IdleRich

IdleRich
No, not I.
That's it... I'm going in.
As for the careers book, I've hardly had a chance to read it but I really like it so far. Just starting the third chapter (once I get my order done and shut down Amazon) and the guy who formed ahem Kangeroulipo looks a lot like Richard Brautigan in the pic.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
This book just got better and better. It's pretty rare for me to laugh out loud at a book but I did just that yesterday several times. In fact this book was pretty much the only thing keeping me sane as we spent hours and hours trying to get a non-existent flight into a drone ravaged Gatwick. Or... I've just had a terrible thought; perhaps I totally lost my sanity and I was giggling hysterically over nothing as the rest of the passengers stared at me aghast.
 

jenks

thread death
This book just got better and better. It's pretty rare for me to laugh out loud at a book but I did just that yesterday several times. In fact this book was pretty much the only thing keeping me sane as we spent hours and hours trying to get a non-existent flight into a drone ravaged Gatwick. Or... I've just had a terrible thought; perhaps I totally lost my sanity and I was giggling hysterically over nothing as the rest of the passengers stared at me aghast.

So glad you like it - make sure to read the index.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
Having a good smeck at two pop intellectual bestsellers from the oughts: Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold and Everything Bad is Good for Youby Steven Johnson. The naive faith in collective intelligence as a solution to political issues, or as a driver of cultural evolution, is just laughable in hindsight. And there were so many books and articles in this vein: more connections and communication means more intelligence, faster thinking is smarter and better (I'm thinking of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink). What they failed to take into account was the fundamental nastiness of human nature, that excess communication leads to hyper-polarization and group serving bias, and that the corporate approach to problem solving and creative solutions - ie by committee - weeds out imagination and originality in favor of the ideal average, pure neutrality. Real insight, originality and intelligence has always come from the margins, which worries me because I don't think a marginal or critical perspective is possible anymore unless you are, I don't know, somehow immune to the etiologies of mental illness.

So now we're stuck with popism, Trumpism, and outrage cycles.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
So glad you like it - make sure to read the index.
Are you talking about the MILD SPOILER missing story? It was funny cos I wanted to read about that guy all the way through. I hope I haven't missed anything cos I loaned it to a friend who was intrigued by my laughing so much at the Pennington/Fearnsby story.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Reading my sixth form copy of Regeneration, complete with unenlightening annotations scrawled in black biro. I'm enjoying it, and wondering if I should read the whole trilogy. I think it's the 'contemporary' novel I've most enjoyed reading since I read another historical novel written by a female writer - Wolf Hall. Not sure if that's just happenstance.

Also taking the odd glance at Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which I've never really understood the magic of - but I believe it's dawning on me, slowly.
 

version

Well-known member
I've just finished The Man Who was Thursday; went in expecting a pretty dry, old-fashioned spy story and was pleasantly surprised to find it closer in tone to something like The Third Policeman.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Also his Father Brown books are good. Some stories are better than others of course but the good ones have some very clever mysteries with nicely satisfying solutions.
 

jenks

thread death
Are you talking about the MILD SPOILER missing story? It was funny cos I wanted to read about that guy all the way through. I hope I haven't missed anything cos I loaned it to a friend who was intrigued by my laughing so much at the Pennington/Fearnsby story.

There's the acrostic in the poem towards the end and also a specific index entry which sheds new light on an important relationship in the book. I too have lent my copy to a friend so i can't reference it specifically.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
There's the acrostic in the poem towards the end and also a specific index entry which sheds new light on an important relationship in the book. I too have lent my copy to a friend so i can't reference it specifically.
Oh no! What did it say?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I sort of ran out of steam with the Wake last year about a third of the way through, which is a shame, because I was enjoying it. Will try and pick it up again in the spring.

Currently alternating between Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth and, appropriately, Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. The latter is surprisingly easy to read, but I guess the language is in the very last stage of Middle English on the cusp of becoming Early Modern. What's interesting is that if you had to classify the work by modern literary forms you'd call it a novel, in that it's a long book that tells a story and isn't in verse, but really it predates any idea of the novel by at least a century, and it isn't so much a single narrative as a series of more or less unconnected mini-adventures involving some of the same characters.

It also struck me that it's exactly the sort of book responsible for turning the protagonist mad in Don Quixote, sometimes called the very first novel - in fact I'm sure Cervantes had this precise book in mind, as much as any other.
 

luka

Well-known member
You certainly don't need to know prynne to work those poems. They're written in a relationship with him and pound and eliot and Joyce and Burroughs etc but you don't need to have read exactly what I've read.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i got a copy of poems from prynne and reading it made me physically sick, nauseous. but i don't consider that a bad thing necessarily. i need to read more poetry tho, from different authors and then work my way to prynne. i need more bagage.

also have been reading vegetable empire again and some passages reverberate in my head real good, read the runes ronnie i keep hearing.
 
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