fucking hysterical. her book is just as funny as her stand-up act.

she's ok but not so great. i watched a couple of her tv specials and about halfway through the HBO special i got tired of it-- it's the same thing over & over: chinky, nigger, spick, i love you, i'm nice, chinky, spick, nigger, i love you, cripples, cripples, etc.

anyway i scored this at the bookstore yesterday:



sweet book.

What'd you think of Ham On Rye?

Ham On Rye is great.

It's a good, solid book. I wouldn't call it amazing or anything, but I think that's mainly because of I can't relate to 99% of his stories. I'd recommend it to people. 7.5/10

I'm reading "Stormbringer" by Michael Moorcock. I own a copy of the 1983 reprint. The cover leaves a lot to be desired.

yeah, but you forgot "fag" too. thats why i love her. shes an equal opportunity offender, and i love the offensive stand up.

anyways, about to start this:

Yet if anyone else uses the word "fag", loony lefties label them homophobes. Double standards have always been the norm for loony lefties.

not bad. well done

I love Bukowski. His letters are particularly good reading. The only novel I've started to read but put down was Pulp. It wasn't that it was bad... I just prefer his non-fictional work.


I'm reading Tropic of Cancer.... again.

I'm totally with you on this. It's ever since those Muslims got into power, I can't kick the shit out of a black cripple without the Politically Correct brigade tutting heavily.

Incidentally, while I'm here, in case anyone's wondering why I never post in this thread, it's because I don't tend to read whole books and mostly stick to academic things that are of marginal interest to... well, even myself I suppose. This week has seen me reading up on Bible slash fic, 'post-Madonna' feminism [gash], Valentinian Gnosticism [AMAZING] and 11th century mysticism. Just in case you were wondering.

It's a load of male feminists making 80s Madonna into feminist wank fantasy. If you get a chance, John Fiske's 'Madonna' is probably the single worst essay I've ever had the misfortune to read.

the zizek and the jackson came in the post recently, but i haven't started either of them yet, just glanced at a few of the articles in the jackson one - first impressions are that it lives up to the whole zero books ideal and is definitly high calibre music journalism.

and this one i've read 10 times online already, but needed a real life copy - they should hand this out on the street instead of bibles

Tell me about this last one. That looks like the sort of thing I might like.

Also, props for Zizek. One of the few philosophers who, regardless of what he's actually saying, always says something meaningful.

Yeah, saw Glenn Beck fear monger over The Coming Insurrection. I would hate that to be the extent of its impact in America but I figure it will be. Should pick up a copy, anyway.

As for Zizek, he's the most love/hate contemporary philosopher that I know of. Some guy on another message board I frequent said literally the exact opposite, that nothing he says is meaningful. Really, I know Zizek mostly from his Marxism 2009 debate and that's about it.

the coming insurrection -

it was called "a manual for terrorism" by the french government"
the supposed authors (they probably weren't but had some connection to them) were arressted in their commune somewhere in northern france. they were released ultimately, i think zizek and agamben had something to do with circulating a petition calling for their release.

when a translation of the book hit new york - people organised an unofficially reading in a barnes and noble. after a crowd gathered the manager tried to get them to fuck off - but they refused and started reading out passages until they were eventually kicked out, they continued down the street and had looted a perfume shop and screamed at the cops before it was all over.

but perhaps best of all, glenn "I AM LITERALLY FUCKING INSANE" beck read an advanced copy and dedicated a segment on his show about it. in which he warns that the ultra left is preparing to take up arms, and we should all be ready.

someone in the new statesman called in potentially the most important book of the century. nina power of the infinite thought blog wrote a review for frieze which i can't read because i'm not a subscriber, and perhaps most interestingly of all, it's really pissing off some of the anarchist community. they really seem threatened by it, perhaps because it threatens their cosy/ineffective activist structures and heirarchies? some of the online reactions to it have been idiotic and irrationally dismissive, calling it simply "poor" and lacking in ideas.

you can read it
http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/t...-insurrection/

He has a few 'inconsistencies' that tend to gall analytic-leaning sorts; he's also a problematiser of postmodernism. He's also non-systematic (although he's almost drudgingly repetitious in his Lacan/ Hegel/ Marx 'trinitarianism' trope).

What Zizek does that very few do is to be a sort of platform, a lens for philosophy in popular culture; his writings on 9/11 or Big Brother (in, I think, 'welcome to the desert of the real') are compelling arguments written at times when resistance to cultural hegemony was sorely lacking from leftist academics. What he doesn't do is try and imbue popular positions with unnecessary gravitas.

He was also heavily involved with the NSK at one point, which also included everyone's favourite 'postmodern' industrialists, Laibach.

I can understand why someone would say he was 'meaningless', but I've very rarely encountered that sort of thinking that doesn't also dismiss postmodernism or poststructuralism out of hand (Zizek is neither). I don't know the guy you're talking about, but I tend to find that the sort of people who dismiss Zizek also dismiss Lacan, which is entirely foolhardy in my book. Did he structure his argument beyond 'it's meaningless'?

yeah i can see were this guy is coming from, the real substance is in his books - not always his talks which are often just very entertaining and inspiring.
the problem people have with zizek is that listening to him will make you feel riled up, like your part of something, like your ready for action - but while it seems like he is telling us exactly what it is we, the left, should do right now, he never does. that's not really the point. his worth lies in struggling to open up new theoretical spaces that are impossible to see clearly in our current situation, blinded as we are by the unconcioussly realized ideological presuppositions of reality.

i can understand someone saying that there is no substance to zizek, i just think the real substance lies in the work you have to do yourself while your contemplating him.

i'm going to make a zizek thread

Yeah, I think you have a good understanding of the guy. He mostly just stated that Zizek is meaningless and appealed to Zizek-followers to produce something 'meaningful' instead of, as he observed, leaving it at lauding the philosopher. Nobody bothered to entertain his request so nothing was developed any further though I'm sure he felt vindicated by the silence. All in all he was just another voice pontificating on the internet so I took it more as indicative of Zizek's presence than any legitimate contention. Honestly, the site where this takes place is utterly shit for philosophizing but it's a good source of links.

^ @glice but good point ni'k