dilbert1

Well-known member
If she’s that attractive and the action’s good, get it while you can. I’m sure she’s sweet but mind your emotional investment level. None of us are perfect, but with those kind of statements, she’s confused about what’s desirable in human relationships and being simply rude and somewhat manipulative where she thinks she’s being open and honest. Not out of malice I’d assume, just immaturity. If she was just saying plainly, “I don’t want a relationship with you,” “I don’t have those kinds of feelings,” “I’m not looking to take this that far” etc., I would still say, abandon all hope for any such prospect, but that its not entirely impossible or undesirable. But she’s revealing herself as unworthy of your soul. Nothing wrong with hittin that, though, or soaking up whatever comfort and validation you’re receiving. Just start doing your best to accept she’s not capable of bringing real light and peace to your life. That person or the closest approximation is still out there and until you meet focus on yourself and your most genuine interests and be your own most solid foundation. Or let “God” be that or whatever.
 

jenks

thread death
Anyway, back to books. Just finished Brian by Jeremy Cooper - a very odd book about a lonely bloke who becomes a film buff, obsessively going to the BFI in London - it’s as much a meditation on a small life as it is about film. I found it disconcerting, a bit clunky but it had something which worked.
 

wektor

Well-known member
stumbled upon Goodnight Jerzy, telling the story of a polish expat writer in NYC. Pretty much swallowed up the first few chapters right after waking up yesterday morning, even though I stumbled upon the book completely by chance (facebook meme post dissing the selections of the polish barnes noble equivalent chain).
To read it with the entire Brooklyn cultural mafia in mind, as well as living abroad too, multiple axes on which slightly bitter amusement is to be found
 

version

Well-known member
I was just trying to work out my top ten novels of the year that I read, and I got caught up in some EPIC slog reads, but "Creation Lake', the Kushner spy noir is probably going to be in the upper reaches of my TOP 10 of 2024

TIP!

What were the others?
 

version

Well-known member
These are the books I've read so far this year; best in bold, worst in red:

Reads

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information - Erik Davis
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations - Christopher Lasch
Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide - Franco "Bifo" Berardi

End Zone - Don DeLillo
Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? - Jean Baudrillard
The System of Objects - Jean Baudrillard

The Agony of Power - Jean Baudrillard
The History of Europe in Bite-sized Chunks - Jacob F. Field
Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment - Philippa Snow
State of Exception - Giorgio Agamben
Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse - Alessandro Sbordoni
The Silence - Don DeLillo

Farewell, My Lovely - Raymond Chandler
The Moro Affair - Leonardo Sciascia
Collected Poems 1909-1962 - T. S. Eliot
Ivory Pearl - Jean-Patrick Manchette
Nada - Jean-Patrick Manchette

The Cybernetic Hypothesis - Tiqqun
The Body Artist - Don DeLillo
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
Positions - Jacques Derrida
Lost Dimension - Paul Virilio

The Maker: Prose Pieces 1934-1960 - Jorge Luis Borges
Big Blue Train - Paul Zimmer
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Minutes to Go - Sinclair Beiles, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin
Painting and Guns - William S. Burroughs
Selected Poems - Jacques Dupin
The Brittle Age and Returning Upland - René Char
Leaves of Hypnos - René Char
Chicago: City on the Make - Nelson Algren
The Zürau Aphorisms - Franz Kafka
The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark
The Cat Inside - William S. Burroughs
Blade Runner: A Movie - William S. Burroughs
Naked Scientology / Ali's Smile - William S. Burroughs
The Ticket that Exploded - William S. Burroughs
Sarabad - Abdulkareem Kasid
Death Sentence - Maurice Blanchot
Guy Debord - Anselm Jappe
The Spirit of Terrorism - Jean Baudrillard
The Evil Demon of Images - Jean Baudrillard
Telemorphosis - Jean Baudrillard
Cool Memories II: 1987-1990 - Jean Baudrillard
All My Pretty Ones - Anne Sexton
The Book of Sand - Jorge Luis Borges
Forget Foucault - Jean Baudrillard
On the Line - Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
Snapshots - Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Intelligence of Evil, or The Lucidity Pact - Jean Baudrillard
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place - Jean Baudrillard
Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss - Claude-Levi Strauss
A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut
Lud Heat - Iain Sinclair

Rereads

Mao II - Don DeLillo
Passwords - Jean Baudrillard
 

version

Well-known member
I might go back and highlight the worst ones too. Some of the stuff I read was fucking awful, namely the Derrida, Virilio, Sbordoni and a couple of the DeLillos (The Silence, The Body Artist).
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm either trying to read multiple books at once or failing to read any single book depending who you ask

Tolkein - two towers
Dickens - David Copperfield
Hughes-Hallet - the pike (biography of Gabriele d'annuzio)
Chekhov - stories
AMIS - London fields

Absolutely out of control
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Read so much lately... one of the ones that really stuck out for me strangely was this biography of Oscar Wilde that I was given for free in this second hand bookshop "you like Oscar?" "Sure" - only read it cos I left the book I was reading somewhere else but it was fascinating, six hundred odd pages of it but I loved it.
Also read All Quiet On the Western Front and Storm of Steel as two contrasting German accounts of WW1 - one was banned by the Nazis, the other they loved - both worth reading of course. And countless others this month. Right now It's Singapore Grip, so far so good, reads almost like Waugh applying his wit to attack colonialists in Singapore.
 

0bleak

Well-known member
Also read All Quiet On the Western Front and Storm of Steel as two contrasting German accounts of WW1 - one was banned by the Nazis, the other they loved - both worth reading of course.

All Quiet on the Western Front was one of the books that was required reading in high school English class here.
 
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