that’s awesome! thanks!

i was aware that utexas had the archives but didn’t know that they had put it all up online and free for the public. which is brilliant.

and fuck Charles Dickens. Praising Dickens for his writing skill in 2017 is like praising Stephen king for his writing skill in 2117. Dickens was a fucking mass-market writer, selling salami to the masses just like Stephen King.

Yeah they’re exactly the same. You nailed it. World wrong, you right (again).

I don't think people read Dickens now for his way with words, which is incredibly bloated at times, at least by today's standards, but for his creation of characters that seem to have near universal relevance, and for his social conscious. We can all play the game of dismissing a great writer on purely formal, medium specific grounds, but we dismiss a lot of great writers that way and end up celebrating a lot of mediocre ones in their place.

He had some great character portraits, which is what I liked about him. You may as well say Shakespeare and Dostoevski were hacks; they did "popular fiction for the masses", too

Exactly — though the social consciousness of his work has come under some scrutiny, I’m not about to dismiss it. It’s important to remember that Dickens was one of the most famous human beings in the world while he was writing, and he stil (often, at least) chose to focus his stories on the day-to-day lives of the British working class and ruined ex-aristocratic families, struggling with love and legacy and so on.

He’d be “woke” by today’s standards. But we can’t really evaluate Dickens on 2017 standards, because the literary world has been so flooded for so long with disciples and disciples of disiples that, like Shakespeare of the Beatles, his influence has been so vast that it makes his own work seem almost derivative. Just because he influenced essentially every Westwrn novelist to lift a pen.

And his character construction is masterful. His prose may feel quaint or “boring” at times, to some, with no perspective. But fuck that noise.

Yep yep.

Bashing the greats for their greatness is cool though. Bashing what’s universally acknowledged as brilliant is super punk rock because it’s *so* unexpected. Rage against the machine, and all that. #toocoolforquality

gonna re-re-re-re-re-watch RAN this weekend.

HURRAHH!!!

Such a good film. I think it's actually my favourite Kurosawa film.

Keeping on topic I'm about 1000 pages into War and Peace and I'm honestly loving it. Even the bits where he's waffling about why such-and-such a battle was lost start to grab me. It's annoying to be at a bit where Prince Andrei, or whoever, is having a dramatic scene and then the next chapter is an essay. However, just as you get into that chapter, he might go off to see what the Rostov family are getting up to.

I honestly love all the characters in it, ESPECIALLY Count Bolkonsky. They're all flawed characters (some more than others) but they all have even the smallest amount of redeeming factor. Except Pierre's wife. God, she's a fucking cunt.

This pretty much sums it up. I dunno, I've grown up with Dickens all my life so I've a soft spot for him.

Thing is, people have anything else to do in terms of entertainment. So having a book that may be bloated by today's standards was nothing. You could easily spend hours reading with no other distractions around.

Got this for Xman, looks like it's going to be great. One of my favorite periods of literature. America from POB to around 1880



https://us.macmillan.com/truthsragge...9780374534400/

its been cold and frigid the past week and I've been reading more...

The Bomb Maker - Thomas Perry. Well written thriller and I learned a lot about making bombs and deactivating them. Scary shit, really.

Two Kinds of Truth - Michael Connelly. the latest Harry Bosch novel, goes deep into the world of pill addicts and dealers, one of the best Bosch novels in awhile, and they're all good anyway.

Reilly:The First Man- Robin Bruce Lockhart. I've been fascinated by Sidney Reilly since I saw the miniseries on PBS back in the 80's. With the contemporary sophistication of intelligence agencies it is odd to read how highly he was regarded for what seems to be obvious, for instance, the best spies to recruit are going to be people of influence and power. You try to position people into those roles over time. While the series depicted Reilly's official death out in the woods by Stalin's goons, in this book,Bruce Lockhart's son shows tendencies and possibilities that Reilly never died and actually went to work for his home country, Russia. Much of Stalin's crew was not sophisticated and Stalin did need a few people of intelligence around to communicate with other people of intelligence.

The Looking Glass War - John Le Carre. 2018 will be my Le Carre year when I read the 20 novels of his I haven't read. Halfway through I can't really say what the book is about yet but I can't put it down.

Rob Instigator's TOP 5 BOOKS of 2017.




-In 2017 I managed to read and review 23 books for my blog RXTT's Intellectual Journey (https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/)

Of those, here are my top 5.




Hail! Hail! Rock N Roll - Chuck Berry (autobiography) http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...uck-berry.html




Black Is The New White - Paul Mooney (memoir/autobiography/comedy)

http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...e-and-his.html




Tycho & Kepler - Kitty Ferguson (science history)

http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/1...o-shining.html




A World Apart - Gustav Herling (Memoir about Russian Labor Camps)

http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...ag-prison.html




The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester (sci fi novel)

http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...-for-ages.html

i started pk dick's VALIS again after hearing a felicia atkinson song with quotes from it, but then i switched over to radio free albemuth, an abandoned precursor to VALIS.

VALIS is way better. one of my fav books.

G R E A T fucking book.

Andrew Wilson, Blood Beneath the Skin

Just finished this bio of Alexander McQueen. Never the nicest man in the world but still, what a tragic story.

as a sculptor, I always admired A McQ's use of media. I put his stuff way way beyond "fashion". Do wish he would have stuck around, as I think he could have done a lot more

Yeah, he had a love/hate relationship with fashion and was apparently interested in moving into other areas of art. Although something I didn't realise until reading the book was that he'd been diagnosed with AIDS not that long before he killed himself. That's not the death sentence it once was, but still. I think his self-destructive personality would've got the better of him one way or another. To say he was a complex character is putting it mildly.

I've made it through the prologue of LotR: Fellowship of the Ring. :D

Just started 3rd book of the Vandermeer Area X trilogy. Not bad. Got em from my public library, so didn't (and wouldn't) buy em. :/

Still working on the Russia in Revolution book. Taking place about 100 years ago. Damn, people say there is no progress, you need to read something like this to see just how far we've come.

The best one, but keep going!

First book was freaking brilliant. Second and third were both much less so, but overall still a fun and intense read.

I would have been perfectly happy if the whole thing had ended with Annihilation, and if all the background and surrounding mythology had been anyone’s guess. Would have been a helluva statement. That book was truly terrifying and unnerving in the best way, and ending it with a mystery would have been a-OK by me. It still ended with a mystery, really; just one with another 400 pages of exposition.

Had it just been Annihilation, I think it would have been truly singular, a near-Lovecraftian work of horror. I for one enjoy the occasional loose end, as the imagination can roam into some pretty fucked up places with the right stimuli.

Out of interest, what are the elements that make something 'Lovecraftian' for you?

I agree on the Lovecraftian concept. What that is for me is a veiled threat either suddenly revealed or hinted at. A discovery that there is something that is very significant to our very existence that we know almost nothing about and that is coming to us without anything we can really do anything about. A feeling that the end of reality and/or the world/universe is at hand.

Sev, what are your Lovecraftian descriptors?

BTW, a friend got a HP Lovecraft tattoo, I asked him, "why do you have a tattoo of Woodrow Wilson" ;)

Yeah, that's pretty much my understanding, too: an existential threat beyond our control or understanding, hints of which can lead to madness and inspire cults.

A few different things.

- An emphasis on academic study of some kind, like anthropology or history or biology being applied to something uncanny and utterly unknowable.
- Psychological horror, particularly a threat that feeds on fear or madness or insecurity
- Giant, difficult to describe or amorphous/multifaceted amphibious leviathans that make Godzilla look like a tinkertoy
- Cults
- Americans in foreign places where the culture (or some other elements of the environment) proves utterly confounding and ultimately dangerous
- Humanoid genetic abberations living in the dark
- Caves and cathedrals and discovered civilizations
- Victims’ minds turning against them, or deceiving them
- Horrors and threats so great and so utterly without peer that the brain doesn’t know how to process them (like Cthulhu, or the “lighthouse keeper” in Area X)
- Water monsters
- Thought contagion

Etc.

Nicely said.

Descriptors?

i thought you guys were gonna say “terrible prose” and “schlocky themes” :D

Whatthefuckyousay?!! :eek:

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

This made me laugh out loud for reasons I can’t explain

Do you really think Lovecraft’s prose is bad? I guess it’s been a while since I read any of his stuff, but I always liked it. Certainly the ideas are the bigger picture, but I think the writing itself is quite good.

Oh well. Gonna read “The Call of Cthulhu” now. Tell me what you think is shitty and I’ll look out for it. 4 srsly.

By modern standards his writing is very florid - although 'Cthulhu' is pretty restrained compared with some of his other stories.

Schlocky themes though? (symbol's point) On the surface maybe but they were underpinned by a worldview that other (arguably better) writers could take in a quite sophisticated direction, philosophically speaking. So I agree that people read Lovecraft now for his ideas far more than his style (and probably always have).

lol i was just shitting ya

( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)

but yeah i could never get into him— when i tried, it read like a bad poe. and i love poe and so why read bad copies i thought

unfair, i know. maybe i’ll look at him again one of these days

(or maybe i’ll reread poe. ha.)

Poe was obviously an influence on Lovecraft but, while someone with minimal interest in horror can still read Poe and appreciate him purely as literature, you can't really say that about Lovecraft. At the level of ideas though, I find Lovecraft far more interesting (and frightening).

True. Though I think every literary should at least read “Madness” and “Cthulhu.”

The fragmentary nature of Cthulhu elevates it above most Lovecraft, at least from a stylistic pov, but I don't recall much about AtMoM beyond its story - which is awesome, obviously.

But even his most conventional writing is now getting interest from literature departments, if only for how it represents a certain 'pulp' style of writing that serious critics had previously dismissed. (The same way film studies programmes are now falling over themselves to focus on b movies or mainstream action movies.)

Postmodernism and all that.

that makes a ton of sense to me. i’m not a fan of “horror” per se, and have had little interest in the genre until recently (last year, i mean 2016, when i asked you guys what horror movies to watch, and actually had a blast with some of them.) so i can see why i didn’t find him appealing in the past.

i might take a look at it again for shits and giggles. or scares. and see what happens.

If you want to cut to the chase of his ideas, the opening paragraph of Cthulhlu is basically Lovecraft's worldview in a nutshell:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

To me, when people talk about 'Lovecraftian', that paragraph sums it up. It's also why I think Martyrs (the French version) might be the most Lovecraftian film ever made.

And Jack may be Cthulhu

right im familiar with the passage. interestingly, current discussions of the potential dangers of AI have a similar bent. mainly the idea being that something that we cannot even see coming will wipe us out when we least notice.

anyway so i went and read dagon and realized i had read it before and left no impression.

and i have some comments now like what severian asked me to give, just different text.

so for this i’d like to vaguely cite nabokov from memory because i dont have the book of his lectures at cornell.

in his discussion of jekyll and hyde he talks about how good literature makes the senses tingle— it isn’t of the head and it isn’t of teh body but in between. he talks about a tingle in the back of the spine. something like that.

he then proceeds to show how precise stevenson was in his descriptions that you could actually draw a map of the house etc etc. all good.

florid language aside, which i can cope with when it works, this is what i see missing in dagon— a lack of precision that makes it hard to know exactly what the fuck one is supposed to fear.

lemme quote

Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail;

but but but

for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer,

“remember when you read poe? just like that” doesn’t make my spine tingle. but poe does.

it’s kinda like when people give the elevator pitch for their shitty, derivative screenplay: “it’s like pulp fiction meets sleepless in seattle”.

they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall.

starts going well then gets vague again. “unpleasant to recall” is more tell not show.

Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself.

i actually like the irony here. the implication being that they are actually giants. which— great. he’s seeing depictions of ancient giants.

I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.


this is fine. but it’s always “beyond” with him and i want to see the thing itself. if a skyscraper is bigger than a house i don’t want to be told it’s bigger than a house, i want to see the lines of the building disappearing into the sky. he’s musing: maybe his musings could illustrate “beyond-the-anthropology” instead of just being mentioned as “musings”.


Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.

so he sees a giant like the cyclops in the odissey and he’s doing what? flaps his arms and makes a belches somewhat.

that’s my problem. the imprecission. i get that he’s seeing a creature unseen before. the problem i have is that i can’t see it with him and therefore i can’t feel his fear.

i don’t mean to shit on a dead writer, he writes better than i ever will, but it’s always been hard for me to feel him and i can’t help it. the above is not any sort of damnation, just a short and sloppy phenomenology of my disappointment. i can’t see and therefore can’t feel.

i get it that at the end the monster is coming for him at the window but since it never materialized for me all i see are the words.

but curiously, now after i have explained it i can see fishface better behind the glass. and it’s a funny image in this way.

but i get the idea of terrifying discoveries now. it’s a good one.