Whatcha reading?

[Silent Majority]

16) Doctor Who and the State of Decay - Terrence Dicks. Audiobook. A story somewhere between Bram Stoker and cosmic horror and written in the stylish, clipped form we've learnt to expect from Dicks. The story itself is brilliant politically, all long lived aristocrats halting progress and living off the peasantry. A good bit of Doctor Who that I hadn't heard spoken about before we got to it.

[Dr. Medulla]

Audio:

Peter Frase, Four Futures. I'll finally be finishing Meet Me in the Bathroom today—I've said way too much about that already—and this is up next. It's quite short, a speculative work on a world after capitalism (i.e., when conditions of abundance became scarcity).

Bedtime:

Ben Alpers, Happy Days. Finished that book on the '88 US election yesterday. It's fine, I suppose, and makes a stab at treating the behaviours and demographic shifts as predictive of trends in American politics. Maybe I'm no longer the audience for that stuff, tho, as it didn't especially spark my intellectual curiosity. Anyhoo, onto the next book, which—fun fact!—was written by the guy who was my external examiner for my diss defence. I've read his other book, on shifting perceptions in America of dictators from the 20s to 40s, and enjoyed very much the blend of traditional intellectual historical sources and popular cultural ones. I'm also curious whether he tackles the emergence of punk as an example of 1950s nostalgia.

[Dr. Medulla]

A piece on GoodReads and its effect on authors: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/ ... ews-go-bad

[Silent Majority]

17) Beowulf - The Poet, or Poets, Who Wrote Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation). Paperback. Some time in the early eighth century / 2000. Everything that makes literature a plus for human beings lives here, so I count this as one of the rare good arguments in favour of our being able to think and communicate. Like the film Metropolis, or Mick Jones playing guitar. A brutal world birthed this piece of deathless art, but the heart of the piece is so recognisably human - helped immeasurably by Heaney's flickering fire of a translation job, where he matches the modern toughness of the Ulster dialect to the old English of the oral tradition. That oral tradition has left us with a story in three acts, and I can't help but imagine each section being added to at the request of a hungry audience, ending with a legacy sequel of sorts where Old Man Beowulf fights a dragon. I'll be returning to this for as long as I live.

[Dr. Medulla]

Finished listening to Frase (it's quite short). Would recommend as provocative speculation of a post-capitalist future, driven by both climate change and automation of labour. He offers four scenarios based on the question of whether a post-capitalist world be one of continued luxury or a return to scarcity. Within each of those possibilities, he speculates on scenarios where there is an impulse toward greater equality or greater stratification and marginalization. So, in essence, whether or not our future is one of scarce resources or ample, it ends up being a political struggle. A good book for sparking discussion, less so if you're seeking answers.

Next audiobook:

John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden. Spring training is in the air, weller is synchronizing his pitch clock in anticipation, so I figured I'd give this a spin. I'm not terribly interested in the earliest era of baseball, but I like historians who claw at myths and Thorn is as knowledgeable a baseball historian as there is.

[Flex]

I'll be curious what you think of Baseball in the Garden. I AM a fan of the earliest days of the game, so it's been a title I've been interested in since I saw it on bookshelves whenever it came out.

[Dr. Medulla]

I'll be curious what you think of Baseball in the Garden. I AM a fan of the earliest days of the game, so it's been a title I've been interested in since I saw it on bookshelves whenever it came out.

Watch this space in a couple weeks then. I should say, tho, that I am interested in the early years of the game but only to the degree of how it mirrored American life in terms economics and racial segregation/exclusion. But the actual game and its players, meh, not really.

[Dr. Medulla]

I'm about four chapters into Thorn's book and … it's really fucking boring. I'll grant that it's a me thing, but I don't care about who invented the game, or rather all the competing versions of its origins. The only thing I've found intriguing—and Thorn didn't follow up on it—is about how the game was a means for clerks, who didn't perform traditionally masculine work, could demonstrate their manhood in physical competition. That rings true for the game gaining popularity (that and football) in the late 19th c at the same time as middle-class occupations—various kinds of office work—grew and their were public conversations about emasculation (Teddy Roosevelt was a big proponent of sports as a substitute for war for that reason).

I'll give this one a couple more hours, but it's really dull. Thorough (presumably) but dull.

[Flex]

I'm about four chapters into Thorn's book and … it's really fucking boring. I'll grant that it's a me thing, but I don't care about who invented the game, or rather all the competing versions of its origins. The only thing I've found intriguing—and Thorn didn't follow up on it—is about how the game was a means for clerks, who didn't perform traditionally masculine work, could demonstrate their manhood in physical competition. That rings true for the game gaining popularity (that and football) in the late 19th c at the same time as middle-class occupations—various kinds of office work—grew and their were public conversations about emasculation (Teddy Roosevelt was a big proponent of sports as a substitute for war for that reason).

I'll give this one a couple more hours, but it's really dull. Thorough (presumably) but dull.

needs more information about early ball players wrestling various large and dangerous animals

[Dr. Medulla]

I'm about four chapters into Thorn's book and … it's really fucking boring. I'll grant that it's a me thing, but I don't care about who invented the game, or rather all the competing versions of its origins. The only thing I've found intriguing—and Thorn didn't follow up on it—is about how the game was a means for clerks, who didn't perform traditionally masculine work, could demonstrate their manhood in physical competition. That rings true for the game gaining popularity (that and football) in the late 19th c at the same time as middle-class occupations—various kinds of office work—grew and their were public conversations about emasculation (Teddy Roosevelt was a big proponent of sports as a substitute for war for that reason).

I'll give this one a couple more hours, but it's really dull. Thorough (presumably) but dull.

needs more information about early ball players wrestling various large and dangerous animals

[tepista]

I bought a copy of Hollywood Babylon for 5 bucks for kicks. I haven't read anything in a while, not sure if and when I'll get to it, but if I need it.

[Dr. Medulla]

Contrary to my threat/hope of abandoning Thorn, I chugged my way thru, mainly because every so often my interest would pique (albeit briefly). I can't recommend it, but I will say that there was enough there that I know I could use it as the basis for a lecture that uses early baseball to explain Gilded Age America, from urbanization and commercialization of leisure to the contradictory development of capitalism and valourization of free labour/market while seeking order by minimizing competition and the power of labour. There's even the basis for using baseball to talk about America's emerging imperial ambitions. None of that is Thorn's ambition, tho, which is more about baseball's creation mythology.

Next audio book:

Chuck Palahniuk, The Invention of Sound. I used to be a fan of his work, the early stuff. Then he either hit a rut or I got bored with what seemed to be the same shit over and over and I dropped out. Decided to test the waters again with a recent book.

[Dr. Medulla]

Well, Palahniuk was a disappointment. All the usual beats were there but the story never grabbed me in any way. Maybe it's him, probably it's me. Oh well.

Next audio book:

Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes. It's been decades since I've read this, but now that I'm plunging into the 70s, this analysis of Nixon mid-presidency (I believe it was published in 70 or 71) might contain some useful insights for what I'll be doing.

[Silent Majority]

21) Madonna: An Intimate Biography of an Icon - Randy Taraborrelli. Paperback, library borrow. 2018. A great story about an uncompromising artist who has made some fantastic singles and a lot of albums that didn't interest me even slightly when I checked them out. The writer's origin as an entertainment news hack shows through occasionally, but not so often that the book suffers in any major way. For me, who came of age after her musical imperial phase and the period of tabloid domination, this was a revealing read about a woman my Mum played a lot of when I was growing up.

22) Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter - Zoe Schiffer. Audiobook. 2024. Little prick.

23) The Highway Code - A Committee of Grey, Driving-Focused People. 2023. Audiobook. Listened to twice. Passed the fucking driving theory test, so fuck 'em.

24) Alcestis - Euripides. 438 BC. Paperback. Knock knock. Who's there? Euripides. Euripides who? Euripides these trousers, you-a pay for these trousers. Vital, very funny at times, sad at others. Lovely old time when something from 2500 years ago moves you, I'm all about that.

[Silent Majority]

25) Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! - David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams. Audiobook. 2023. I saw this film more times than I count on DVD and heard the audio commentary maybe half a dozen time, so I knew a decent amount of what this book had to share, but the fun here is the creative team kind of just hanging out. I had a really good time with it - probably more so than if I'd rewatched the film, which is starting to creak and had some of its energy superseded by its imitators. Now do the Naked Gun.