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"Christabel". I'm not a fan of Coleridge but this was agreeably horny.
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Jun 14, 2020 05:11
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Safety Biscuits posted:"Christabel". I'm not a fan of Coleridge but this was agreeably horny. everything about this post is embarrassing
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Jun 14, 2020 05:41
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I propose a two axis grading scale for books X axis is horny Y axis is nazi Mishima is v. Horny and v. Nazi Lord of the Rings is not very horny but very nazi
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Jun 14, 2020 17:57
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I propose a two axis grading scale for books What is at 0,0? White Fragility? Edit: poo poo, I was just thinking of horniness. Definitely needs some example for calibration. tuyop fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Jun 15, 2020 |
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Jun 15, 2020 03:01
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Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides. I was getting pretty bored of this book by the halfway point despite the neat history of Detroit baked in, but the third quarter took a nice turn and I actually really enjoyed the last quarter. A pretty emotional ending to a nice multigenerational story about incestuous grecians.
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Jun 17, 2020 00:53
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Copying this from the PYF terrible book thread: The Guest List by Lucy Foley. The premise is that a wedding takes place on a remote island, only for it to end in murder. Notice how I said it ends in murder. That's because the murder happens at the literal and chronological end of the book, so there's no room for a detective, and that also means all the action before the murder is just a wedding. A wedding full of coke-snorting snobs, but still a wedding for the first 350 pages of this large-margin, big-font, 370 page book. To compensate for this lack of action the author keeps flashing forward to the aftermath of murder, again and again in a "Three Weeks Earlier" teaser. It never gets exciting and every cliffhanger is that annoying faux type: A big man holding a blood knife appears! He's just carving lamb in the kitchen. A scary face peers through the window! It's one of the guests who arrived late. You know that trope where someone stumbles on a murder and immediately decides to manhandle the murder-weapon? That's also here. The last 20 pages has a series of revelations where it turns out all the characters are connected to a degree that Kevin Bacon would blush. But given how small the cast is it fails to surprise. At the end it feels like the Author got tired and hammers the entire epilogue in a thousand words or less. If this gets a TV adaptation it'll need a poo poo-ton more murder or perhaps a completely different ending. As is this reads like someone mixed Shameless with Murder She Wrote, but reads nowhere near interesting as that combination.
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Jun 17, 2020 13:24
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tuyop posted:What is at 0,0? White Fragility? Discworld
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Jun 17, 2020 15:36
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Peanut Butler posted:Discworld All fantasy at its core is at least a little bit nazi
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Jun 17, 2020 15:42
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Yeah I hated all those subtle hints of Nazi sympathies in Tehanu and On a Sunbeam. I don't think anyone would argue with "many", and few would argue with "most", but "All" is a uh... strong proposition.
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Jun 17, 2020 15:54
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Sarern posted:Yeah I hated all those subtle hints of Nazi sympathies in Tehanu and On a Sunbeam. Fantasy has inescapable Palingenetic undertones which means there will always be trace nazism
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Jun 17, 2020 15:57
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If a random poster can find two counterexamples in less than five minutes those undertones aren't that inescapable.
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Jun 17, 2020 16:06
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Sarern posted:If a random poster can find two counterexamples in less than five minutes those undertones aren't that inescapable. how are they counter-examples of having no palingenesis?
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Jun 17, 2020 16:08
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I get that you're referencing Ur-Fascism but 'containing palingenetic ultranationalism' doesn't describe all fantasy novels, nor is its presence alone a signifier of fascist tendencies like I can't think of a way to describe A Wizard of Earthsea as a Nazi book without being intentionally absurd
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Jun 17, 2020 16:21
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I didn't say "palingenetic ultranationalism" I just said "Palingenesis"
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Jun 17, 2020 16:23
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I didn't say "palingenetic ultranationalism" I just said "Palingenesis" which is not in itself a feature or indicator of fascism
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Jun 17, 2020 16:24
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Peanut Butler posted:which is not in itself a feature or indicator of fascism but it is foundational to fascist thought ergo inescapable from trace naziism
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Jun 17, 2020 16:27
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trace nazism
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Jun 17, 2020 16:52
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how do you so consistently manage to make potentially interesting ideas so stupid and dull
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Jun 17, 2020 16:52
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CestMoi posted:how do you so consistently manage to make potentially interesting ideas so stupid and dull practice
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Jun 17, 2020 16:53
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trace nazism is the kind of term you'd come up with if the extent of your engagement with politics is following people on twitter with handles like michel_fuckault
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Jun 17, 2020 16:59
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CestMoi posted:trace nazism is the kind of term you'd come up with if the extent of your engagement with politics is following people on twitter with handles like michel_fuckault Hrm yes I should take the joke of rating all books in TBB on a graph of "Horniness and Naziness" with utmost seriousness
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Jun 17, 2020 17:03
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CestMoi posted:trace nazism is the kind of term you'd come up with if the extent of your engagement with politics is following people on twitter with handles like michel_fuckault brb, registering a new twitter account
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Jun 17, 2020 17:30
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i’m more of a leftover socialist myself
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Jun 17, 2020 21:15
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just a dash of totalitarianism
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Jun 17, 2020 21:24
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agreeably horny trace nazism
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Jun 17, 2020 21:50
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CestMoi posted:trace nazism This water here is continuous with water that probably touched a U-Boat in WWII. The molecules remember.
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Jun 18, 2020 00:06
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Mel Mudkiper posted:just a dash of totalitarianism Subtotalitarianism
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Jun 18, 2020 00:06
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just gotta calculate and add the tax in
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Jun 18, 2020 00:07
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Bilirubin posted:This water here is continuous with water that probably touched a U-Boat in WWII. The molecules remember. TBB: homeopathic naziism
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Jun 18, 2020 00:36
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Sarern posted:TBB: homeopathic naziism Get on that HA
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Jun 18, 2020 00:37
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Peanut Butler posted:Discworld I'm finding Discworld to be very horny, it just doesn't happen to any of the POV characters or on-screen.
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Jun 18, 2020 02:38
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Poldarn posted:I'm finding Discworld to be very horny, it just doesn't happen to any of the POV characters or on-screen. Mort is pretty horny
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Jun 18, 2020 02:41
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Sarern posted:TBB: homeopathic naziism 
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Jun 18, 2020 04:31
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I just finished Malone Dies, and I don't really see the point of reading any other book (not at the moment, at least.) It definitely feels like a crossover point for Beckett from modernism to aware post-modernism. I was approaching it from the point of view Beckett was writing his career into the story, the act of writing written into the story (with the character literally writing another.) At the end it felt like the deaths were to give permission for the reader to write/create/imagine/think their way forward for the characters/themselves. A great read overall, and probably the "tightest" of the Beckett novels I've read so far.
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Jun 20, 2020 05:59
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Just finished The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels. This was an interesting exploration of the evolution of the concept of Satan in the early Christian Church from the tester of the old testament to diabolical forces driving ones theological or political enemies. The final chapter provides a quick overview too of Gnostic Christian thought but her earlier book goes into more detail on that topic.
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Jun 22, 2020 04:00
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Finished On the Road by Jack Kerouac. For some reason I had it in my head that the book was one of those very quotable but otherwise dull slogs, and whoosh was I wrong. I probably had someone insist I read it when I was younger and ran the other way from the advice. It was a brisk read and the story (which is mostly lightly fictionalized truth) was structured amazingly well with each part taking its own arc in similar but sometimes wildly different tonal ways. I really appreciated in a story like this that the main characters are not portrayed as generational heroes, Dean's final scenes in particular were brutal. I caught the heavy Catholic imagery and tones as well, and I honestly thought the book was pushing away from religion due to the conformity (ie, the imagery was talking about how you find those things by running away from the church) and was surprised after I finished to see Kerouac thought basically the opposite. Either way, I don't think Kerouac was necessarily looking for consistency between his ideas and his work though. Anyway, it's good. If you're looking for a "classic" that easy to read, and has some just amazing prose I'd recommend it. It really captures the "your good buddy tells you about this amazing bender" feel to a T.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:55
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Just finished How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighbourhood by Peter Moskowitz. It's a pretty comprehensive overview of the history and mechanisms of gentrification by studying gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York. I really appreciated the blending of activist and community member voices with academic research on the subject. Moskowitz pretty successfully centres people of colour and their victories and ongoing resistance while also sharing his own experience. It's very well done, recommended.
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Jun 22, 2020 15:57
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Lockback posted:Anyway, it's good. If you're looking for a "classic" that easy to read, and has some just amazing prose I'd recommend it. It really captures the "your good buddy tells you about this amazing bender" feel to a T. It's more "modern" than what you've described, but Threshold by Rob Doyle captures something similar. Less "good buddy telling you about an amazing bender" and more random mysterious guy in a pub who's done interesting stuff but you don't know if he's full of poo poo, just that you probably won't see him again. It has the same vibe of someone recounting, learnedly, their excess, while indulging in excess (i.e. actually writing a book about it.)
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Jun 22, 2020 16:01
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Mrenda posted:It's more "modern" than what you've described, but Threshold by Rob Doyle captures something similar. Less "good buddy telling you about an amazing bender" and more random mysterious guy in a pub who's done interesting stuff but you don't know if he's full of poo poo, just that you probably won't see him again. It has the same vibe of someone recounting, learnedly, their excess, while indulging in excess (i.e. actually writing a book about it.) Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson is also this way, but first person. Also short. It flops between hilarious and horrifying, depending on my mood when reading.
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Jun 22, 2020 22:26
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Finished reading SF-LOVERS Digest Volume 01. Volume 01 started on September 9 1979 and lasted until June 30 1980, with 175 total issues. Overall, reading the SF-LOVERS mailing archive has been a good idea. Lots of interesting discussion, with only a few things that aged super badly. The mailing list maintainers (Brodie@PARC-MAXC & DUFFY@MIT-AI) deserved raises or demotions/pay cuts for all the work they put in on it (since the SF-LOVERS mailing ran ontop of 100% taxpayer funded Offical ARPANET networks/servers). ====== part 1 Jun 20, 2020 13:56 Re-reading the SF-LOVERS digests from the beginning, only I'm taking notes this time. -If you're disappointed that there isn't more black/non-white/female/alt-gender main characters in modern fantasy + science-fiction stories, that has been an ongoing complaint about the scifi + fantasy genres for at least 40 yrs (source: SF-LOVERS Digest Vol 1, late March 1980) -Posts coming from @UCLA-Security in the SF-LOVERS mailing list were highly readable: lots of interesting behind the scenes info about the Star Trek franchise, prophetic generic statements, and detailed summaries of then current sci-fi themed tv series/tv-movies you can now find at wikipedia/imdb. -If you thought Roger Zelazny's original content do-not-steal AMBER series sucked and was derivative....you are correct! AMBER series was apparently a direct ripoff of Philip Jose Farmer's "World of Tiers" series. But since PJF ripped off everyone else constantly, no lawsuits happened. -Even back in 1980 Andre Norton had a staggering amount of published fiction out in the world. -You can palpably feel the growth of Star Wars fandom as time goes on. A now forgotten part of the "Empire Strikes Back" marketing was phone banks you could call to listen to special teaser audio clips from the ESB cast, and those phone banks being unavailable keeps cropping up. 40 years later I'm wondering WTF was in those phone-bank ESB audio clips. -Robert Forward was a "hard-scifi author" of his era, and used the SF-LOVERS mailing list as a sounding board/rebuttal forum to hard scifi "that doesn't make sense" questions and statements. -the ongoing jokes, taunts and dares about computer viruses and network tapeworms in the SF-LOVERS mailing list give some compelling backstory to Robert Tappan Morris's 1988 "breaking of the Internet". -Hal Draper's 1961 short story MS Fnd in a Lbry was very prophetic, especially for software developers ====== part 2 June 20, 2020 18:15 Calm the gently caress down. Or get mad at AQE@MIT-MC and their 03-19-1980 post "Re: Similarities between "World of Tiers" and "Amber" which I quoted. Lots of people in this thread and the previous SF&F mega-thread have commented that Zelazny's Amber series isn't the greatest and was at best written for the paycheck. Other stuff oddball stuff gleaned from SF-LOVERS Digest Vol 01 so far(only 42% through on the re-read while taking notes): -Both Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle made the humble-brag claim at a 1980 MIT lecture called "How to get Rich Quick" that "they, and many other experienced authors. write without editing their work". (DGSHARP@MIT-AI 02-13-1980) Robert Forward chimed in a few days later to "clarify" Niven and Pournelle's statements about "never editing" or revising their work and to make the counter humble-brag of "Poul Anderson and me both agonize over each word at least 6 or 8 times before the final draft is sent into the publishers." -An early collaborative fantasy-scifi world setting called Darkover keeps getting mentioned over and over again in the SF-LOVERS. However, this is one of the things that have aged super badly because Marion Zimmer Bradley was a major contributor to the Darkover series...and keeps getting praised for writing strong female characters in the Darkover stories. Ughh. -During discussion of black main characters, SALawrence@MIT-Multics brought up Richard Lupoff's The Sacred Locomotive Files because of it's sheer weirdness. The story had a white main character but almost everyone else in the book was secretly black and appeared to be white from taking a weird drug that changed their skin color and also made them obese as a side-effect. The book sounds weird enough that I've added it to my "try to find it" list -More retroactively weird Star Wars stuff. Fanzines named BANTHA TRACKS (great user name btw) and ALDERAAN. One on one interviews with David Prouse, the body-actor actively erased from Star Wars by Lucas and Disney. Bootleg SW character themes & SW themed albums before John Williams scores became the default Star Wars sound. e: oh jesus. Richard Stallman (RMS@MIT-AI) just popped up on the SF-LOVERS mailing list for the first time ever. Noticed it was him from the EMACS humblebrag and the omnipresent RMS handle. Just checked, RMS only posted 3 times in the Vol 01 SF-LOVERS Digest. 2nd time was debating about Darth Vader really being Luke's father and 3rd time was to nitpick a core piece of Robert Forward's Dragons Egg. ===== part 3 June 20, 2020 22:34 You may be right. Up to where I am at in the SF-LOVERS mailing list(late april 1980), the Darkover series has been mentioned as a collaborative world with MZB having the most stories/having the strongest female characters/writing in it. Still have over 150 mb/20 years of mailing list posts left to dig through, and I tend to outright power-skim for sanity's sake whenever MZB get's mentioned in it anyway. ===== part 4 June 22, 2020 10:11 My SF-LOVERS Digest Vol 01 re-read is still going on, 82% finished with about 70 bookmarks and climbing. Distinct posting persona's have emerged. People from UCLA-Security mostly post about non-print scifi media, a SuperMechaGodzilla style troll has appeared along with a tech-fetisher that maps everything to it's equivalent in Larry Niven's stories (lightsabers=variable blades, superconducters, klingons=kzinti, etc). Besides Stallman, Don Woods the godfather of cRPGs + roguelike games started posting in the SF-LOVERS mailing list....am now waiting for the people responsible for creating TCP/IP, HTML, etc to appear. MZB/Darkover chat mostly died off at the 48% mark, while Zelazny's AMBER series only got mentioned majorly by the guy that triggered jng2058. My back-burnered theory that Philip Jose Farmer was the Neil Gaiman of his era keeps getting fueled up whenever PJF stories come up. The burgeoning Star Wars chat in SF-LOVERS got segregated to a special PM-only SF-LOVERS edition where Star Wars spoiler discussions were 100% ok after Empire Strike Back came out. The PM edition Star Wars chat is very skip-able for a 2020 reader, yet I swear 95.999% of the theories brought up there eventually happened in Star Wars Expanded universe fiction. SF-LOVERS Digest Vol 01 Oddball things pt 3 -The time in Action Comics where "Superman got temporarily brain-damaged by an enemy, and had a TRS-80 think for him" -not wanting to be captured by HUMAN Naturalists if you're an alien(Alien Intelligence tests) -"the giant mechanical turtles of the ice planet of Hoth" -VIA GALACTICA the musical ======= part 5 June 22 2020 17:43 The first two paragraphs of this post verbatim. ====== Next up on my reading list is SF-LOVERS Digest Volume 02, which literally pickups the next day on July 1 1980 and ends on December 31 1980.
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Jun 23, 2020 00:04
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