John Storey: An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture
Helen Thomas (ed.): Dance in the City
Keith Negus: Music Genres and Corporate Cultures
David Hesmondhalgh & Keith Negus (ed.): Popular Music Studies

Words of Science. One of Asimov's many hundreds of non-fiction works. details the word origins and meanings behind many of the most used words in science.

wish I knew Greek!

I've been most reading wikipedia about the East-West Schism, the Crimean War, and things related to both.

Almost finished



It's excellent. About sexual desire/frustration, unhappiness, Jewishness. And it's incredibly lol.

Phillip Roth is still one of the 4 most important living American novelists, and that's my second favorite by him, behind "American Splendor", which is just too good for me to get into.

Im reading this, its very pleasent and wistful, which makes a nice change. And i bought it, new, from a branch of Poundland.

http://www.suketumehta.com/books.html

Also currently reading:

sweet mother of fuck, i've been looking for that in spanish, and nada!

i don't want to read a shitty translation

meanwhile...



i used to have a shitty college-used edition full of ketchup stains and a stranger's pen notes on the margin-- now i got a pristine hardbound copy-- still used, but sweet-smelling-- which makes it much more readable.


are you into panny cameras or are you, as they say in your country, "taking the piss"?

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...een%22&x=0&y=0

You mean American Pastoral? That's next on my list of Roth books to read. Just waiting for it to show up in a second hand book somewhere in the 'hood. In the meantime, now that I've finished Portnoy's Complaint, it's on to:



or

a new pkd documentary from 2007 on youtube

this isn't the bbc arena one or the gospel one.

Don't bother

Just finished:


Now:


The guy hasn't really started talking about the Beatles yet, and I'm 100 pages in. It's mostly jazz history. My mind has repeatedly been blown by this book so far.

If I were fluent enough in Spanish, I'd do the same. I have Bolanos "Romantic Dogs", and the nice thing about the edition I have is it's both in spanish and english.

2666 was supposed to be 3 books (upon bolanos request), but after he died they just stuffed it into one book and published it anyway.

guess what, i found them in the public library, thanks to your post it was in my mind the other day and when i did a search-- surprise! i grew up in spanish so gringospeak is actually still foreign to me (you'll notice at times i'm clumsy with idioms, also my syntax is more convoluted than your average english speaker-- that's my brain in spanish). anyhuevos, i've ordered Llamadas Telefónicas, will follow with Los Detectives Salvajes, etc-- meaning I'm gonna approach him chronologically. there's one called Nazi Literature in the Americas that I haven't found untranslated yet, but i'll keep looking for it.

so, thanks for bringing up this book cuz i've been meaning to read it for the last couple of years. i'd rep you if i could even if rep is meaningless-- so thanks.

This book is so ridiculously insightful.

Oppression is caused by socio-cultural structures which tyrants thrive on and exploit, its bottom up not top down..

The past is cyclic and the cycle is petrified into the structures of society, our cultural/historical myths which dictate our current thinking and perpetuates the ills of previous societies such as greed, corruption and thirst for power.

Our society is a pyramid, and we sacrifice ourselves and others to the "Gods" of history in order to keep the flow of our society in flux.

Criticism is the essense of freedom, silences is the stagnant petrification of the status quo and the birth of authority.

Essentially, the problem is our own, and we must own up to it and change our society to remove the structures which oppress us. Why are we controlled and manipulated by power hungry individuals and businesses? Because we let them and structure our society around it and continue it on as ever...

http://www.iplant.eu/fiction.html

iPlant fiction

This is a novel-in-progress by Chris Harris. It describes the development of iPlants from the perspective of reserchers working in the private brain surgery industry. The different segments of the story are not in chronological order.

In the novel, conditional rewarding brain stimulation (CRBS) is first introduced as a last-resort procedure to help morbidly obese patients exercise. The move is motivated by a worsening obesity-cardiovascular-neurodegeneration-aging epidemic, unsuccessful attempts to inhibit hunger in morbidly obese patients with traditional deep brain stimulation procedures (Hamani et al 2008), and several effective applications of CRBS to motivate exercise in rats (Burgess et al 1991, Garner et al 1991). Following success in several hospitals, the procedure is rapidly applied to a wide variety of patient groups and behaviours, including learning. As the effectiveness and safety of the implants improve, an increasing number of clinically healthy individuals choose to undergo the surgical procedure, and private clinics specializing in the procedure become increasingly lucrative. Ike, Meg, Lucy and the narrator Chris conduct R&D at such a clinic/company. Their research is necessarily self-experimental. The novel begins with the public launch of the 'iPlant' - an advanced CRBS implant aimed at a general market, which, unlike previous CRBS implants, targes dopamine and serotonin nuclei directly.

I prefer this "V".

!@#$% where you at?