The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

authors aren't crazy assholes?

in all seriousness, hopefully we don't expect the people who make art to be saints. or at least those who do are at least occupying themselves with strange cults, fad diets and dodgy metaphysics, so as to keep consistent.

i liked koba the dread for what it's worth. but i also like ballard so my taste in british authors may be broken or something.
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[Dracko]

It ain't. Early Ballard is awesome stuff.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Dracko]

I found Virgil's Aeneid, well, underwhelming. For the record, mine is the Robert Fagles translation. Now, the poem itself is not poor by any extent, nor does it lack in Roman contradiction or glory that makes these things classics. But the tale gets repetitive. The violence is fetishistic and predictable, and unfortunately, in the later books, so is most of the tragic elements. The first six are the strongest, I found, the last six requiring you to follow a massive cast of characters it's genuinely hard to care for and almost superfluous warfare, a massive excuse to suggest that the Trojans were accepted peacefully on account of their divine duty, but had to demonstrate how big their balls were all the same.

Not that I don't understand the purpose behind all this, nor am I trying to impose a modern reading on the text, hopefully, but I'm not very familiar with antique texts, and this one, though not a horrible read by any extent, really didn't edify me.

I'm far more interested in the history and its influence, especially in relation to Medieval Christian scholars and writers.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dessgeega]

i've been reading nana komatsu's pink box (which is amazing) and scott pilgrim books (which are pretty good!). bryan lee o'malley is married to my favorite comic artist but i'd never read his work before.
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[Dracko]

Necroscope is a teen adventure, especially in writing style. But it's a particularly superlative one, so I've purchased the second book in the series, Wamphyri! to read eventually.

Today, I got Eddie Campbell's Fate of the Artist. It's a meta-graphic novel, which investigates his own disappearance. I'll get round to reading it, and I'm pretty excited. Very much looking forward to his The Black Diamond Detective Agency. My comic book shop as also wrung in to tell me they've finally received Garth Ennis' 303, so I'll have to pick that up soon.

At the moment, I'm finishing reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and then I plan to finally, finally, read Burroughs' Naked Lunch in its entirety, maybe re-read The Atrocity Exhibition in more depth afterwards.

I've been stocking up on Joyce also, specifically The Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My hope is to read these books, along with the Greco-Italian classics and related books I have to read for my course (Dante, Homer, Chaucer's House of Fame, etc.) so that afterwards I can re-read Ulysses in a broader, more knowledgeable context.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dessgeega]

i'm reading roadside picnic, the short novel that inspired the movie that inspired the book that inspired the game s.t.a.l.k.e.r. translated from the original russian, but it reads pretty well.
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[dhex]

i've been reading a roundup of books from my old religious studies classes and so i'm now on stephen l. carter's "culture of disbelief." a smart guy i don't really agree with, which is a good thing to get into now and then.
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[ryan]

I'm on a bit of a Roman kick lately with The Roman Emperors, The Jugurthine War/Cataline Conspiracy, and Discourses. Also still making my way through An Evening in the Palace of Reason and Hellenistic and Roman Sparta: A Tale of Two Cities. I have different books in different spots, so I'm always shuffling around.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[Swimmy]

[dhex]

that's cute.

did he have a save the whales bumper sticker on his bong?
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[ryan]

oh my ... what did he make on that? I really hope you know, because that was really something else.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[dhex]

i keep reading it and still have no idea what the hell is going on there.
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[Swimmy]

I don't know what he made, but I got a 79 for my pretty decent paper, so they weren't super lenient. Either he got a 10 for actually turning something in or a 0 for it being the worst thing ever.

As for what's going on, he didn't understand the paper when I explained it to him, obviously. He didn't read the right book, so he just glanced through the Catiline Conspiracy. Near the end of the paper it's a little more clear that he thinks the story is supposed to be an allegory rather than an account of what happened--he calls Catiline a character repeatedly, thinks Sallust portrays him the way he does so he can get his message across, etc.

He was the football coach's assistant.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[Shapermc]

OH MAN, the Masterpieces. Do you still have your livejournal where you did all the commentary?
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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!"

[Swimmy]

They're still on there somewhere. Or you could just read them in this rar file.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[Shapermc]

Shit, I downloaded that when you first put them up. I guess I didn't reailze your commentary was in there.
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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]

It has been a while since I've submitted some book reports here, and I have been up to my eyeballs in reading, so here's the scoop on everything I've been up to:

First, some disappointment. I became overwhelmed with required reading before I had a chance to finish Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I was something like 200 pages in and loving it before I had to put it aside. I will get back to it as soon as I graduate.

Ulysses Report- This novel is pure delight to read. If you have reservations about starting it, you've probably got the right idea, but you should just go ahead and jump into it anyway. I just finished the notorious 'Oxen in the Sun' section (in which Joyce parodies many of the styles in the history of English-language prose) with a smile on my face. There is a lot to keep track of, but if you can keep your mind on task it is an incredibly rewarding and, more importantly, fun book. Bonus incentive: the description of Bloom's fart at the end of 'Sirens' is the best fart passage I have ever read.

Faulkner. Again.- I'm taking a class right now which seemingly has no real direction to it other than "write a 30-page research paper on any topic you want." I settled on a new interpretation of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses as much because I wanted to re-read it as anything. The second time through, and supplemented by a thorough reading of the scholarship surrounding the novel/short-story-cycle/book, I like it even more than before, which is saying something. My paper, ideally, should trace the importance of documents both in providing a structure for the book and in obscuring all the implications of its plot.

Orientalism- This was my spring break reading. I only managed to get through the lengthy introduction and the first section, but I find Edward W. Said's style of criticism incredibly appealing, even when I am skeptical of his ideas. Anyhow, the basic premise of this book is a study of how the Western world has treated the 'Orient' (particularly the Middle East in this work) not in terms of any real observed identity, but merely as a fantastical projection that forces subserviance in thought and political systems among the 'Orientals'.

Poetry!- I find Auden boring. James(?) Powell is a current American poet whose book Cocktails is an incredible refashioning of Dante's Divine Comedy into a narrative of Powell's homosexuality. Olena Davis is pretty great, too. I am sick of reading T.S. Eliot for every class ever.


So there you have it, y'all.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[nICO]

what are you going to school for, heicopterp?

i'd like to read orientalism one day. i did want to read it a lot more before I trudged through most of said's imperialism book. -culture and imperialism-, was it? dryly written, uninspiring ideas, lax logic. i'm not exactly gonna say the book was bad, but i had no interest in it. the critiques of said were far more entertaining.

and yes, auden is dreadfully boring and i too am sick of reading ts eliot for every class ever. eliot is pretty much whoever you want him to be. he was born american, so the americanists pick him up. then he became a british citizen so the british claim him as well. he was also important for looking to a fractured future and the metaphysical past (i still feel uneasy using "metaphysical" as a poetry genre to describe donne, etc., even though i guess it's standard), so both tendencies teach him. he was both full of shit and truly brilliant. well, i guess you could never call him a populist, though some people have tried even that.
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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.

[helicopterp]

I'm getting a degree in English! I was going to get one in Russian, too, but then I decided not to.

Hopefully, on April the 19th I will be able to tell you what I'll do after May.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[nICO]

What happens on the 19th? Deadline for decision on graduate school or a job interview or something? Or just graduation?
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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.

[helicopterp]

Teach for America tells me whether or not they want to offer me a job. My fingers are crossed!
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[nICO]

well good luck. teach for america seems like a really good program. not only do you get the same pay as beginning teachers, but you get to do something particularly beneficial. i wonder if their summer training is a sufficient replacement for a masters in education that is necessary to teach in some states?
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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.

[simplicio]

[nICO]

right now i'm reading foucault's the order of things. i have to give a lecture on it in a couple weeks for a class (the professor realized he would only have to teach once a week if he makes the students each teach one day). i'm finding it a bit more difficult than his "histories of the other", as he refers to them, that i've read, though it's not nearly as tough-going as the discourse on language or society must be defended.

other than that, i haven't been reading much recently. i've just been revising my history thesis for presentation to graduate which has been taking more time than i hoped and the new warm weather has been drawing me outside.

my roommate is trying to get me to read some reimagining of goethe's sorrows of young werther that takes place in the 1980s or something. has anyone heard of this? i do love the original (at least the modern library translation...i can't read german and don't like the other english translation i've picked up).
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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.

[Dracko]

Easter Sunday by Gene Wolfe

Reverend Dobson paused in his daily walk and sat down on the park bench. The cool green of the park around him seemed too good to enjoy merely in passing, so he sat, pausing a moment first to thank the Creator for this rest in the midst of an Easter Sunday's tasks. He momentarily forgot Mrs. Albright, who acted so superior and left a dime in the collection plate, the worries of the coming Sunday School picnic; he meditated on the glory of God and the miracle of the resurrection.

He was a religious man with no hint of fear in his love of God. The Reverend's meditations were not to continue long, as it chanced. The interruption was the sight of a man walking toward him. The stranger was strikingly tall; his figure gave the impression of both nobility and sadness. Here, however, all resemblance to Lincoln ceased. The stranger's nobility was not that of the common man, but that of the superior one. He had a high forehead, flashing black eyes, wide mouth, and thin hawk nose. His clothes had a vaguely foreign cut, and he walked with a slight limp. It was, thought the Reverend, such a limp as might have been acquired in some battle encounter.

The Reverend decided he had never seen a man who suggested so plainly the idea of exiled aristocracy.

The stranger seated himself on the bench beside him and leaned forward, his head in his hands, and his hands on a worn but well cared-for walking stick. Reverend Dobson was a shy man by nature, but the stranger looked such an interesting person that he could not resist the temptation:

"I, er, I just love Easter Sunday. Don't you?" he finally blurted. The stranger looked up as if cold water had been dashed in his face.

"No." A decisive answer. "No I don't. It reminds me of my forced exile." Reverend Dobson noted he spoke with only the slightest trace of an accent.

"A revolution?" ventured the Reverend.

"Yes. But I was a revolutionist, not an autocrat." His eyes flamed and met the Reverend's squarely, and his voice continued:

"My country was a dictatorship. He calls it a kingdom now, and plans on his son following him, but you must understand that there is no established line preceding him. The leader, or as he calls himself, the Master, started well enough. They all do, you know. Then he worked himself into a position that would be fantastic if it were not real. The peasants are taught that to doubt him is the most hideous crime. In fact, in the last analysis, it is the only crime. He pardons whatever a man may do if only the man will apologize for it, and, of course, affirm that he is willing to die for the Master."

The Stranger turned his head, a look of despair on his face. Reverend Dobson felt he could hardly blame him.

"Tell me about the religious life in your nation," he asked, anxious to get hack on familiar ground.

"There is little to tell," said the stranger. "They worship the Master. So you see my crime wasn't only treason, but blasphemy also. I knew I had little chance at the start, but my friends and I could stand it no longer. We revolted, a pitiful handful of us. Now we are exiles. The people of my homeland have been taught to think of us as depraved monsters. I shall never see the green fertile fields of my homeland again."

"Well, I wouldn't be too sad, sir. No doubt your home is beautiful, but there are lovely sights over here too."

"You would not say that if you had seen my homeland," snapped the stranger.

"Tell me, sir, are you a Trotskite?" asked the minister. "You don't look much like a Russian."

"No, my home is more distant than Russia, and my rebellion greatly predates Trotski's." A half-smile played about the stranger's lips.

The conversation was interrupted by the sound of Easter bells from Reverend Dobson's church. The stranger arose with a start and hastily departed.

A moment later the minister left also, reflecting on the stranger's limp and concluding it was due to an artificial limb.

His left foot, the Reverend had noted, clattered almost like a hoof when it struck the pavement.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

the master and margarita makes for great easter reading. as does the western lands (burroughs' overwhelming sadness comes through very strongly near the end of the trilogy)

[Shapermc]

So, like, I don't know why but recently I've heard a lot about "the road" in my reading and discussion about games. I've seen it come up in an article about game writing twice in the last month, and heard it mentioned in coversation a few times at GDC. After a failed attempt to use a gift certificate at both Best Buy and Circuit City I decided not to waste the trip and stop in at Borders. I was originally just going to pick up The Castle, but I saw a huge display for "the road"

Considering that I don't remember the last time I heard this much about a recent book, let alone about a book related to video game discussion, I figured it was some kind of karma or fate or ... something. So I'm about half way through it. When I got in the car I noted to my wife that the book had "big words." She asked if I needed to go back and pick up a dictionary so I could understand them. "I meant the size." It's not that big of a book, but it's fairly engrossing. It's also very creepy and unnerving. I'm also a little suprized that it's on the Oprah book club list thing. Perhaps I just don't understand what her book club list thing is.
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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]

Oprah is a more interesting person than you give her credit for, if I understand you correctly. And if I understand her book club correctly, it is merely a way that she a) considerably boosts the sales of any book she happens to like, and b) makes reading a little more popularly acceptable and much more social activity.


P.S. Only one more chapter to go in Ulysses!
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[SuperWes]

[Shapermc]

[ryan]

[dhex]

dude the secret is awesome if only because it's wicca minus the silly spelling!

blessed be...i mean, the universe loves you, bro!

(teh best part about it is that a whole lot of people spend their time thinking about money they're never going to get; however, if they spend 15 bucks on the book, they'll learn they were just thinking in the wrong ways)

to be fair, i do have an excessive amount of love for charlatans. everyone wins, mostly; followers get to be what they are (cue osho - "a disciple is an asshole in search of a human host to attach itself to") the leaders get money, bling and, generally, underage/barely legal ass; and the world gets to tut tut their excesses. EVERYONE WINS.

a few years back, i was walking through a store in manhattan that i don't believe actually exists anymore, where a tremendous hoax of great hilarity was once cast upon the world (it involved the necronomicon, if you can believe that shit) and i saw a box of something called "Zen Runes."

i did a doubletake. my companion at the time, being an official representatives for a great and shadowy conspiracy, was amused by my reaction. "but, but..." was all i could sputter, having been handed a classic mental double-bind. runes are culturally specific, if adaptable...but what the hell does that have to do with buddhism? buddhism has a whole slew of magical objects and culturally based fortune telling devices. why introduce an indo-european phenomenon?

and then i saw the baseball greats tarot card set, and i understood.

amen.

edit: one other neat thing about the secret is that it is very close - almost disturbingly close - to sigilization as found in western occultism a la austin osman spare and other famous crazy people, minus the abstraction and sexual activation, of course. (i.e. i doubt the secret has people cutting out pictures of whatever they happen to desire and beating off on them, i mean, much less collage activities)

condensed chaos by phil hine is a good place to start if you're interested in jerking off for great justice, btw.
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[helicopterp]

[Ethoscapade]

vonnegut died.

by the by.

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

so it goes.
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[Shapermc]

Oh, yeah, I finished The Road last night. I can't decide on how I feel about the ending, but it was a very good read.

I would like to recommend the book to DHEX.
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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!"

[Dracko]

Three children born in blood and baptised in fire. All orphans, days-old, in a hospital in Sarajevo. Background noise of civil war and T-34 shells. One of them, named Nike Hatzfeld, not his real name, his parents gunned down by a mad sniper, possesses perfect memory. He'll remember everything, from his birth, for the rest of his days. He'll gradually, retroactively, remember having promised, in his bubbling infant's mind, to protect his companions. In the year 2026, he'll want to seek them out. But he lives in a world which is unkind to those in possession of knowledge. A fanatical terrorist group, consisting of extreme elements from the three monotheistic religions, known as the Obscurantis Order, wants to see a complete black-out of history and culture. Tabula rasa. Nike is saved from a hit by the Federal Bureau of International Investigation. After interrogating him, yet unable to determine his origins (Serbian? Croatian? Muslim?), they give him a revolver, along with its own glove, a disc containing classified info on the O.O, as well as their target, the Eagle Site, a region targeted by a signal of alien origin - thereby putting the notion of God, yet again, in question, and a bottle of red wine for his troubles. Once it becomes obvious that he's just as disposable for one side as he is for the other, and that his companions of old all play their equally expendable part in this brutal conspiracy, he sees no other choice than to find them as quickly as possible. This is the starting grounds for Enki Bilal's latest work, his Monster (Or Hatzfeld, depending on who you ask) tetralogy, nine years in the making, and which came to term at the end of this March.



Unbeknownst to him, the extreme (supreme?) artist Optus Warhole, the most extraordinary and diabolical performance artist since Adolf Hitler, is quietly manoeuvring the O.O from behind the scenes, his insolence, not to mention expert manipulation, allowing him to get away with, quite literally, mass murder, in the name of industry and artistry. In other words, he’s what Station to Station-era Bowie should have been, and then some. He is unreservedly savage in his baroque excesses, a veritably epic force of nature. You’d be excused for thinking he’s a pretext, a mere guide for Hatzfeld and company. If he is, then he only lets things become crueller, outright cannibal, before reprieve is allowed. So cruel, in fact, that that essential component, memory, that is to say identity, will betray and devour long before it enlightens, much like Warhole’s army of bionic parasitic flies. The designs of the insane artist, who is to be sure the eponymous Monster – and all monsters are portents – of the tetralogy twist the knife in old wounds as well as the paths of the searching protagonists. He is an awesome and unrelentingly deviant, often grotesque, guide to what lies at the heart of it all. If Nike Hatzfeld’s primal memories, and his promise, are essential to him, Warhole serves to remind him and his own perpetually what brought them into being. But the trek throughout is also very much his own. Bilal manages to tie him, as he does with all of the ideas presented, into the structure of the whole. So Warhole is birth, is the alien, is the Surrealists’ Boucherie of World War I and, of course, is the strains that lead to the Kosovo War. His exploitation of Hatzfeld, always purposeful, always barbaric, and ever effective, breaking his memories and his own sense of self, leads to a focus on odour – Smell being intimately linked to memory and all that – which by its almost sexually obsessive aspect, reinforces and sublimates with phantasmagorical thematic concern all that is cold-blooded and aquatic, all that is unfeeling and buzzing. Identity, more than subverted, becomes duplicated and the proliferation of viciousness and ersatz oneness, in the shape of clones or religious fundamentalism, take your referential pick, is constantly present thanks to those peculiar red flies that ravage and despoil, and those fish that seem to feed, even allow to breathe, and the perverse merging between the two. It may have taken him years, but Bilal didn’t let it all go to waste; every image connects and it all comes together so effortlessly, never feeling forced, that you can tell it took him a lot of effort to get it right.

Hatzfeld is very much Bilal, but this brutal exercise is of a whole other order than just one artist/writer’s attempt at coming to terms with his life experience. It barely even registers as compensation for trauma. The impression is that Bilal has already come to terms with the past he gleans over here, and is more interested in navigating the peculiar currents of reconstructed memory, and what it may signify for different moral breeds of people. But it's not some daft humanist effort either. This is an adult work in the sense that it operates beyond ethical conceits, but never feels clinical. The energy is obvious, as is its flux: The first couple of books’ violence gradually subdues, and it all settles to a simple dinner around a table for all four of our protagonists.
The characters will not come out anywhere near complete, and perhaps more is lost in remembrance than is gained, which may feel anticlimactic, but then again, as ornery and esoteric as it all can seem, in spite of its darkly humorous sci-fi aesthetic, it’s about people, and that’s never been a definitive affair, nor would I want it to be. Some lessons come from the oddest experiences, is all.



A bullet to the head, then, with all the educational value that comes with it – Take that as you will. A detonation that explodes across a sniper’s alley before becoming echoes on the walls, fading into scarring memory. And what to feel about that? Nothing that you might easily come to expect, in any case, because it’s not an experience you’re likely to expect.

You’ve got to love a book that leaves a taste of salt water and gun smoke in your mouth.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Dracko]

Borges cameo on Love Boat?

Someone find this and upload it to GoogleVideo or something.

---

The Darkening Sky
The Darkening Sky is a book by Henrik Boemer, a Dutch art professor (1918 - 1976), published by The Fourth International Press 1966.

Described as "a new exploration of the philosophy of Fatalism" on its back cover, this short-run paperback combines treatise and fiction in its discussion of cyclical history and its notion that humanity can combine into a perceptual-reality "machine" that can overthrow the tyranny of "time" itself. It's a frequently bizarre, self-sabotaging work that often conflates inevitable, almost Creationist cycles of rise and fall with the Elder Gods of HP Lovecraft, whom Boemer had something of an obsession with. One chapter simply lists the more frightening events in world history that occurred in 1925, the year he estimated that Lovecraft first conceived of his main sequence of horror tales.

Samizdat copies of The Darkening Sky have existed into the 21st Century, the few remaining original copies often jealously guarded in private libraries: far outliving Boemer himself, who, after a series of psychotic breaks following the publication of his final book in 1971 (The European Lloigor (Weisen Books), an attack on what he saw as an usurpation of the occult traditions by middle-class European intellectuals like Colin Wilson), hanged himself in a jail cell in Amsterdam on June 6 1976 following an arrest for public indecency.

The Fourth International was an international organisation of Trotskyist communists, founded in 1938 with Trotsky's backing and informed by his theory and program of "permanent revolution" . The Fourth International suffered two serious splits in the 40s and 50s, and a partial reunification in 1963. It's believed that the short-lived Fourth International Press was a small esoteric-minded splinter group that fell away from the main direction of The United Secretariat of the Fourth International sometime in 1964. They published spottily until late 1966, when they reconfigured as the San Francisco publishing house International Echo.

So, it's going to be Transmetropolitan if it was good?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[helicopterp]

"North"

I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders,
those lying in Orkney and Dublin
measured against
their long swords rusting,

those in the solid
belly of stone ships,
those hacked and glinting
in the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voices
warning me, lifted again
in violence and epiphany.
The longship's swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsight--
it said Thor's hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenges,

the hatreds and behind-backs
of the althing, lies and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.

It said, 'Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.'
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[helicopterp]

Also, I just read Samuel Beckett's Molloy, which is as hilarious as it is abstract. Which is to say, very.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[dhex]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/books/06mcgr.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

he's dead wrong about valis, but otherwise a decent portrayal.
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[Shapermc]

It's not DEAD wrong. I mean, VALIS is a tough read if you're use to his other stuff, and it was more fun to talk and think about than to read. I mean, it doesn't say that the book is bad. (though I'm not familiar with Finnegans Wake, so that could be an insult).

Anyways, it was a decent read and nice to see. PKD does deserve more recognition. He's dead now so it's ok.
_________________
“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!"

[ryan]

I'm still chewing my way through The Roman Emperors: A Biographical Guide to the Rulers of Imperial Rome 31 BC-AD 476, and I'm about to wrap up The Jugurthine War/Cataline Conspiracy. Finals, and projects lovingly made due during the final two weeks of the semester, have made it tough to get any fun reading in.

I'm going through Constantine the Great's reign now. I'm really interested in Aurelian (Lucius Domitius Aurelianus) now - it's a shame his portion was so short; and now is the time I head to amazon to get some more thorough material. Sallust, despite getting dates wrong and siding with the Populares, provides an entertaining read.

I think I'll have to cut back on the history after these so I can get into Death by Black Hole. Today's my last final, so I hope to get in some more leisure reading/gaming. Whew.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[dhex]

[helicopterp]

Ryan, where are you in school?

I just finished my all my undergrad coursework as of Friday, and now I'm just biding my time until commencement on Saturday. Instead of finals, I had to turn in a really big Faulkner research paper, a less big but still reasonable Heaney paper, and a relatively small one on Ulysses. The Ulysses one was about pooping, farting, and erections, and I had a blast writing it. I also turned in a portfolio of poetry of which I am exceedingly vain.


I think I have come to the conclusion that Paul Muldoon is a pretty worthless poet, and anyone who thinks he's the next best thing to Seamus Heaney just can't get past the idea that they're both Irish.


Since I finished Friday, I have absorbed myself in a collection of Poe's prose fiction. His novel, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, is a good read so far (we'll see if I can say anything better than that about it by the time I'm done with it) and seems to be a chief inspiration for, among other works, Yann Martel's Life of Pi. Poe's exacting sense of descriptive detail and his penchant for creating unease often turn this story of sea mis-adventures into a horrifying account. He certainly seems to revel in the extremes.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[helicopterp]

Shaper, do you have any opinion of The Road yet? I'm more than curious. Also, it seems to be planted near the top of the best-seller list right now. Good for Cormac McCarthy.
_________________
Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[ryan]

[helicopterp]

Hot.

But, hey, now you've got your whole Tuesday early a.m. ahead of you!
_________________
Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Shapermc]