- Hieronymous Alloy
- Jan 30, 2009
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Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!
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Morbid Hound
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You can vote for more than one, but please only vote if it's a book you'd actually like to read and talk about. Thanks!
1) The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
Please read my favorite nonfiction book of all time: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. The dude was a world class narcissist who also happened to be a legitimately talented sculptor who rubbed elbows with many of Renaissance Italy's brightest political and artistic lights. Every sentence is a masterpiece of total self-absorbtion and there are also enough duels and battles and imprisonments to keep things lively. It is also a detailed and interesting description of the time and place.
I saw him in Harold Bloom's list and read his wiki. Wild.
"In the attack on Rome by Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, Cellini's bravery proved of signal service to the pontiff. According to his own accounts, he himself shot and injured Philibert of Châlon, prince of Orange (allegedly Cellini also killed Charles III, Duke of Bourbon during the Siege of Rome)."
"On returning to Rome, he was employed in the working of jewellery and in the execution of dies for private medals and for the papal mint. In 1529 his brother Cecchino killed a Corporal of the Roman Watch and in turn was wounded by an arquebusier, later dying of his wound. Soon afterward Benvenuto killed his brother's killer – an act of blood revenge but not justice as Cellini admits that his brother's killer had acted in self-defense. Cellini fled to Naples to shelter from the consequences of an affray with a notary, Ser Benedetto, whom he had wounded. Through the influence of several cardinals, Cellini obtained a pardon. He found favor with the new pope, Paul III, notwithstanding a fresh homicide during the interregnum three days after the death of Pope Clement VII in September 1534. The fourth victim was a rival goldsmith, Pompeo of Milan."
"In 1548, Cellini was accused by a woman named Margherita, of having committed sodomy with her son, Vincenzo"
"Meanwhile, in Paris a former model and lover brought charges against him of using her "after the Italian fashion" (i.e. sodomy)."
TLDR: Cellini was a cool dude and I'm going to read his book.
2) The Toy Collector by James Gunn
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The Toy Collector by James Gunn is pretty good dark middle-brow lit from a guy that would go on to make genre flicks. He wrote it during his Troma days. S'about a guy that steals prescription drugs from his hospital job so he can buy nostalgic collectibles while he constantly fucks up his life and alienates everyone around him.
Pretty self-aware in many ways. Like I said, it was written over five years, during his Troma days (published in 2000) when he was living paycheck to paycheck in NYC. It is a very bleak book. It has more in common with Burroughs's Junky and Welsh's Trainspotting, or, for a film analogy, kinda like Good Time but without a heist element. Just a book about a severely depressed guy, loving over everyone around him, recalling memories of a crappy childhood with trauma and neglect, covering his wounds with totems of nostalgia, while still convincing himself that he's better than everyone around him. It's a strange outlier in his career, since he really never got anywhere as dark or as grounded as his novel. Kind of a shame he'll probably never write something as good as this, now that he's bouncing back and forth between DC and Marvel's films stuff.
It's not all bleak. It has a dark and vulgar sense of humor throughout.
It's polarizing, but I've read it multiple times at various stages in my life, and it holds up. There's a couple of book reviews out there where fans of his Marvel stuff read it and it broke them.
3) We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
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From George Orwell's review:
Several years after hearing of its existence, I have at last got my hands on a copy of Zamyatin’s We, which is one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age. . . .
Writing at about the time of Lenin’s death, he cannot have had the Stalin dictatorship in mind, and conditions in Russia in 1923 were not such that anyone would revolt against them on the ground that life was becoming too safe and comfortable. What Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any particular country but the implied aims of industrial civilisation. I have not read any of his other books, but I learn from Gleb Struve that he had spent several years in England and had written some blistering satires on English life. It is evident from We that he had a strong leaning towards primitivism. Imprisoned by the Czarist Government in 1906, and then imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in 1922 in the same corridor of the same prison, he had cause to dislike the political regime he had lived under, but his book is not simply the expression of a grievance. It is in effect a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again. This is a book to look out for when an English version appears.
4) Winners Take All By Anand Giridharadas
quote:
Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas review – superb hate-reading
The big questions animating this book are the ones central to western politics today: why is the state of affairs made nonsense by the economic crisis still in place? What explains both the governing class’s lack of serious response to 2008’s banking crash, and the vast inequality that continues in its wake? Rather than economic or political analysis, Winners Take All is a study of the alibis and strategies used by Dell and his kind to justify inertia. Giridharadas takes us inside charitable foundations and back-slapping summits to meet management consultants, greying politicians and a few of the most important names in philanthropy. His is the view from the panel discussion, the venture capitalist’s boardroom and the fundraiser with its bespoke canapes.
As reporting assignments go, this calls not so much for a flak jacket as a sick bag. In a Manhattan crammed with visiting dignitaries for UN week, Bill Clinton convenes a conference at which the audience is told: “Empowering girls and women is the hot new branding thing!” David Miliband gazes on as the boss of Western Union chides the prime minister of Sweden: “One of the issues in the politicians, with all due respect, Mr Prime Minister, is that you guys are voted by local people, but you’re responsible for global issues.” Never mind that Mr Western Union is beholden to his shareholders, it’s the nation state that’s parochial.
. . .
Simply put, we pay the billionaires to tell us what to do. What gives their demands such amplification isn’t just their money, vital though that is, it is that they and their friends in government have razed many of the countervailing institutions, whether organised labour or local government. Winners Take All doesn’t name it, but what it’s really describing is an institutional crisis in which the political landscape has been cleared of its forces for representation and reformation. Instead, power has been put in the hands of a group that believes trade unions are merely cartels, thinkers are far inferior to “thought leaders” and hell is other people voting.
Giridharadas’s answer to all this is simple: a bigger and more powerful state. “The government is us,” he quotes Italian philosopher Chiara Cordelli approvingly. And he is right that it is high time politics took back the ground it has lost to policy. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 11:39 on Jan 31, 2020
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Jan 31, 2020 11:37
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Apr 25, 2024 15:31
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- quantumfoam
- Dec 25, 2003
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Nobody appears to like BOTM February 2020 options.
Got excited when I saw James Gunn on the BOTM list, then unexcited when I realized it was not a book by James E Gunn, the 96 yr old scifi author.
Why not go rogue and do Guy Boothby's A Prince of Swindlers for February 2020 BOTM instead?
It's a bunch of heists set in Victorian england, it's free/copyright expired, etc.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54771
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Feb 2, 2020 15:41
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- Sham bam bamina!
- Nov 6, 2012
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ƨtupid cat
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I advise anyone interested in We to stay away from the Penguin Classics translation by Clarence Brown, which very stupidly invents the name "OneState" for the One State, presumably because people wouldn't understand that it's a dystopia without that extra dash of Ingsoc artifice.
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Feb 3, 2020 19:11
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Jan 31, 2020 11:37
