DannyL

Wild Horses
Love that Jonathon Rose book. I used to have the Brian Massumi book but I didn't really understand it, I don't think - too young. What did you make of Bastani's offering?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Love that Jonathon Rose book. I used to have the Brian Massumi book but I didn't really understand it, I don't think - too young. What did you make of Bastani's offering?

The Masumi is just entertainingly bonkers I think. Rose is genius. Bastani’s book is one of the worst things I read this year. Will try and dredge up what I wrote about it elsewhere. It was about 2 quid in the verso e-book sale though.
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
Don't know if you seen Cosey's book about her time in Psychic TV?

Her time in Throbbing Gristle and COUM before that. She was never in Psychic TV.

It's basically a curse on the reputation of Geneis P. Orridge. Someone who ticks all the experimental lifestyle boxes but in her book comes over as a completely horrible damaged piece of shit.

He certainly does.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Aaron Bastani - Fully Luxury Automated Communism: A Manifesto

This was always going to be a bit of a hate-read for me but to his credit the author is slightly less annoying in book form than in his media incarnation. Most of the book describes technological developments which are probably going to shake things up in the course of the rest of my time on this shitpit of a planet. I found a lot of this section pretty tedious and it reminded me of the breathless puff pieces you would get in 1990s tech mags like Wired, Boing Boing and Mondo 2000. I don't really give a shit what Bastanti thinks about genetic engineering.

Where those magazines fell down was that their utopianism relied entirely on technology to make our lives better. Which it has in some ways but the fact remains that I now exchange most of my time in a windowless basement frantically answering emails, tinkering with Word documents and trying to understand spreadsheets for the money I need to pay for my mortgage and the Morrisons bill. Oh and for the latest iPhone.

So you'd hope Aaron would get to grips with this what Communism being in the title and all. As many other reviewers have noted he doesn't do this. The optimism of the book is not tempered with any suggestion that these technological innovations might cause us some problems. For example the prospects for a workless dystopia enforced by robots and genetic engineering. Or even that the technology itself, as developed under the capitalist mode of production might have some horrific knock on effects in the same way that the industrial revolution lead directly to the climate crisis.

He also, weirdly, thinks that, during the twentieth century "Whether you were an employee or an industrialist, it was in your rational interest to protect the system" and "until now, communism was impossible". Which kind of shits on the workers' movement, but whatever. Now that it is possible, how do we get there? Again, as others have pointed out, it's through the ballot box, daddio. Because most people are too knackered by life to get into politics in a sustained way. Which is on the one hand a neat criticism of hyper activists like Extinction Rebellion, but on the other hand flies in the face of the fact that it is "kicking off everywhere" as Bastani's fellow techno-optimist Paul Mason has it. Clearly a lot of people in Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon etc do have time for this sort of thing. As do the campaigners out to save Latin Village in Seven Sisters just up the road from where I am typing this. (It's also strange that there is no futuristic techno-utopian vision of how political campaigning may change in here but perhaps that is another book).

So in summary - there is a huge change in how we live and work on the horizon. And there is an optimistic vision of how this will make our lives better. But it relies on political specialists in parliament, and technological specialists who are currently developing everything at breakneck speed under the capitalist mode of production. Here comes the new boss.
 

version

Well-known member
I picked up The Odyssey again and enjoying it a lot more now, also started A Thousand Plateaus and rereading The Crying of Lot 49.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I wouldn't mind re-reading The Crying of Lot 49, there is a logo for some company that here that makes me think of that book every time I see it.
I just opened Borges - The Book of Imaginary Beings which I found just before Christmas on a table of second hand books someone had set up on the street. I think it's the only one of his collections that I haven't read (could be wrong though) and I'd always assumed that it was a list of creatures that he had made up, something like Calvino's Invisible Cities but for for beasts, and I put off starting for a while cos to me that simply didn't sound as varied or enticing - but in fact it's a little different and, I think, slightly more interesting than that. What he actually does is compile a load of legendary and mythical creatures from folk tales, books and so on - although I reckon some are probably just made up by him, for instance the first creature which apparently he quotes discovering in different sources in different editions. I like the ones from literature cos it sends you off in different directions to investigate things (or else let's you feel smart cos you've read the thing he cites), already he's mentioned creatures dreamt up by Kafka, Poe and CS Lewis.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
While dipping in and out of Borges I thought I should read a proper novel too. On the shelf, sitting staring reproachfully at me for a long time I've had a copy of William Gaddis - The Recognitions. It's about the size of a two year old child and bright pink so I can't miss it even though I've never really any had any enthusiasm to read it (I think it was a gift, possibly from Lewis who used to be on dissensus in fact - what was his name now? - though I'm not sure he read it either). Anyway, fuck it, I'm going in, wish me luck, first few pages I read last night seemed ok although the style was somewhat circumlocutory and may grow wearing over the following 1000 or so massive pages.... anyone ever had a crack at this fucker?

I do ask something of the reader and many reviewers say I ask too much . . . and as I say, it's not reader-friendly. Though I think it is, and I think the reader gets satisfaction out of participating in, collaborating, if you will, with the writer, so that it ends up being between the reader and the page. . . . Why did we invent the printing press? Why do we, why are we literate? Because the pleasure of being all alone, with a book, is one of the greatest pleasures
 
While dipping in and out of Borges I thought I should read a proper novel too. On the shelf, sitting staring reproachfully at me for a long time I've had a copy of William Gaddis - The Recognitions.... anyone ever had a crack at this fucker?

yes, about 20 years ago, but never finished it.
I recall a couple of virtuoso passages in it that are worth persisting for. I'll have another crack at it 20 years from now, probably.
 

version

Well-known member
On the shelf, sitting staring reproachfully at me for a long time I've had a copy of William Gaddis - The Recognitions. It's about the size of a two year old child and bright pink so I can't miss it even though I've never really any had any enthusiasm to read it (I think it was a gift, possibly from Lewis who used to be on dissensus in fact - what was his name now? - though I'm not sure he read it either). Anyway, fuck it, I'm going in, wish me luck, first few pages I read last night seemed ok although the style was somewhat circumlocutory and may grow wearing over the following 1000 or so massive pages.... anyone ever had a crack at this fucker?

I've been wanting to read it for a while, but haven't found it cheap enough yet. It's always like £20 second-hand. I've got A Frolic of his Own, the one he did about the law, but it's in the stack atm.

(I think it was a gift, possibly from Lewis who used to be on dissensus in fact - what was his name now? - though I'm not sure he read it either).

Bangpuss?
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I am reading Michael Weiss's book on ISIS. Hard to say that fast.

It's subtitled "Inside the Army of Terror" it's very good, but a little hard to follow because of the depth of the research. All the Arabic names and organisations, and lots of complex bloody feuds, counterfeuds. feints, deceptions and hatreds. A bit like the modern Labour Party but with carbombs. It's very good but I keep on having to take breaks for the aforementioned reason and also the fact it's so filled with blood. Murder and massacre after murder and massacre. Blood atop of blood. I find myself really alienated from the kind of sociopaths who drove it and am still finding it hard to inhabit that world.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The Recognitions came in handy cos girlfriend went for a run in the marshes and I was waiting for her to come back and watching her stuff. It was really windy and her coat started to blow away and so I put the book on it as a kind of paperweight, with that on top it would take a hurricane to move it.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Read 150 pages of trickys new autobiography last night. Perfect stuff. I dont care what anyone says, hes one of the best artists this country has produced. Theres some good stuff in there about how he lived in squats in london as a teenager and went poaching rabbits with his uncles as a child. I like what he says about maxinquaye being so good cos he didnt know how to do anything except pull out sounds from his head, and all the engineers were saying ‘you cant do that, the notes dont fit together’ etc.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
In The Recognitions a phrase comes up several times which I first heard (I think) as the title of Pynchon's novel - Inherent Vice. I'm guessing Pynchon is a fan of Gaddis, was that a homage?
 

version

Well-known member
In The Recognitions a phrase comes up several times which I first heard (I think) as the title of Pynchon's novel - Inherent Vice. I'm guessing Pynchon is a fan of Gaddis, was that a homage?

I don't think it's ever been confirmed, but wouldn't surprise me. It's not a phrase you see too often and it seems like the kind of wink Pynchon would give. Some people actually thought Pynchon was Gaddis when V. was published.
 
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