currently in the middle of:

monsieur pain (roberto bolaño, 198...2?. published in this century)



featuring a similarly highly subjective, imprecise narrator as we’d find in the latter “una novelita lumpen,” and it’s at times hard to tell what is dream and what is reality, this is a book about... books? not really, but the story circles around a latin american poet in paris in the 1930s, and there are countless literary allusions, mainly to do with poets and poetry.

the strangest thing of all is that this cover picture i linked above is hosted by... walmart! mallarmé at walmart- who knew it was possible? well...

parts of it might be slightly alien to inhabitants to the anglosphere, but some familiarity with the literary scene of paris in the years before the war, spanish civil war, etc, would be helpful to approach it.

On the back half of Celine's Journey to the End of the Night

i tried reading that once in the original and failed

maybe could work with a kindle version, thanks to dictionaries. otherwise might break down and locate it en inglés

you gonna post a review in the blog?

monsieur pain, by the way, was bizarre and brilliant and incomprehensible as fuck, but in a good way. i mean, you can follow this book, but—where do you follow it to?

i have not read any criticism about bolaño, thank fuck, i have avoided it purposefully, especially the academic kind. but it reminds me somewhat of paul auster’s new york trilogy, except that... there’s a driving logic in paul auster that is totally missing here. this one just... goes! (but where? where??)

brilliant little book. a fast read, too, although confusing, but fast. by this i mean the main character falls asleep has a dream wakes up you follow him and then wonder—“wait—is he still dreaming?” well, in the story, no, but... he might as well be.

will do, once I am done. I will attach a PDF version to download as well.

Dan Simmons - Hyperion


super cool so far, oldschool kinda sci-fi, reminds me of the masterwork of Isaac Asimov. Really digging that.

just started this morning

LA LITERATURA NAZI EN AMÉRICA (Roberto Bolaño, 1996)



i cracked this open for the first time in a very serious waiting room and i had to really hold myself back to avoid laughing my ass off and spooking everyone there

these fictional biographies read, to me, like the apex of social satire. A+++++...

there was a prelude to that form in the epilogue of monsieur pain, which preceded this novel by decades, but those biographical notes were more or less serious, whereas these ones seem to me really transcendent of their borgesian origins.

maybe i’m judging too soon, but yeah, seems to me this is the most exquisite high comedy. im fucking stoked!

^ indeedy! One a my favorites!

40 pages...2 chapters...before I've reached the end of the 20th Century. I'm just past the 9/11 attacks section.

And finished. Good book, would recommend, though it definitely slows down in depth content once Washing Machine era is hit.

Christmas present.

that looks fucking great lololol

It's a lot of fun; if you're familiar with his other work it'll be right up your alley.

Here's an excerpt, where he got Serena Williams to try and hit drones with tennis balls.

hahahahaaa


great

The Terror by Dan Simmons :cool:

Finished

Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Céline https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2020/...s-awesome.html

First book of 2020 for me is, I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid.

I will begin my way through Sun Ra's Reading List for the class he taught back in day day, with a book called The Two Babylons: or, the Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife - Alexander Hislop (1916)

Here is the full reading list. This would have been a HELL of a University class.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Radix

Alexander Hislop: Two Babylons

The Theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky

The Book of Oahspe

Henry Dumas: Ark of Bones

Henry Dumas: Poetry for My People eds. Hale Charfield & Eugene Redmond, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1971

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, eds. Leroi Jones & Larry Neal, New York: William Morrow 1968

David Livingston: Missionary Travels

Theodore P. Ford: God Wills the Negro

Rutledge: God's Children

Stylus, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1971), Temple University

John S. Wilson: Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It's At, United States Information Agency

Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochannan: Black Man of the Nile and His Family, Alkibu Ian Books 1972

Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney: The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, and the Law of Nature, London: Pioneer Press 1921

The Source Book of Man's Life and Death (Ra's description; = The King James Bible)

Pjotr Demianovitch Ouspensky: A New Model of the Universe. Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art, New York: Knopf 1956

Frederick Bodmer: The Loom of Language. An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, ed. Lancelot Hogben, New York: Norton & Co. 1944

Blackie's Etymology



I am not gonna read Blavatsky's books, because I already did, and they suck fucking ASS

very unusual list ;)

Finished Star Trek - The Deep Space Nine Companion. https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2020/...ne-mother.html

I found it on Ebay for $30. Used copies sell for $80-$100. for the Niner nerds.

Imagine the students who signed up for Sun Ra's course!

Imagine the ones that signed up for this guy:


Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature


just got this for xmas, but yet to crack into it

that would be one DENSE reading list I am sure!

he never forced anyone to read anything!

anyway check out his BIBLIOTECA PERSONAL for his book reviews/recommendations.

Susan Choi "Trust Exercise". Really good novel. I love this author very much. She is a great woman and writer!

i really hope you're for real and not a copywriter fishing for SEO links :D

so, anyway, what’s this book about?

Finished Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons, from 1916, in which h exhaustively details the way that the Roman Catholic Church has framed old babylonian pagan beliefs as a christian religion, all while doing every NON-christian thing available. https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2020/...hant-down.html

“ The worst one is the Roman Catholic Church.”

hold on—you’ve never heard of southern baptists?

just saying

ok will continue the review

bar mitzvah

the holy roman empire was a germanic/ central european business, appointed themselves “protectors” of the church first with charlemagne

the papal states were a different story

i love the rage, boricua jesus. i dont know this hisop, maybe he was legit or maybe he just wanted a piece of the religious pie, but your personal righteous indignation is the real deal.

Southern Baptists have been in it to win it for just over 200 years. The Roman Catholic Church has been doing their evil for 1600 years.

thanks for clarification!

historically already in 300 there were splinters and religious wars, “heresies” (arrianism), etc. not sure when the eastern churches split. habte used to know this shit from primary sources. it has never been a single thing. not sure when “catholic” proper began.

anyway though, we live in the present. i think protestantism’s good intentions also unleashed many deep atrocities that were worse. there’s a sort of obligatory moderation in being mainstream, and “personal interpretation” became a free for all. consider evangelicals in charge of u.s. nukes.... onwards christian soldiers (yikes).

funny story (not funny): i went to catholic school and the child molesters turned out to be the fucking civilian teachers! at least 2 were found out. also, some cub scouts asshole. the priests were ok.

i dodged those bullets but heard the gossip.

ANYWAY. keep fighting the good fight.

read The Bad Popes, it's hilarious. One of em was hanging, drunken, out of the window of his palace, excommunicating the fuck out of everybody while they were shooting arrows at him. Good times!!

https://www.amazon.com/bad-Popes-R-C.../dp/0880291168

all you say is true, but not part of what the book covered,

Mr. Hislop was deeply offended by the 1865 Papal decree that Mary, wife of Joseph and mother of lil baby jeebus, was born and died a Virgin, and was born FROM a virgin, ideas wholly drawn from paganism and not part of the Bible in any way. He saw where that type of shit leads.

to me protestantism was an attempt to go back to early christian days, but once churches are set up, and priests start collecting mad cash from the people, corruption always sets in.

ah, right. that was originally worked out by james frazier’s golden bough, yeah

but as opposed to protestants i think it’s cool as fuck that when the splinter jews set up their own monotheism in rome, rome squeezed the pantheon back into it in the form of saints and virgins and the bleeding sacred heart and all manner of gold robes and special effects and statues and shit. rome conquered judea, judea conquered rome, then they had a baby, lol.

monotheism is fucking boring! hahaha.


yeha, when you look at the history of renaissance philosophy and the justifications each church found for splintering you realize how grotesque things got. i have an idea therefore i have a church. which is good for “freedom” i guess, but makes for some terrible religions.

this is how over the centuries we end up with the gospel of money or whatever the fuck some people believe in this country. “being rich means god loves you” basically. lololol.

the ultimate con-game is telling people that you can guarantee somehow that, after they die, their non-verifiable, non-evidential, non-corporeal "soul" will get to go to a place of everlasting happiness.

No one will ever contradict you, because no one truly knows what happens upon death. No one will ever come back and ask for their money back, CUZ THEY R DEAD. ll the while, the con-artist/religion takes your money, provides you with nothing more than a social club every "sabbath", and the feeling that you are not tied to the evils you perpetrate, because the priest told you that he is certain you are one of the chosen few and that God has forgiven you.

billions of people are being lied to so that 4,000 priests/nuns/"pastors"/monks/bishops can rape children, rape women, birth bastards, force abortions, and hold the collective "salvation" of the human race in their hand as a bargaining chip. http://bishop-accountability.org/pri...astName-F.html

fuck this shit makes me so ANGRY!!!

Read some more funny western religious tripe, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards. The Calvinists had some great death bed behavior, they’d hang around the dying asking about whether God had revealed if they were among the saved. Real great folk in Early America....

ah yeah the big myth of the soul. if there’s one after death it probably disintegrates in bardo.

whatever we call “soul” i consider a temporary aggregate arising from shifting phenomena—here today, gone tomorrow, never the same.

i believe in the no-self. meaning that the self is temporary and mutable, not essential.

i mean, it’s practical to have a self for social life (with a passport and a birth certificate and all), but beyond that, if i may say so, i do not wanna fucking live forever, i just wanna compost—the true meaning of reincarnation is the worm lol.

finished Chris Wilson's novel/satire MISCHIEF http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2020/0...e-for-our.html

A script of Royall Tyler's play "The Contrast" - intending to write an exam for the lecture "Early Performance Culture in America" soon. It's... rough to say the least.

about 2/3 thru this



well written and engaging, but not as in depth nor insightful as I'd hoped for, but still valuable history

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/b...o20517118.html