i finished the book just to make sure it really was shit. and it was.
now i am off to new, and hopefully better, adventures

you want adventures?

go visit the empress...

coming up dawg.... coming up.

I am currently reading an anthropological text called The Gender of Debt by Mariano Pavanello, an Italian retired professor of anthropology.

he actually reached out to me and offered the book for me to review. https://www.cambridgescholars.com/the-gender-of-debt

My stated goal with my book review blog was for it to become a resource, and for heady, nerdy, intellectual types to want to contact me so I can review their books, and IT IS HAPPENING! (Just took almost 5 years....) http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/

was just coming in to say CONGRATS!

must spread more quantum paste...

:) (needs more charactersssss)

Right on, man. Well done!

(I was actually really looking forward to reviews of the remaining New Sun books, hence the hounding... so the hounding has been a compliment, and I shall pay you more!)

Made about 111 page progress on "Small Victories". Started just short of Mosely's firing all the way through "The Real Thing"'s rocket and ending in the early stages of "Angel Dust"'s recording.


Loving this book, but having a long appreciation for the band in the first place does NOT hurt.

Thank the gods


Cool! Well done!

And finished. Onwards to Pirate Latitudes. Been a good weekend.

feel free to laugh at me. im testing this app

https://www.blinkist.com/

yes yes yes. cliff notes are not books.

and yet so many nonfiction books these days are just 2 or 3 ideas wrapped in a bunch of fluff...

why not skip the fluff and decide later what’s worth a full read?

been reading a bunch of summaries. so far so good...

I am reading Maria Stepanova's "Nach dem Gedächtnis" (original: Pamjati pamjati). She writes about all things that have to do with memory. It is really nice, as she is using theory, novels, art, but also stories of her own, and letters and pictures of/written by her older family members (of those she has known, and those she had never met) in order to discuss memory. At times it is hard to follow and I am not sure if I do get everything she is saying/I have to re-read a lot. That is probably because I am not so used to russian sentence structure? I am not sure. I do enjoy the book a lot though and I am sad that, apparently, there aren't any other books by the author translated into German.
I saw the author doing a reading back in March. Before that, I had never heard of her. The reading was of her poetry (which I can't find translations of; at the event they used a power point presentation with translations in Dutch, French, and English) was in Russian, it was so nice to listen to Poetry in Russian! I instantly fell in love with her. She also talked about the book that I am reading right now, but there was no mention of any translation. Found it by "accident" in a book store and overdrafted my bank account, ha ha ha.

I don't think there is an English translation out yet. I could only find (the original) Russian, German, Dutch. The French version will come out next month, I think. If you guys can read any of those languages, I highly recommend reading this book. If you cannot, I am crossing my fingers for you for an English translation to come out soon!


/edit: I went book shopping, and I will these books shortly:

Helene Bukowski - Milchzähne
Annie Ernaux - A Man's Place
Édouard Louis - History of Violence
A book of essays by David Grossmann, titled Eine Taube erschießen
Bessel van der Kolk - The Body Keeps the Score
Leslie Jamison - The Recovering
Tiqqun - Introduction to Civil War
W.G. Sebald - Austerlitz

|||| lol so its just Ready Player One for hippies?

ooo look at me im a fancy man listening to throbbing grizzle and eating miracle whip with a fork look at my fancy dress

XDXDXD 100

i read this book

And topped off Pirate Latitudes. One of the things I found interesting is that it was actually posthumously published for Crichton.

This month I actually have a to be read pile of books. Currently reading

For lack of better term, I'm reading an indie book named "Foop!" by a Chris Genoa. Definitely an odd one, and not sure what i think of it, even being halfway through. However, it's one of those i'll finish just to see how it finishes.


Likely to follow up with "Rat Girl" by Kristen Hersh of Throwing Muses fame.

How is that? I liked the other hardboiled novel he wrote, Joyland, but I hear mixed things about this one.

I literally just started it, I'm 50 pages in. Its alright so far.

There’s a corny series on Syfy called “Eureka” that contains a fuckton of references to “The Colorado Kid,” but is not a direct adaptation.

Weird.

Also, Syfy channel, so pretty bad.

You might be thinking of a series called "Haven". In the introduction to this book, they mention it, but say it was a fairly loose adaptation.

Finishing up How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis. 1880’s NYC, life in the unregulated tenements, just after Civil War and during the great migrations from Poland, Italy, etc. Fascinating history, interesting and flowery writing style. Unintentionally racist in parts...definitely worth it for anyone who appreciates history and the lives of those less notable than those history usually emphasizes

a short history of brexit



im reading a summarized version of that already “short” history. which is kind of a brilliant scheme haaa haaa haaa.

didn’t know everything began with coal and steel...

and it’s hilarious that the single market was... thatcher’s idea!?!?

and wow, the eejit may did indeed back herself into a million corners

And already about half way through Rat Girl. Not sure if I'll finish it all up tomorrow, or leave some for next weekend. Regardless, I have "Horns" queued up after it.

I ended up finishing off Rat Girl, which I quite enjoyed all in all.

this shit rules

This morning I started A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

I got Manhattan Reach sitting around, Xmas present, may get to it sometime.

NR: The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell, 1937. Damn, we've come a long way in less than a hundred years.

It's also very, very funny

what’s the gist of it?

that is partially the result of politics as belief. i started thinking about that the other day when you described the liberal democrats opportunism/lack of beliefs. i nodded, but the word “belief” kept rattling in my head. this is where we have settled. politics becomes not the rational contest for the running of the polis but a matter of religious faith.

in response to that previous thing, i thought that liberals do hold some values as somewhat “sacred” but deal more with pragmatic agendas than with utopias, and could therefore appear as opportunistic. but i’m not saying that’s the case with your liberal democrats (whom i don’t really know), just with the notion in the abstract. the faithless appear fickle to the faithful.

as for the religion bit: it’s all about credos these days, isn’t it? there is a serious split and a loss of common ground that has made everyone more intolerant. plus a kind of repetitive strain fatigue: the same fucking dumb interactions over and over and over. so people begin to take practical shortcuts.

personally i try to be tolerant when possible and engage in dialogue, but at the same time i’ve had it up to my last nut with certain specimens, and will shoot both barrels at a moment’s notice. which is not running away from discussion, but engaging it in more brutal fashion than usual. i mean, life is too short to spend it entertaining the mentally ill. i take uncle bill’s advice.

speaking of the deluded woke (i often treat them with the same kind of irritation as i do the magas), there was an article in the washington post yesterday about how a bakery just won $11 million from oberlin college in a lawsuit for having been framed and boycotted as racist by school administrators. turned out the baker was just trying to stop an underage shoplifter from pinching some wine bottles from his store, and a political clusterfuck ensued. lol college! home of the holy inquisition.

A lot of what you say reflects my thinking about 'woke' politics. It does feel increasingly like a religion (although I've had far more stimulating conversations with Catholics, or Muslims, than I have with any SJW I've met). I just hope they eventually fuck off on the unicorns they rode in on, but I don't see any sign of it yet. So I'm actually far less tolerant of them than the author of the book.

i don’t know how that works in your land but i think something has changed with the politics here.

i have this professor friend i visit from time to time when i go “to town”. she used to be a fun person to argue with. well, still is, but there was an... incident....

a couple of years ago we had a disagreement about the portrayal of women in a film and we’re sitting at this diner exchanging viewpoints when she started banging her fist on the table like kruschev with his shoe at the UN. the screamings continued later and ufff uncomfortable.

we’ve made peace since then and have continued our friendly disputes. but i saw that incident as a sort of seismograph that reflects tectonic shift. maybe it’s this whole poetry business of looking for the universal in the particular, maybe im a fool who thinks he sees “signs”, but yeah, it was a sign to me that the general rhetoric, not just of this person but of the culture, is getting more shrill at both ends of the spectrum.

i had a similar incident with a friend who used to throw big quasi-orgies but has now become a raging, preachy, self-righteous, ultramilitant... something. ayayay.... im avoiding now.

shit’s turning ugly all around.

but fuck the magas first and foremost. of all the pestilent beasts out there, they take the (shit) cake.

On one level I think the woke thing is strictly down to the millennials, but a lot of the most strident academics pushing this stuff are older than me. So it's an unholy alliance between the boomers and the millennials. With poor Gen Xers left wondering how the fuck did we go from giggling along to Butthole Surfers records to suddenly having to watch everything we say out of fear of offending someone we don't even know, and almost certainly wouldn't like if we did.

if anything, the early love of debauchery was handed down to gen-xers by boomers. earlier genxers grew up looking at the degenerate glory of the 70s and trying to emulate it. and then, there was AIDS.

but see, there were always also puritanical genxers. see: ian mackaye &co.

when i was still living in dc the city paper published this glorious little article:
https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/...on-the-killjoy
it went unnoticed outside the dc metro i think, but i once met the author who was saying he caught a lot of shit for it. someone named in the article called him to tell him to “eat a bag of dicks”, etc. hahahaha.

the writer was an older guy—a boomer by the look of it. and he maybe had a very specific idea of what rock music was about. but he’s doing it in ideological terms that had already carried into many genxers. sometimes i see similar expectations in someone older, like that village voice critic... christgau? who doesnt like stereolab cuz he thinks marxism and rock dont mix lolol.

take a character like hank whatever in californication: he’s supposed to be a gen-xer, weep over cobain, etc, but his dreams are all pre-aids rocknroll boomer fantasies.

see if you spot the same generational and ideological fault lines i did in that article. for me it’s a very significant artifact even if it wasn’t impactful. it shows forces at play like a mineral sample shows the geology that formed it. im interested in the geology.

but anyway, this little woke intifada doesn’t have to conclude so badly. once the pendulum swings back maybe we’ll all be a little more inclusive and less abusive without having to be so paranoid at some future orgy.

That was a great article. Yes, there's an evident connection between the boomers and GX although, obviously, generations themselves are always too broad to be truly definable. Fugazi and Butthole Surfers were both GX bands, just as Zappa and Phil Ochs were both Boomers.

Equally 'millennials' is, on reflection, too broad a term to be that useful. I talk to millennials at work, I read their comments on 4chan, I interact with them here, I meet them at a football match and I see huge irreconcilable differences, but they all qualify as millennials. No doubt the SJW types dominate at universities but I wouldn't want to say about other areas. And even there, I'd say, the woke thing (which I use synonymously with SJW) seems far more dominant among academics than students. Those students who do fit that stereotype are just far more vocal than the majority, and get near unanimous support from academics.

Anyway I gave up on the book about halfway through, when it started repeating itself and using endless examples to make the same point. A case of a decent article unnecessarily inflated into a book.

a case of most books being published today lol

related to this: i tried the blinkist app and loved it

it’s like cliff notes for nonfiction. 6-7 pages to summarize all main points, and offers text + audio versions.

yes, peterson’s 12 advices for whatever is there too lol

(more on peterson later)

all this true, no generation is monolithic, but where it gets meaningful is that certain currents become more dominant within each generation even if they don’t represent the whole of it.

take for example the hippies and counterculture of the 60s, a time of great upheaval: they were never more than 25% of all young people. the other 75% of them were squares.

the 80s were marked by yuppie culture, but how many people were actually yuppies?

there was medieval stuff still done in the renaissance, there was renaissance stuff being done in the baroque, the renaissance returns in the neoclassical, the baroque comes back as rococo, etc.

i see these as forces/currents that take turns taking over rather than definitive periods or generations. vico was right.

all you really need to define a [whatever] is:

1) a generation large enough to make waves (tiny gen-xers were sandwiched between mass boomers and millennials never had the chance to set the agenda)

2) a portion of that big generation large enough to determine the kinds of waves made by said generation

gen-xers are torn between the generational pull that preceded them and the one that succeeded them. they didn’t have enough weight on their own.

recently read a piece in the economist (hi h8kurdt!) that hypothesized that a new tianamen square could not happen today in china because the large generation that rebelled in the late 80s/early 90s is now older and more conservative; and the generation that succeeded them, while restless, simply lacks the numbers to make a difference.

we’re all just a bunch of math problems, haaa haaa haaa



i wouldn’t even say they dominate universities: they only dominate liberal arts colleges and humanities departments. people in physics or engineering or business or (i’ll go there) petroleum science (lol) are gonna say very different things than the more strident cultural studies types.

so you’ll get these sort of shenanigans at oberlin but not at mit for example.

again a matter of enough numbers.

...

ok i dont know where peterson went so i guess we’ll skip that

I have friends in science departments who say they're increasingly self-censoring simply by not looking into areas that might end up giving the 'wrong' answer, for fear of losing funding or simple demonisation, or worse. No biologist wants to look into anything that might contradict the approved 'woke' position on gender, and face being called a trans-phobe as a consequence. Just as you won't find many Climatologists willing to ask difficult questions about man made climate change, just in case.

Meanwhile a Harvard Law professor who represented Harvey Weinstein has just been dismissed due to student protests. So Harvard Law School (supposedly the most respected law school in the world) has just folded under pressure from students effectively questioning the right to counsel. I mean where do you even start?

raising children who feel entitled to never be offended, never be disturbed, never be insulted, has created what you guys are speaking about.

As always, BLAME THE PARENTS, not the school system or the university system.

I worked at Univ of Houston for 7 years. Houston is right up there with NYC as a multi-cultural melting pot (probably more actually), and the University was very much like that, with many first time University students and tons of international students. Most kids that go to UH are working class kids, or lower middle class kids. They never put on the kind of bullshit you hear about from the coddled fancy schools.