DannyL

Wild Horses
So 2018 be like

10. We Crossed A Bridge & It Trembled - Wendy Pearlman
11. The Book of the Magi - Dr Alexander Cummins
12. Kill All Normies - Angela Nagle
13. The Thai Occult Sak Yant - Peter Jenx
14. The Body Knows the Score Bessel van de Kolk
15. Crossed Keys - Michael Cecchetelli
16. The Righteous Mind - Jonathon Haidt
17. Takeaway - Tommy Hazard
18. A Very Shorit Introduction to Empire - forgot
19. Bury the Chains - Adam Horschild
20. The interestig Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
21. Lost Japan - Alex Kerr
22. Roman Empire - A Very Short Introduction
23. Wizard of Earthsea/Tehanu/The Farthest Shore - Le Guin

.... and on the home straight with Daniel Kahnmann's Thinking Fast and Slow.
Will add a few notes on some of these later on, I just wanted to get the list down first.

... and I see I forget Julio Cesar Ody's Magister Officiorum, which is a short and amazing book about evoking Goetic demons.
 
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droid

Well-known member
Yeah, thats him. Its basically a no-nonsense account of the summoning of each goetic demon. Best bit is when he shrugs off the death of two people after asking for an earthquake as proof of power.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I'll try and check it out. It's strange to see people produce such compelling accounts of experience from the grimoires - as they tend to be fairly minimal texts and quite obscure. There's some real next level nerd scholarship that goes on in the field. Both Julio and John King are interviewed on the Glitch Bottle podcast btw, should the topic pique your interest. I'll be giving the latter a listen.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
to reply to this
no worries bro.

Cometbus isn't bad he's a solid diarist and I relate on a personal level to a lot of the punk rock life bullshit. just seemed weird to be reading him as a middle-aged man but hey.

ya I'd be more interested in mad Autonomia shit too. never knew any OG Italians but I knew this older German cat from the 80s and his stories were WILD. the legacy of the 80s-90s Euro autonomist and squatting movements (and the long gone 80s NYC squatting scene) were really inspiring to me when I was coming up.

I knew the Hancox would be really good, gonna have to check it out
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
short little chapbook Jesus' Son
nah but I heard it's good. I have a good friend who's mad for dude. obv anything intimately referencing the Velvets has my basically automatic cosign.

Tree of Smoke is the first novel I'd read in a while. a true American magnum opus I think. reminds me of McCarthy a bit, not the prose but the sweeping biblical scope and tragedy, as well as some of the characters. I've also read I think all the big canonical American Vietnam novels and it might just be the best tho The Short Timers (whence Full Metal Jacket) is also an amazing book. Tree of Smoke does better than anything I've seen at taking the insanity of that war and using it to say something profound about America in all its awful glory, ugliness and well-meaning fuck-ups. kinda like Faulkner and the Civil War, in that way. idk like I said, pretty good.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
also just on Vietnam War novels, from the other side I'd like to recommend The Sorrow of War by NVA vet Bao Ninh. that is an amazing book in a different way, the novel of the generation born in the north to die in the south.

The Sympathizer is also supposed to be good, might have to check it out
 

john eden

male pale and stale
no worries bro.

Cometbus isn't bad he's a solid diarist and I relate on a personal level to a lot of the punk rock life bullshit. just seemed weird to be reading him as a middle-aged man but hey.

ya I'd be more interested in mad Autonomia shit too. never knew any OG Italians but I knew this older German cat from the 80s and his stories were WILD. the legacy of the 80s-90s Euro autonomist and squatting movements (and the long gone 80s NYC squatting scene) were really inspiring to me when I was coming up.

I knew the Hancox would be really good, gonna have to check it out

The best Cometbus I've read is #56 which is about the weird characters he's met in the NYC 2nd hand book dealing scene over the last few years + an odd romantic quest. It's not really punk at all - and actually I think we are about the same age so it's less weird that you would think...

I knew some of the Luther Blissett / Wu-Ming types from Bologna through the Association of Autonomous Astronauts and they were really smart and funny. It feels like Autonomia is the next thing people are latching onto now that the French 68 stuff has been rinsed dry but I'm all for that to be honest - seems like there's lots of good stuff in there. "Living in a Hurricane" by Red Notes is the one people always mention - it's online at Libcom but I've not read it... there are some novels that cover those times too which I need to check out.

ETA Dammit - Living With an Earthquake https://libcom.org/library/italy-1977-8-living-earthquake-red-notes
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
also just on Vietnam War novels, from the other side I'd like to recommend The Sorrow of War by NVA vet Bao Ninh. that is an amazing book in a different way, the novel of the generation born in the north to die in the south.

The Sympathizer is also supposed to be good, might have to check it out

Cheers for that. I'll check it out. There are precious few narratives from that side - that I'm aware of anyway, just as in cinema.

I thought of Vietnam actually in relation to Ursula Le Guin mentioned above. I got the titles wrong above - I read Tombs of Atuan, and started Tehanu last night (both re-reads but I don't think I understood the latter title first time round). It's amazing - the first really noticeable thing is the introduction to a image of horror to what has otherwise been, in the other books, a land of idealised heroic fantasy, all dragons and shining seas. The image is of a burned child, and I couldn't help flash back to the famous image from Vietnam of the kid running screaming from the napalm attack. I also thought of Idlib (Droid has mentioned that I seem to relate everything to Syria - maybe he has a point). It's quite incredible what she's doing - revisioning the heroic world that she's built in light of deeper understandings of what it's really like to live in ruralised pre-modern climes and the oppressive gender roles that accompany that.
 

droid

Well-known member
I read Earthsea to the nine year old recently and did a little lecture on Le Guin at a course I was involved in which meant a bit of recent re-reading. Her nuance and sensitivity is remarkable, her subversion without clamour, the weaving of radical ideas into genre... arguably the best sci-fi writer of the 20th century.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Well put. Sci fi without the stars as well - in that her stuff is so rooted in land, in place and a kind of felt sense of human mortality that grows out of that.

Have you read "Always Coming Home"? I read it recently. Pretty incredible and working on so many levels - creating a complete and full utopian vision and deconstructing it at the same time, all in the guise of an anthropology textbook. I was struck by how much fun it must've been, the world-building here.
 

luka

Well-known member
im in a bit of a sorry state which often leads me to read things i cant touch under
normal conditions, in this case, dhl's the plumed serpent. if you get in a flap about
hearts of darkness being racist never open this book. you'd (rightly) never get away
with it now.

(not to interupt or derail the le guin convorsation.)
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm reading this Beckett biography and it's quite good but also I keep wondering why I'm reading the fucking thing, why not read some actual Beckett? Whenever he is quoted from the linguistic level rockets beyond the quotidian.

There's an interesting bit in it about Finnegan's Wake Luka in which Beckett talks about how music is superior to literature in that it isn't tied to chronology, can express simultaneity of emotion, and how FW is an attempt to do just that, to get beyond the "falsifications" of Ulysses's rendering of human consciousness as a series of discrete thoughts...
 

luka

Well-known member
im in a bit of a sorry state which often leads me to read things i cant touch under
normal conditions, in this case, dhl's the plumed serpent. if you get in a flap about
hearts of darkness being racist never open this book. you'd (rightly) never get away
with it now.

(not to interupt or derail the le guin convorsation.)

i havent got to the end yet, it's quite long, but i like this book very much. although dh lawrence obviously has a very different sensibility to ballard the set up is actually quintessentially ballardian.

the main character is in a dark, chaotic, crumbling world and decides to stay. is drawn to the darkness and the violence and the disintergration for obscure but compelling psychological reasons. on the other half of the equation is a very ballardian, powerfully built, personally magnetic, chaos-merchant. someone who understands and uses the moment and moulds it to his own ends.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
How did it take me this long to get around to reading Cold Comfort Farm? Absolute genius. Beautifully written and one of those rare 'famous funny books' that's actually funny. Full of wry observations about the class system, gender, the city/country divide, plus loads of obviously made-up pretend country dialect that you can immediately grasp the gist of.
 
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