Full article: [Wayback]
Fiction
Alfred Jarry "Ubu Roi"
Leonora Carrington "The Hearing Trumpet"
Jack Kerouac "On the Road" &c
William S. Burroughs "Junky" "Naked Lunch" "Nova Express" "Soft Machine"
Charles Bukowski "Factotum" "Post Office" "Ham on Rye"
John Kennedy Toole "A Confederacy of Dunces"
Mary Lasswell "Suds in your Eye"
Jane Austen "Pride and Prejudice"
Nick Hornby "High Fidelity"
Jim Thompson "Killer Inside Me" &c
Cornell Woolrich "I Married a Dead Man" "The Bride Wore Black"
Charles Willeford "Wild Wives" "High Priest of California"
Philip K. Dick "Martian Time-Slip" "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" "Ubik" "Valis" "The Man in the High Castle"
H.P. Lovecraft "At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror"
Harlan Ellison (ed) "Dangerous Visions"
J.G. Ballard "Crash" "The Crystal World"
Frederic Brown "Martians Go Home"
William Gibson "Neuromancer"
David R. Bunch "Moderan"
R.A. Lafferty "Nine Hundred Grandmothers"
Samuel R. Delany "Dhalgren"
Robert Heinlein "The Star Beast" "Have Spacesuit Will Travel"
Dr. Seuss "Green Eggs and Ham" "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish"
Richard Scarry "Best Word Book Ever"
Madeleine L'Engle "A Wrinkle in Time"
De Saint-Exupery "Little Prince"
Daniel Pinkwater "The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death" "Young Adult Novel"
Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat series
Iceberg Slim "Pimp: The Story of My Life" "Trick Baby" &c
Dirck Van Sickle "Montana Gothic"
Nonfiction
Jane and Michael Stern "Encyclopedia of Bad Taste"
Berkeley Pop Culture Project "Whole Pop Catalog"
Gene Sculatti (ed) "The Catalog of Cool" "Too Cool"
Jan Harold Brunvand "The Choking Doberman" "The Vanishing Hitchhiker"
William Poundstone "Big Secrets" "Bigger Secrets" "Biggest Secrets"
Cecil Adams's Straight Dope books
Re/Search and V/Search Books " Modern Primitives" "Pranks!" "The Industrial Culture Handbook"
Barbara O'Brien "Operators and Things"
John G.H. Oakes (ed) "In the Realms of the Unreal: 'Insane' Writings"
Charles Fort's compendia
Criswell's predicitions
SCHWA World Operations Manual
Douglas Curran "In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space"
Margaret Cheney "Tesla: Man out of Time"
Joel Whitburn "The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits"
Lester Bangs "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung"
Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk"
Deborah Spungen "And I Don't Want to Live This Life"
Nick Tosches "Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams"
Harvey Pekar "American Splendor Anthology"
Alan Moore "Watchman"
Art Spiegelman "Maus"
Peter Bagge
Dan Clowes
Hergé's adventures of Tintin
R. Crumb's works
Walt Kelly's Pogo
Crockett Johnson's Barnaby
VIP (Virgil Partch) "Bottle Fatigue" "Virgil Partch's Funny Bar Book"
Scott McCloud "Understanding Comics" "Manga!"
Frederik Schodt "Manga! The World of Japanese Comics"
Jack Chick minicomics
Robert Williams "Zombie Mystery Paintings"
Laguna Art Museum "Kustom Kulture"
Jim Shaw "Thrift Store Paintings"
"Man's Ruin: The Posters and Art of Frank Kozik"
Weegee "Naked City"
Photos of Bettie Page
Michael Weldon "Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film"
Kenneth Anger "Hollywood Babylon"
Drew Friedman "Warts and All"
Rudolph Grey "Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr."
Edward D. Wood Jr. "Killer in Drag"
John Waters "Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters" "Shock Value: A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste"
Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins "Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head"
Ray Richmond (ed) "The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family"
Bob Black "The Abolition of Work and Other Essays"
"The Anarchist Cookbook"
Loompanics catalog.
Thomas Frank "The Conquest of Cool"
Jim and Debbie Goad (eds) "Answer Me! The First Three Issues"
"The Book of the SubGenius"
Adam Parfrey "Cult Rapture and Apocalypse Culture"
Robert Anton Wilson's works
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain "Acid Dreams, The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond"
Truman Capote "In Cold Blood"
Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry "Helter Skelter"
Harold Schechter "Deviant"
Any book on Jeffrey Dahmer
Michael Lesy "Wisconsin Death Trip"
Hunter S. Thompson "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
David Foster Wallace "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"
Frederick Drimmer "Very Special People"
Dan Mannix's works
Katherine Dunn "Geek Love"
Ricky Jay "Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women"
Thomas Hine "Populuxe"
John Baeder "Gas, Food, and Lodging"
Alan Hess "Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture"
Showing posts with label bookreview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bookreview. Show all posts
05 November 2007
27 June 2007
A key to "Ravelstein"
"Teaching, as Ravelstein understood teaching, was tricky work. YouI picked up Bellow's "Ravelstein" ($1 at DollarTree) because I'd heard Wolfowitz is in it. Some of the other identities were a little harder to trace:
couldn't afford to let the facts become generally known." p.59
"Abe Ravelstein" is Allan Bloom
"Chick" is Saul Bellow
"Vela" is Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea Bellow [pix]
"Rosamund" is Janis Freedman-Bellow
"Radu Grielescu" is Mircea Eliade [cite]
"Rakhmiel Kogon" is Edward Shills [cite]
"Felix Davarr" is Leo Strauss
"Nikki" is Michael Z Wu [cite]
"Phil Gorman" is Paul Wolfowitz
"Prof. Glyph" is John U. Nef [cite]
"Prof. Battle" is Paul Wheatley [cite]
"Mr Flood" is Jonathan Kleinbard [cite]
"Morris Herbst" is Werner Dannhauser [cite]
"Dr Abern" is Nicholas Davidson? [cite]
unidentified: Crazy Marford, Ruby Tyson, Dr Schley, Kerrigan, Kurbanski/Les Atouts, Sam Pargiter, Trimble, Smith, Durkin, Dr Bakst
real names: Paul Nitze, Alexandre Kojeve, Gus Alex, Nae Ionescu
If nothing else it's making me (re)read Allan Bloom with new attention.
[Bloom's pupils including Wolfowitz] "imitated his manners and tried to walk and talk as he did-- freely, wildly, pungently... They could be trusted with classified information, the state secrets they naturally would not pass on to their teacher." (pp.58-59)
Quote, 'Ravelstein' to 'Chick': "Do you expect to be tapped one of these days and be told that you have now become an elder of Zion?" (p.127)
.
18 June 2007
The Barger Canon
i distrust all best-books lists
because it's impossible to be completely honest
under the pressure of peers' sneers
in rejecting consensus classics
and admitting guilty pleasures
but i invented a countertechnique
for sorting favorites
where you imagine that any pair of authors
have each released a new work
touted as comparable to your favorite
among their earlier works
which would you try first?
by this test
escapist pleasures bubble up
while remorse-lit plummets
but i wouldn't call this a canon
just a reading list
for a ranked canon
you need to believe your omissions are justified
and you need to ask which of the two
candidate authors
you'd recommend others read first
assuming they're eager to
know
confront
have their eyelids pried open
weighing payoff vs effort
(the remarkable range of overlaps with bloom
are marked "(bloom)"
while effective escapism
ie payoff much greater than effort
is graded "(escape+++)"
the year i discovered each work
is also now noted "(2006)"
and known etexts are linked)
because it's impossible to be completely honest
under the pressure of peers' sneers
in rejecting consensus classics
and admitting guilty pleasures
but i invented a countertechnique
for sorting favorites
where you imagine that any pair of authors
have each released a new work
touted as comparable to your favorite
among their earlier works
which would you try first?
by this test
escapist pleasures bubble up
while remorse-lit plummets
but i wouldn't call this a canon
just a reading list
for a ranked canon
you need to believe your omissions are justified
and you need to ask which of the two
candidate authors
you'd recommend others read first
assuming they're eager to
know
confront
have their eyelids pried open
weighing payoff vs effort
(the remarkable range of overlaps with bloom
are marked "(bloom)"
while effective escapism
ie payoff much greater than effort
is graded "(escape+++)"
the year i discovered each work
is also now noted "(2006)"
and known etexts are linked)
- israel shahak (1999) [fan]
"jewish history, jewish religion" [etext]
and "jewish fundamentalism in israel" [etext]
if these accurately reflect the hebrew press
the gentile world is
perishing of gullibility - william blake (bloom, 1974)
start here
[full etext] - wallace stevens (bloom, 1970)
just 23 short poems [links] - "zen flesh, zen bones" (1970)
- barbara o'brien's "operators & things" (escape, 1981)
- pynchon's "crying of lot 49" (bloom, escape, 1974) [etext]
- robert stone's "dog soldiers" (bloom, escape+, 1974) [fan]
- krishnamurti (1972) [fan]
the "commentaries on living" especially - "laws of form" by g. spencer brown (1974) [fan]
- ulysses, finnegans wake, ellmann, annotations (bloom, 1968)
browse first, then lean on my pages - roget's thesaurus (1965)
- gravity's rainbow (bloom, 1974)
- iris murdoch "a word child" (escape+, 1977) [fan]
- nabokov's "strong opinions" (1974) [fan] [etexts]
- robert stone's "a flag for sunrise" (bloom, escape, 1993) [fan]
- nabokov's "lolita" (bloom, 1974) [etext]
- iris murdoch "the black prince" (escape+, 1977) [fan]
- early 'peanuts' by charles schulz (escape++, 1959)
- walker percy's "love in the ruins" (escape, 1974)
- mortimer adler's syntopicon (1986)
- mcelroy's "ancient history" (1976) [fan]
- le carre's karla trilogy (escape++, 1979) [fan]
- ralph pape "say goodnight, gracie" (play) (1982)
- renata adler 'speedboat' (1976)
- nabokov's "pale fire" (bloom, 1974)
- dawkins' "selfish gene" (1976)
- polti's "36 dramatic situations" (1986) [outline]
- harold brodkey's "stories in an almost classical mode" (bloom, 1988) [fan]
- blanche mccrary boyd's collected fiction (escape, 1977) [fan]
- patrick o'brian's aubrey-maturin series (escape++, 2000)
- kingsley amis "lucky jim" (escape+, 1977)
- christopher cerf's "world's largest cheese" (1969)
- feynman's QED (1985)
- le carre's "looking glass war" (escape, 1976)
- pynchon's "against the day" (2006)
- graham greene's "the comedians" (escape, 2005)
- joseph heller "catch-22" (escape++, 1967) [page images]
- bill james's harpur and iles series (escape+, 2004)
- cf hockett "man's place in nature" (1976)
- gribbin's "schrodinger's kittens" (2004)
- jl austin (1975)
- robert anton wilson's historical illuminatus trilogy (escape+, 1991)
- pirsig's "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" (1975)
- jim harrison's "sundog" (escape+, 2004)
- lynda j barry's comics (1983) [recent]
- "the ape within us" by frans de waal (2007)
- joyce's "stephen hero" (2001) [annotated etext]
- peter bowen's gabriel du pre series (2004)
- dickey's "deliverance" (escape+, 1971)
- stone's "children of light" (1986)
- martin amis "other people" (1990)
- murdoch's "the sea, the sea" (escape+, 1978)
- tom wolfe's "bonfire of the vanities" and "a man in full" (escape+, 1987/1998) [fan]
- castaneda's "teachings of don juan" and "separate reality" (1971)
- robertson davies's "deptford trilogy" (bloom, escape+, 1977)
- jeff dorchen "ugly's first world" (play) (1991)
- peter dickinson "tulku" (&ccccc) (escape++, 1979) [fan]
- stone's "outerbridge reach" (escape, 1992)
- melville's "moby dick" (bloom, 1982) [etexts]
- tolstoy's "anna karenin" (bloom, 1975) [etexts]
- colin wilson's early fiction (escape+, 1988)
- william wharton "dad" (&c) (escape, 1982) [fan]
- philip pullman's "his dark materials" trilogy (escape+, 2002) [fan]
- tolstoy's war and peace (bloom, 1975)
- robert bly "little book of the human shadow" (1990)
- finkelstein's "bible unearthed" (2001)
- doctorow's "ragtime" (escape++, 1975)
- graham greene "a burnt-out case" (1985)
- martin amis "london fields" (&c) (escape, 1989)
- jd salinger's works (bloom, 1968) [etexts]
- walker percy "the moviegoer" (bloom, escape+, 1974)
- kingsley amis "stanley and the women" (escape, 2007)
- "the 100th boyfriend" by daly and skeels [Az] (1992)
- peter redgrove's "black goddess and the unseen real" (1989)
- fink "social philosophy" (2006)
- gospel of thomas (2001) [etexts]
- le carre "a perfect spy" (&c) (escape+, 1999)
- grass's "tin drum" (bloom, escape, 1967)
- michael gruber/ robert k tanenbaum's karp-ciampi series (&c) (escape++, 2004) [fan]
- thomas harris "red dragon" (escape++, 2007)
- colin harrison "afterburn" (escape+, 2007)
- carl hiaasen's "stormy weather" (escape+++, 2006)
- ruth rendell's "a judgment in stone" (&c) (escape+, 2007)
- murdoch's "nuns and soldiers" (&ccc) (escape, 1980)
- flaubert's mrs bovary (bloom, 1988)
- grif stockley's fiction (escape, 2006)
- jeffery deaver's fiction (escape+++, 1998)
- stone's "damascus gate" (1998)
- mcelroy's "lookout cartridge" (1975)
- ward just's fiction [fan]
- pinter's "homecoming" (bloom, 1973)
- conrad's "nostromo" (bloom, 2004) [etext]
- gibson's "pattern recognition" (escape+, 2003)
- thomas mcguane's fiction (escape+)
- graves' "white goddess" (1981)
- minette walters' "acid row" (escape+, 2004)
- joseph wambaugh "golden orange" and "black marble" (escape, 2007)
- michael connelly "the closers" (&ccc) (escape++, 2006)
- scott turow's fiction (escape)
- julian jaynes "origin of consciousness" (1977)
- nicholson baker "the mezzanine" (escape, 2004)
- dan brown "da vinci code", "angels and demons" (escape+++, 2004)
- elmore leonard "stick" (&ccc) (escape+++)
- thomas perry's jane whitehead series (escape++)
- george v higgins's fiction
- vance bourjaily's "now playing at canterbury" (&c) (1977)
- patricia highsmith's "a suspension of mercy" (&c) (2006)
- brodkey "first love and other stories" (1988)
- greg iles's fiction (escape+, 2007)
- berger's "little big man" (&c) (escape+)
- franzen's "the corrections" (2002)
- eric ambler's "the levanter" (&c) (escape+, 2006)
- james purdy's fiction
- maupin's "tales of the city" series (escape+, 1994)
- joyce maynard's fiction (escape+)
- mary mccarthy's fiction
- madison smartt bell's fiction
- wright morris's fiction (bloom)
- barbara pym's fiction
- graves "i, claudius"
- vonnegut (bloom, escape+, 1968)
- Skinner's "Walden Two"
- Tufte's "Envisioning Information"
- Alexander's "A Pattern Language"
- EO Wilson's "Sociobiology"
- Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science"
- Stephen Gaskin's talks and sermons
- Joni Mitchell's lyrics
- Wade's "Before the Dawn"
- Dawkins' "Ancestors' Tale"
- Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind"
- Sinuhe
- Amarna letters
- Kleist essay
- lynn kostoff "a choice of nightmares"
08 June 2007
A current of pleasure he'd never thought of looking for
john casey frames his
1989 national book award winner
'spartina' as the struggle of a
poor unhappy but ethical rhode island local
(dick pierce)
to purloin the secret of happiness from
the happy but unethical wealthy tourists
disgnated early in the book
as the 'players' (unethical)
vs the non-players
his mata-hari accomplice
is a welthy tomboy
who's attempting to jump ships
from tourist to local
(inspired partly by her admiration for pierce)
by playfully taking the job of game warden
early in their affair casey writes
"He watched her laugh get the better of her,
and he felt a current of pleasure
he'd never thought of looking for."
on one level this metaphor
echoes pierce's expertise in finding fish
by understanding sea currents
but at a higher level it echoes
the highest task of the novelist:
to reveal unexpected currents of human motivation
in the synchronising-spreadsheets metaphor
this is the highest level
pierce is trying to reverse-engineer
the hidden formula
that makes players happy
while casey offers all readers
a chance to synchronise
to that same formula
via pierce's process of search
1989 national book award winner
'spartina' as the struggle of a
poor unhappy but ethical rhode island local
(dick pierce)
to purloin the secret of happiness from
the happy but unethical wealthy tourists
disgnated early in the book
as the 'players' (unethical)
vs the non-players
his mata-hari accomplice
is a welthy tomboy
who's attempting to jump ships
from tourist to local
(inspired partly by her admiration for pierce)
by playfully taking the job of game warden
early in their affair casey writes
"He watched her laugh get the better of her,
and he felt a current of pleasure
he'd never thought of looking for."
on one level this metaphor
echoes pierce's expertise in finding fish
by understanding sea currents
but at a higher level it echoes
the highest task of the novelist:
to reveal unexpected currents of human motivation
in the synchronising-spreadsheets metaphor
this is the highest level
pierce is trying to reverse-engineer
the hidden formula
that makes players happy
while casey offers all readers
a chance to synchronise
to that same formula
via pierce's process of search
.
30 May 2007
Autobiographical calendar of reading (part two)
[part one]
later 1980s
Kate Bush
Wenders' "Wings of Desire"
Tufte's "Envisioning Information"
Lynda J Barry (comix)
modest successor to Peanuts
Harold Brodkey
awesome prose
Moby Dick
Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal
bonobos bonobos bonobos
Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations
via Joyce, or a.i.?
Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon
[fan]
WordPerfect 4.0
billgates is satan
love poems
[fan]
especially graves, millay, teasdale
Peter Redgrove
The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real [Az]
Mary Daly's Wickedary
[Az]
Blue Velvet (film), Twin Peaks (tv)
canonical
Spy magazine
Inside Macintosh docs
Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind"
for the physics and math, not the AI
MoMing (dance venue)
Alexander's "Pattern Language"
Ward Just
[fan]
George V Higgins
John Carpenter's "They Live"
LISP
early 1990s
Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky film)
Reservoir Dogs
Jacques Rivette (films)
[fan]
also Peter Greenaway
Jellyeye/Bryn Magnus/Shu Shubat (theater)
Oobleck/Jeff Dorchen (theater)
Curious/Jenny Magnus (theater/music/performance)
Mary Zimmerman (theater)
Cyc (ai)
[fan]
WZRD's latenight freeform, Suspended in Gaffa (music shows)
introduced me to several of my favorite female voices
Stewart/Gaskin, Marta Sebestyen [fan], Mary Coughlan [fan]
Robert Bly
Iron John and especially 'the little book of the human shadow' (jungian psych) [Az]
netnews, alt.religion.kibology
smart, fast, hip, funny
especially Lisa Pea (Elizabeth Higgins)
James 'Kibo' Parry
David Pacheco
Joseph Michael Bay
Michael Parenti
discovered via Pacifica radio show on WZRD
later 1990s
Herring's editions of Joyce's Ulysses notebooks
Martin Amis
a trouble child
Scott Turow
"The 100th Boyfriend"
Altavista
[fan]
Ana Voog
web exhibitionist
Armistead Maupin
via the pbs miniseries
Israel Shahak
worldtransforming (gulp!) [fan]
Jeffery Deaver
Thomas Perry
early 2000s
The Bible Unearthed
intro to the new biblical minimalism [Az]
Patrick O'Brian
Philip Pullman
[fan]
Google
i wear their cap
Jesus Seminar, Crossan, Ehrman
[fan]
Get Your War On
Dan Brown
Dominick Dunne
Bill James, Peter Bowen, Lynn Kostoff
obscure literary crime
Dean Baker, Sam Smith
political/economic sanity on the Web
Michael Connelly
Wolfram's "New Kind of Science"
Jim Harrison's "Sundog"
[Az]
The Sims (a.i.)
Schrodinger's Kittens
quantum weirdness resolved! [Az]
Flaubert
[fan]
Malcolm Brown on Irish history
a must-read for joyceans [fan] [Az]
Never at Rest
fine bio of Newton [Az]
Conrad's Nostromo
some little paperback on graph theory
[Az?]
Carl Hiaasen
Minette Walters
later 2000s
Franzen's Corrections
Ning.com
Gruber/Tanenbaum
[fan]
Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith
[Rendell fan]
[Highsmith review]
Colin Harrison
[review]
Against the Day
[comment]
Joseph Wambaugh
Thomas Harris
Wade's "Before the Dawn"
human origins [review]
Greg Iles, Grif Stockley, Stephen White
school of Turow, mostly
Kinneavy's Theory of Discourse
[comment]
Overheard in X
the pulse of contemporary speech
Double Tongued Word Wrester
the pulse of neologising
Social Philosophy by Fink
the socioeconomic context of ethical theories [Az]
Ayn Rand's Fountainhead
sillily romantic
but accurate about persecuted idealists, imho
Ernst Mayr "The Growth of Biological Thought"
best-yet inquiry into realworld scientific method
later 1980s
Kate Bush
Wenders' "Wings of Desire"
Tufte's "Envisioning Information"
Lynda J Barry (comix)
modest successor to Peanuts
Harold Brodkey
awesome prose
Moby Dick
Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal
bonobos bonobos bonobos
Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations
via Joyce, or a.i.?
Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon
[fan]
WordPerfect 4.0
billgates is satan
love poems
[fan]
especially graves, millay, teasdale
Peter Redgrove
The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real [Az]
Mary Daly's Wickedary
[Az]
Blue Velvet (film), Twin Peaks (tv)
canonical
Spy magazine
Inside Macintosh docs
Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind"
for the physics and math, not the AI
MoMing (dance venue)
Alexander's "Pattern Language"
Ward Just
[fan]
George V Higgins
John Carpenter's "They Live"
LISP
early 1990s
Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky film)
Reservoir Dogs
Jacques Rivette (films)
[fan]
also Peter Greenaway
Jellyeye/Bryn Magnus/Shu Shubat (theater)
Oobleck/Jeff Dorchen (theater)
Curious/Jenny Magnus (theater/music/performance)
Mary Zimmerman (theater)
Cyc (ai)
[fan]
WZRD's latenight freeform, Suspended in Gaffa (music shows)
introduced me to several of my favorite female voices
Stewart/Gaskin, Marta Sebestyen [fan], Mary Coughlan [fan]
Robert Bly
Iron John and especially 'the little book of the human shadow' (jungian psych) [Az]
netnews, alt.religion.kibology
smart, fast, hip, funny
especially Lisa Pea (Elizabeth Higgins)
James 'Kibo' Parry
David Pacheco
Joseph Michael Bay
Michael Parenti
discovered via Pacifica radio show on WZRD
later 1990s
Herring's editions of Joyce's Ulysses notebooks
Martin Amis
a trouble child
Scott Turow
"The 100th Boyfriend"
Altavista
[fan]
Ana Voog
web exhibitionist
Armistead Maupin
via the pbs miniseries
Israel Shahak
worldtransforming (gulp!) [fan]
Jeffery Deaver
Thomas Perry
early 2000s
The Bible Unearthed
intro to the new biblical minimalism [Az]
Patrick O'Brian
Philip Pullman
[fan]
i wear their cap
Jesus Seminar, Crossan, Ehrman
[fan]
Get Your War On
Dan Brown
Dominick Dunne
Bill James, Peter Bowen, Lynn Kostoff
obscure literary crime
Dean Baker, Sam Smith
political/economic sanity on the Web
Michael Connelly
Wolfram's "New Kind of Science"
Jim Harrison's "Sundog"
[Az]
The Sims (a.i.)
Schrodinger's Kittens
quantum weirdness resolved! [Az]
Flaubert
[fan]
Malcolm Brown on Irish history
a must-read for joyceans [fan] [Az]
Never at Rest
fine bio of Newton [Az]
Conrad's Nostromo
some little paperback on graph theory
[Az?]
Carl Hiaasen
Minette Walters
later 2000s
Franzen's Corrections
Ning.com
Gruber/Tanenbaum
[fan]
Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith
[Rendell fan]
[Highsmith review]
Colin Harrison
[review]
Against the Day
[comment]
Joseph Wambaugh
Thomas Harris
Wade's "Before the Dawn"
human origins [review]
Greg Iles, Grif Stockley, Stephen White
school of Turow, mostly
Kinneavy's Theory of Discourse
[comment]
Overheard in X
the pulse of contemporary speech
Double Tongued Word Wrester
the pulse of neologising
Social Philosophy by Fink
the socioeconomic context of ethical theories [Az]
Ayn Rand's Fountainhead
sillily romantic
but accurate about persecuted idealists, imho
Ernst Mayr "The Growth of Biological Thought"
best-yet inquiry into realworld scientific method
.
18 May 2007
Autobiographical calendar of reading
[i did one of these for joyce]
if i compiled a personal 'canon'
the primary criterion would be
how often, day to day
i'm reminded of an artist's work
(so i'm including
influential performers
along with authors)
pre-1960
Peanuts
by my 'canon' standard (above)
Schulz is certainly in the top 20
for his portrait of childhood in the early strips
is surely unequalled
(pogo left little impact)
New Yorker cartoons
Chas Addams and Saul Steinberg especially
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans
early 1960s
Walter R. Brooks' Freddy the Pig-Detective
i read all these
and tried to write my first fan letter in verse:
i like freddy/ i think he's steady
i like jinx/ i think he... stinks?
Phantom Tollbooth
Andy Griffith
stamp collecting
Beatles/ Richard Lester/ John Lennon
In His Own Write, Help, and Hard Day's Night especially [Lester fan]
Hardy Boys
Heathkit
their manuals and catalogs
along with Edmund Scientific
were an enduring influence
world almanacs
devoured them
coin collecting
Martin Gardner's mathematical recreations
a very positive influence
monthly in Scientific American
and collected in books
James Bond
Ian Fleming's sexual kinks
in smuggled paperbacks
baseball stats
i spent the summer of '65
graphing baseball stats
Mad magazine
rather too lowbrow
Minivac 601
a programmable 6-relay computer
designed by Claude Shannon
later 1960s
Lewis Carroll
via Martin Gardner
Yes I Can by Sammy Davis Jr
one of the first grownup books
i remember reading
Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
easy to interpret
an older girl's dream:
her friends were sliding down a log
into a pond
but she was scared of splinters
Tolkien
Roget
a lifelong fascination
Asimov's Intelligent Man's Guide to Science
Ray Bradbury
rare literary scifi
Wff'n'Proof
a logic game i played alone
aided by a programmed textbook on logic
Estes model rockets
not very successfully
Super-8 moviemaking
Ulysses, Ellmann
my sister introduced me to a constrant stream
of hip lit borrowed from the public library
Catch 22
surprisingly enduring
Tin Drum
Barbarella (movie)
Autobiography of a Yogi
via the Sgt Pepper's cover
Donald E Westlake
comic crime novels, soon outgrown
Sondheim crosswords, Springbok jigsaws
the composer, in the late 60s
created elegant weekly crosswords
in the british style
for New York magazine
Vonnegut, Brautigan, Castaneda
60s inevitables
Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In, Music Scene w/David Steinberg (tv)
Dick Cavett (tv)
Christopher Cerf's "World's Largest Cheese"
brainy silliness i adored [Az]
"One Million" by Hendrik Hertzberg
bold visualisation experiment
200 pages each with 5000 dots [Az]
Finnegans Wake, Norman O Brown
Firesign Theatre
meets the 'canon' criterion
Luscher Color Test
inexplicably fascinating
slow to outgrow
astrology
started c1967 when my sister
ordered a computerised horoscope
finally outgrew in 1974
at best provided random noise
i could project personality theories onto
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
[Az]
early 1970s
Incredible String Band
their lyrics easily make my canon [fan]
Wallace Stevens
Rider-Waite tarot
Psychology Today magazine
challenged me to my life's work
Arthur Koestler
Act of Creation, Ghost in the Machine
provocative multidisciplinary thinking
Samuelson's Economics
computer simulation
Jay Forrester, Bucky Fuller's World Game, Antioch College seminar
Janov, Perls, Ouspensky, Gaskin, Wilhelm Reich
fringe psych/ occultism
a course at antioch
called 'science and experience: east and west'
introduced me to various fringe schools
American Heritage Dictionary
with proto-indo-european roots!
Joyce Carol Oates
soon outgrown
Updike
gradually outgrown
Durant's "Story of Philosophy"
Robert Altman (movies)
probably canonical
Krishnamurti
the ultimate koan
there is no path [fan]
Whole Earth Catalog (WEC)
portal to much good obscure reading
Bucky Fuller
especially "Intuition"
(anticipating my theory of whitespace)
Pinter's "Homecoming"
American Film Theater series
Skinner's "Walden Two"
John McPhee's early nonfiction
G Spencer Brown (GSB)
Laws of Form
and Only Two Can Play This Game
via WEC [fan]
Pynchon
with Joyce, the topmost in my canon
Nabokov
slowly partly outgrown [fan]
Robert Stone
[fan]
William Blake
especially his marginal annotations [fan]
in Erdman's edition [Az]
probably via GSB
AN Whitehead
outgrown stylish obscurantism (Process and Reality)
JL Austin
philosophy done right
Michael Polanyi's "Personal Knowledge"
also Stephen Toulmin
later 1970s
Scott Joplin's Bethena
a ragtime novel
Joseph McElroy
[fan]
Iris Murdoch
[fan]
Renata Adler
her first is neglected genius [Az]
Robert Pirsig
Tom Wolfe's Painted Word (etc)
[Az]
Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy
Vance Bourjaily
readable but unfashionable
Mary McCarthy
Peter Dickinson
wonderful mysteries and kids' books [fan]
le Carre
[fan]
Walker Percy
especially Love in the Ruins
Joni Mitchell
definitely canon [fan]
Wright Morris
James Purdy
Thomas McGuane
Joyce Maynard
Barbara Pym
Stephen Gaskin's books and sermons
Blanche McCrary Boyd
[Az] [fan]
Selfish Gene; Sociobiology
worldchanging
Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness
faded if not outgrown
Mark Vonnegut's Eden Express
firsthand drug psychosis [Az]
Velikovsky
not the astrophysics
but the chronologies (now outgrown)
Kleist's "On The Marionette Theatre"
[etext]
early 1980s
White Goddess, Robert Graves
Mary Beth Edelson (art)
goddess-installation in Buffalo 1980
Operators and Things
canonical
via WEC i think [Az]
Man's Place in Nature by CF Hockett
[Az]
Robert Anton Wilson, Colin Wilson
unrelated literary twins
William Wharton
[fan]
Elmore Leonard
topnotch crime escapism
Steve Wozniak, Bill Budge (code)
i learned my bad programming habits
from Woz's brilliant
Apple ][ machine language monitor
my good habits from Budge's tutorials in ?Softcell
Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
useful but outgrown
Feynman's QED
SCTV, Monty Python (belatedly)
especially catherine o'hara
WXRT w/Bobby Skafish
Steppenwolf's Say Goodnight, Gracie (tv)
[IMDb] good luck finding it
[part two]
if i compiled a personal 'canon'
the primary criterion would be
how often, day to day
i'm reminded of an artist's work
(so i'm including
influential performers
along with authors)
pre-1960
Peanuts
by my 'canon' standard (above)
Schulz is certainly in the top 20
for his portrait of childhood in the early strips
is surely unequalled
(pogo left little impact)
New Yorker cartoons
Chas Addams and Saul Steinberg especially
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans
early 1960s
Walter R. Brooks' Freddy the Pig-Detective
i read all these
and tried to write my first fan letter in verse:
i like freddy/ i think he's steady
i like jinx/ i think he... stinks?
Phantom Tollbooth
Andy Griffith
stamp collecting
Beatles/ Richard Lester/ John Lennon
In His Own Write, Help, and Hard Day's Night especially [Lester fan]
Hardy Boys
Heathkit
their manuals and catalogs
along with Edmund Scientific
were an enduring influence
world almanacs
devoured them
coin collecting
Martin Gardner's mathematical recreations
a very positive influence
monthly in Scientific American
and collected in books
James Bond
Ian Fleming's sexual kinks
in smuggled paperbacks
baseball stats
i spent the summer of '65
graphing baseball stats
Mad magazine
rather too lowbrow
Minivac 601
a programmable 6-relay computer
designed by Claude Shannon
later 1960s
Lewis Carroll
via Martin Gardner
Yes I Can by Sammy Davis Jr
one of the first grownup books
i remember reading
Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
easy to interpret
an older girl's dream:
her friends were sliding down a log
into a pond
but she was scared of splinters
Tolkien
Roget
a lifelong fascination
Asimov's Intelligent Man's Guide to Science
Ray Bradbury
rare literary scifi
Wff'n'Proof
a logic game i played alone
aided by a programmed textbook on logic
Estes model rockets
not very successfully
Super-8 moviemaking
Ulysses, Ellmann
my sister introduced me to a constrant stream
of hip lit borrowed from the public library
Catch 22
surprisingly enduring
Tin Drum
Barbarella (movie)
Autobiography of a Yogi
via the Sgt Pepper's cover
Donald E Westlake
comic crime novels, soon outgrown
Sondheim crosswords, Springbok jigsaws
the composer, in the late 60s
created elegant weekly crosswords
in the british style
for New York magazine
Vonnegut, Brautigan, Castaneda
60s inevitables
Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In, Music Scene w/David Steinberg (tv)
Dick Cavett (tv)
Christopher Cerf's "World's Largest Cheese"
brainy silliness i adored [Az]
"One Million" by Hendrik Hertzberg
bold visualisation experiment
200 pages each with 5000 dots [Az]
Finnegans Wake, Norman O Brown
Firesign Theatre
meets the 'canon' criterion
Luscher Color Test
inexplicably fascinating
slow to outgrow
astrology
started c1967 when my sister
ordered a computerised horoscope
finally outgrew in 1974
at best provided random noise
i could project personality theories onto
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
[Az]
early 1970s
Incredible String Band
their lyrics easily make my canon [fan]
Wallace Stevens
Rider-Waite tarot
Psychology Today magazine
challenged me to my life's work
Arthur Koestler
Act of Creation, Ghost in the Machine
provocative multidisciplinary thinking
Samuelson's Economics
computer simulation
Jay Forrester, Bucky Fuller's World Game, Antioch College seminar
Janov, Perls, Ouspensky, Gaskin, Wilhelm Reich
fringe psych/ occultism
a course at antioch
called 'science and experience: east and west'
introduced me to various fringe schools
American Heritage Dictionary
with proto-indo-european roots!
Joyce Carol Oates
soon outgrown
Updike
gradually outgrown
Durant's "Story of Philosophy"
Robert Altman (movies)
probably canonical
Krishnamurti
the ultimate koan
there is no path [fan]
Whole Earth Catalog (WEC)
portal to much good obscure reading
Bucky Fuller
especially "Intuition"
(anticipating my theory of whitespace)
Pinter's "Homecoming"
American Film Theater series
Skinner's "Walden Two"
John McPhee's early nonfiction
G Spencer Brown (GSB)
Laws of Form
and Only Two Can Play This Game
via WEC [fan]
Pynchon
with Joyce, the topmost in my canon
Nabokov
slowly partly outgrown [fan]
Robert Stone
[fan]
William Blake
especially his marginal annotations [fan]
in Erdman's edition [Az]
probably via GSB
AN Whitehead
outgrown stylish obscurantism (Process and Reality)
JL Austin
philosophy done right
Michael Polanyi's "Personal Knowledge"
also Stephen Toulmin
later 1970s
Scott Joplin's Bethena
a ragtime novel
Joseph McElroy
[fan]
Iris Murdoch
[fan]
Renata Adler
her first is neglected genius [Az]
Robert Pirsig
Tom Wolfe's Painted Word (etc)
[Az]
Robertson Davies' Deptford trilogy
Vance Bourjaily
readable but unfashionable
Mary McCarthy
Peter Dickinson
wonderful mysteries and kids' books [fan]
le Carre
[fan]
Walker Percy
especially Love in the Ruins
Joni Mitchell
definitely canon [fan]
Wright Morris
James Purdy
Thomas McGuane
Joyce Maynard
Barbara Pym
Stephen Gaskin's books and sermons
Blanche McCrary Boyd
[Az] [fan]
Selfish Gene; Sociobiology
worldchanging
Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness
faded if not outgrown
Mark Vonnegut's Eden Express
firsthand drug psychosis [Az]
Velikovsky
not the astrophysics
but the chronologies (now outgrown)
Kleist's "On The Marionette Theatre"
[etext]
early 1980s
White Goddess, Robert Graves
Mary Beth Edelson (art)
goddess-installation in Buffalo 1980
Operators and Things
canonical
via WEC i think [Az]
Man's Place in Nature by CF Hockett
[Az]
Robert Anton Wilson, Colin Wilson
unrelated literary twins
William Wharton
[fan]
Elmore Leonard
topnotch crime escapism
Steve Wozniak, Bill Budge (code)
i learned my bad programming habits
from Woz's brilliant
Apple ][ machine language monitor
my good habits from Budge's tutorials in ?Softcell
Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
useful but outgrown
Feynman's QED
SCTV, Monty Python (belatedly)
especially catherine o'hara
WXRT w/Bobby Skafish
Steppenwolf's Say Goodnight, Gracie (tv)
[IMDb] good luck finding it
[part two]
.
29 January 2007
Rave: Wade's "Before the Dawn"
for anyone interested in human origins
this is a must-read survey of recent literature
with lots of insights i'd missed
most vivid map:
descendants of just 150
african emigrants c50k bc
colonised the entire rest of the world
quickly boating across south asia
then north crosscountry by 30k bc
looking at their shared behaviors
wade suggests the emigrants might have said
'tic' for finger/counting
'ma' for hand
wade argues that territorial wars
had claimed some 10% of each generation
from when we were chimps
to when we finally settled down into villages
he suggests the most dramatic social change
since the chimp days
was human pair bonding
replacing alpha-males-with-harems
(i'd speculate this must have begun
with informal sleeping partners
sharing small temporary shelters
with loyal partners gradually
earning social status)
wade is wrong, i'm sure, in blaming
the degradation of our sense of smell
on agriculture reducing selection pressures
it's too broad to be that recent
(i've placed it with fire 2M years ago
as cooked foods introduced
an entirely new palette of flavors)
he dates long hair to 200k bc
with the critical factor
the ability to keep it groomed
(which stone tools could trim hair?
which could shave skin smooth?)
he imagines ungroomed heads
have been ostracised that long
he makes a plausible case
that proto-indo-european
got its start with agriculture
in turkey-iraq-iran
10,000 years ago
then a second wind
from west european horsemen
4000 years later
some interesting stats from iceland
suggest most family trees quickly go extinct
and average generations there are 30 years
(more for men, less for women)
timeline:
14M BC: orangutan/gorilla split
7M BC: gorilla/chimp split
6M BC: global cooling, African drought
5M BC: human/chimp split (pop 75k) chimps stay in trees, defending fruit-tree teritories
4.4M BC: bipedal vegetarian australopithecines
2.5M BC: forests retreat; omnivorous tool-maker homo habilis
1.8M BC: homos erectus and neanderthal emigrate during warm interlude
1.7M BC: homo ergaster loses body hair, skin blackens, males shrink, fathers care for infants? tubers cooked?
1.5M BC: chimp/bonobo split
500k BC: homo heidelbergensis
465k BC: human/neanderthal split
350k BC: mousterian toolkit of neanderthals
200k BC: long hair? foxp2 mutation?
195k BC: modern brainsize at kibish
150k BC: mitochondrial Eve?
140k-40k BC: genetic Adam
135k BC: dog/wolf split???
125k BC: first neanderthals, west of Urals
100k BC: global warming, anatomically modern humans
95k-11k BC: homo erectus on flores?
87k-37k BC: M168 mutation on Y chromosome
75k BC: global cooling
74k BC: anomalous shell necklace
70k BC: body lice genetics suggest tailored clothing
65k BC: eurasian eve?
55k-45k BC: U5 mitochondria in europe
pre-50k BC: cannibalism hinted by gene
50k BC: behaviorally modern humans (150 of total 5000 enter asia?) modern language abilities; warm window
50k-10k BC: 10% of each generation KIA
45k-33k BC: neanderthals displaced in europe
44k BC: african cultural revolution; australia occupied
43k BC: europe invaded by modern humans w/aurignacian toolkit
40k BC: dog domesticated in east asia?
40k BC: chatelperronian toolkit (neanderthal anomaly?)
40k-30k BC: gracilisation via pedomorphism
38-33k BC: M173 Y chromosome (aurignacians?)
35k BC: microcephalin brain gene (60k-14k)
30k BC: chauvet cave art
26k-19k BC: gravettians hunt mammoth
23k-18k BC: M170 Y (gravettians?)
20k BC: glaciers depopulate europe, siberia
19k-14.5k BC: solutreans hunt horse, deer
18k-13k BC: Last Glacial Maximum (pop 1M-10M)
17k BC: ice age ends; siberians domesticate dogs
16k-13k BC: M242 Y
16k-9k BC: magdalenians hunt reindeer
16k BC: gravettian mammoth-bone houses
15k BC: egalitarian warlike tribes supplanted by gracile property-respecting villagers; V and H mitochondria dominate europe
13k-10k BC: warming
13k-9.5k BC: natufians harvest wild grains w/sickles
13k BC: dog domesticated?
12k BC: dog bone in germany
10.5k-9k: younger dryas cold snap
10k BC: wild einkorn cultivated
8.5k BC: domesticated einkorn
8.4k BC: domesticated emmer wheat, rye, barley
8k BC: mongoloid skulls in china
8k BC: end of ice age; sheep and goats domesticated; J mitochondria in europe
7k BC: hittite splits from PIE
5k BC: tocharian splits from PIE
5k BC: hybrid wheat in Iran
4k BC: ASPM brain gene
4k BC: european languages diverge from PIE
4k BC: horse domesticated north of black sea
4k-3k BC: funnel beaker culture breeds cattle, drinks lactose
3k BC: lactose tolerance
catal hotuk, M172, LBK pots
this is a must-read survey of recent literature
with lots of insights i'd missed
most vivid map:
descendants of just 150
african emigrants c50k bc
colonised the entire rest of the world
quickly boating across south asia
then north crosscountry by 30k bc
looking at their shared behaviors
wade suggests the emigrants might have said
'tic' for finger/counting
'ma' for hand
wade argues that territorial wars
had claimed some 10% of each generation
from when we were chimps
to when we finally settled down into villages
he suggests the most dramatic social change
since the chimp days
was human pair bonding
replacing alpha-males-with-harems
(i'd speculate this must have begun
with informal sleeping partners
sharing small temporary shelters
with loyal partners gradually
earning social status)
wade is wrong, i'm sure, in blaming
the degradation of our sense of smell
on agriculture reducing selection pressures
it's too broad to be that recent
(i've placed it with fire 2M years ago
as cooked foods introduced
an entirely new palette of flavors)
he dates long hair to 200k bc
with the critical factor
the ability to keep it groomed
(which stone tools could trim hair?
which could shave skin smooth?)
he imagines ungroomed heads
have been ostracised that long
he makes a plausible case
that proto-indo-european
got its start with agriculture
in turkey-iraq-iran
10,000 years ago
then a second wind
from west european horsemen
4000 years later
some interesting stats from iceland
suggest most family trees quickly go extinct
and average generations there are 30 years
(more for men, less for women)
timeline:
14M BC: orangutan/gorilla split
7M BC: gorilla/chimp split
6M BC: global cooling, African drought
5M BC: human/chimp split (pop 75k) chimps stay in trees, defending fruit-tree teritories
4.4M BC: bipedal vegetarian australopithecines
2.5M BC: forests retreat; omnivorous tool-maker homo habilis
1.8M BC: homos erectus and neanderthal emigrate during warm interlude
1.7M BC: homo ergaster loses body hair, skin blackens, males shrink, fathers care for infants? tubers cooked?
1.5M BC: chimp/bonobo split
500k BC: homo heidelbergensis
465k BC: human/neanderthal split
350k BC: mousterian toolkit of neanderthals
200k BC: long hair? foxp2 mutation?
195k BC: modern brainsize at kibish
150k BC: mitochondrial Eve?
140k-40k BC: genetic Adam
135k BC: dog/wolf split???
125k BC: first neanderthals, west of Urals
100k BC: global warming, anatomically modern humans
95k-11k BC: homo erectus on flores?
87k-37k BC: M168 mutation on Y chromosome
75k BC: global cooling
74k BC: anomalous shell necklace
70k BC: body lice genetics suggest tailored clothing
65k BC: eurasian eve?
55k-45k BC: U5 mitochondria in europe
pre-50k BC: cannibalism hinted by gene
50k BC: behaviorally modern humans (150 of total 5000 enter asia?) modern language abilities; warm window
50k-10k BC: 10% of each generation KIA
45k-33k BC: neanderthals displaced in europe
44k BC: african cultural revolution; australia occupied
43k BC: europe invaded by modern humans w/aurignacian toolkit
40k BC: dog domesticated in east asia?
40k BC: chatelperronian toolkit (neanderthal anomaly?)
40k-30k BC: gracilisation via pedomorphism
38-33k BC: M173 Y chromosome (aurignacians?)
35k BC: microcephalin brain gene (60k-14k)
30k BC: chauvet cave art
26k-19k BC: gravettians hunt mammoth
23k-18k BC: M170 Y (gravettians?)
20k BC: glaciers depopulate europe, siberia
19k-14.5k BC: solutreans hunt horse, deer
18k-13k BC: Last Glacial Maximum (pop 1M-10M)
17k BC: ice age ends; siberians domesticate dogs
16k-13k BC: M242 Y
16k-9k BC: magdalenians hunt reindeer
16k BC: gravettian mammoth-bone houses
15k BC: egalitarian warlike tribes supplanted by gracile property-respecting villagers; V and H mitochondria dominate europe
13k-10k BC: warming
13k-9.5k BC: natufians harvest wild grains w/sickles
13k BC: dog domesticated?
12k BC: dog bone in germany
10.5k-9k: younger dryas cold snap
10k BC: wild einkorn cultivated
8.5k BC: domesticated einkorn
8.4k BC: domesticated emmer wheat, rye, barley
8k BC: mongoloid skulls in china
8k BC: end of ice age; sheep and goats domesticated; J mitochondria in europe
7k BC: hittite splits from PIE
5k BC: tocharian splits from PIE
5k BC: hybrid wheat in Iran
4k BC: ASPM brain gene
4k BC: european languages diverge from PIE
4k BC: horse domesticated north of black sea
4k-3k BC: funnel beaker culture breeds cattle, drinks lactose
3k BC: lactose tolerance
catal hotuk, M172, LBK pots
.
02 December 2006
The Pynchonian historian
with 'Against the Day'
pynchon fans finally have
a large new body of
Gravity'sRainbow-like prose
allowing much better triangulation
of what th' heck TRP is up to
and how
now
if we want to explore
any period of history
via the old pynchonoscope
we first ask
what intoxicants were available?
what subversive groups
plotted against what power elites?
what superstitions
lingered at the fringes?
what new scientific theories
mathematical metaphors
metaphysical speculations
were about to stir up controversy?
which old ones
were fading from fashion?
what was the general state
of language and literature?
then take the standard
comic ethnic stereotypes
and contrast them against
anachronistic human hipsters
(who enter poetic fugue states
at the drop of a hat)
and glimpses of real love
find fitting names
for streets and bars
camouflage
your painstaking researches
by alluding to the worst obscurities
in the most offhand way
pynchon fans finally have
a large new body of
Gravity'sRainbow-like prose
allowing much better triangulation
of what th' heck TRP is up to
and how
now
if we want to explore
any period of history
via the old pynchonoscope
we first ask
what intoxicants were available?
what subversive groups
plotted against what power elites?
what superstitions
lingered at the fringes?
what new scientific theories
mathematical metaphors
metaphysical speculations
were about to stir up controversy?
which old ones
were fading from fashion?
what was the general state
of language and literature?
then take the standard
comic ethnic stereotypes
and contrast them against
anachronistic human hipsters
(who enter poetic fugue states
at the drop of a hat)
and glimpses of real love
find fitting names
for streets and bars
camouflage
your painstaking researches
by alluding to the worst obscurities
in the most offhand way
.
24 November 2006
Windy f___ed Vere Utter
seattle 1926
home for christmas
from boarding school
14yo mary mccarthy
reluctantly gives up
after waiting an hour
for 26yo forrest crosby
whom she thinks she loves
who'd taken her virginity
with ambiguous consent
the month before
home for christmas
from boarding school
14yo mary mccarthy
reluctantly gives up
after waiting an hour
for 26yo forrest crosby
whom she thinks she loves
who'd taken her virginity
with ambiguous consent
the month before
.
21 November 2006
ToE vs ToL
edward o wilson's
elegant autobiography
"Naturalist"
sketches an epochal
Shem/Shaun brotherbattle
in Harvard's biology department
of the 50s and 60s
between wilson
representing the classical tradition
of evolutionary macrobiology
and james 'double helix' watson
as the insufferable young turk
of molecular biology
dismissing wilson's classical tradition
until the introduction of mathematical models
for sociobiology
and island biogeography
rehabilitated that tradition
and i see a parallel
with the classical approach to the
unification of the sciences
versus the physicists' megalomaniacal
ten-dimensional Theories of Everything
rehabilitatable via
the Tree of Life
approach?
elegant autobiography
"Naturalist"
sketches an epochal
Shem/Shaun brotherbattle
in Harvard's biology department
of the 50s and 60s
between wilson
representing the classical tradition
of evolutionary macrobiology
and james 'double helix' watson
as the insufferable young turk
of molecular biology
dismissing wilson's classical tradition
until the introduction of mathematical models
for sociobiology
and island biogeography
rehabilitated that tradition
and i see a parallel
with the classical approach to the
unification of the sciences
versus the physicists' megalomaniacal
ten-dimensional Theories of Everything
rehabilitatable via
the Tree of Life
approach?
.
16 November 2006
The cop who came in from the cold
[this is an overview
of some more-or-less-recent thrillers
with special attention to
Michael Connelly
Colin Harrison
and Charles McCarry]
the very best novels
immediately establish themselves
as '10's
on a new scale
with no 9s or 8s in sight
and where even a 7
is cause for celebration
eg Pynchon's Lot 49
finds an unexpected 7 in
Alan Furst's silly "Paris Drop"
but Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers"
arguably The Great American Novel
had barely found its first 6
(Lynn Kostoff's "Choice of Nightmares")
until Colin Harrison's "Afterburn"
Stone's special gift
is to sink his teeth, deep
into the heart of american darkness
so we desperately need
more like him
Harrison's first three works
are all admirable
but Afterburn is a quantum leap
out-Spiking Elmore Leonard
(Leonard has pwned
a scale of his own
in the shadow of
early George V Higgins
Ed McBain sometimes
hits an 8 there
despite generally disgraceful padding)
Harrison's plotting
has quickly caught up
to his always poetic prose
("Manhattan Nocturne"
was a perverse anti-noir
with less plot in the first 150 pages
than in Chandler's average chapter)
Harrison also has a weird obsession
with porn-star sexual athletics
where pounding your genitals raw
is supposed to equate to transcendence
this idiosyncracy is interestingly mirrored
in McCarry's extraordinary "Lucky Bastard"
effectively the backstory to Klein's "Primary Colors"
told from the point of view
of the Clintons' KGB handlers
the best part is a KGB school
called 'Swallows'
where agents are trained in
sex as a martial art
like Harrison
McCarry argues unconvincingly
that technique can always trump emotion
but his re-invention of Hillary
as deadly sex goddess
is priceless
if leCarre's "Smiley's People"
establishes the 10
McCarry never gets past 6
in the other works i've read
often bogging down
in gag-me-with-a-silver-spoon
aristocratic luxury-porn
the NYT blurb for Michael Connelly's
recent "The Closers"
claims he's reinvented the police procedural
and i'm inclined to agree
the dominant, exhausted cliche
has been the taunting genius serial killer
and more recently
the triple-twist ending
where the villain is revealed
as one of the investigative team
(Jeffery Deaver
i'm pointing at you)
Connelly has emerged from these traps
in his latest Harry Bosch episode
where this classic noir outsider cop
finally comes in from the cold
hammering us
from the first chapter
with the sort of
tenderness normally quarantined
in the next-to-last-chapter
then reburied
in the last
and instead of jumpstarting
tired emotions with exotic crimes
Connelly turns things inside out
building a tiny forgotten murder
into a cosmic ethical battleground
compacted into a single week
of minute-by-minute minutia
(Connelly is
the
master craftsman
for capturing character in the way
eg
one holds a coffee cup)
there are enough spoilers
in each Bosch episode
that serious thriller-fans
should try to read them in order
but each stands fine alone
Connelly's recent "The Lincoln Lawyer"
is a non-Bosch legal procedural
full of topnotch tradecraft
but almost too realistic
in its anticlimactic ending
and i must't omit Michael Gruber
aka Robert K Tanenbaum
whose Butch Karp series
hits consistent literary highs
(my addams family post
unconsciously plagiarised his early
"Immoral Certainties")
of some more-or-less-recent thrillers
with special attention to
Michael Connelly
Colin Harrison
and Charles McCarry]
the very best novels
immediately establish themselves
as '10's
on a new scale
with no 9s or 8s in sight
and where even a 7
is cause for celebration
eg Pynchon's Lot 49
finds an unexpected 7 in
Alan Furst's silly "Paris Drop"
but Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers"
arguably The Great American Novel
had barely found its first 6
(Lynn Kostoff's "Choice of Nightmares")
until Colin Harrison's "Afterburn"
Stone's special gift
is to sink his teeth, deep
into the heart of american darkness
so we desperately need
more like him
Harrison's first three works
are all admirable
but Afterburn is a quantum leap
out-Spiking Elmore Leonard
(Leonard has pwned
a scale of his own
in the shadow of
early George V Higgins
Ed McBain sometimes
hits an 8 there
despite generally disgraceful padding)
Harrison's plotting
has quickly caught up
to his always poetic prose
("Manhattan Nocturne"
was a perverse anti-noir
with less plot in the first 150 pages
than in Chandler's average chapter)
Harrison also has a weird obsession
with porn-star sexual athletics
where pounding your genitals raw
is supposed to equate to transcendence
this idiosyncracy is interestingly mirrored
in McCarry's extraordinary "Lucky Bastard"
effectively the backstory to Klein's "Primary Colors"
told from the point of view
of the Clintons' KGB handlers
the best part is a KGB school
called 'Swallows'
where agents are trained in
sex as a martial art
like Harrison
McCarry argues unconvincingly
that technique can always trump emotion
but his re-invention of Hillary
as deadly sex goddess
is priceless
if leCarre's "Smiley's People"
establishes the 10
McCarry never gets past 6
in the other works i've read
often bogging down
in gag-me-with-a-silver-spoon
aristocratic luxury-porn
the NYT blurb for Michael Connelly's
recent "The Closers"
claims he's reinvented the police procedural
and i'm inclined to agree
the dominant, exhausted cliche
has been the taunting genius serial killer
and more recently
the triple-twist ending
where the villain is revealed
as one of the investigative team
(Jeffery Deaver
i'm pointing at you)
Connelly has emerged from these traps
in his latest Harry Bosch episode
where this classic noir outsider cop
finally comes in from the cold
hammering us
from the first chapter
with the sort of
tenderness normally quarantined
in the next-to-last-chapter
then reburied
in the last
and instead of jumpstarting
tired emotions with exotic crimes
Connelly turns things inside out
building a tiny forgotten murder
into a cosmic ethical battleground
compacted into a single week
of minute-by-minute minutia
(Connelly is
the
master craftsman
for capturing character in the way
eg
one holds a coffee cup)
there are enough spoilers
in each Bosch episode
that serious thriller-fans
should try to read them in order
but each stands fine alone
Connelly's recent "The Lincoln Lawyer"
is a non-Bosch legal procedural
full of topnotch tradecraft
but almost too realistic
in its anticlimactic ending
and i must't omit Michael Gruber
aka Robert K Tanenbaum
whose Butch Karp series
hits consistent literary highs
(my addams family post
unconsciously plagiarised his early
"Immoral Certainties")
07 November 2006
Highsmith's persecuted liberals
Patricia Highsmith's
1972 'A Dog's Ransom'
opens with the dog's murder
her 1977 'Edith's Diary'
opens with an attempt
on a pet cat's life
both are peculiar meditations
on the uncomfortable status
of leftists in the USA
in the first case
a young cop
with a psych degree from Cornell
in the second
a Bryn Mawr alumna
who freelances for respectable
lefty magazines
the cop's story is a sort of
chemistry experiment
where a drop of something
with a mildly basic pH
is added to a mildly acidic solution
(ie, idealist among cynics)
and a gradual series
of individually innocuous missteps
each rubbing against the grain
escalate over a few short weeks
into major tragedy
in the other
over two decades
(1955-1975)
the leftist can't catch a break
isolated in a small town
with a bad-seed son
(the abovecited cat-smotherer)
and an ungrateful invalid in-law
her husband runs off
back to the city
with a younger woman
but instead of breaking out
she turns inward
stoically nurturing her ingrates
building a fantasy life in her diary
finding catharsis in competent sculpting
alienating her few lefty friends
with increasingly unconventional
political stances
until in the last 50 pages
based on clues we have to seek
between the lines
her friends all conclude
she's gone mad
and apparently she has
1972 'A Dog's Ransom'
opens with the dog's murder
her 1977 'Edith's Diary'
opens with an attempt
on a pet cat's life
both are peculiar meditations
on the uncomfortable status
of leftists in the USA
in the first case
a young cop
with a psych degree from Cornell
in the second
a Bryn Mawr alumna
who freelances for respectable
lefty magazines
the cop's story is a sort of
chemistry experiment
where a drop of something
with a mildly basic pH
is added to a mildly acidic solution
(ie, idealist among cynics)
and a gradual series
of individually innocuous missteps
each rubbing against the grain
escalate over a few short weeks
into major tragedy
in the other
over two decades
(1955-1975)
the leftist can't catch a break
isolated in a small town
with a bad-seed son
(the abovecited cat-smotherer)
and an ungrateful invalid in-law
her husband runs off
back to the city
with a younger woman
but instead of breaking out
she turns inward
stoically nurturing her ingrates
building a fantasy life in her diary
finding catharsis in competent sculpting
alienating her few lefty friends
with increasingly unconventional
political stances
until in the last 50 pages
based on clues we have to seek
between the lines
her friends all conclude
she's gone mad
and apparently she has
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