Ah, never came across that one. Does it purport to be the complete collection of his fictional works?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

i don't think so, just a hunk of them:

http://www.amazon.com/Borges-Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis/dp/0140286802/sr=8-2/qid=1172071581/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/002-2281178-3736058?ie=UTF8&s=books
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[ryan]

Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment - mental note: read more about Frederick the Great.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[Dracko]

[GSL]

I just finished Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as part of a course I'm taking on the American novel after 1900. This is the third of five books we've got lined out; the remaining two are titles I've never heard of, and the first two were Gertrude Stein' Three Lives and John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle. Stein was her usual redundant self, and I'm convinced that Steinbeck's novel is the only worthwhile one we've read so far.

Pynchon? Fuck. Halfway through the book (the part where he stops being a jackass and starts writing reasonably cohesive English), I got to thinking how much better the novel would have been were it written by Neal Stephenson. He writes with a lot of the same ideas as Pynchon--large casts of strange characters, multifaceted plots that center around fairly technical details--only he writes in real English, like the kind normal people can read. After all the praise I've heard for Pynchon, I'm extremely disappointed--especially since I found myself liking the premise of the novel, when I could excavate it from the run-on sentences and comma splices.

[Scratchmonkey]

For Pynchon, it ends and begins for me with Gravity's Rainbow. That's a king-hell bitch of a book. I've tried to read Lot 49, V and Vineland and never finished any of them (although my wife likes Vineland pretty good) for reasons similar to what you've described, that being that it's just too much work to get through it when you just want to plow through something.

That said, I'm not a big fan of Stephenson either (although my wife likes Diamond Age pretty good).

[Shapermc]

I picked up the Transmigration of Timothy Archer again. It's better than I remember it. Hopefully I'll finish it this time.
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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!"

[helicopterp]

[dhex]

eh, i like pynchon. v is > vineland tho.
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[Dracko]

"If the media refer to Martin Amis as 'Britain's greatest living author' once more," wrote Kathy Love from south London, "I shall kill myself. The fact that such a misconception exists at all is enough to make most people with a passion for books want to emigrate to Uruguay immediately. Please save my life and don't do it again."

Seriously, fuck Martin Amis.

Also, who here misses the days when authors were crazy arseholes?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"