Now Reading

well i finally finished 'suttree'. must have been reading for....i don't want to think it. enjoyed reading it once i got into it but it left me a little disappointed at the end. i do want to reread though as i read it so slowly it was disjointed.

also finished 'shakey'. which was truly excellent. listening to ragged glory right now infact.

just started 'goodbye 20th century: a biography of sonic youth' and so far the writing is terrible but the story interesting so we'll see. i've read another book by this guy, about jeff and tim buckley and i remember enjoying that.

so i need another fiction book to read alongside. not sure where to go. maybe read 'the road' again quickly.

Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano - I'm struggling through this one... I wanted to read it before watching the film but god damn.... 95% seems to be statistics and the remaining 5%, story. It has taken me a week to read 92 pages.

  On 2/2/2008 at 9:11 PM, cardan said:

ah, ye it isn't really what i expected... what do you recommend i read next by pkd?

and, RAW! spectacles, testicles, brandy and cigars!

 

"I would hate to be taken seriously. Serious people are always so grim and uptight that they make me want to dance naked on the lawn playing a flute. Of course, as Mavis says in the first volume of the trilogy, nothing is true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't really understand it until it makes you cry. The basic situation of humanity is both tragic and comic, since we are all domesticated apes with marvelous 30-billion-cell brains, which we seldom use efficiently because of domination by the older mammalian parts of the back brain. I mean, we're living on the Planet of the Apes, man. Is that funny or serious? It depends on how broad your sense of humor is, I guess."

 

mwahaahaaa!! praise bob!

Is that a PKD quote? very encompassing of the human condition indeed

I'm on Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, after that I have Ulyssus looming onthe horizon.

Praise Bob indeed! Full slack for the people!

everyone should read 'The Divine Invasion' by PKD

  On 11/18/2009 at 9:17 AM, AJW said:

 

I'm on Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, after that I have Ulyssus looming onthe horizon.

 

lol palahniuk and then ulysses. not sure that's good preparation

Allen S. Weiss - Varieties of Audio Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Musical Landscape and Pierre Boulez - Orientations, got a big pile to go though after these.

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino.

This is fantastic! I'm definitely going to reread Invisible Cities after this.

i'm reading dhalgren by samuel delany and it makes no fucking sense at all

I'm re-reading "Lord of the flies". Fucking dark book.

I always forget about this thread.

  On 12/2/2009 at 7:43 AM, zaphod said:

i'm reading dhalgren by samuel delany and it makes no fucking sense at all

How far in are you? I really enjoyed this novel, don't let wikipedia ruin it for you before you finish.

i'm about 100 pages in. the writing style seems really forced and artsy.

finished the sonic youth biography. it was a bit lightweight after shakey, not very well written but i learnt a few things

half way through cormac mccarthy's "the orchard keeper" now. ok so far, he already had his style down with his first book it seems.

next i'm going to read a lee scratch perry biography and a new author whcih i haven't decided on yet

  On 12/2/2009 at 4:10 PM, zaphod said:

i'm about 100 pages in. the writing style seems really forced and artsy.

Really? It felt like the style of most 60's-70's pulpy as fuck sci-fi to me. I definitely don't get a forced feel, it flowed rather smoothly for me, and rather than artsy I'd just feel he's pushing social taboo's as much as he can in this novel, but not in an annoying "artsy" way.

the art of war

"Zodiac" - Robert Graysmith

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. This novel is great because it's about men and horses. Like all great novels, women are barely involved at all and are reduced to two-dimensional stereotypes.

  On 12/2/2009 at 6:01 PM, Glass Plate said:

pulpy as fuck

lol

  On 12/2/2009 at 6:01 PM, Glass Plate said:

  On 12/2/2009 at 4:10 PM, zaphod said:

i'm about 100 pages in. the writing style seems really forced and artsy.

Really? It felt like the style of most 60's-70's pulpy as fuck sci-fi to me. I definitely don't get a forced feel, it flowed rather smoothly for me, and rather than artsy I'd just feel he's pushing social taboo's as much as he can in this novel, but not in an annoying "artsy" way.

well, i feel his style is sort of self consciously post modern, or artsy, or whatever you would call it. like he's trying too hard to write a sort of beat poetry as prose style. that bothered me. the story itself is sort of straightforward, or moreso than i had expected after all i'd read about the novel.

  On 12/3/2009 at 3:29 AM, zaphod said:

  On 12/2/2009 at 6:01 PM, Glass Plate said:

  On 12/2/2009 at 4:10 PM, zaphod said:

i'm about 100 pages in. the writing style seems really forced and artsy.

Really? It felt like the style of most 60's-70's pulpy as fuck sci-fi to me. I definitely don't get a forced feel, it flowed rather smoothly for me, and rather than artsy I'd just feel he's pushing social taboo's as much as he can in this novel, but not in an annoying "artsy" way.

 

well, i feel his style is sort of self consciously post modern, or artsy, or whatever you would call it. like he's trying too hard to write a sort of beat poetry as prose style. that bothered me. the story itself is sort of straightforward, or moreso than i had expected after all i'd read about the novel.

I agree to some extent and I definitely got the same feeling about it seeming a lot more straight forward than I thought it would be, but I think once you get a lot further you'll start to hit the major bumps in the novel that both make it more confusing and interesting. Ir at least that's how it worked for me. He uses very long sections that flow rather normally that are all set in a similar mood, and then there are almost shifts, I mean in retrospect that's the biggest thing about the book is just the structure it's self and a lot of the stuff you're reading through is sort of there to just build that structure. I dunno, I sometimes worry that I just haven't read enough books and I'm being entertained too easily by it. I like to think otherwise.

im reading this for the second time because its one of the best books on music and 60s counterculture that ive ever read. an exhaustive study on probably the most underrated group in the history of rock/pop.

the la times sums it up better than i can:

  Quote

Lost in the tie-dyed wash of the ’60s is the story of the 13th Floor Elevators, a band of Texas psychedelic rock pioneers whose story is less the typical rock train wreck than an outsized Greek tragedy. Musicians praise them and psych-rock geeks own their albums, but there’s precious little historical record of the group, save some old clips on YouTube and tall tales about the band’s vocalist, Roky Erickson, one of rock’s great lunatics.

 

“[T]his history of the 13th Floor Elevators is nothing short of a holy text,” musician Julian Cope writes in the foreword to “Eye Mind,” Paul Drummond’s exhaustive, hide-your-eyes journey through the morass of their career. The manager of the Roky Erickson archive, Drummond tackles the story as if he were conducting an archaeological excavation, crawling through the ruins, piecing together the band’s story from their roots and early promise to the drugs, law enforcement and insanity that ultimately took them out. It’s a gut-wrenching glimpse into rock’s unadulterated dark side.

nice, but i prefer the simple beauty of 'dust'. epic band with an epic story.

not the place to post this but i will anyway because this group was so amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX1W7T0ySSo

  On 12/2/2009 at 5:30 PM, Benedict Cumberbatch said:

finished the sonic youth biography. it was a bit lightweight after shakey

shakin' stevens?

please say yes

I just read Story of the Eye by Georges Batailles. Pervy pretentious hipster trash.

  On 12/5/2009 at 3:19 AM, CondenseWindow said:

I just read Story of the Eye by Georges Batailles. Pervy pretentious hipster trash.

Lol you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.