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| 0316289361
| 9780316289368
| 0316289361
| 4.32
| 8,283
| 1938
| 1999
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #34. It’s summer, which means I’m back to my usual summer reads, a series of easy-to-digest genre novels (also sometimes known as “airport and beach reads”) being done to honor 10-year-old Jason, who used to read the kid’s version of these each year for his public library’s summer reading program. CS Forester’s “Horatio Hornblower” books are a recent addition to my summer completist list, and fall under a category that I call “Grandpa Lit,” which I just recently aged into myself (I’m 55 this year), called this mostly because the books in this category are ones I remember my own grandfathers reading back in the 1970s when I was a kid, and seem like the kinds of books that only grandpas can fully get into (including not only these but old-style Westerns by people like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, military technothrillers along the lines of Tom Clancy, and more). Like with the first one I read last summer, 1937’s Beat to Quarters (my review), I’m tempted to say that you actually need to know a lot less in advance about the intricacies of tall sail ships to enjoy these than you might expect at first (for those who don’t know, these all take place within the British Navy of the late 1700s and early 1800s, as they fight France in the romantically historic Napoleonic Wars); but upon reflection, perhaps it’s more that here in late middle age, I’ve finally picked up enough general information about sailing here and there over the years and decades to be able to follow along with these books in a way a younger person can’t, thus helping to explain even more why these might only appeal to grandfathers and others who have lived long enough a life to actually be able to figure out what’s going on here in these jargon-filled books full of references to “quarterdecks” and “tops’ls” and the like. And for sure, another reason grandpas gravitate towards these kinds of books is that they’re unabashedly and unapologetically old-fashioned in their morals and culture, which is something important for younger people to understand before picking one up; in the world of the Hornblower novels, men are men, women are mostly pregnant and silent, God has chosen the rich to be the natural masters over the poor (and He has given them happy permission to beat the poor with knotted ropes anytime they put up a fuss about it), and people of color largely just don’t exist at all, with most of the storylines so far revolving one way or another around the idea of the people of southern Europe, in countries like Spain and Italy, being shiftless, lazy ne’er-do-wells, constantly causing trouble for the “True Gentlemen” of northern Europe who are always having to come down with their big impressive warboats and save their incompetent asses yet again. That said, if you can embrace a milieu such as this, the Hornblower books are undeniably thrilling adventures, giving us a sweeping look at a planet quickly being corralled and mapped by the newest generation of these tech-forward, highly proficient tall ships, a world in which navies are all-powerful because water is the one and only way humans have in these years to move large amounts of goods quickly, meaning that even the largest army in the world is quickly in trouble if their navy can’t get food and ammunition to them regularly. Forester very deliberately packs in just about everything that could possibly happen to one of these naval ships into each one of these books, deliberately to crank up the drama and stakes to a ridiculously high level, where it’s a matter of life or death pretty much every week of their sometimes year-long voyages; in the first book this all happened over on the west coast of Central America, as Hornblower and company help a Nicaraguan general who has declared his independence against invading French forces, while this second book is set in the much more expected area of France’s southern coast and Spain’s eastern coast, with his ship being just one of half a dozen traveling together (the “line” of the book’s title), and whose mission is this time the much more general “try to screw things up for France in as many ways as you possibly can.” This leads us to all kinds of adventures, including lots of daring raids on occupied Spanish forts in the middle of the night (not to mention a little retconned contemporary social commentary from Forester, writing this in the late 1930s, and having Hornblower think about how the Spanish are fated to have a country-destroying civil war in the future if they don’t get their act together), all while he takes an equal amount of time to simply describe what daily life was like on these ships, a harsh martial life where it’s just taken for granted that some humans are naturally the masters over others simply because God made it that way, and where the tiniest infractions can often lead to public beatings while the offender’s crewmates are forced to stand silently and watch. That’s the main reason to read these, because they describe in exacting detail a world that not only doesn’t exist anymore but that never really existed in the first place, taking the events that might happen to half a dozen ships over their course of their entire lives back then and squeezing them all into just one ship over the course of a single year here, then making everything work out great for the British people in charge of things just from their natural can-do spirit and God-given smarts above the rest of those other, lesser European states that surround them. (Not for nothing were these novels written while in the middle of England being bombed back into the Stone Age by an all-powerful Germany at the beginning of World War Two, an attempt by Forester to nostalgically remember the “good ol’ days” when the sun never set on an unstoppable British Empire.) They should be read with this mindset; but brother, if you do, you’ll get a thrilling experience unlike any other in modern literature, and they come recommended in this highly specific, highly grandpa-friendly spirit. CS Forester "Horatio Hornblower" books being reviewed in this series: Beat to Quarters (1937) | Ship of the Line (1938) | Flying Colours (1939) | Commodore Hornblower (1945) | Lord Hornblower (1946) | Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) | Lieutenant Hornblower (1952) | Hornblower and the Atropos (1953) | Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958) | Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962) | Hornblower During the Crisis (1967) ...more |
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| 0802123457
| 9780802123459
| 0802123457
| 4.01
| 121,338
| Apr 02, 2015
| Apr 07, 2015
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2024 reads, #23. DID NOT FINISH. I picked up this hugely popular 2015 novel in preparation for watching the streaming adaptation that just came out of
2024 reads, #23. DID NOT FINISH. I picked up this hugely popular 2015 novel in preparation for watching the streaming adaptation that just came out of it. Although technically his debut novel, there are a lot of things about author Viet Thanh Nguyen that make it easier to understand why it had such a phenomenal amount of success for a first book (including winning that year’s Pulitzer Prize); for one thing, he actually has a PhD in creative writing and was already a popular and famous professor at the University of Southern California (and a guest professor at Harvard) before writing this, and had also already been writing short nonfiction pieces regularly for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, mostly on cultural and political issues related to him being a Vietnamese immigrant whose family fled the country during the civil war there in the 1960s and ‘70s, which also doubled as a Cold War proxy battle between the US (who supported and sunk billions of dollars into the southern army) and the Soviet Union (who did the same thing with the northern army, which famously ended up winning the war). That’s what this novel is about as well, interestingly told not through the filter of any American soldiers (the viewpoint of almost 100% of every other book and movie ever made in the US about the war), but instead using a double-agent who ends up emigrating to California after the fall of Saigon to take a sweeping look at how the Vietnamese themselves dealt with the massive, complicated after-effects of the war, including over a decade of brutal Maoist-style re-education camps for the southerners who lost but couldn’t get out of the country in time. That’s all very interesting, and unlike most books I give up on, I actually made it halfway through The Sympathizer (or close to 250 pages) before finally stopping; but Nguyen’s PhD bona fides just finally did me in, and his habit of (to paraphrase “The Simpsons”) taking forever to say nothing, until I had finally had just one too many page-long run-on paragraphs of tedium and gave up in frustration. However, I did at least achieve my goal, which was to get a sense of the book and its writing before watching the television series based on it; and that for sure I’ll be doing, because this is a really fascinating story, told from a unique perspective that most of us Americans have never really gotten to see regarding this infamous black stain in America’s history, essentially the first military conflict the US ever lost in its entire history, beginning a downward spiral that many argue we’re just now finally seeing bottom out into the collapse of our country fifty years later. If you can take the hoity-toity prose style, it’s well worth your time; or you can just be like me and watch the streaming adaptation instead. ...more |
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May 2024
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May 01, 2024
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| 1913462420
| 9781913462420
| 1913462420
| 3.56
| 467
| Dec 2021
| Sep 14, 2021
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did not like it
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2024 reads, #1. For my review to make sense, let me confess that bottles of amyl nitrate, known slangily as "poppers," were a regular part of my sex l
2024 reads, #1. For my review to make sense, let me confess that bottles of amyl nitrate, known slangily as "poppers," were a regular part of my sex life during my "swinging" years of my youth 25 years ago, back during the so-called "alt dot sex years" of the early 2000s; and that the drug has a particularly profound effect on me when combined with cannabis, a combination I used to do all the time when heading off to my latest orgy or other opportunity to have sex with a complete stranger. So I had been hoping that this new book on the subject would shed some light on what poppers actually are, and why they seem to have such a profound mental effect on some people when it comes to lowering inhibitions yet no effect on others. Unfortunately, this isn't the book Adam Zmith has written, but rather he's given us yet another history of the male gay community, only this time as filtered through the rise of poppers as a recreational drug in the "cruising" community of the 1960s onward, using the drug simply as a symbol and coat rack off which to hang a bunch of dry, tedious, academic writing about "queerness" and "belonging" and a bunch of other ten-dollar grad-school words. That's fine, but not the book I was expecting, and not in any way at all a book I'm interested in actually reading, which is why it's getting such a low score from me in particular. Your results may vary, though, so you might want to give it a try anyway.
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| 0985452307
| 9780985452308
| 0985452307
| 3.81
| 6,892
| Mar 22, 2012
| Mar 26, 2012
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liked it
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2023 reads, #35. It was...let's see, 15 months ago now that I decided to become a completist reader of famed and widely admired alt-right writer and "
2023 reads, #35. It was...let's see, 15 months ago now that I decided to become a completist reader of famed and widely admired alt-right writer and "Dark Enlightenment" philosopher Jack Donovan, not because I'm an alt-right person myself (I repeat, I'm not an alt-right person myself, I want to state that unambiguously at the start of today's write-up), but because as a middle-aged straight white male there is of course some overlap here between my life and what Donovan talks about in his "masculinist" or "meninist" books of the 2010s or whatever you want to call them, far-right thought has something like a hundred different terms and movements by now, so I guess it doesn't really matter what exactly you call it anymore. I also must admit that I'm picking up his work again specifically because I'm in the outlining stage of what's about to be my very first romance novel as an author, not being done to make a success of it myself but rather to give advice and better understand the romance-writing clients I have as a freelance book editor; and just to have fun and be original, I decided to make my romance novel a dark BDSM "unwilling sub" tale, but instead of setting it in a world of vampires or werewolves or space aliens like most of the others are, mine is set within a post-apocalyptic US Midwestern settlement called "New Sparta" started by a group of Proud Boys-type guys, who partly based their city-state on the actual details of ancient Sparta, and partly on a sort of religious devotion to Donovan's "how do men live with other men" thoughts here in his early books on the subject, and so I was reading this book with that specific filter in mind, of how it could help me plot a novel set in a world where a group of guys actually are getting to run a political patriarchy city-state (i.e. only men can vote) and what that might actually look like. And the good news here is that Donovan gives us a lot to chew on when it comes to that specific subject, in that a good portion of this book (easily 30 to 40 percent of it) is set among exactly this kind of theoretical world, in which he invites us to think back to the distant past or forward into a dystopian future and imagine a world of chaos again, with no strong national military or police to keep everyone in line through mere threat of authority and a working justice system. If we imagine a group of men trying to band together to protect what's theirs in that environment, what are the traits those men need to have to make a real go out of it? What kinds of things do they need to prove to each other in order to work as a group, and what kinds of things do such men need to prove to themselves to feel like they belong there? That's the most interesting part of the book by far, when Donovan delves into the virtues most treasured and needed in a survival situation specifically by men (being defined here as humans who have more testosterone in their bloodstream than estrogen -- Donovan's big on biological differences between genders), which is basically strength, courage and mastery, with the resulting honor being basically a summation of how well you did at the first three. In this part of the book he's simply not talking about women at all -- he's imagining a purely hypothetical situation where those who primarily have estrogen aren't around to want to be in leadership positions in the first place -- giving us this Ayn Randian all-clear to come in and picture how Rule By Men would work in a theoretically perfect world where everything goes right for the meninists who would want something like this to work. That's very interesting, and not what I would call inherently sexist; I think it's fine to be interested in your own gender if you want, as long as you're not slagging on the other one. Where Donovan loses me, though, and where this book goes off the rails, is when he takes all this "great on paper" theories about how to run a society by male-only rule, and how a perfect version of that society might run if everything was to conveniently go the plotters' way, and just basically uses it as a big excuse to slag on women for just dozens of pages at a time for no particular reason other than that they exist, as well as the more effeminate side of the gay community. This of course is easily where Donovan is most controversial (and most well-known) as a writer, being a gay man himself who violently disagrees with being called "gay" and being lumped in with the "rainbow flag" crowd, calling himself instead an "androphile" and defining his attraction to other men in a much more tribalist and politically conservative way. To be fair as fast as I can, even Donovan himself has been walking a lot of this back since around 2017, for the exact reasons I saw myself when reading this 2012 book; that a lot of it is just sloppy, messy thinking, being heavily influenced in a way he couldn't admit to himself at the time by his still high level of confusion over his identity as a man who loves other men (even he admits that he himself was a part of this "rainbow flag crowd" as recently as the mid-'00s, and I imagine there was still a lot of lingering unprocessed stuff still there from his personal life when he was writing about it politically in this book a mere five years later), where he just spews a lot of very base hatred towards groups that he didn't need to, when his writing about masculine issues divorced from gender and sexual orientation is just really smart and complex on its own without needing all that. That's why I believe Donovan when he says he's trying to separate himself these days from those hate groups that spun up during the Tr*mp years who were waving his books around like bibles, illuminated by tiki torch as they made their way to the latest lynching; I can clearly see that this is the work of someone ten years younger than they are now, and who I bet has much more nuanced and sophisticated ways to express his thoughts now about masculinity and homosexuality than he did when he wrote this original half-manifesto half-screed. So like everyone who writes about radical politics, no matter what the subject, that makes Donovan (and especially early-'10s Donovan from the beginning of his career) a mixed bag; there are interesting concepts being floated about, but you must forgive him a lot of literary transgressions, and see this work as the "unpolished diamond in the rough" his thoughts were back then. You must also do some literal forgiving of him too -- he's quite rough on all women in this book, in a way they don't deserve (I mean, he's making rational points, don't get me wrong, but he doesn't have to be so fucking cruel and insulting about it), which goes even double for gay men guilty of the "crime" of being born with more effeminate genetic personalities. And for sure, this makes me want to throw myself into some Roxane Gay next just to sort of karmically balance myself out some, which I think I might just in fact actually do next, with her now classic Bad Feminist from these same 2010s years (and to be clear, I am not a far-left liberal either, so get ready now for me perhaps having bad things to say about your saintly fucking hero Roxane Gay, who knows, YOU'VE BEEN WARNED). But, you know, the whole reason I decided to read Donovan in the first place is because a writer I greatly admire, Chuck Palahniuk, claims that Donovan writes more smartly on the subject of what it is to be a man than any other living writer today; and that for sure is something I can confirm with The Way of Men, which has me not only thinking a lot about my own behavior these days as a middle-aged man myself, but also gave me tons of new ideas for the New Sparta post-apocalyptic community I'll be creating for my dark BDSM romance novel. So take that for what it is, but understand that you're getting a bunch of extra baggage with that interesting philosophical stuff when you take on a book like this, that you may be able to discard from your brain and you may not, depending on who you are. Pick it up or not based on how you think you yourself would respond. ...more |
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Apr 14, 2023
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Apr 14, 2023
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| 1560006218
| 9781560006213
| 1560006218
| 4.45
| 58
| 1939
| Jan 30, 1995
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really liked it
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2023 reads, #22. I've only recently developed a new fascination for economic theorist Peter Drucker, because I only recently learned that he was the o
2023 reads, #22. I've only recently developed a new fascination for economic theorist Peter Drucker, because I only recently learned that he was the one who almost single-handedly proved that in a post-World-War America, the previous Henry Ford-derived theory about what makes a nation economically prosperous (that is, lots of humans combined with lots of factories, both of them thought as of a series of easily replaceable cogs in a giant machine) needs to be replaced with the concept of what he (and the rest of the world) would eventually call "knowledge workers," specialized and educated intellectuals whose main job is to oversee and improve the rapidly expanding series of automated machines quickly taking over the former jobs of "human cogs," leading to a new world of corporate offices filled with "white collar" workers (named literally after the starched white shirts and ties they wore to work, versus the factory workers' "blue collar" denim work shirts), doing what quickly became known as the defining job of the latter half of the 20th century, being "managers." (To give you an idea of how radical his theories were at the time, and how thoroughly they've since been adopted, consider the fact that Drucker himself was the creator of one of the first-ever "Masters of Business Administration" [or MBA] degree programs, something that seemed ludicrous to many at the time but has by now essentially become a requirement for anyone planning on having a career at a corporation.) What's really fascinating about all this, though, is that Drucker actually started his career as a nerdy, abstract philosophy professor, and that his interest in economics didn't even begin until his alarm over the rise of fascist governments around the world in the 1930s. (Of course, it helped that Drucker was actually born and raised in Austria, the exact birthplace of the Nazi Party, leaving himself by fortunate coincidence in the early 1930s because of a business opportunity elsewhere in Europe, and never returning to his homeland again.) He knew that these authoritarian governments went directly against what at the time was the unquestioned assumption by the Enlightenment philosophers of the 1700s that humans were fundamentally rational beings (the "economic man" of this book's title), and that in all situations will act with scientific, predictable behavior to promote their own interests and always strive for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Fascism turns this theory on its head, which we can easily see by example in the newest crop of far-right radicals who have been threatening to take over our own country for the past 20+ years now; note for one example how many far-right people espouse the opinion (even if they don't necessarily say it this way out loud with these exact words, but rather demonstrate it through their actions) that they are perfectly fine with their own lives being destroyed, as long as it guarantees the destruction of the lives of their perceived enemies as well (or put another way, "I'm too busy trying to outlaw gay rights to worry about possible new laws that would make my own finances go better"). This is essentially a complete repudiation of what the Enlightenment philosophers argued, an argument that had become unquestioned by the 1930s when fascism became an international movement; and so Drucker started concentrating almost exclusively in his philosophical writings about this subject, on why fascism happens, what might happen in a society that would convince people to voluntarily act against their own self-interests, and what kind of society we might be able to create once the war was over that would end this kind of irrational self-destruction for good. And so I thought that would make it worthwhile to actually start way back at the very first book Drucker ever published, then move forward chronologically until finally reaching his famous books in the '50s and '60s on modern management that ended up having such a profound influence over the American business world at the time (or, well, eventually did -- an infamous part of the Drucker legend, in fact, is that he first got involved in the business world by being hired exactly by "human cog" companies like General Motors in the late 1940s to given them philosophy-based breakdowns of their companies and how they could improve their business practices, but his radical new ideas about entire companies that consisted only of 100% college-educated managers went down so badly with these elderly executives left over from the Victorian Age, all these first companies essentially ignored his conclusions, with for example the chairman of GM being so incensed that he declared that no employee was to ever mention the name Peter Drucker out loud in front of him ever again). That had me starting this way all the way back with The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism, which to be clear doesn't have anything to do with business at all, other than Drucker's pleadings of "there's got to be a better way of running the world besides everyone hurtling towards self-destruction because at least it means the destruction of their enemies as well." Unfortunately, though, since this was written in the years 1936 and '37 and then published in '38, there's not really too much to this slim book that we don't now already know in detail about authoritarian societies and how they come about, with Drucker's tone mostly being in this book, "No, SERIOUSLY, I understand you think these Nazis are ridiculous cartoon characters that will come to nothing, but I assure you that they're just about to try to take over the world, and all your pretty little Enlightenment thinking about how the citizens of Germany wouldn't ever sign on to something so self-destructive is basically nonsense that can no longer be trusted in a 20th-century world." And so, while he was much more correct than any of us wish he would've been, this also doesn't make for very exciting or even illuminating reading by here in the 2020s, and I found myself sort of skipping around and just skimming a lot of this stuff about how "Germany's economy has tanked yet they all continue worshipping Hitler like a god for some strange irrational reason" (which, again, none of us in 21st-century America would know anything about whatsoever). So, that has me moving on quickly to the first book he published after the war, 1946's Concept of the Corporation, basically his book-length conclusions about the year he spent as an embedded consultant inside GM with a VIP pass to all the proceedings, basically one of the first books to introduce the concept of "behavioral economics" (i.e. "sometimes humans act insane, and it's the modern business's job to prepare for it and then overcome it"), which like I mentioned went over with GM's executives like a lead balloon. (However, the book was a huge hit in post-war Japan, which inspired Drucker to go over there and start consulting in the early 1950s, one of the main reasons history saw the rise of mega-successful corporations there in the wake of their war loss and moment of national identity-searching.) Please keep an eye out for my review of that here in the coming weeks. ...more |
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Mar 26, 2023
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Mar 26, 2023
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| 125027804X
| 9781250278043
| 125027804X
| 3.97
| 2,035
| Jul 19, 2022
| Jul 19, 2022
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #21. As a member of Generation X, I of course obsessively played the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons way back in the late '70s right a
2023 reads, #21. As a member of Generation X, I of course obsessively played the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons way back in the late '70s right after the game had been invented (I bought my first Basic boxed set in 1978, just one year after they began being sold, then moved to Advanced D&D a year later); but unlike the Gen-X males who went on to be lifelong gamers (of not only RPGs but then tabletop games and then videogames), I gave up on gaming of all kinds for good a few years later as a teen in the early '80s, as my focus shifted much more to things like music and girls. So, I largely missed all the drama at the time when D&D creator Gary Gygax was forced out of his own company in 1985, then with the new executives managing to run the company completely into the ground in just over another decade after that, through a series of decisions so bad it makes the head spin still to this day, eventually going bankrupt and being bought for a pittance by their rivals, the now massive multinational corporation Wizards Of The Coast. That makes me glad for books like the new Slaying the Dragon, a clear and plainly written guide to the ultra-fascinating proceedings, penned by gaming-focused journalist Ben Riggs (who among other bona fides publishes regularly with Felicia Day's "Geek & Sundry" multimedia content company). Under his sure hand (if not dipping a little too often into Joss Whedon-level purple prose), the story he paints is almost ridiculously easy to understand in hindsight: a group of dysfunctional, nerdy gamers in a small town in Wisconsin, who are used to "publishing" their guides as xeroxed booklets and maybe selling in the hundreds if they're lucky, catch lightning in a bottle by inventing the world's first intellectually-based (i.e. doesn't rely on miniatures) roleplaying game, at the exact moment in history the entire general public is hungry for such a game. Suddenly they're selling out left and right, and quickly realize they could be selling in the millions if they can get their shit together enough to actually scale up to that level; but unfortunately, they're all a bunch of dysfunctional nerdy gamers in a small town in Wisconsin and therefore not up to the task, making TSR almost fold not even a decade after they began. That's when Gygax was convinced to invite in the sister of a friend, the now notorious villain Lorraine Williams, which as far as I can tell happened because she was the only person any of them knew who actually had an MBA from a business school; but unfortunately she turned out to be one of those people who was probably at the bottom of her class at that business school, skating by with a D+ average, just barely understanding the basics of how to run a corporation, and not smart enough to understand that big risky decisions can easily blow up in your face. This then seemed to be combined with a thoroughly unpleasant personality, one of those permanently sour fucks who notoriously thought she was morally better than the nerdy artists and writers who produced all of TSR's contents, with the kind of cold sociopathy that lets someone casually commit horribly offensive, dispiriting corporate acts with a bored wave of the hand, and an monomania that Riggs cleverly describes as "speedboat thinking" (as in, if you're a rich asshole who owns a speedboat, then you get to do whatever the fuck you want to do with the speedboat, even crash it into a brick wall if you want, because you're the rich asshole and you own the speedboat, plebes). That led to a series of bad decisions from day 1 of Williams' reign, which began by her sneaking around behind Gygax's back and purchasing a 51% ownership of the company, then immediately firing him without even a two-week notice or a kiss goodbye, then leading to a series of evermore bungling and hole-digging mistakes as the years continued, which instead of humbly fixing caused Williams to react with evermore indignation and defensive posturing. Just to name one example out of hundreds I could (and bear with me for the long story), at a certain point TSR was partnering with DC Comics to put out a line of popular D&D titles, but Williams started insisting that they also do a title about Buck Rogers, because Williams' family just happened to own the rights to Buck Rogers (her grandfather, newspaper executive Frank Lille, was willed it by the character's creator, Philip Francis Nowlan, as a thank-you for helping him get it sold to syndicates in the first place), and so she was constantly shoving the intellectual property down everyone's throats so her family could make another extra buck on top of everything else TSR was making. Problem was, in the '90s Buck Rogers stank from the leftover reek of the cheesy '70s adaptation, before it had become retro and warmly remembered, and before the explosion of big-budget superhero movies, so TSR took a hard pass. Now incensed, Williams impulsively decided to start an entire new comic book division of TSR, despite no one there actually knowing anything about how to write, draw, ink, print, publish or distribute comics, and suddenly threw tens of millions of dollars at it; and DC, rightly pissed, took them to court over the deal they supposed had with them. Williams was then forced to come up with a shaky legal loophole, calling their product "comic modules" that come with both a comic story and a cut-out mini-game in the back of each issue, which was just enough to stop the lawsuit; but DC reacted by canceling all their D&D lines but retaining their exclusive right over it, making TSR not only lose out on missing revenue but double-lose by not being able to actually publish D&D comics through TSR Comics. Now add that their exclusive distributorship at the time with Waldenbooks had the comics stored in the gaming aisle where the comics kids never saw them, that the gamer kids didn't like the games, and that the comics kids weren't about to cut up their collectible comics, and suddenly TSR was gushing money, simply because Williams combined bad business sense with a grating personality. And this is to say nothing of how the company finally ends, where Williams really shows off her D+ in business school by engaging in such ultra-risky behavior as "sectioning" [that is, when a proven profitable company presells that year's profits at an 18% loss to an investment bank, in return for getting all the cash at once at the beginning of the year, so to cook the books and look like they're doing much better than they actually are], and taking advantage of the 150-year-old "gentlemen's agreement" between publishers and brick-and-mortar bookstores, where the stores pay immediately for all books they might order from a publisher, but have the legal right to send back unsold copies a few months or a year later and get a full refund, with TSR in the early '90s shipping millions of extra copies of merchandise to Waldenbooks nationwide to get the cash for them fast, and deciding to worry later about what happens when Waldenbooks returns all that unsold merchandise and demands their money back. Which of course is what they notoriously did a few years later, right when the Great Comics And Gaming Crash Of The Mid-'90s happened and everyone's chits were called in, the company finding themselves now with a whopping $30 million in unpaid debt, which led to mass firings five days before Christmas (because of course it did), then their bankruptcy and acquisition by Wizards Of The Coast six months after that. There's a whole lot more here to discover, so don't let today's extra-long writeup make you think I'm telling you the entire story; we haven't even touched today, for example, on Gary Gygax's insane turn in the early '80s starting up an LA production company for TSR, in which he bought a luxury home in the Hollywood Hills and started having these crazy drug and sex parties, having meetings with people like Orson Welles about being in a big-budget D&D movie, and all kinds of other nutso details about the whole saga over this book's fast-reading 300 pages. But perhaps one of the most fascinating details, and something I'm glad Riggs was able to get in right at the end of the book, was how Wizards founder Peter Adkison is almost like the anti-Williams: he's brutally honest with himself about his strengths and weaknesses (Wizards' first attempt at a product was written by him, but everyone hated it, and he realized he needed to start hiring outside creatives); he saw the writing on the wall early (their first official product was an add-on manual for an RPG, and when it bombed he saw that the industry was about to crash); he understood that great ideas often come from identifying a need (their massive seller -- nay, society changer -- "Magic: The Gathering" was inspired by him going to sci-fi conventions and seeing conventioneers endlessly spending 20-minute periods hanging out in hallways waiting for banquet rooms to open, and realizing they desperately needed a mini-game easy to carry that could provide exactly 20 minutes of legitimately thrilling fun); and he recognized and rewarded talent (his first employee went on to be the world's first female CEO of a gaming company, going all the way back to Parker Brothers and the like). People like to paint Wizards as a giant faceless corporation that swept in and picked up D&D for a song and then blanded it out to its listless state it's now in; but it's good for Riggs to remind us that they started as just another small nerdy gaming company too, but in their case knew how to do everything right, which is how they ended up being such a massive success and a shadow over all of gaming that they now are. So, yes, a lot here to take in, a kind of simply written but conceptually sweeping look at...well, really, the whole of American society from the late-'70s to late-'90s, which is why this will appeal so much to so many middle-agers out there, even if told through this interesting but ultra-niche corner of society dedicated to the rise, fall, then normalizing of this brand-new form of entertainment that suddenly cropped up out of the blue. It comes strongly recommended, and will undoubtedly be making my Best Of The Year list I'll be publishing later in December. ...more |
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Mar 24, 2023
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Mar 24, 2023
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Hardcover
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| B07V7HVND4
| 4.17
| 965
| Jul 23, 2019
| Jul 23, 2019
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #61. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through
2022 reads, #61. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them one a day this week just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves. This is now my third book of the run (see also Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty and Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop ), and one that slowed down my streak of a book per day by a few extra days, because this turned out to be the first full-length actual three-act book I've read through this promotion so far, a telling sign of its higher quality in general. And indeed, this is a real textbook example of how to get a quick-reading Kindle Unlimited romance novel right, because it hits all the right tropes at all the right moments but still keeps the fundamentals of genre storytelling at a high level. Set in the Evil King John period of 1200s England (the same setting as the Robin Hood stories), it's the story of a France-loving blacksmith who's secretly also a knight in a Templar-type organization devoted to taking down John from the inside; at his next boss's castle, where he specifically inserted himself in order to gauge the earl's chances of supporting a rebellion, he doesn't expect to fall in love with the earl's beautiful, headstrong, curiously modern and progressive daughter (ah, but who ever does?). The thing that really strikes me here, which I've noticed before and have recently added to the essay of romance advice I'm putting together for an upcoming issue of my free editing newsletter, is how the best romance novels present a male romantic lead who's not this type of guy or that type of guy, but is instead every type of guy for every occasion, with directly competing aspects of his personality that manifest themselves at the exact most perfect time for the female romantic lead to be impressed, attracted or aroused by (depending on the situation), almost as if he can somehow magically read her mind. While this infuriates me as an actual guy who actually exists in the actual world (and goes a long way towards explaining why so many of my exes in my early twenties acted the way they did, as if offended that I couldn't read their minds), I have to admit that this is really effective in a romance novel designed for a fanbase of 95% women, and when done right like is the case here makes it easy to see why fans of the genre can get so sucked in so thoroughly. That makes our hunky hero Lance (or "Sir Lance" if you're Frenchy) really compelling, because he can be a strict follower of traditional gender roles one moment and suddenly a radically progressive supporter of modern women's rights the next, aggressive and territorial about love one moment and suddenly reticent and intimate the next. When you combine this, then, with a main female lead who's deliberately shown as kind of a smart nerd, but not afraid of a little hard work (it's established in the backstory that the earl's daughter, Idalia, was already a fan of visiting the smithing forge even during the last blacksmith's time, which gives her a convenient excuse for she and Lance to spend time together), this provides a really engaging couple to put into a will-they-won't-they situation, fraught with all the subsumed eroticism that comes with the High-Chivalry period of the Medieval years. What seals it all up, though, is author Cecelia Mecca's devotion to period accuracy, authentic-sounding dialogue, and strange and wonderfully odd details to add the whole thing a little color; witness for example the lovingly convoluted story that goes into explaining why their castle has this one lone interior abandoned tower not connected to anything else, which Idalia has used since childhood as her secret little book-reading nerd getaway spot, which adds this nicely concrete visual image that helps flesh out this northern British castle and regional market location where our story takes place. It's nothing spectacular, mind you, but the writing's every bit as good as a random episode of a Medieval-style show on cable TV, whether that's House of Dragons or The Rings of Power, The Wheel of Time, etc. In fact, that's probably a good litmus test -- if you can write a spec script for your favorite genre television show that sounds like an actual episode of that show, you're skilled enough to churn out quick but above-average novels in that genre for Kindle Unlimited fans. Plus, I have to admit, it's the only romance novel I've ever read in my life so far that made me legitimately interested in reading the rest of the books in the series; and that's a big leap forward for someone who not even ten years ago was still actively making fun of this genre, like a large portion of America continues to do to this day. Coming next, Pearl Tate's sci-fi "fated mates" tale Mate Exposed, so join me again in a few days for that; but in the meanwhile, I give The Blacksmith a ringing endorsement, a solid example of a High Medieval tale (basically Tolkien fantasy without the dragons or hobbits) that will scratch all the itches of the usual romance fan. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 28, 2022
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Dec 28, 2022
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0316289329
| 9780316289320
| 0316289329
| 4.28
| 11,623
| Feb 04, 1937
| Sep 30, 1985
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #47. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they
2022 reads, #47. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation I recently had a chance to watch again all eight of the "Horatio Hornblower" television movies produced by the British ITV in the late 1990s and early '00s, regarding the derring-do adventures of an officer in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars; and my big enjoyment of them all over again finally convinced me to try reading at least one of the original books by CS Forester these are based on, first published in the 1930s through '60s. I've put it off until now, frankly, because it feels like a real grandpa move to me; and that's primarily because when I was a kid in the '70s, these were exactly the kinds of books my actual grandfathers and all the grandfather-types around me used to read, along with unending amounts of Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey, James A. Michener and other such "manly men" genre thrillers about cowboys and conquistadors and square-jawed sailing ship captains, screaming "FIRE!!!" to their dutiful crew shooting a 50-pound cannon out a hole in the side of their wooden ship at those damned dirty Frenchies. On the other hand, however, I am trying to get in more easy-reading genre thrillers in my life these days, or at least during the summer, to nostalgically honor my pleasant memories of being in my public library's childhood Summer Reading Camp each year; and it's not like I had to sign on for the entire eleven-book series just to check out one of them, and not like I even had to finish the first book if I wasn't jibing with it, given that I just got it from the Chicago Public Library for free anyway. And so I tried it, and I suddenly discovered why grandpas the world over have been falling in love with these books for the last 80 years and still counting, because this turned out to be a lot easier for a non-sailing enthusiast like me to read and understand than I had been expecting, a real corker of a swashbuckler that not only delivers action-movie thrills but also gives you a lot to philosophically think about when it comes to human nature, why we admire the people we do, and the age-old question of whether the severe stoicism of military life erodes our fundamental humanity or not. Here in the first book of the series, originally published in 1937 during the interregnum of the World War (which, as sci-fi author Ada Palmer has inspired me to do, I now treat as just one big war that lasted from 1914 to 1945, not a War 1 and War 2), we are introduced to our series hero already as a middle-aged captain of a major naval ship in the year 1808, in the middle of the war years when the people of Spain and its Central American colonies rose up against French occupation, declared independence and suddenly became the allies of Great Britain. That's what takes Hornblower and the HMS Lydia not just to Central America but to the western, Pacific side of Central America, where British ships almost never went (this is long before the Panama Canal, mind you, when the only way over there from Europe was to sail all the way around the southern tip of South America), to help out a former member of the Nicaraguan nobility who has decided to enact a military coup of the occupying French forces. This nicely also helped Forester solve the challenge he faced each time with every new book, which is that he didn't want to have to deal with the Mid-Century Modernist equivalent of snotty Comic Book Guy leaving rants at Amazon about how he got tiny details of actual Napoleonic battles wrong, so he instead set each Hornblower book far away from any of the actual battles that were taking place in the real world at that time. In the 1808 of this book, these were mostly back in Spain and Portugal, so Forester instead places Hornblower literally thousands of miles away, which allows him to be both geographically accurate in the book but also take a lot of liberties when it comes to what actually happens. That's what lets him stuff this first one to overflowing with fascinating developments that, while fanciful, did actually happen occasionally in these years; the Central American noble he's sent to help turns out to be a dictatorial psychopath who literally crucifies his enemies, while Hornblower's ship ends up in a rare turn of events picking up a woman for part of its trip, an important noble back in Britain who's also unusually forward and independent, and unusually has training in treating the sick and injured (and so helps out after a major battle in which half the ship is injured or killed, gaining her a lot of admiration among the all-male crew). And that's not even counting the chasing of a fabled ship filled with Spanish gold; the idyllic pause at a sandy South Pacific island while they tip the entire ship sideways, repair the hole-filled bottom, and create a brand-new 125-foot-tall main mast; and the bragging contest on board over which sailor ate the most amount of rats during a period at sea when they ran out of food. Yeah, Forester's packing in every detail he can get away with in a tale about the Napoleonic British Navy, including introductory lessons on sailing terms and how ships navigated in the 1700s using only a sextant and the night sky. That's what makes this so memorable, because it's everything and the kitchen sink, not just exciting but thought-provoking and instructive, and so scratches that very specific older male itch that modern authors like Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton do in our own times. That makes it all the more the surprise that it's so relatable and easy to follow as well, and that Forester really squeezes as much as he can out of this milieu by making Hornblower an unusual character on top of everything else, unusually caring and sensitive but who overcompensates by always maintaining a stony arms-length demeanor with his men, ironically celebrated by them for this as an exemplary example of the True British Man. That's beating in the heart of any grandpa nerd who still tears through a book every couple of days like they did when younger, but whose tastes have simply gravitated towards the more traditional, more historical and more conservative as they've gotten older; underneath the fascination with guns and vehicles and other inventions is the heart of a romantic, and this Hornblower novel lets this tech-obsessed military-friendly male reader vicariously see himself in our admirably tender captain, who feels much more deeply for his men than the infamously insular discipline of a naval ship would ever allow him to display publicly. Forester actually wrote five novels in a row depicting Hornblower at the height of his powers, a dashing and wise Jean-Luc Picard type who is never less than brave, honest, even-tempered, and most often the smartest one in the room, which got us in his fictional timeline to July 1815 and Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo; but public demand for more stories was so vociferous, Forester then turned to Hornblower's early years in the Navy as a bumbling teenager who was constantly making mistakes but still acting with guts and bravery, set way back in the 1790s when Napoleon was still just a military commander and not yet emperor. Those turned out to be equally as popular, so much so that some people now read them in the chronological order of the character, not the order Forester originally wrote them. (Certainly this is what the ITV movie series did, following an adventurous Hornblower in his teens and twenties as he rises from a lowly midshipman [basically a cadet] to eventually the captain of his own warship; star Ioan Gruffudd, who moved to Hollywood at the end of the series to star in the ill-fated "Fantastic Four" movies, has publicly stated in many interviews since that he'd be very enthusiastic about doing a contemporary big-budget adaptation of this first Hornblower adventure now, in that he's currently middle-aged himself and thus naturally ready to take on the part.) Whatever the case, with there being only eleven books in the whole series, I think for sure that I'll be tackling at least one more of them, and I imagine unless they suddenly go horrible that I'll probably be incorporating the rest into my summer reading challenges over the next decade, when I tackle such other summer-friendly beach and airport authors as Lee Child, Jim Butcher, Elin Hilderbrand, Terry Pratchett and more. For now, I very enthusiastically recommend this first book of the series, at least for those of you who also have at least a theoretical interest in Clancy, Crichton, Michener, Grey, L'Amour and others. I'm 53 this year, so I'm just officially old enough now to start unironically embracing the "grandpa-lit" category out there (eat your heart out, chick-lit); and this first Hornblower novel is a super-solid entry in this category, exactly the gift for the silver-haired technothriller fan in your own life. CS Forester "Horatio Hornblower" books being reviewed in this series: Beat to Quarters (1937) | Ship of the Line (1938) | Flying Colours (1939) | Commodore Hornblower (1945) | Lord Hornblower (1946) | Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) | Lieutenant Hornblower (1952) | Hornblower and the Atropos (1953) | Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958) | Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962) | Hornblower During the Crisis (1967) ...more |
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Sep 16, 2022
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Sep 16, 2022
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0385732953
| 9780385732956
| 0385732953
| 4.24
| 26,101
| 1951
| Aug 23, 2005
|
it was amazing
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2022 reads, #11. There's a longer story here, but basically one of my friends has recently decided in her fifties to finally pursue a lifelong goal, t
2022 reads, #11. There's a longer story here, but basically one of my friends has recently decided in her fifties to finally pursue a lifelong goal, to not only become a successful children's author but a highly influential and groundbreaking one, in the spirit of Judy Blume or John Green; so that has her reading classics from the genre these days that first missed her attention as an actual child, which in turn has me occasionally reading children's classics that first missed my own attention as an actual child. This is one of them, first published in 1951, eventual winner of the Charles W. Follett Award and the first-ever National Jewish Book Award for children's literature; it can be rightly called "Little House on the Prairie but for an urban Jewish family," in that it's based on the true childhood of the author (who was in late middle-age when she wrote it), who grew up in a Yiddish immigrant family who lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1910s, in the height of its days as a tenement-filled magnet for fresh Eastern European immigrants, especially Yiddish Jews from Tsarist Russia's "Pale of Settlement" (i.e. the countries that have always borne the brunt of the damage from Russia's collisions with the West -- Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, etc.). To be clear, it's very well-done, a charming and captivating look back at these crowded, noisy, smelly streets from the nostalgic filter of an eight-year-old girl who saw it all with magic and wonder; but as I pointed out to my friend in our mini-book club of it afterwards, it's not a coincidence at all that this found a publisher just three years after the publication of Anne Frank's diary, and I remarked how if it this had come out twenty years previous or twenty years in the future, it wouldn't have gotten nearly the kind of traction from society that it did by coming out directly after the Holocaust, when the Western arts was looking for as many heartwarming stories about Judaism they could find. Also, be aware that this is written from a pre-Beverly Cleary point of influence, i.e. all the kids are angelic little docile sweethearts and the forever wise parents are always patient and understanding, one of the last big hurrahs of the "Don't Speak Unless Ye Have Been Spoken To" school of children's literature before Mid-Century Modernism and then Postmodernism put an end to it for good. Still, the pure joy the girls get out of things like the giant beards and bellies of all the shopkeepers along their street, or eating a plain baked sweet potato for a penny because it's literally the one thing they'll have all week with any kind of sugar in it whatsoever, is worth the time alone it takes to read this slim little volume, not to mention the entire chapter devoted to all the sisters getting scarlet fever (!), which is to say nothing of the ridiculously Dickensian coincidence to end the entire thing. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit, a chance to see a forgotten classic written in a Mid-Century Modernist style but about subjects you've never seen Mid-Century Modernism take on before, an eye-opening experience still very much worth the time of your own current tween kids. ...more |
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Apr 03, 2022
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Apr 03, 2022
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1883398088
| 9781883398088
| 1883398088
| 4.48
| 467
| Jan 01, 1979
| Oct 04, 1994
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it was amazing
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2021 reads, #103. A recent rewatch of Prometheus had me looking up the Wikipedia page for the alien race featured in all the Alien movies; and while i
2021 reads, #103. A recent rewatch of Prometheus had me looking up the Wikipedia page for the alien race featured in all the Alien movies; and while it was a surprise at first to find that the page was the length and depth of the biography of some major figure in world history, upon reflection I realized that that shouldn't really be a surprise at all, after having the race featured in one slightly different form or another through a dozen feature films and hundreds of comic book issues. That got me thinking again about Swiss artist H.R. Giger, whose legitimately unsettling yet simultaneously metal-album-cover cheesy "biomecha" paintings in the 1970s (some of the first in the fine-art world to be painted with airbrushes, along with more entrenched gallery people like Ed Paschke) provided the first inspiration for the aliens in this franchise, and who was eventually hired by director Ridley Scott to come to London to design and build many of the first film's most iconic setpieces, for which he won an Oscar and forever changed the world of dark sci-fi (not to mention metal album covers). On an impulse, I checked out the two books on him the Chicago Public Library has, 1977's Necronomicon -- Giger's debut publication, the book that made it into Salvador Dali's hands by way of a mutual friend, who gave it to Alejandro Jodorowsky, who hired Giger to work on concept paintings for his ultimately doomed production of Dune, which is how he came to the attention of fellow staffer Dan O'Brannon, who soon afterward successfully pitched his Alien spec script to 20th Century Fox, which is how it is that Giger did all the alien design for that movie -- and then a book made out of Giger's concept art from Alien itself, first published in 1979 right after the movie came out. Or, at least I thought this was just going to be a book of concept paintings; but it instead turned out to be a much more interesting thing, which is those paintings combined with an extremely candid journal Giger kept at the time about the entire experience, and the copious still photos he took on the sets and inside the effects workshops where he and his buddies worked. It's fascinating, I have to admit, which is why I thought it was worth writing about here at Goodreads, even though I won't be doing any such write-up for the more traditional exhibit-catalogue-style Necronomicon; fully of snotty opinionated rants from the uncompromising Giger about all the details of the production that drove him crazy, it has the same "fuck these California normies" vibe as Charles Bukowski has in Hollywood, his memoir of adapting his story Barfly into a movie starring Mickey Rourke as a fictionalized version of Bukowski himself. That's being kind of unfair, though; Giger in fact has all kinds of complimentary things to say about the various hardworking production designers and special-effects bottom-rung employees that brought his nightmarish airbrushed visions to full three-dimensional life, plus he pretty rightly gives a lot of credit to Scott himself for having the singular vision of the film he did, and being Giger's quiet champion at various points when it seemed no one else would. It's this unfiltered look at how the sausage is made (literally in this case), combined with the nerd-amazing production photos, combined with the flabbergasting paintings Giger originally made, that makes this such a spectacular book, and comes recommended to an audience way beyond the fanboys who just like gawking at his robot-squid vagina-penis monstrosities. ...more |
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not set
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Nov 22, 2021
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Nov 22, 2021
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1250075580
| 9781250075581
| 1250075580
| 3.96
| 11,100
| Oct 18, 2016
| Oct 18, 2016
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it was amazing
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2021 reads, #94 and 95. For a lot of us who eventually become artists as adults, when we're in our late teens and first get the idea that we might wan
2021 reads, #94 and 95. For a lot of us who eventually become artists as adults, when we're in our late teens and first get the idea that we might want to do this for a living, we don't yet have the experiences or portfolio to show off our own artistic sensibilities yet, so we tend to obsessively latch on to already successful artists who have similar sensibilities as ours. In my case, for example, that was David Lynch, whose mindfuck classic Blue Velvet came out my senior year of high school, which is pretty much the exact most perfect time to watch a movie like that. That made the airing of his notorious TV show Twin Peaks while I was in college not just popular but a legitimate phenomenon among me and my snotty little Generation X art-school buddies; and I've never rewatched the show since, for fear of diminishing returns ruining the purity of my enjoyment of it back when it was originally on the air, and we used to hold giant watching parties each week complete with multiple pies and pots of coffee. But I recently decided to drop my subscription to the streaming service Hulu, and Hulu is the current home of Twin Peaks, so I decided to finally watch the entire two-season run again before I lost access to it, which for those who are curious was pretty much the experience I was expecting -- it was okay, and I can see why we all went so nuts for it at the time, but Lord was it filled with a whole bunch of pointless filler, in Lynch's attempt to make what he considered a nighttime soap opera, which is what he always saw Twin Peaks as first and foremost. That then got me thinking about the companion books again for the first time in a long time, early examples of the kind of cross-media marketing and publicity we now take for granted, in which a series of three themed volumes gave gentle and not very important clues about the bizarro mythology driving the only storyline of the series anyone actually gave a damn about -- the death of Laura Palmer, that is, at the hands of what turned out to be an evil supernatural being, governed by a byzantine set of rules and laws these supernatural creatures have among the places along the magical veil where they dwell, the unique details of which were invented by Lynch during the open thinking stages within his lifelong habit of transcendental meditation. And that finally gets us to today's books, when I learned during my research of this rewatch that the show's co-creator Mark Frost actually published two more tie-in books decades after I and the rest of the world stopped being obsessed by the show, 2016's much bigger The Secret History of Twin Peaks and 2017's much smaller Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, both of which seem to have been greenlit because of the coming third season of the show, which debuted just a few months after these books came out. The "lore" of the franchise's Hollywood history often leaves out Frost, who although has the kind of sensibility to appreciate and produce Twin Peaks, nonetheless comes from a much more traditional background, having been a veteran already of more pedestrian fare like Hill Street Blues, The Equalizer and The Six Million Dollar Man, which I guess doesn't really fit the "brilliant weirdo genius comes out of nowhere" shtick that continues to drive the cult status of Lynch. Frost has had a middling career since -- he was co-writer of a couple of those "Fantastic Four" films from the early 2000s, produced half a dozen failed pilots, and seems to have spent more time than anything else on penning a series of Young Adult fantasy novels known as "The Paladin Prophecy" -- but it's clear with hindsight that he was the one sort of holding the original Twin Peaks together as any kind of watchable show at all, especially now that we have the evidence of a third season that was largely made without him, which is so viewer-hostile and obtuse that it might as well not even exist. Lynch may have been pulling random shit out of his meditation sessions and waking dreams for such details as the dancing dwarves and Log Ladies, but it's clear in Secret History that Frost was getting his inspiration for the mythos' details from much more mundane and trackable sources; for this book actually has very little to do with the show itself, but is rather an impressively researched look at all the actual bizarre little true stories over the centuries that would sound like Twin Peaks if they weren't in fact completely real, and which Frost quite methodically shows provided the inspiration behind such franchise details as the Black and White Lodges, owls as spirit animals, characters who talk backwards, even why the show was set in the Pacific Northwest in the first place. Turns out there's all kinds of bizarre stories from real life that sound like an episode of Twin Peaks: such as the fact that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was co-founded by two friends of occultist Alastair Crowley who regularly enacted his strange, sex-filled Satanist rituals (one of whom was Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard); or that 1950s entertainer Jackie Gleason was obsessed with UFOs, owning one of the largest libraries in the world on the subject and actually buying a mansion in the shape of a flying saucer that he called the "Mothership;" or that Gleason's widow after his death sincerely swore that he told her about his friend Richard Nixon getting drunk one night and showing him crashed UFO wreckage from Roswell; or that Merriweather Lewis of Lewis & Clark fame supposedly committed suicide under mysterious and suspicious circumstances, not very long after returning from a trouble-filled exploratory trip to the Pacific Northwest where they were spooked by Native American stories about evil ghosts in the woods. All of these stories are absolutely, 100 percent true; so in the tradition of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Discordian classic "The Illuminatus! Trilogy," here Frost takes all these stories and weaves them into one giant uber-conspiracy theory of which the events in Twin Peaks, Washington in 1989 plays just a small part. That's actually kind of brilliant, in this '80s indie Church Of The Subgenius kind of way (after all, the '50s-born Frost is the exact right age to love all these crazy old '70s and '80s underground occult-conspiracy "Hail Discordia" projects); and the book should be read in this spirit for full enjoyment, as an extremely clever and well-written way to present a broad overview of the most famous bizarro conspiracy theories over the course of US history, from Majestic-12 to the Kennedy assassination, completely bonkers '50s sci-fi author Richard Shaver, Project Blue Book, the Freemasons, and a lot, lot, lot more. And I suppose we'll forgive Frost for the short follow-up volume a year later, which seems to only and exclusively exist to provide tie-in promotion to the third season of the show, which was released the exact same month this book was released, and contains nothing else but hastily assembled overviews of all the show's main characters, and Frost's half-assed look at the general highlights of each person's life in the 25 years since. It's become known by now that Frost's main involvement with this third season was to throw together a bunch of ideas beforehand but not be involved with the day-to-day production, while Lynch then proceeded to get to the production stage and throw out a bunch of Frost's ideas at the spur of a moment while on set, because a fucking bee flew in his face that morning or whatever and suddenly now they're all going to go to the Black Lodge and see a giant thirty-foot-high CGI beehive floating in the sky, shedding blood or whatever, and that this is why the third season turned out to be so head-scratchingly awful. So this book written beforehand, frankly, doesn't do a whole lot to explain all the on-set turns towards the explainably bizarre that now marks the edited and finished episodes, and only provides the kinds of background details you'll quickly learn yourself over the first couple of episodes. It's kind of a shame that Lynch didn't have the boundaries of a nervous network or a TV vet like Frost this time, to rein him in and deliver a much tighter and more interesting third act to this beloved series (the Lynch projects with the most boundaries over the years have always turned out to be the best Lynch projects, whether that's Blue Velvet or The Elephant Man, Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive); but in the meanwhile, we have this "Transgressive's History of the United States" as a gift from the show's other creator, not really vital for learning about the show itself, but certainly an invaluable look at the kind of world that would greenlight a show like Twin Peaks to begin with. ...more |
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Oct 18, 2021
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Oct 18, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0313200572
| 9780313200571
| 0313200572
| 4.11
| 18
| 1978
| 1978
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really liked it
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2021 reads, #76. Most people no longer remember this, but for the entire first half of the 20th century, ex-patriate Ezra Pound was largely considered
2021 reads, #76. Most people no longer remember this, but for the entire first half of the 20th century, ex-patriate Ezra Pound was largely considered one of the greatest writers in the entirety of American history, one of the high-profile gatekeepers at the beginning of Modernism who was the first and loudest champion of such now household names as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, and who by all signs should here in the 21st century be known in the same rarified air in which we breathlessly utter such names as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. And the reason most people don't remember this is because when the 1930s rolled around, and most liberal American artists became disgusted with the unregulated free-market capitalism that had led to the Great Depression, while most of his peers pivoted to the radically left precepts of Communism, Pound instead decided that these fascists in Europe certainly had some interesting things to say, and ended up moving to Italy and becoming a gleeful Nazi speechwriter for years and years, eventually penning and performing over 300 monologues on the radio about how all our modern problems were being caused by the Jews, and life would return to a happy normal just as soon as his pals Hitler and Mussolini eliminate all the Jews from the face of the Earth. Pound was eventually captured by Allied forces during the liberation of Italy, was found guilty of war crimes, and was incarcerated in a prison hospital for the criminally insane for a little over a decade; but this is where his story gets extra-fascinating, in that the same liberal intellectuals who denounced fascism during the war suddenly came to the passionate defense of Pound, including the US Library of Congress awarding him the prestigious Bollingen Prize a mere three years after he publicly declared Hitler a "saint" and a "holy martyr on the level of Joan of Arc," and with there eventually being a concerted effort among Hemingway and such mainstream publications as The Nation and Esquire to successfully get Pound released from the mental institution, whereby he promptly moved back to Italy, gave a Nazi salute to the awaiting press, then spent the last 14 years of his life in depressed isolation, reportedly suffering from dementia and spending his last days dazedly wandering the hallways of a friend's crumbling Medieval castle, obsessively complaining about how the government had injected evil microbes in him for the purpose of murdering him. American liberals' love affair with such a vile, detestable human being simply flummoxes me, to tell you the truth, not just among his contemporary friends which at least is understandable, but modern liberals' championing of him to this day -- the entire reason this all even came to my attention, in fact, is that I'm currently reading the 90th anniversary anthology put together by Poetry magazine in 2002, in which editors Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young claim that the book represents the "finest artists" the magazine has ever published, which makes it a quite pointed comment when a full five out of the first fifteen pieces in the book are by Pound, leading me to wonder what exactly the magazine's Jewish readers and supporters thought of this development when the book first came out. So to try to make better sense of it all, I went straight to the source, and recently read the published transcripts of Pound's Nazi radio addresses, or at least the hundred-odd ones the American government thought to actually record during the 1940s in preparation for his eventual war-crimes trial, first published in 1978 and currently out of print, but that can be downloaded for free at the Internet Archive. It's there that I discovered the main justification that his defenders use for his deplorable actions during the war, and was forced to admit that they kind of have a point; that Pound had simply gone insane at this point in his life, in that same kind of "the echo chamber became too much and broke his brain" way that we've seen millions of otherwise rational Americans become during the Tr*mp years, and that his anti-Semitism and passionate embrace of Hitler had a lot less to do with actively supporting either of these concepts, and a lot more to do with what at the time was an extremely common disgust for free-market capitalism. Let's never forget, after all, that in these same exact years, John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel that also passionately argues that the US government needs to be violently overthrown by a people's revolution, only in that case arguing for a much more liberal-friendly socialist revolution and with no mention of Jews at all. It turns out that Pound was a huge fan of an economic philosophy in these years called "Social Credit," which in very general terms sounds a lot like modern Libertarianism (lending yet more credence to the modern complaint that Libertarianism and Fascism are much more closely related than Libertarians want to admit, but that's an angry rant for another day), and which blamed most of society's ills on the fact that our economic system is centrally controlled by banks and other financial institutions. The vast majority of Pound's rambling, almost nonsensical speeches actually have to do with this, and what he considered the cardinal sin of usury that banks commit every time they give a person a loan, which he claimed wouldn't exist if people had the opportunity to lend to each other without the banks being involved at all. (Maybe you're starting to see already why this economic theory, especially when coming from someone who was already in the process of losing his sanity, quickly devolves into unreadable nonsense just a few pieces into Pound's Nazi-era writings.) But since Jews have been spending several thousand years now storing their assets in the portable form of money in banks, instead of the Gentile tradition of real estate (which is impossible to do when you keep getting chased out of every country you try living in), by the 1930s the entire global banking system was primarily associated in many people's minds with Judaism in general, which is how it is that Pound's speeches became more and more peppered with (paraphrased) statements like, "And this is why all our current problems have been caused by the Jews, and why everything would be great again if we simply killed all the Jews and burned down all the banks, like my buddies Hitler and Mussolini are in the process of doing." It's this part where I keep getting hung up when it comes to the post-war embrace of Pound by intellectual liberals; for as hard as these people worked in the 1950s and '60s to essentially sanctify Jews as an angelic people who can do no wrong, as a way of justifying America's involvement in the war after the fact (which is another thing we've generally forgotten, that most Americans generally disliked Jews in the decades leading up to the war, and reacted to the news of concentration camps with a shrug and a mutter of, "Yeah, that sounds about right," a viewpoint that was only slowly changed over decades through such acts as the beatification of Anne Frank, and the ascendancy of such Jewish writers as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth), it seems incomprehensible to me that when it came to Pound's own fiery pronouncements about the Final Solution, these same intellectual liberals sort of waved their hands in the air and said, "Eh, yeah, but he's okay, because he used to be one of us, so let's just spend the rest of our lives pretending that Pound never spent a decade of his life telling millions of people on the radio that they should go out and kill all the Jews now." And judging by his veneration still going on as lately as this 2002 Poetry magazine anthology, it seems to be an attitude that modern intellectual liberals still have to this day, a full half-century-plus after the Holocaust, which I find even more incomprehensible, especially now in our "cancel culture" days when other artists' careers have been entirely and permanently destroyed for what I consider a lot less. Have whatever opinion about Philip Roth that you want, for one good example, but at least he didn't spend years of his life screaming in public to anyone who would listen, "LET'S KILL ALL THE JEWS!!!!!!!" Pound, however, did exactly this -- and I don't mean metaphorically, but I mean he literally screamed this, on the radio every single week for an entire decade of his life -- yet here we are in the 21st century, with Pound still dominating poetry anthologies and still being declared one of the greatest geniuses America ever produced. Isn't it time we put a stop to this? Isn't it time we put Pound's work into the locked underground biohazard container where we currently keep Disney's Song of the South and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, to only be occasionally pulled out with lead tongs and full shielding whenever some nerd wants to write another academic paper about the "bad old days?" I don't understand why we're continuing to give Ezra Pound a free pass to this day, why he continues to show up in contemporary anthologies as someone to be admired and read for pleasure here in the 21st century. I think it's time for this to stop, for Pound to be put in that radioactive "Box of Forbidden Mystery" where Mitchell and Uncle Remus and all the rest of them now live; and all it will take for you to agree with me is one read through these clearly insane, clearly fascist radio addresses he spent a decade of his life happily writing and performing, something I encourage all of you to do the next time you think it's a good idea to include Pound in a list of the greatest thinkers the 20th century produced. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Sep 05, 2021
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Sep 05, 2021
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1566634687
| 9781566634687
| 1566634687
| 3.76
| 33
| Oct 25, 2002
| Sep 24, 2002
|
did not like it
|
[I was originally going to write a critical review of this book, which as friends know I took on this year as part of my first-ever explorations into
[I was originally going to write a critical review of this book, which as friends know I took on this year as part of my first-ever explorations into the world of formal poetry. But the more I thought about it, the more incensed I became by Poetry magazine's warm embrace here of Nazi speechwriter and convicted war criminal Ezra Pound; so I've decided instead to reprint the review I originally wrote about the book of transcripts from Pound's Nazi-era radio speeches, Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War Two, edited by Yale professor Leonard Doob. My hope is that the information below will have you thinking twice about Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young's decision here to so prominently feature Pound's work in this anthology, and that you too will in the future no longer passively put up with these kinds of post-war apologetics for a man who spent a decade of his life passionately and publicly arguing for the violent genocide of the Jewish race.] 2021 reads, #77. Most people no longer remember this, but for the entire first half of the 20th century, ex-patriate Ezra Pound was largely considered one of the greatest writers in the entirety of American history, one of the high-profile gatekeepers at the beginning of Modernism who was the first and loudest champion of such now household names as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, and who by all signs should here in the 21st century be known in the same rarified air in which we breathlessly utter such names as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. And the reason most people don't remember this is because when the 1930s rolled around, and most liberal American artists became disgusted with the unregulated free-market capitalism that had led to the Great Depression, while most of his peers pivoted to the radically left precepts of Communism, Pound instead decided that these fascists in Europe certainly had some interesting things to say, and ended up moving to Italy and becoming a gleeful Nazi speechwriter for years and years, eventually penning and performing over 300 monologues on the radio about how all our modern problems were being caused by the Jews, and life would return to a happy normal just as soon as his pals Hitler and Mussolini eliminate all the Jews from the face of the Earth. Pound was eventually captured by Allied forces during the liberation of Italy, was found guilty of war crimes, and was incarcerated in a prison hospital for the criminally insane for a little over a decade; but this is where his story gets extra-fascinating, in that the same liberal intellectuals who denounced fascism during the war suddenly came to the passionate defense of Pound, including the US Library of Congress awarding him the prestigious Bollingen Prize a mere three years after he publicly declared Hitler a "saint" and a "holy martyr on the level of Joan of Arc," and with there eventually being a concerted effort among Hemingway and such mainstream publications as The Nation and Esquire to successfully get Pound released from the mental institution, whereby he promptly moved back to Italy, gave a Nazi salute to the awaiting press, then spent the last 14 years of his life in depressed isolation, reportedly suffering from dementia and spending his last days dazedly wandering the hallways of a friend's crumbling Medieval castle, obsessively complaining about how the government had injected evil microbes in him for the purpose of murdering him. American liberals' love affair with such a vile, detestable human being simply flummoxes me, to tell you the truth, not just among his contemporary friends which at least is understandable, but modern liberals' championing of him to this day -- the entire reason this all even came to my attention, in fact, is that I'm currently reading the 90th anniversary anthology put together by Poetry magazine in 2002, in which editors Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young claim that the book represents the "finest artists" the magazine has ever published, which makes it a quite pointed comment when a full five out of the first fifteen pieces in the book are by Pound, leading me to wonder what exactly the magazine's Jewish readers and supporters thought of this development when the book first came out. So to try to make better sense of it all, I went straight to the source, and recently read the published transcripts of Pound's Nazi radio addresses, or at least the hundred-odd ones the American government thought to actually record during the 1940s in preparation for his eventual war-crimes trial, first published in 1978 and currently out of print, but that can be downloaded for free at the Internet Archive. It's there that I discovered the main justification that his defenders use for his deplorable actions during the war, and was forced to admit that they kind of have a point; that Pound had simply gone insane at this point in his life, in that same kind of "the echo chamber became too much and broke his brain" way that we've seen millions of otherwise rational Americans become during the Tr*mp years, and that his anti-Semitism and passionate embrace of Hitler had a lot less to do with actively supporting either of these concepts, and a lot more to do with what at the time was an extremely common disgust for free-market capitalism. Let's never forget, after all, that in these same exact years, John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel that also passionately argues that the US government needs to be violently overthrown by a people's revolution, only in that case arguing for a much more liberal-friendly socialist revolution and with no mention of Jews at all. It turns out that Pound was a huge fan of an economic philosophy in these years called "Social Credit," which in very general terms sounds a lot like modern Libertarianism (lending yet more credence to the modern complaint that Libertarianism and Fascism are much more closely related than Libertarians want to admit, but that's an angry rant for another day), and which blamed most of society's ills on the fact that our economic system is centrally controlled by banks and other financial institutions. The vast majority of Pound's rambling, almost nonsensical speeches actually have to do with this, and what he considered the cardinal sin of usury that banks commit every time they give a person a loan, which he claimed wouldn't exist if people had the opportunity to lend to each other without the banks being involved at all. (Maybe you're starting to see already why this economic theory, especially when coming from someone who was already in the process of losing his sanity, quickly devolves into unreadable nonsense just a few pieces into Pound's Nazi-era writings.) But since Jews have been spending several thousand years now storing their assets in the portable form of money in banks, instead of the Gentile tradition of real estate (which is impossible to do when you keep getting chased out of every country you try living in), by the 1930s the entire global banking system was primarily associated in many people's minds with Judaism in general, which is how it is that Pound's speeches became more and more peppered with (paraphrased) statements like, "And this is why all our current problems have been caused by the Jews, and why everything would be great again if we simply killed all the Jews and burned down all the banks, like my buddies Hitler and Mussolini are in the process of doing." It's this part where I keep getting hung up when it comes to the post-war embrace of Pound by intellectual liberals; for as hard as these people worked in the 1950s and '60s to essentially sanctify Jews as an angelic people who can do no wrong, as a way of justifying America's involvement in the war after the fact (which is another thing we've generally forgotten, that most Americans generally disliked Jews in the decades leading up to the war, and reacted to the news of concentration camps with a shrug and a mutter of, "Yeah, that sounds about right," a viewpoint that was only slowly changed over decades through such acts as the beatification of Anne Frank, and the ascendancy of such Jewish writers as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth), it seems incomprehensible to me that when it came to Pound's own fiery pronouncements about the Final Solution, these same intellectual liberals sort of waved their hands in the air and said, "Eh, yeah, but he's okay, because he used to be one of us, so let's just spend the rest of our lives pretending that Pound never spent a decade of his life telling millions of people on the radio that they should go out and kill all the Jews now." And judging by his veneration still going on as lately as this 2002 Poetry magazine anthology, it seems to be an attitude that modern intellectual liberals still have to this day, a full half-century-plus after the Holocaust, which I find even more incomprehensible, especially now in our "cancel culture" days when other artists' careers have been entirely and permanently destroyed for what I consider a lot less. Have whatever opinion about Philip Roth that you want, for one good example, but at least he didn't spend years of his life screaming in public to anyone who would listen, "LET'S KILL ALL THE JEWS!!!!!!!" Pound, however, did exactly this -- and I don't mean metaphorically, but I mean he literally screamed this, on the radio every single week for an entire decade of his life -- yet here we are in the 21st century, with Pound still dominating poetry anthologies and still being declared one of the greatest geniuses America ever produced. Isn't it time we put a stop to this? Isn't it time we put Pound's work into the locked underground biohazard container where we currently keep Disney's Song of the South and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, to only be occasionally pulled out with lead tongs and full shielding whenever some nerd wants to write another academic paper about the "bad old days?" I don't understand why we're continuing to give Ezra Pound a free pass to this day, why he continues to show up in contemporary anthologies as someone to be admired and read for pleasure here in the 21st century. I think it's time for this to stop, for Pound to be put in that radioactive "Box of Forbidden Mystery" where Mitchell and Uncle Remus and all the rest of them now live; and all it will take for you to agree with me is one read through these clearly insane, clearly fascist radio addresses he spent a decade of his life happily writing and performing, something I encourage all of you to do the next time you think it's a good idea to include Pound in a list of the greatest thinkers the 20th century produced. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 05, 2021
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Sep 05, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0140298517
| 9780140298512
| 0140298517
| 3.86
| 5,136
| Oct 01, 1999
| Feb 01, 2001
|
2021 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. This book suffers from the same problem as that history of George Handel in London volume I recently marked as DNF an
2021 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. This book suffers from the same problem as that history of George Handel in London volume I recently marked as DNF and turned back into the library as well; that after thinking, "Hmm, that looks interesting" when first stumbling across it at Wowbrary, once I got it home I realized that I'm not actually interested enough in the subject to get through a 400-page book about it, and so it ended up sitting in my room for an entire four months without me ever getting past the 50-page mark. That's a shame, because this is actually very well-written, done in the kind of witty, highly literary style of fellow "geographical biographies" like Bettany Hughes' Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities and Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography. If you have the patience for it, I actually recommend it, despite me not getting even close to finishing it myself.
...more
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Sep 02, 2021
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Sep 02, 2021
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Paperback
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| 1509882065
| 9781509882069
| 1509882065
| 3.73
| 197
| Sep 20, 2018
| Sep 20, 2018
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2021 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. The little I read of this biographical look at German Baroque composer George Handel's time as a court musician in 17
2021 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. The little I read of this biographical look at German Baroque composer George Handel's time as a court musician in 1700s London was pretty interesting; but what I've come to learn is that I'm just not that interested in the detailed minutiae of his life, and so after having the 400-page library book in my possession for literally four months now and still finding myself only at page 50, I'm reluctantly giving up and turning it back in. Don't let my abandoning of it make you think that it's bad, because it's not; but sister, make sure you really, really want to know about the day-to-day life of Handel before you pick it up yourself.
...more
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Aug 25, 2021
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Aug 25, 2021
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1579659411
| 9781579659417
| 1579659411
| 3.89
| 66
| 2018
| Sep 15, 2020
|
2021 reads, #55. DID NOT FINISH. Although this coffeetable guide to the world of cheese is exhaustively researched and gorgeously designed, I realized
2021 reads, #55. DID NOT FINISH. Although this coffeetable guide to the world of cheese is exhaustively researched and gorgeously designed, I realized very quickly into my reading of it that I simply don't care very much about the subject, or at least not to the extent of reading this entire oversized book full of teeny, tiny text. (Also, it was hard to take the hundreds upon hundreds of detailed descriptions of specific cheese names seriously, once I learned at the beginning of the book that there are actually only eleven distinct categories of cheese that exist on the planet, and that all these hundreds of "distinct" cheese types actually fit neatly within one of these eleven categories.) It comes strongly recommended to those who are looking to do a deep dive into the subject; but for those like me who are merely curious about a top-level overview, just stick to the Wikipedia page on the subject instead.
...more
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Aug 11, 2021
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Aug 11, 2021
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0231112599
| 9780231112598
| 0231112599
| 3.99
| 335
| 1990
| Apr 15, 1998
|
really liked it
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2021 reads, #54. Big news -- for the first time in twenty years, I've started writing poetry again! And unlike last time, this time it ain't any of th
2021 reads, #54. Big news -- for the first time in twenty years, I've started writing poetry again! And unlike last time, this time it ain't any of that poetry-slam nonsense either, but actual formal poetry based on actual classic poetry forms, things like sonnets and haikus and other thousand-year-old traditions. As part of my research into what the genre of poetry currently contains, this month I'm doing what I consider a really interesting reading of four anthologies in a row, all four of which have very different flavors: --A collection of what's called "the American people's favorite poems," a project put together by Robert Pinsky back when he was the US Poet Laureate under the Clinton administration, in which over 18,000 random Americans made nominations for their favorite poem of all time, and Pinsky and others selected several hundred to include in the book; --The Best American Poetry 2020 anthology, published by Scribner and with pieces hand-selected by a different famous guest editor each year, which ideally should give me an idea of what kind of work is appealing to people in the literary community at this exact moment in history; --The 90th anniversary anthology of Poetry magazine, featuring several hundred pieces hand-selected by their editors as a good overview of the best the magazine has published over the last century (almost all of it modern free verse, which is what the magazine originally got famous for when first established in the Modernist 1920s); --And today's anthology, the most traditional of the lot, which I thought would be a good one to start with, since it's an overview of what was generally considered the best poetry in existence up to the start of the Modernist era and the invention of free verse. Published by Columbia University, The Classic Hundred is actually an "anthology of anthologies," assembling over 400 other academic tomes and then aggregating all their tables of content in order to determine the hundred most frequently republished poems in these 400 anthologies. As such, then, it's largely a primer to history's most famous poetry, but by definition contains almost no modern work at all (only 17 pieces here are from the 20th century whatsoever, and I don't think there's a single poem from World War Two to the present day), and in uncharitable terms might also be defined as a primer to all the hoary old "thee" and "thou" crap you were forced to read in high school, and which turned you off poetry for good. So does this make the book a valuable read or not? Good question! On the one hand, this book takes a lot of freaking patience to get through, and I had to limit myself to only five or ten per day so to not get burned out on all the flowery purple prose on display here, as good an example as any to why a disgusted literary community invented free verse modern poetry at the beginning of the 20th century to begin with. But on the other hand, this was my first chance to read what's widely considered many of the best poems ever written in human history, and gave me a gentle starting point for falling down the rabbit holes later this year of Early Romanticism, Shakespearean sonnets, the huge resurgence in popularity poetry went through during the Victorian Age, and a lot more. It was also this anthology that taught me that the famous phrase "season of mists" comes from John Keats, "miles to go before I sleep" from Robert Frost, "gather ye rose-buds while ye may" from Robert Herrick, "death be not proud" from John Donne, "slouching towards Bethlehem" and "no country for old men" from William Butler Yeats, "look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair" from Percy Shelley, and "shall I compare thee to a summer's day" from William Shakespeare, as well as that Robert Oppenheimer gave the atomic bomb tests the codename "Trinity" after Donne's poem "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God;" and it could be argued that just this knowledge alone was worth the time to read this. So all in all, a mixed bag; and unlike the novels I regularly review here at Goodreads, I suspect that whether or not you should read this anthology yourself depends a lot more on what you're looking to get out of poetry in the first place, and not so much on the objective quality of the manuscript itself. Since I must give it a score, I'm giving it 4 stars, to reflect the undeniable fact that many, many people consider these the best poems of all time; but be aware that that score quickly drops to zero stars if all you're interested in is modern verse, for example, or non-Western poetry forms like haiku (of which there isn't even a single one here). Keep it in mind when making your own decision about whether or not to pick it up; but as for me personally, I'm glad I did so, in that it gave me a strong sense of the formal fundamentals behind pre-Modernist poetry, which is what I'm most interested in writing myself. ...more |
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| 9781939987440
| 2.62
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| Aug 01, 2021
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it was amazing
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Surprise -- I published a new book for the first time in a decade! This came about because of recently remembering that I still have 50 unused ISBNs l
Surprise -- I published a new book for the first time in a decade! This came about because of recently remembering that I still have 50 unused ISBNs left over from my days of running a small press, back in the 2000s and '10s, and thinking what a shame it would be to just eat those unused numbers since I originally had to spend $700 just to secure the initial hundred of them in the first place. That had me thinking again about the serialized reviews I sometimes write here at Goodreads, where I'll take on a certain author or a certain story cycle and not only write critical reviews of the books in question, but take a larger look at the culture that was going on around this author at the time they wrote them, and the ways this larger culture influenced both the decision to write those books and the way the finished books turned out. That's certainly the case here, when earlier this summer I was reminded of the fact that I've never actually read any work by famed Generation X edgy LGBTQ author Dennis Cooper, even though my snotty little friends and I used to name-check him all the time back in the '90s, along with his "New Transgressive" peers like Poppy Z. Brite, Bret Easton Ellis and others. That led to me checking out from the library all five titles of his most famous series, the semi-autobiographical "George Miles Cycle" from the 1990s, where I discovered a lot of food for thought when it comes to Generation X in general, that period in the '90s when transgressive storytelling took over the mainstream culture (i.e. "The Tarantino Years"), and the legitimate tragedy behind why this unending appetite for doom and gloom among my young '90s peers eventually led to the fascist, QAnon, Trumpian times of right now. All five of my original reviews are still online here at Goodreads for you to read for free if you want (1989's Closer , 1991's Frisk , 1994's Try , 1997's Guide , and 2000's Period ); but for this book edition, I've removed all the redundancies and repeated exposition from the five standalone essays, cleaned up the references and grammar, and in general have put together a manuscript that reads now much more like one big unified piece, and have released it quickly and cheaply in an ebook-exclusive format simply as a way of using up another one of those 50 unused ISBNs I still own. To be frank, the entire book is less than 10,000 words, which is why it's selling for only $2.99 as an "Amazon Single," and why I've authorized it to be available for free for anyone who has Kindle Unlimited. (Also, like all my books over the years, I'd be happy to just email you a free copy if you drop me a line at [email protected].) I'm planning on doing this with all my future themed review series here at Goodreads as well, including all my eventual collected editions from my ongoing "Great Completist Challenge," with the next one likely to be my contemporary re-read of Isaac Asimov's 15-book "Future History" mega-series stretching from the 1950s through '80s, which during his own lifetime was known as three different smaller series called the "Robot" books, the "Empire" books, and the "Foundation" books (whose recent new adaptation by Apple+ was the impetus behind moving this to the top of my Completist Challenge list). In the meanwhile, though, this new book about Dennis Cooper is now officially for sale or rent at Amazon, so I hope you'll have a chance to check it out when you have a chance. ...more |
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| B099TLQT85
| 5.00
| 1
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| Aug 01, 2021
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it was amazing
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I'm very happy to say that the latest book by one of my freelance clients is now out and for sale! This was a particularly satisfying one as well, for
I'm very happy to say that the latest book by one of my freelance clients is now out and for sale! This was a particularly satisfying one as well, for this was my first time acting as a "self-publishing consultant" for one of my clients, and I ended up doing a lot more work on this particular book than just my usual editing of the manuscript (but for more, see the case study I wrote for this book over at my freelancing profile). Bakary, an elderly nutrition scientist currently living in Denver, is in the fascinating historical position of being part of the last generation of African nationals who were raised under British colonial rule, and so the first third of this book is mostly about that, growing up as a sustenance farmer in a tiny village in The Gambia in West Africa, and how the decision by his father to let him finally attend elementary school at a late age was actually inspired by the famous visit of Queen Elizabeth to this part of the world in 1961, right when most of the UK's former colonies were being transitioned into independent "Commonwealth" nations. Then in the second third of the book, we follow Bakary's adventures in trying to obtain a college degree with no money or connections, in a country that only had even a handful of public high schools at the time. This basically meant relying on the graciousness of other nations, which is what led him to Sierra Leone on a scholarship just in time for their '70s student revolution, and then to Libya on a different scholarship just in time for Gaddafi's revolution (and you thought you had it bad in college!), just to finally end up in a doctorate program at England's storied Cambridge University, and his eventual move to the US. All of this is fascinating and historically important, a major new piece of primary-research academia when it comes to the end days of British African colonial rule; but I would not be telling the full story of why this book is so readable if I didn't mention Bakary's deep wit and incurable optimism, and the way he's put together a manuscript that's not only academically important but also just a funny and entertaining general read. That's what makes the book of far greater interest than just to those studying the West Africa Diaspora, and includes an inspiring last third that's all about why it's so important that the US continue its financial and logistical support of these still oftentimes struggling nations. It was a true honor to work on this title, and it was also one of the best books I've ever worked on as a freelancer, and it comes strongly and warmly recommended to one and all in this spirit. ...more |
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| 1941072771
| 9781941072776
| B0883CX823
| 3.80
| 5
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| Sep 01, 2020
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really liked it
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This newest title from the genre small press D.X. Varos starts off as a by-the-books haunted-hotel tale, but very quickly gets a lot better than that.
This newest title from the genre small press D.X. Varos starts off as a by-the-books haunted-hotel tale, but very quickly gets a lot better than that. Author Claryn Vaile, who up to now has only written nonfiction about historical architecture, creates an extremely real feeling place to set her debut novel, a supposed fading old grand hotel in the heart of downtown Denver, and the NPR misfits who serve as its docents and tour guides. Prone to a lot of stories about hauntings over the years, and constructed by a weirdo millionaire a century ago with all these bizarre references to occult theosophy in the architecture and interior design, the hotel was recently bought by a corporation known mostly for gaudy tourist destinations like cruise ships and casinos, who now want to turn it into a renovated high-end space for middle-class steampunkers and other cosplayers (which, frankly, actually sounds kind of awesome). But the NPR docents won't have it, which sends our plucky sixtysomething hero Rebecca on a journey that includes psychics, "Ghostbusters" style parascientists, menopause, dark secrets from the past, Freemasonry symbolism, the international brotherhood of historic hotel nerds, a wee touch of The Da Vinci Code, and perhaps some buried treasure to boot. It's all very breezy and charming, even if Vaile does broadcast her villains with all the subtlety of a movie-theater searchlight; and the surprisingly apocalyptic climax is a welcome raise in stakes for what will otherwise remind many of the British "cosy mystery" genre. It comes recommended in that spirit to such readers.
...more
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Apr 23, 2021
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my rating |
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| 4.32
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it was amazing
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Jun 13, 2024
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Jun 13, 2024
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| 4.01
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May 2024
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May 01, 2024
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| 3.56
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did not like it
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Jan 10, 2024
not set
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Jan 10, 2024
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| 3.81
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liked it
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Apr 14, 2023
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Apr 14, 2023
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| 4.45
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really liked it
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Mar 26, 2023
not set
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Mar 26, 2023
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| 3.97
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it was amazing
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Mar 24, 2023
not set
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Mar 24, 2023
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Dec 28, 2022
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Dec 28, 2022
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| 4.28
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it was amazing
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Sep 16, 2022
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Sep 16, 2022
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| 4.24
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it was amazing
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Apr 03, 2022
not set
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Apr 03, 2022
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| 4.48
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it was amazing
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Nov 22, 2021
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Nov 22, 2021
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| 3.96
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it was amazing
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Oct 18, 2021
not set
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Oct 18, 2021
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| 4.11
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really liked it
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Sep 05, 2021
not set
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Sep 05, 2021
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| 3.76
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did not like it
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Sep 05, 2021
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Sep 05, 2021
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| 3.86
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Sep 02, 2021
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Sep 02, 2021
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| 3.73
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Aug 25, 2021
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Aug 25, 2021
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| 3.89
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Aug 11, 2021
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Aug 11, 2021
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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Aug 09, 2021
not set
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Aug 09, 2021
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| 2.62
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it was amazing
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Aug 08, 2021
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Aug 08, 2021
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| 5.00
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it was amazing
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Aug 08, 2021
not set
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Aug 08, 2021
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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Apr 23, 2021
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Apr 23, 2021
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