pussycat
thinks "perineum" might be a type of disinfectant
Posts: 288
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Post by pussycat on Mar 1, 2023 22:34:30 GMT
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Mar 11, 2023 1:41:38 GMT
Currently back chipping away at the meandering musings of Tolstoy's "Resurrection".
Laser guided insights into the human condition but fffs it7s taking me foreever to finsih this thing.
Leo had 13 kids with his wife in just 15 years. So much for the tortured socially-awkward artist as writer paradigm.
TOLDR; LEO WAS A CHAD STUD AND HE LIKED FUKKKING
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Mar 24, 2023 12:14:29 GMT
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Apr 4, 2023 22:48:16 GMT
FILTH.
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nikkeisindex
in the market for yet another kaftan
Posts: 376
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Post by nikkeisindex on Apr 4, 2023 23:40:49 GMT
I've taken a brief crack at Tolstoy but never seriously.
The rock bios are back baby.
Alice Bag SST Story god i'm even reading Nothin But A Good Time about... you know... that era Got the Jah Wobble book what else was good... viv albertine
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Apr 5, 2023 0:03:22 GMT
This would be wild. Unless it was written by the arsehole Greg Ginn who stiffed everyone. Even up to a few short years ago you could get TOP SHIT wholesale deals direct from them. I did a big order and hoovered up Black Flag LP's and 7"s, fIREHOSE lp's etc. Cheap as chips. Then suddenly the prices went absolutely fucking greedhog insaaaaane.
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Apr 12, 2023 10:09:18 GMT
Tolstoy - Resurrection.
Finally, limped into the end with this. The class war fuck-the-rich stuff was great. The finely, finely parsed insights into the human condition marvellous.... but the actual meat and bones plottery structure was a total afterthought. The book meandered about and limped across the finishing line with less wuthering heights romantic inferno than stodgy manifesto and ragdicks at no-mast.
6/10
ps was skulking about the dolly bird college library and went down 3 wee rabbit hole floors to what looked like the archives and found.... the English books section. HUGE. Every Updike. Every Vidal. Vonnegut. Roth. The whole fucking lot. Look like they've been sitting here for decades, probably never checked out of the library by the dolly birds who are too busy on youtube looking at nail art or K-Pop or whatever stupid shiny magpie bullshit has caught their eye that particular day. Huge collections of Mark Twain etc ffs some of these books look 80 years old. In pristine condition, maybe never even been opened let alone read. How did they get here? Who paid for this shit?
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nikkeisindex
in the market for yet another kaftan
Posts: 376
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Post by nikkeisindex on Apr 12, 2023 23:21:36 GMT
Funny.
I remember biking over to check out the "English" section of my local library. Not like I had high expectations but why not. Was like... I dunno seemed like 20 random books. Then I started ordering whatever to my parents house from amazon, pick up on trip home, bring back.
Left all that crap there when I moved home too. I really only miss the Mr. Show - What Happened book. Probably just the odd size made me be like fuck, I can't deal with this.
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Apr 18, 2023 9:05:44 GMT
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nikkeisindex
in the market for yet another kaftan
Posts: 376
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Post by nikkeisindex on Apr 21, 2023 17:38:34 GMT
Or a punk record.
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Apr 27, 2023 9:22:42 GMT
John Updike - "Memoir".
Just rando memories really. Skipped great swathes of it where he's word-toodling around his hometown from the 1930's (ffs) describing some boring as fuck buildings.
The huge chapter on his psoriasis perked me up though. Had no idea he was a fellow psoriatic. Never mentioned it in his books. No wonder he was so self-deprecating and modest. Hard to be arrogant when your very skin has betrayed you. My condition is mild but his sounds like it was hell on ice. To the extent his neck crusted up and he couldnt turn his head. Buying a house by a beach so he could lie in sand dunes burning the fucking shit out of himself. Spending entire summers in the Caribbean to escape the Pennsylvanian winter and fix his fucked up skin.
Felt sorry for him when he's detailing the lobster and crab he enjoyed in his seaside lifestyle chasing the scab-healing sunlight cos from what I've read, shellfish, along with tomatoes, potatoes and green peppers (the "deadly nightshades) are massive no-go's for the psoriatic. Corrodants of the gut lining which manifests itself as outbreaks on the skin surface. Or something like that.
7/10
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Post by Sprague Dawley on May 2, 2023 21:42:34 GMT
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Post by Sprague Dawley on May 10, 2023 11:23:30 GMT
The Country of The Blind and Other Stories - HG Wells
Found this tiny old hardback in the archives of the dolly bird uni library.
The date on it is 1926 ffs. It must be worth a cuntload of $$. I was almost reluctant to check it out of the library lest it fall apart on me or I spill my fucking drink on it and I'm on the hook for a priceless antique or some shit. God knows what it's worth. The fucker is almost 100 years old! I carted it around town for a fortnite of public transporting in a plastic bag ffs
Anyway had read the main story before. The rest of the short tales never really took flight, pretty much just taxiied around the runway with ominous portent then quietly dethrottled and harmlessly came to rest in the brambled thicket.
5/10
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Post by Sprague Dawley on May 24, 2023 9:37:14 GMT
John Irving. Have loved this guy since the 80's. Cider House Rules. Hotel New Hampshire. I gobbled that shit up in my mid-teens. He aint got the preternatural vocab chops of an Updike or the searing insights into human nature of a Roth but he's got the storyteller thing down pat. This one is a kind of memoir plus a few short stories. Most of it is about his wrestling days ffs. He went berko for that shit.
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Post by Sprague Dawley on May 31, 2023 11:54:23 GMT
Kurt Vonnegut - "Mother Night" (1962)
Raced through this. Completely radio rental nazi spy satire in the same vein as Catch 22 but actually better than that, iHomo.
God knows why Slaughterhouse 5 got a billion plaudits and not this.
Author prolly laboured laboriously over this novel but the rambling glorious mess of a thing reads as if he got high as fuck and churned all 200 pages out in one sitting.
10/10
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Jun 1, 2023 10:00:39 GMT
All The Pretty Horses - Cormac Mcarthy.
Cried off after 15 pages.
15 pages of the most tediously dull and stultified dialogue I have ever read in my motherfucking life.
Why would the author think we want to read conversations between extremely boring people? Does he enjoy listening to conversations between extremely boring, uninteresting people? No? Then why inflict that moribund bullshit upon your reader? Fucking dickhead. Getting annoyed now. I'm confiscating all your writing awards, Mcarthy. OK, you can keep the one you probably got for "The Road" but that's it. All the rest, confiscated until you personally apologise to me for this dogshit book.
1/10
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Jun 6, 2023 4:29:32 GMT
Animal Farm - George Orwell (SPOILERS)
Goddamnit, right up to the last paragraph I was still hoping for a Hollywood ending and the animals to come to their senses and overthrow the pigs. FFS.
120 wee pages, damn, it could've done with an 800 page version. Bit more character development of Boxer and the lads.
10/10.
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sukebegg
Whacked it raw to Schindler's List
熟女の力
Posts: 857
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Post by sukebegg on Jun 7, 2023 9:56:35 GMT
John Irving. Have loved this guy since the 80's. Cider House Rules. Hotel New Hampshire. I gobbled that shit up in my mid-teens. He aint got the preternatural vocab chops of an Updike or the searing insights into human nature of a Roth but he's got the storyteller thing down pat. This one is a kind of memoir plus a few short stories. Most of it is about his wrestling days ffs. He went berko for that shit. I went gaga for Irving in my teens also...and then he blew up with all the movies. "Keep passing open windows..." Nastassja Kinski still haunts me to this day.
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Jun 7, 2023 11:09:17 GMT
note to self, forage for these at library
Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin The Edible Woman The Testaments
Paul Bowles
Sheltering Sky (fuckit anything really)
Kurt Vonnegut
Cats Cradle Breakfast of Champions Goodbye Blue Monday! Somethign about Monkey Island
Bernard Malamud
The Fixer
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Jun 20, 2023 21:55:13 GMT
Welcome To The Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut
Early 50's and 60's collection of his short stories.
Stellar, bonkers, radio rental, absolutely brilliant. Dystopian. In fact while reading I could see most of the tales playing out as stand-alone Black Mirror style vignettes. Then I read there already was a wee series on Canadian telly in the early 90's. Hosted by the man himself. Better not have dropped the ball, Canaderp.
9/10
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Jun 25, 2023 5:50:19 GMT
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
1st time with this author, had high hopes. Good reviews.
She has a fantastically economical style of prose but I gave the fuck up after 30 pages. Horribly pretentious structure for a novel. Basically starting a new novel every 4 pages. Then a massive flex of her imagination with swathes of descriptive fantasy that I skipped right the fuck past.
30 pages in and zero idea wft is going on in the "story" + the 2 characters I can recall only seemed to exist in a photo. Bish, its too hot to expect me to follow along with your giddy mental gymnastics, don't make me work this hard.
1/10
Tale of Two Cities - Chuck Dickens
Gave up after 3 pages. Sorry, Chuckster. Just didnt have the patience for that 1800's style of circumlocutious perambulating sentence. Too fucken hot for that shit buddy.
1/10
Think I need a nice smooth easy reader next, a Stephen King or something. Don't make me have to think too hard on each sentence bitchez.
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nikkeisindex
in the market for yet another kaftan
Posts: 376
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Post by nikkeisindex on Jun 27, 2023 16:37:18 GMT
Still crushing through punk (ish) bios and added The World of Suzie Wong for fun. The Billy Idol biography is hilarious. I get it's an autobiography and your memory is your memory but there's just a lot of grandiosity (should I be surprised)? I built Vortex, there were drugs and bodily fluids flying off the ceiling, fucking on the floor, etc etc. Maybe? I don't know, I wasn't there, but seems kinda farfetched. At one point seems to imply The Saints came along a couple years after Gen X. You may not have heard about them, but I'm pretty sure they existed solidly first. There's so much talk of the wild shagging etc at one odd point it goes into a random porno-esque description of a girl (attendant?) on a plane where they just looked at each other and went into the bathroom and he slid his cock into her quivering mound of love pudding, etc. Then basically he ends up all crazy on drugs (one of the interesting parts of these kinds of books is these guys with intense drugs addictions -- for whom money was essentially no object, they could just fund them) including heroin which he kicks because he gets really into riding motorcycles. I am not an addiction counselor, but it generally seemed like something pretty hard to do that most people really struggle with leaving the reader to draw only one conclusion from these countless examples: Billy Idol is a pretty fucking badass rad dude.
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sukebegg
Whacked it raw to Schindler's List
熟女の力
Posts: 857
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Post by sukebegg on Jun 28, 2023 9:59:04 GMT
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Jul 5, 2023 11:27:18 GMT
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Jul 18, 2023 22:25:44 GMT
Museums and Women - John Updike.Fairly formative. Only a couple of these very short short-stories work for me. Was very young when he wrote these. 1960's. Seems very enamoured with himself. I made the mistake of recently reading his memoir before reading this and a lot of his real life married up to these tales, so much so that it pretty much seemed like nonfiction. He got wayyy better at the writey writey later on in his literariii career inTheIhomo style. 5/10
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Post by Sprague Dawley on Jul 24, 2023 0:06:28 GMT
Just started Jorge Orwell's "1984". Fuck knows why it took me so long to get to this. Written in 1949 ffs. The language, oh God, it's just some sumptuous dystopiiii and it's going to start permeating all aspects of the Forii Generalis. FFS "The Memory Hole"? So thats where the old gaijinpot forum (maybe only beta will rememebr this) trope came from... I'm guessing they made a movie of this within femtoseconds of the motherfucking book coming out...
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beta
today's multi-task: stretch and cough
Neophyte
Posts: 682
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Post by beta on Jul 24, 2023 12:25:04 GMT
Just started Jorge Orwell's "1984". Fuck knows why it took me so long to get to this. Written in 1949 ffs. The language, oh God, it's just some sumptuous dystopiiii and it's going to start permeating all aspects of the Forii Generalis. FFS "The Memory Hole"? So thats where the old gaijinpot forum (maybe only beta will rememebr this) trope came from... I'm guessing they made a movie of this within femtoseconds of the motherfucking book coming out... Better to read it now. I had to read it for some high school course. Not much learning done let alone any enjoyment. Can't wait for the sumptuous bits.
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sukebegg
Whacked it raw to Schindler's List
熟女の力
Posts: 857
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Post by sukebegg on Jul 24, 2023 14:52:27 GMT
I think I read 1984, Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies for HS classes. Cold War staples, since we were still in the midst of it, as I graduated in 1984 actually. Gotta vote for the Apple or the Orange, otherwise automatic descent into barbarism and chaos. Could be fun, I thought... Why were the students in their mid-20s?? FWIW, the first filmic version of 1984 came out in 1956 and the second came out in...1984! "Many of the film's scenes were shot on the actual dates mentioned in the novel." Now that's post-modern...Richard Burton's last film. I am not sure if I ever saw it... A new one is coming...well, prolly not available for viewing in the West: I think The Trial is a much better "dystopian movie". Brazil also. (And of course, Clockwork Orange, of which "Class of 1984" tried to rip off I think.) www.pastemagazine.com/movies/dystopian-movies/best-dystopian-movies-of-all-time-1
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Post by fuckface on Jul 24, 2023 23:20:46 GMT
read 1984 while on the dole in the late '70s...it felt both distant and looming. mind you, i was listening to a lot of weird music, smoking pot, taking mushrooms and various over the counter long since banned pharmaceuticals around that time...most of which probably didn't help my paranoid state of mind too much.
the whole period culminated in early '81 when after watching 'network' with my friend rodney one night. he got up walked out and got on his bike to ride home. then stopped, came back to the front door, stuck his head thru it and yelled that classic line "i'm as mad as hell, and i'm not going to take this anymore" then rode off. the last words i heard from him. the next day he commited suicide. fuck, i'm shaking and crying now. fuck!!!
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Post by fuckface on Jul 25, 2023 2:36:26 GMT
uh, feeling a bit silly now for over sharing and getting emotional about something that happened so long ago. i mean, i often think about rodney but never get upset when i do...it was just a long time since i had been back and revisited that exact moment i saw / heard him last.
it just came on and it surprised myself. damn. sorry.
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