[Shaka Moloch]

Originally Posted by evollove

Lee K. Abbott
One of Star Wars, One of Doom
Conrad Aiken
Silent Snow, Secret Snow
Dorothy Allison
Jason Who Will Be Famou
Sherwood Anderson
Want to Know Why
Margaret Atwood
Death by Landscape
James Baldwin
Sonny’s Blues
Toni Cade Bambara
Gorilla, My Love
Andrea Barrett
The Littoral Zone
Donald Barthelme
Me and Miss Mandible
Richard Bausch
Letter to the Lady of the House
Charles Baxter
The Disappeared
Ann Beattie
Snow
Madison Smart Bell
Witness
Wendall Berry
A Burden
Ambrose Bierce
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Jorge Luis Borges
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
Ray Bradbury
The Veldt
Frederick Busch
Bread
Truman Capote
Miriam
Raymond Carver
The Student’s Wife
Cathedral
R. V. Cassill
The Rationing of Love
Willa Cather
A Wagner Matinee
Paul’s Case
John Cheever
The Enormous Radio
The Death of Justina
Anton Chekhov
Gusev
Anna on the Neck
Kate Chopin
The Story of an Hour
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The Invalid’s Story
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
Julio Cortázar
Letter to a Young Woman in Paris
Stephen Crane
The Open Boat
The Blue Hotel
Edwidge Danticat
A Wall of Fire Rising
Anita Desai
Royalt
James Dickey
There Was an Old Man Over at Choestoe
Isak Dinesen
Sorrow-Acre
Andre Dubus
The Intruder
Stuart Dybek
We Didn’t
Ralph Ellison
King of the Bingo Game
Louise Erdrich
Matchimanito
Percival Everett
The Fix**
William Faulkner
Barn Burning
A Rose for Emily
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Babylon Revisited
Richard Ford
Privacy
Great Falls
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A New England Nun
Mavis Gallant
The Ice Wagon Coming Down the Street
George Garrett
Feeling Good, Feeling Fine
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wallpaper
Nadine Gordimer
A Soldier’s Embrace
Allan Gurganus
Nativity, Caucasian
Barry Hannah
Sick Soldier at Your Door
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown
The Birthmark
Ernest Hemingway
Hills Like White Elephants
Amy Hempel
In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried
Alice Hoffman
The Wedding and Snow and Ice
Zora Neale Hurston
The Conscience of the Court
Shirley Jackson
The Lottery
Henry James
The Real Thing
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Passion
Charles Johnson
Moving Pictures
Edward P. Jones
A New Man
James Joyce
Araby
The Dead
Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis
A Hunger Artist
Yasunari Kawabata
The White Horse
A.L. Kennedy
Not Anything To Do With Love
Jamaica Kincaid
Girl
Jhumpa Lahiri
Hell-Heaven
Ring Lardner
Ex Parte
D. H. Lawrence
The Horse Dealer’s Daughter
The Rocking Horse Winner
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Doris Lessing
To Room Nineteen
John L’Heureux
Brief Lives in California
Sandra Tsing Loh
My Father’s Chinese Wives
Bernard Malamud
Angel Levine
Katherine Mansfield
The Garden Party
Bobbie Ann Mason
Shiloh
Guy de Maupassant
Boule de Suif
An Adventure in Paris
William Maxwell
The Thistles in Sweden
Jill McCorkle
Intervention
Thomas McGuane
Cowboy
T.M. McNally
Bastogne
James Alan McPherson
Why I Like Country Music
Herman Melville
Bartleby, the Scrivener
Bharati Mukherjee
The Management of Grief
Alice Munro
Royal Beatings
Miles City, Montana
Sabina Murray
Position
Vladimir Nabokov
Signs and Symbols
Joyce Carol Oates
How I Contemplated the World...
Convalescing
Tim O’Brien
The Things They Carried
How to Tell a True War Story
Flannery O’Connor
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Good Country People
Frank O’Connor
Guests of the Nation
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O Yes
Grace Paley
The Used-Boy Raisers
Jayne Anne Phillips
El Paso
Luigi Pirandello
War
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The Purloined Letter
Katherine Anne Porter
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
Flowering Judas
V. S. Pritchett
The Fall
Annie Proulx
What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?
Ron Rash
Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes
Agnes Rossi
Morpheus
Philip Roth
The Conversion of the Jews
George Saunders
Victory Lap
James Salter
Give
Danzy Senna
Admission
Irwin Shaw
The Girls in Their Summer Dresses
Jean Shepherd
Lost at C
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Gimpel the Fool
Jane Smiley
The Life of the Body
Lee Smith
Intensive Care
Elizabeth Spencer
Wisteria
Jean Stafford
In the Zoo
John Steinbeck
The Chrysanthemums
Robert Stone
Under the Pitons
Elizabeth Strout
Pharmacy
Linda Svendsen
Marine Life
Amy Tan
Rules of the Game
Peter Taylor
A Spinster’s Tale
Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilych
William Trevor
Events at Drimaghleen
John Updike
A&P
Brother Grasshopper
Helena María Viramontes
The Moths
Alice Walker
Everyday Use
Robert Penn Warren
Blackberry Winter
Brad Watson
Visitation
Stephanie Powell Watts
Unassigned Territory
Eudora Welty
Why I Live at the P.O.
A Worn Path
Edith Wharton
Xingu
Thomas Williams
Goose Pond
William Carlos Williams
The Use of Force
Tobias Wolff
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
Bullet in the Brain
Virginia Woolf
Kew Gardens
Richard Wright
The Man Who Was Almost a Man

*blink*

[!@#$%!]

past couple of days i was reading this academic article (but a good one, no bullshit) about a book of stories from the mexican revolution (cartucho). had to do with the multiple spanish editions and the bad english translations and how good and important the book was, feeding masterpieces like pedro páramo or 100 years of solitude.

anyway in there it's mentioned how one of the condemned to the firing squad loved reading the three musketeers. which i haven't read since i was 10. i know i was 10 because we moved that year and my book stayed behind.

so i decided to reread it... but in the original french. it's in the gutenberg project and kindle has a free french dictionary.

holy fuck! i'm so out of practice, it's a long slog. but thank fuck for e-books which lighten the burden of dictionary searches.

---

ETA: ok here i go again, a few more pages

[Severian]

New Neil Gaiman not that good. Norse Mythology... supposedly made fresh by Gaiman's highly capable touch. But I'm pretty sure the original stories, wherever they are, are equally if not more interesting.

Cut the shit Neil. Write a real book. This thing is a glorified short story collection, and it's all based on old ass shit. Weirdo.

[Rob Instigator]

I think the new Gaiman is aimed at 12 yr olds.


I contacted Perter Godfrey-Smith's publisher and I have received an advanced-review digital copy of OTHER MINDS: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Gonna be fucking awesome as I love octopi, consciousness, and the oceans!

 

I am like a "real" book reviewer and shit now.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

I think the new Gaiman is aimed at 12 yr olds.


I contacted Perter Godfrey-Smith's publisher and I have received an advanced-review digital copy of OTHER MINDS: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Gonna be fucking awesome as I love octopi, consciousness, and the oceans!

 

I am like a "real" book reviewer and shit now.

that book looks superinteresting

so THE KRAKEN is real?

ha ha-- did you ever read russell hoban's "the medusa frequency"?

it's a funny book. featuring the kraken in the place of deep consciousness. oh yeah.

you should like it. i think it's probably your style. lots of mythological references in everyday life. a bit of a hallucination. yeah.

[Rob Instigator]

reality is for the cowards....

[Rob Instigator]

The Other MInds book is super cool. The Octopus and Cuttlefish have compound lens eyes, evolved wholly separate from mammalian eyes, and about 200 million years earlier. They have very intelligent brains. Octopi have 80% of their neurons in their ARMS! They have mini-brains in each appendage! Cuttlefish are some of the most intelligent life on Earth yet they only live a little longer than 2 years. Insane.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

reality is for the cowards....

let's shoot them. with acid pellets.

but for real, funny book. reminds me a bit of illuminatus but at a small scale. also features vermeer. oh man! i really liked that book a lot.

reading the 3 musketeers in french is HARD. i wonder if i should switch to a translation. it's more of a language lesson than an actual novel so far. ufff....

[Rob Instigator]

I tried reading Don Quixote in Spanish when I was 13. I needed the dictionary eevry few paragraphs. (and that is with me as a native spanish speaker!)

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

I tried reading Don Quixote in Spanish when I was 13. I needed the dictionary eevry few paragraphs. (and that is with me as a native spanish speaker!)

yeah. it's hard for anyone due to the age of the book.

okay, im sold. i will look for another french-lesson book and read los tres mosqueteros en español o en inglés.

---

as for the brain things: makes sense that their neurons would be in their many arms. didn't know about their cuttlefish cousins. intelligent how? how is it defined/tested?

clever aliens

[Severian]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

I think the new Gaiman is aimed at 12 yr olds.

Feh. It feels that way, yeah. But it was heralded as a "Modern Classic" as soon as it was released by all the major outlets. Bah! Reading Marvel's "The Mighty Thor" comics is more challenging/interesting.

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

I am like a "real" book reviewer and shit now.

Good for you man!

[Rob Instigator]

It is wild shit. not only do cuttlefish and octopi have advanced problem solving skills, they have been shown to recognize the faces of people they "know", and this has been tested with experiments where three people are all wearing the same clothes and the cuttlefish recognizes the one face he knows from it's care and maintenance. Cuttlefish have each one of their motor and sensory neurons running directly from their location on their skin or muscle into the brain, with no connective neurons. This allows for lighting fast reflexes, color changes, and skin texture changes. Humans, and most any mammal, have ganglia and neurons connected throughout the body, slowing down the reflex time, response times to sensory stimuli.

Octopi, even small ones, are sick smart. They are known to squirt water outside their aquariums at the lights above so as to short circuit them and turn them dark. That takes a certain level of cognition that only dolphins, some higher apes, dogs, elephants, and us humans have been shown to have.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

They are known to squirt water outside their aquariums at the lights above so as to short circuit them and turn them dark.

haaaaa haaaaaa wtf???

i didn't know this

[Rob Instigator]

an octopus is one of the trickiest animals man. https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...s-philip-hoare

In lab experiments, octopuses attain good results, able to negotiate mazes and unscrew jars containing food, using visual cues to achieve their goals. They also show a sense of craftiness – squirting water at researchers they don’t like, for instance. One celebrated aquarium-kept octopus proved its skill when staff noticed fish from a neighbouring tank had gone missing overnight – CCTV revealed the smooth operator. The octopus was lifting the lid on its own tank, slithering over to the fish, claiming its prize, then crawling back, covering itself again as if nothing had happened. But Godfrey-Smith finds another anecdote more revealing: an octopus at the University of Otago in New Zealand learned to turn off lights by squirting water at the bulbs; brightness annoys an octopus. Cephalopods are not only aware of their environment; they seek to manipulate it.

[Severian]

Octopuses are actually extremely fucking smart. Read studies about them. They've shown they can plan and manipulate and learn quickly. Seriously, they're pretty awesome.

[Rob Instigator]

Finished up Schopenhauer's Essays & Aphorisms. http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...en-all-my.html

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

Finished up Schopenhauer's Essays & Aphorisms. http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...en-all-my.html

I feel that the field of philosophy is one where the individual great thinkers should be studied, not for the truth they uncovered about the world, but for how they saw the world they inhabited. Too many pedantic people get fixated on one philosopher whose ideas about existence so mirror their own ideas that other philosophers are neglected. This is the sign of a closed, simple mind, one that cannot comprehend that it is in their best interest to read widely, think deeply, and then to come up with their personal ideas about existence. This is the best way to read philosophy. It is a map to human thought, not a set of rules to live by.

😂😂😂

i love the bluntness of those opinions man!

calling people closed-minded and simple-minded ha ha ha ha

j'accuse

also, nice choice quotes

now, he said some horrible things about women, didn't he?

e.g.

Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted—in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word. Consider how a young girl will toy day after day with a child, dance with it and sing to it; and then consider what a man, with the very best intentions in the world, could do in her place.

haaaa haaa haaaaa. i do feel that way, i do, when it comes to comparing my wife's talents with kids vs mine. but i think it's because she's smarter and i'm stupider.

[Rob Instigator]

he was writing in 1850, and his views on women are colored by the fact that I think he was asexual at a time when that was not even understood. he gives the women props as to what he sees as their gifts, but he definitely still was working through a prism of prejudice on that front. he did say that as a whole, a woman is greater than a man.

"I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the masses, or rather raising herself above the masses, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man."

[Rob Instigator]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

😂😂😂

i love the bluntness of those opinions man!

.

I thought i was being diplomatic!

[Rob Instigator]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i love the bluntness of those opinions man!

Can I quote you on the review blog? hahahahha gonna do it either way.