Whatcha reading?

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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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tepista wrote:
24 Mar 2023, 12:19pm
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I’ll be honest with you: Every Canadian lives in fear of the possibility of irradiated beavers growing to be 15-feet tall and looking for vengeance. Every single one of us.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Flex
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Flex »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
24 Mar 2023, 12:33pm
tepista wrote:
24 Mar 2023, 12:19pm
Image
I’ll be honest with you: Every Canadian lives in fear of the possibility of irradiated beavers growing to be 15-feet tall and looking for vengeance. Every single one of us.
FINALLY, after decades of slogging through this accursed website, we get to the content I crave.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle - you can raise the dead

Pex Lives!

Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Flex wrote:
24 Mar 2023, 8:10pm
Dr. Medulla wrote:
24 Mar 2023, 12:33pm
tepista wrote:
24 Mar 2023, 12:19pm
Image
I’ll be honest with you: Every Canadian lives in fear of the possibility of irradiated beavers growing to be 15-feet tall and looking for vengeance. Every single one of us.
FINALLY, after decades of slogging through this accursed website, we get to the content I crave.
You would treat the buttplug thread with such contempt?
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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I'm currently reading that 33 1/3 genre series book on trip-hop that Kory recommended. Can't say that I'm enjoying or getting much out of it. The writer is too comfy cozy up his ass and uninterested in making clear points. Still, just received an email about this new installment, on dance-punk, that I'll be getting: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dancepunk ... ce=Adestra
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Flex
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Dr. Medulla wrote:
06 Apr 2023, 10:47am
I'm currently reading that 33 1/3 genre series book on trip-hop that Kory recommended. Can't say that I'm enjoying or getting much out of it. The writer is too comfy cozy up his ass and uninterested in making clear points. Still, just received an email about this new installment, on dance-punk, that I'll be getting: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dancepunk ... ce=Adestra
Interesting. Didn't even know they were doing genres now. Dance punk seems like a must read. Music I really know exclusively because of this place (and you, doc, in particular) and love it.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle - you can raise the dead

Pex Lives!

Silent Majority
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Silent Majority »

21) The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty - Mathew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLis. Audiobook. 2013. The idea is to make everything as simple as it can be for a customer and for them to perceive it as such.

22) Billion Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork - Reeves Wiedeman. Audiobook. 2020. Lovely schadenfreude of a book, where a messianic douche with a crap business plan strikes it rich then everything falls apart. I'm done. I can't take another business book.

23) Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams. Paperback, then Audiobook. 1992. Read for David Faggiani's EscapeGoat podcast. Gets better each time, as it happens.

24) Victoria Wood: Unseen On TV - Edited by Jasper Rees. Paperback. 2021. I love the way she writes, jokes come out of the way people talk to eachother, rhythm perfect. I appreciate it all the more on the page, but her series Dinnerladies is the perfect pre-Office sitcom.
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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Audio:
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What is this, the fourth or fifth time I've read or listened to this? I'm coming to the conclusion that this is my favourite novel of all time. I was inspired to revisit (again) because of Bob Odenkirk's Lucky Hank, based on this book. Where's Odenkirk's Hank Deveraux is somewhat melancholy, amidst a midlife crisis, Russo's character is the perfect existential figure, the guy aware that life is a cosmic joke and he's not going to rage against it but ride the wave. He is, as the novel's title indicates, the straight man to all the comedians who surround him, the guy who fuels others and gets to smirk because he thinks he's onto the game. What is especially striking upon this listen is how effortless Russo's prose seems. Of course he worked and reworked his text, but the writing here is just so easy. He knows his protagonist so well that the words convey his personality like the finest wine to the mouth. As good as Russo's Empire Falls is, I like this more (tho probably because I lean toward the protagonist's wry, absurdist view of life).

Tub book:
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Catherine Lacey, Pew. A student gave me this last week because she thought it would appeal, so I thought it only right to bump it to the front of the queue. It's a rather short novel—I'm halfway thru in only a couple bathes—with a simple premise. The narrator is someone of ambiguous race, sex, and gender (and to all but a few seemingly a mute) who wanders into a small Southern town and is taken in by the sincere, generally religious and conservative townsfolk. They want to help the person they name Pew (because they were found sleeping on a church pew) and many can't help but share their stories with this cypher, even as Pew prefers to stay quiet and resist their probings. There's not plot really, more a premise and characters playing off it. As much as I'm enjoying the writing and how people interact with this ambiguous stranger, I do hope the novel works toward a greater purpose or resolution.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Silent Majority
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Silent Majority »

25) Teatro Grotesco - Thomas Ligotti. Paperback. 2008. Ligotti deserves his reputation. I love his short stories, as I love Charles Beaumont's, and I am so pleased Ligotti's more pulp than I thought he would be. Poe and Lovecraft are in there, as expected, but so is their mordant delight in telling the story, which I didn't expect.

26) Lord Hornblower - C.S. Forester. Audiobook. 1946. Best novel in the series so far, an exciting penultimate entry.

27) A Convenient Parallel Dimension: How Ghostbusters Slimed Us Forever - James Greene, jr. Audiobook. 2021. Highlights include learning just how unhealthy an influence Bill Murray, who's an abusive, self absorbed prick, was for a young James and the fantastically insane ideas Dan Aykroyd had for Ghostbusters III over the years. I got round the Afterlife thanks to this - the best Ghostbusters sequel we could have asked for in 2021.

28) The Sign of the Four - Arthur Conan Doyle. Audiobook. 1890. The second Holmes novel. Had to remind myself that all the stuff that I found tired would have been entirely new to the readers of the day, with the possible exception of the first person narration from the criminal explaining his life and motives for ages in an idiolect better suited to a country doctor than an affable convict. I love that Holmes' happy ending here involves his binging on his beloved cocaine.
a lifetime serving one machine
Is ten times worse than prison


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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Finished (re)listening to Straight Man the other day. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's my favourite novel, even if it's not terribly weighty or anything like that. Russo's humour and easy prose just makes the experience so enjoyable, a story that I know so well already, but love the retelling all the same. I'm thinking I'm going to revisit the book every April going forward, a bonus after the school year has ended. That said, the tone is so much more different than the current tv adaptation, Lucky Hank. Where Russo's story is mid-life crisis told from the perspective of someone who sees it all as a cosmic joke, of being trapped yet approaching it not with rage by wryness, the Odenkirk version of the mid-life crisis is more to the melancholy. I've been enjoying Lucky Hank, but Russo's approach is far more appealing, and even more instructive.

New audio:
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Robert Draper, Weapons of Mass Delusion. If you asked me, I'd swear that I'm not into politics in a serious way. I'm a bit too jaded, like, I suspect, most of my generation who came of age in the 1980s, when right-wing governments across the western hemisphere asserted that government doesn't work, and proved their case well. They were wrong, of course, but at some gut level I've absorbed their argument. So listening to this and other Trumpish books is probably more therapeutic for me than political or intellectual. I don't expect to be enlightened by any of this; I expect to be appalled and perhaps driven more into the despair camp. So it goes.

Bedtime book:
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Matthew Dallek, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. Seriously, I swear I'm not a politics guy! My interest here is more akin to Greil Marcus' curiosity in Lipstick Traces, of how marginal movements can emerge, collapse, and be reborn and gain real influence (in that case, dada, situationist critique, and punk). Marcus' writing was, as always, coated with glistening, liquid feces, but the idea is fascinating. Dallek examines how Birchers emerged in the 50s as the flakiest conspiracy nuts, unseemly even to the far right wing of the GOP, and then seemed to fade back into tinfoil hell by the 80s. However, Dallek suggests, they continued their work and found a more receptive audience after Bush Jr's failed war, economic collapse, a Kenyan Muslim socialist became president, and then a senile grifter presented himself as a vehicle for their lunacy. And now, it's fair to say, Bircherism, or some kind of descendent variety, is the dominant expression of the American right. No idea, good or bad, ever truly dies once it's gained initial expression.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Flex
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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I feel like we haven't gotten enough recent updates about your "tub books" Doc. What you reading when you have the scented candles lit and the bubble bath bubbling?
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
Wiggle - you can raise the dead

Pex Lives!

Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Flex wrote:
21 Apr 2023, 4:45pm
I feel like we haven't gotten enough recent updates about your "tub books" Doc. What you reading when you have the scented candles lit and the bubble bath bubbling?
Since finishing Pew (above), I've been reading a craptacular book on Killing Joke called Are You Receiving? I think it was written in a week, with the first draft submitted straight to the printer. Not the kind of weeping I tend to do in the tub. Hardly worth pouring a rosé over.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Finished that horrible KJ book. I think it's the worst, sloppiest music book I've ever finished. Its sole virtue was getting me to play lots and lots and lots of KJ over the past week. They might be joining Wire and Swans as a 1a, 1b, 1c grouping. Maybe.

Next up:
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Because Kory said this was the greatest book ever written and that it's helped him become the happiest person in Seattle, I bought a copy of Rory Sullivan-Burke's John McGeoch biography.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Kory
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Dr. Medulla wrote:
26 Apr 2023, 11:55am
Because Kory said this was the greatest book ever written and that it's helped him become the happiest person in Seattle, I bought a copy of Rory Sullivan-Burke's John McGeoch biography.
a) I only alluded to that, I didn't say it explicitly
b) You probably won't like it—it's really just a retelling of what happened rather than anything deeper
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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Kory wrote:
27 Apr 2023, 2:18pm
Dr. Medulla wrote:
26 Apr 2023, 11:55am
Because Kory said this was the greatest book ever written and that it's helped him become the happiest person in Seattle, I bought a copy of Rory Sullivan-Burke's John McGeoch biography.
a) I only alluded to that, I didn't say it explicitly
b) You probably won't like it—it's really just a retelling of what happened rather than anything deeper
I'm treating it more as a voyeuristic thing—not expecting to be all that engaged. Which, to be fair, is my experience with most biographies. It ends up acquiring some anecdotes, but little else.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Finished the McGeoch bio. Not all that impressed, really. Part of it might be that the writing isn't that good, partly that it's explicitly a celebration. Which isn't to say that JM doesn't deserve recognition as a seminal guitarist, only that going into a project with an aim to celebrate a life boxes the project in from the start. So, what we get is: he was an innovative guitarist respected by peers but unheralded by the public; he was a modest and kind person; and he had troubles with alcohol. There. Over and over, that's the book. It doesn't need to be dull, but in the end it is.

Next tub book:
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James Ellroy, Blood on the Moon. I've had for years a book that collects three early novels featuring Lloyd Hopkins but never cracked it open. No idea why. But the first one is up next.
Last edited by Dr. Medulla on 07 May 2023, 7:46pm, edited 1 time in total.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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