Now Reading

i burned through Money in less than 2 weeks. nearly 400 pages long but barely felt half that. i gotta read some more of his stuff.

next up: Forbidden Colours (Yukio Mishima)

Dr. Futurity devolved into typical sci-fi time travel tripe. It's one of PKD's earliest novels, so it's not too surprising. Halfway through Vulcan's Hammer and it's a promising simple set up - all world governments give complete control to an intimidating supercomputer to solve the world's problems while a group of people are trying to destroy it.

Reading:

The Power Broker: Robert Moses & The Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

also just picked up a used copy of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles And The Imagination Of Disaster by Mike Davis, but idk when I'll get around to it. 

Finally finished Mason & Dixon. It was brilliant and i already miss hangin out with them. Such fun characters.

Now started Dune cause like i've gotta read it at some point init. It's alright so far, but the contrast between pynhcon's writing and this is kinda jarring. Sorta feels like it was written in an A-level english class.

The man said this.

The woman was surprised.

"Oh no!" said the woman.

^ yeah I felt the same way about Dune. Great ideas and story; terrible, flat/formulaic writing.

Dune is so dull. i dropped it maybe 3/4ths through. huge disappointment.

Frank Herbert's prose reads almost exactly like GRRM's to me. Granted, it's been a while since I read either. 

Welcome to 99 percent of genre fiction. Read the book of the new sun if you want the ideas and world building of dune written by a person with an actual prose style.

Funnily enough when Herbert came on the scene (or maybe it was slightly after), everyone considered him 'new wave', breaking from the pulpy non-literature SF that came before it. I guess writers like Dick, Aldis and obviously Ballard hold up a bit better nowadays in that regard.

herbert wasn't really new wave. he wasn't avant garde in the way michael moorcock or zelazny was. he basically was the endpoint of old school sf. ballard, alfred bester, leigh brackett, even dick all wrote work that predate dune and are far more avant garde and experimental in terms of literary sensibility. i think of herbert like asimov, attempting to change his work to fit the fashion of the time as classic sf slowly became obsolete during the sixties. dune has a lot of great ideas in it, really strong imagery and world building, but it's a product of a fifties imagination that happened to be concerned with issues of the sixties, but it isn't of the sixties, in the same way as the more progressive, younger writers.

native son: now here's a goodn. thoroughly enjoying this (enjoying meaning its sad but fulfilling)

curtis' modern architecture since 1900 - an standard with which all other histories are judged. the definitive canon of work across the world delivered with humorous and critical prose. just. the. best!

Just finished Books of Blood volumes 1-3. Cannot wait to read the rest of Barkers work, I don't understand why I never read him back in the day (probably because I had the stupid and foolish mindset that if it wasn't Stephen King it wasn't worth reading)

Vulcan's Hammer was shit. I'm done with reading the pulp sci-fi PKD novels.

Read The Road over the course of 3 evenings... Really beautiful book all the way through

Started reading The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero (who plays Mark in The Room). Hard to put down, especially being a huge fan of The Room and Tommy's personality. Some of Greg and Tommy's interactions sound like fan fiction, but I'm trusting that Greg isn't playing things over the top to sell more books. I'd give Greg the benefit of the doubt because of Tommy's eccentricities 

the book's pretty short, should be finished in a day or so

  On 3/5/2017 at 7:00 AM, Danny O Flannagin said:

Started reading The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero (who plays Mark in The Room). Hard to put down, especially being a huge fan of The Room and Tommy's personality. Some of Greg and Tommy's interactions sound like fan fiction, but I'm trusting that Greg isn't playing things over the top to sell more books. I'd give Greg the benefit of the doubt because of Tommy's eccentricities

 

the book's pretty short, should be finished in a day or so

I want everything in this book to be real. Wiseau is a fascinating human being. Great read.

Sad they didn't cast Greg as himself in the movie, wasted opportunity imo.

  On 3/5/2017 at 8:40 AM, ladalaika said:

 

  On 3/5/2017 at 7:00 AM, Danny O Flannagin said:

Started reading The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero (who plays Mark in The Room). Hard to put down, especially being a huge fan of The Room and Tommy's personality. Some of Greg and Tommy's interactions sound like fan fiction, but I'm trusting that Greg isn't playing things over the top to sell more books. I'd give Greg the benefit of the doubt because of Tommy's eccentricities

 

the book's pretty short, should be finished in a day or so

I want everything in this book to be real. Wiseau is a fascinating human being. Great read.

 

Sad they didn't cast Greg as himself in the movie, wasted opportunity imo.

 

Ya i guess Dave Franco is playing Mark. I mean, from what I've read so far, Tommy and Greg's relationship sort of forms a kind of buddy movie with Tommy being the one with the crazy big ideas that aren't fully realized and Greg being the voice of reason for Tommy, while still just going along for the ride. I'm sure Dave and James Franco will have some on screen chemistry by being brothers

  On 3/5/2017 at 6:08 PM, Danny O Flannagin said:

 

  On 3/5/2017 at 8:40 AM, ladalaika said:

 

  On 3/5/2017 at 7:00 AM, Danny O Flannagin said:

Started reading The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero (who plays Mark in The Room). Hard to put down, especially being a huge fan of The Room and Tommy's personality. Some of Greg and Tommy's interactions sound like fan fiction, but I'm trusting that Greg isn't playing things over the top to sell more books. I'd give Greg the benefit of the doubt because of Tommy's eccentricities

 

the book's pretty short, should be finished in a day or so

I want everything in this book to be real. Wiseau is a fascinating human being. Great read.

 

Sad they didn't cast Greg as himself in the movie, wasted opportunity imo.

Ya i guess Dave Franco is playing Mark. I mean, from what I've read so far, Tommy and Greg's relationship sort of forms a kind of buddy movie with Tommy being the one with the crazy big ideas that aren't fully realized and Greg being the voice of reason for Tommy, while still just going along for the ride. I'm sure Dave and James Franco will have some on screen chemistry by being brothers

Wait so James Franco is playing Tommy??? I thought he was just directing uuuuggghhh

  On 3/5/2017 at 6:32 PM, ladalaika said:

 

  On 3/5/2017 at 6:08 PM, Danny O Flannagin said:

 

  On 3/5/2017 at 8:40 AM, ladalaika said:

 

  On 3/5/2017 at 7:00 AM, Danny O Flannagin said:

Started reading The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero (who plays Mark in The Room). Hard to put down, especially being a huge fan of The Room and Tommy's personality. Some of Greg and Tommy's interactions sound like fan fiction, but I'm trusting that Greg isn't playing things over the top to sell more books. I'd give Greg the benefit of the doubt because of Tommy's eccentricities

 

the book's pretty short, should be finished in a day or so

I want everything in this book to be real. Wiseau is a fascinating human being. Great read.

 

Sad they didn't cast Greg as himself in the movie, wasted opportunity imo.

Ya i guess Dave Franco is playing Mark. I mean, from what I've read so far, Tommy and Greg's relationship sort of forms a kind of buddy movie with Tommy being the one with the crazy big ideas that aren't fully realized and Greg being the voice of reason for Tommy, while still just going along for the ride. I'm sure Dave and James Franco will have some on screen chemistry by being brothers

Wait so James Franco is playing Tommy??? I thought he was just directing uuuuggghhh

 

Directing and acting

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3521126/

Gasset's Revolt of the Masses. Seems to mostly consist of a rant about how the bottom half of the white collar set looks down on poshos and thinks it knows what's best for the proles. Oh and they take stuff for granted too.

Interesting to think who he would call Mass-Men were he alive today. Mail readers or Guardian readers? Or both?

I enjoyed The Disaster Artist, read most of it when I walked into a cafe in Vauxhall that I took to be a greasy spoon but was a twee nightmare. Paid ten quid for a full English. Anyway. He gets the balance right between laughing at Tommy whilst making him sympathetic, I'm sure the film will be awful.

Franz Kafke - The Castle.

Reading after getting fairly into The Trial. This is currently working in the same vein which I quite like. Haven't noticed how far I am through as it's part of a collection in a single book and haven't looked ahead. Guess I'm about half way. Enjoying so far.

  On 3/10/2017 at 11:39 PM, tec said:

I enjoyed The Disaster Artist, read most of it when I walked into a cafe in Vauxhall that I took to be a greasy spoon but was a twee nightmare. Paid ten quid for a full English. Anyway. He gets the balance right between laughing at Tommy whilst making him sympathetic, I'm sure the film will be awful.

A mate of mine ordered me a pair of Tommy Wiseau-branded undercrackers for my birthday a few years ago, proper Y-front job, came with a signed photo of the man (?) himself. Can't quite bring myself to wear them.

^I definitely wouldn't, I high-fived him at a screening and felt the need to wash my hand immediately. 

  On 2/21/2017 at 2:01 AM, keanu reeves said:

i think of herbert like asimov, attempting to change his work to fit the fashion of the time as classic sf slowly became obsolete during the sixties. dune has a lot of great ideas in it, really strong imagery and world building, but it's a product of a fifties imagination

I appreciate this. I'm a pretty lazy reader, maybe 5 books a year. I read Dune when I was 17 and my family was about to move across the country and all my shit was in boxes so I didn't have much else to do. I've tried to re-read it a few times since and I couldn't put my finger on why I couldn't get past page 12 or so, but have no problem reading e.g. any PKD. What you said rings true, both about the fifties imagination and the Asimov comparison, although there is something else about Asimov that I find a lot more interesting. Maybe it's a bit more imaginative, it doesn't have that pop-nerd-reek to it like so many things begging to get made into a movie.