Whatcha reading?

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Low Down Low
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Low Down Low »

Silent Majority wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 7:18am
22) Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers - Grant Naylor. 1989. Kindle/Audiobook. I've read this, on average twice a year since I was nine years old and listened to the Chris Barrie read audiobook on cassettes a number of times, too. It's probably been about three years since I picked up the now coverless paperback but the damn thing is in my bones. A relief to learn the book is still an overachiever. Episodic, naturally, but an actually solid novel and the definitive take. The series looks so much worse in comparison, in terms of the depth of the writing.
That's interesting. I absolutely adore the tv shows so it's long past time i got stuck into the books. Don't know what's taken me so long.

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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Silent Majority »

Low Down Low wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 12:05pm
Silent Majority wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 7:18am
22) Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers - Grant Naylor. 1989. Kindle/Audiobook. I've read this, on average twice a year since I was nine years old and listened to the Chris Barrie read audiobook on cassettes a number of times, too. It's probably been about three years since I picked up the now coverless paperback but the damn thing is in my bones. A relief to learn the book is still an overachiever. Episodic, naturally, but an actually solid novel and the definitive take. The series looks so much worse in comparison, in terms of the depth of the writing.
That's interesting. I absolutely adore the tv shows so it's long past time i got stuck into the books. Don't know what's taken me so long.
Definitely recommend them for fans and non-fans alike.
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Kory
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Kory »

Silent Majority wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 1:11pm
Low Down Low wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 12:05pm
Silent Majority wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 7:18am
22) Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers - Grant Naylor. 1989. Kindle/Audiobook. I've read this, on average twice a year since I was nine years old and listened to the Chris Barrie read audiobook on cassettes a number of times, too. It's probably been about three years since I picked up the now coverless paperback but the damn thing is in my bones. A relief to learn the book is still an overachiever. Episodic, naturally, but an actually solid novel and the definitive take. The series looks so much worse in comparison, in terms of the depth of the writing.
That's interesting. I absolutely adore the tv shows so it's long past time i got stuck into the books. Don't know what's taken me so long.
Definitely recommend them for fans and non-fans alike.
I'm a huge Dwarfer, I'll have to read this. Are the books actually funny, or are they more standard sci-fi?
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Marky Dread
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Marky Dread »

Kory wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 3:44pm
Silent Majority wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 1:11pm
Low Down Low wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 12:05pm
Silent Majority wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 7:18am
22) Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers - Grant Naylor. 1989. Kindle/Audiobook. I've read this, on average twice a year since I was nine years old and listened to the Chris Barrie read audiobook on cassettes a number of times, too. It's probably been about three years since I picked up the now coverless paperback but the damn thing is in my bones. A relief to learn the book is still an overachiever. Episodic, naturally, but an actually solid novel and the definitive take. The series looks so much worse in comparison, in terms of the depth of the writing.
That's interesting. I absolutely adore the tv shows so it's long past time i got stuck into the books. Don't know what's taken me so long.
Definitely recommend them for fans and non-fans alike.
I'm a huge Dwarfer, I'll have to read this. Are the books actually funny, or are they more standard sci-fi?
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Silent Majority
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Silent Majority »

Kory wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 3:44pm
Silent Majority wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 1:11pm
Low Down Low wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 12:05pm
Silent Majority wrote:
08 Jun 2021, 7:18am
22) Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers - Grant Naylor. 1989. Kindle/Audiobook. I've read this, on average twice a year since I was nine years old and listened to the Chris Barrie read audiobook on cassettes a number of times, too. It's probably been about three years since I picked up the now coverless paperback but the damn thing is in my bones. A relief to learn the book is still an overachiever. Episodic, naturally, but an actually solid novel and the definitive take. The series looks so much worse in comparison, in terms of the depth of the writing.
That's interesting. I absolutely adore the tv shows so it's long past time i got stuck into the books. Don't know what's taken me so long.
Definitely recommend them for fans and non-fans alike.
I'm a huge Dwarfer, I'll have to read this. Are the books actually funny, or are they more standard sci-fi?
Lots of jokes taken from the series, some very good original material in the extended backstory and the Better than Life conclusion.
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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Dr. Medulla »

Finished up Matt Thorne's novel Eight Minutes Idle. Mixed feelings on it. It slots in as 90s slacker novel—20-something in a dead-end job and no real ambition—and while Thorne's writing is mostly enticing, there's no there there to this story. It could have gone on for another 300 pages or it could have stopped 200 pages earlier. It also doesn't help that none of the characters are especially appealing, especially the protagonist. Thorne is skilled enough to make me want to find out what happens, but I increasingly wanted bad things to result. If it's worth reading, it's for Thorne's prose and technique, managing to keep a story going where there is no compelling narrative and no characters to sympathize with. (If you come across the film adaptation, avoid like a JW come knocking on your door. Out of curiosity I watched it. Various scenes are lifted from the novel but there's no flow or sense or interest. It's just dire.)

New tub book:
Image
There is, stunningly, a real lack of solid books on riot grrrl. Lots of good scholarly articles, some in journals and some in collections. There's Sarah Marcus' oral history, and there's this, which is out of print. I decided to splurge on it when I found it for a non-absurd price. Reading for pleasure and to perhaps modify my RG lecture.

Also finished listening to Michael Lewis' The Premonition. Pretty standard Lewis, turning policy stuff into a thriller-style narrative. Don't expect shitting on Trump, tho. The villain here is the CDC's primary interest in image and turf, and, more generally, a system ill-constructed for crisis. You could squint and see this as a more left-humanist critique of systems marginalizing people, but it comes off as more of an inverted great man theory of history, except that the great people here are stymied by abstract systems and bureaucrats. Lewis seems more like a modern-day Vance Packard, an angry liberal who longs for expert individuals to be given their due, rather than subservient to sinister systems.

Audio to start tomorrow:
Image
Why the hell am I listening to this? Well, it's been on my audiobook ipod for a zillion years and I decided to put it out of its misery. It's only 8 hours long, so if it's crappy, my misery won't be long, either.
"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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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Silent Majority »

Well, I'm interested in the Whiskey Rebellion. One of the first moves the US took towards conventional authoritarian government after the revolutionary fervour. Even if the break from Britain was done by property owning white men, they made some good noises about liberty which they immediately failed to live up to.
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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Dr. Medulla »

Silent Majority wrote:
13 Jun 2021, 6:32am
Well, I'm interested in the Whiskey Rebellion. One of the first moves the US took towards conventional authoritarian government after the revolutionary fervour. Even if the break from Britain was done by property owning white men, they made some good noises about liberty which they immediately failed to live up to.
That seems hyperbolic. Describing late 18th c American government as authoritarian abuses the concept and leads to binary thinking. If you're going to have a government organized for order and the common good, it requires power and funding. Nothing about the principles of the American Revolution ever suggested there should be no government.
"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 »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
13 Jun 2021, 8:34am
Silent Majority wrote:
13 Jun 2021, 6:32am
Well, I'm interested in the Whiskey Rebellion. One of the first moves the US took towards conventional authoritarian government after the revolutionary fervour. Even if the break from Britain was done by property owning white men, they made some good noises about liberty which they immediately failed to live up to.
That seems hyperbolic. Describing late 18th c American government as authoritarian abuses the concept and leads to binary thinking. If you're going to have a government organized for order and the common good, it requires power and funding. Nothing about the principles of the American Revolution ever suggested there should be no government.
Yeah. I’ll cheerfully retract ‘authoritarian’, which is anachronistic for early America. Having IMCT with me at all times means I respond on my phone on the way to doing something else which means the thought-to-post time’s been reduced. Of course, in 1789, the fledgling United States was a comparative beacon of radical democracy in relation to its international competitors where absolute monarchies were alive and thriving and constitutional monarchies beginning to become the norm.

I would say that, in particular, the Jeffersonian school of thought (one of many usually opposing and contradictory fuels for the revolution but arguably the dominant one) had considerably more emphasis on the empowerment of the (white, male) people in rhetoric, if not in the theoretical and legislational side which he farmed out to the far more federalist, aristocratic minded Madison. The Tom Paine egalitarian and (small r) republican fire that caught alight in the taverns, cities and farms, was understood in the zeitgeist as less centralised power, which is evidenced by the extraordinary opposition in the press to the wielding by the hyper-conservative Washington of any federal power. Tyranny was the buzzword of the time to be fought.

There’s a difference between ‘no government’ and ‘localised governing’ which I think is what the declaration of Independence and, perhaps more vitally, the perception of that document had to offer. The work of Hamilton (tacitly approved of and encouraged by Washington, however non-partisan he delighted in appearing) took popular expression of opinion and avenues of quick recourse away from the states; that’s one of the issues the Whiskey Rebellion was reacting against, whether they were intellectually aware of it or not.

The strong, powerful Union seems to have been morally vindicated in its eventual triumph over slavery and in balance, I really don’t give a shit about the rights of some long-dead Yankees compared to the suffering ended when the Confederacy was smashed. It’s a counterfactual, but without chattel slavery and the resultant white supremacy on the continent, state’s rights were an opportunity for more power to go to the American people at the expense of the American government and banks.
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Silent Majority »

23) Diamonds Are Forever - Ian Fleming. Paperback. 1956. This is the novel that sees the character lose a lot of his humanity and become the near empty cypher of pop culture. The premise - Bond vs some diamond smuggling gangsters - is not mined for its fullest potential but I enjoyed the secret agent's prejudices about greasy Italians wiping meatballs off their monogrammed shirts for long enough to rob a liquor store to pay off their butcher's debts being challenged by a formidable and intelligent organisation. We're taken on a whistle stop tour of some of the US, long enough for Fleming to display several different flavours of racism, sometimes in the same sentence. The scenes with the most life are the gambling and horse racing ones. Fleming Bond novels left: From Russia With Love, Thunderball, the Spy Who Loved Me, the Man With the Golden Gun.

24) Dig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince by Ben Greenman. Audiobook. 2017. An okay book which offered exactly what it says on the tin. I still need to find a good cradle to the grave traditional biography.
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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

Post by Dr. Medulla »

Silent Majority wrote:
14 Jun 2021, 5:38am
Dr. Medulla wrote:
13 Jun 2021, 8:34am
Silent Majority wrote:
13 Jun 2021, 6:32am
Well, I'm interested in the Whiskey Rebellion. One of the first moves the US took towards conventional authoritarian government after the revolutionary fervour. Even if the break from Britain was done by property owning white men, they made some good noises about liberty which they immediately failed to live up to.
That seems hyperbolic. Describing late 18th c American government as authoritarian abuses the concept and leads to binary thinking. If you're going to have a government organized for order and the common good, it requires power and funding. Nothing about the principles of the American Revolution ever suggested there should be no government.
Yeah. I’ll cheerfully retract ‘authoritarian’, which is anachronistic for early America. Having IMCT with me at all times means I respond on my phone on the way to doing something else which means the thought-to-post time’s been reduced. Of course, in 1789, the fledgling United States was a comparative beacon of radical democracy in relation to its international competitors where absolute monarchies were alive and thriving and constitutional monarchies beginning to become the norm.

I would say that, in particular, the Jeffersonian school of thought (one of many usually opposing and contradictory fuels for the revolution but arguably the dominant one) had considerably more emphasis on the empowerment of the (white, male) people in rhetoric, if not in the theoretical and legislational side which he farmed out to the far more federalist, aristocratic minded Madison. The Tom Paine egalitarian and (small r) republican fire that caught alight in the taverns, cities and farms, was understood in the zeitgeist as less centralised power, which is evidenced by the extraordinary opposition in the press to the wielding by the hyper-conservative Washington of any federal power. Tyranny was the buzzword of the time to be fought.

There’s a difference between ‘no government’ and ‘localised governing’ which I think is what the declaration of Independence and, perhaps more vitally, the perception of that document had to offer. The work of Hamilton (tacitly approved of and encouraged by Washington, however non-partisan he delighted in appearing) took popular expression of opinion and avenues of quick recourse away from the states; that’s one of the issues the Whiskey Rebellion was reacting against, whether they were intellectually aware of it or not.

The strong, powerful Union seems to have been morally vindicated in its eventual triumph over slavery and in balance, I really don’t give a shit about the rights of some long-dead Yankees compared to the suffering ended when the Confederacy was smashed. It’s a counterfactual, but without chattel slavery and the resultant white supremacy on the continent, state’s rights were an opportunity for more power to go to the American people at the expense of the American government and banks.
Revolutions require zeal and inspiring ideas and words. Jefferson provided them. Governing and a normal state of affairs requires tamping that down, otherwise every disagreement and ambition can be elevated into a liberty or tyranny deathmatch. One can see Hamilton et al as cynically betraying the revolution or as cooling passions to get on with a more peacefulish life (acknowledging the foundation of that was slavery). There were other practical matters to worry about—Britain still had colonies to the north, France and Spain had possessions to the south and west, and there were the indigenous nations to the west. There's good reason to both rein in the passions and ambitions of people on the borderlands and to organize and stabilize a more central govt for the likelihood of more war in the future. Which is to say that without that effort to consolidate power, which necessarily meant backtracking from the revolutionary mindset and practice, independence could well have been short lived. The Hamiltonians may not have been virtuous and institutions certainly gained at the expense of people, but I see it all as an inevitable compromise, not as a stab in the back.

That said, in practical ways, of daily life, the presence of government in ways that we think of it, was still extremely mild and experienced very locally. Certain events blistered, like the Whiskey Rebellion, but generally speaking the average farmer or cobbler didn't experience significant effects from whatever was happening in New York/Washington.

edit: Thought of another way—and not suggesting that you're some kind of Trotskyite here—but the purpose of revolution is not, for the vast majority, to have permanent revolution. Most people want a return to an orderly, more predictable existence, which means dampening the revolutionary zeal once the main task has been achieved.
"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 »

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Silent Majority
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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26) Last Words - George Carlin. Kindle. 2009. What's great about this book, ghostwritten with the guy who played the manager in Spinal Tap, is the hyper aware journey we go through Carlin's creative boundaries and his striving to be a better, more authentic artist. The life stuff is non-sentimental and accepts responsibilities for his failures as a husband and a father without tedious self recriminations. The last few chapters, when George's work is at its peak, are best and his ideas of where the craft was going to be taken to next are an enticing big tease considering the reaper slashed him down before he got there. I also loved the boyhood stuff, which is usually the dullest shit a biography or autobiography has to offer. A little shit of a Brooklyn Irish wiseass is an interesting kid to spend time with and his time in the military is defined by getting drunk, smoking grass and bucking authority. Recommended.
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Dr. Medulla
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Re: Whatcha reading?

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Silent Majority wrote:
21 Jun 2021, 6:18am
26) Last Words - George Carlin. Kindle. 2009. What's great about this book, ghostwritten with the guy who played the manager in Spinal Tap, is the hyper aware journey we go through Carlin's creative boundaries and his striving to be a better, more authentic artist. The life stuff is non-sentimental and accepts responsibilities for his failures as a husband and a father without tedious self recriminations. The last few chapters, when George's work is at its peak, are best and his ideas of where the craft was going to be taken to next are an enticing big tease considering the reaper slashed him down before he got there. I also loved the boyhood stuff, which is usually the dullest shit a biography or autobiography has to offer. A little shit of a Brooklyn Irish wiseass is an interesting kid to spend time with and his time in the military is defined by getting drunk, smoking grass and bucking authority. Recommended.
Read it when it came out and loved it. He'll always be one of my inspirations. If you want a darker side, his daughter wrote a memoir relating growing up in the 70s with two addict parents. She's not bitter, but the story can be rough.
"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 »

Dr. Medulla wrote:
21 Jun 2021, 6:28am
Silent Majority wrote:
21 Jun 2021, 6:18am
26) Last Words - George Carlin. Kindle. 2009. What's great about this book, ghostwritten with the guy who played the manager in Spinal Tap, is the hyper aware journey we go through Carlin's creative boundaries and his striving to be a better, more authentic artist. The life stuff is non-sentimental and accepts responsibilities for his failures as a husband and a father without tedious self recriminations. The last few chapters, when George's work is at its peak, are best and his ideas of where the craft was going to be taken to next are an enticing big tease considering the reaper slashed him down before he got there. I also loved the boyhood stuff, which is usually the dullest shit a biography or autobiography has to offer. A little shit of a Brooklyn Irish wiseass is an interesting kid to spend time with and his time in the military is defined by getting drunk, smoking grass and bucking authority. Recommended.
Read it when it came out and loved it. He'll always be one of my inspirations. If you want a darker side, his daughter wrote a memoir relating growing up in the 70s with two addict parents. She's not bitter, but the story can be rough.
I'll probably not get to it, but it's a good reminder that even a well-balanced artist in later life can't have the culpability record erased on their past behaviour.
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