New now reading

in reality, all of this has been a total load of old bollocks
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Diamond Dog
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Re: New now reading

Postby Diamond Dog » 16 Jul 2018, 11:07

Jimbo wrote:
Diamond Dog wrote: This was written in 2002 - it's a collection of essays from 36 different sources, outlining the dissent to the Bush/Blair war in Afghanistan, following 9/11.


Very good choice DD. But I notice, however, not one of the writers whose name I recognoze, as progressive as they are, ventures into the anomalies of the actual 9/11 event. I have complained on progressive fora how the critical writings of the post-9/11 world begin just prior to - i.e., when the Patriot Act was written - and just after with the ridiculous invasion of Iraq. It's like to them everything that happened on the day of 9/11 happened as the 9/11 Commission said it had. Lies here. Lies there. But 9/11 happened as the same liars said it had. Did I not send you a David Ray Griffin book as a Secret Santa gift once?


I guess the authors have a right to decide the parameters/timescales of their book.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 16 Jul 2018, 11:35

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Re: New now reading

Postby Tactful Cactus » 16 Jul 2018, 12:43

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Re: New now reading

Postby Snarfyguy » 19 Jul 2018, 01:14

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I'd never read R. MacDonald before, and while enjoyable to a degree, I found this Archer mystery 1) overstuffed with minutely intricately related characters and 2) unusually densely plotted, even for the genre. I'm not sure anyone with a normal attention span is really going to be able process this all as intended without resorting to taking notes or something.

NR:

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Trillin is reliably amusing, in the mode of an egghead Bill Bryson.

Next up, either JR by William Gaddis or My Struggle, Book 2 by Karl Ove Knaussgard (if I haven't already read it. Who can keep that stuff straight?)
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Re: New now reading

Postby joklend » 21 Jul 2018, 18:26

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I was reading this while actually crossing the Forth Bridge two days ago, amazing right?

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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 21 Jul 2018, 21:03

joklend wrote:Image

I was reading this while actually crossing the Forth Bridge two days ago, amazing right?

That's one of Banks' more difficult books, I thought, and I seem to recall him saying it was his personal favourite of everything he wrote. Long time since I read it mind, I should really go through all of them again some time.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 21 Jul 2018, 21:04

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Like fast-moving clouds casting shadows against a hillside, the melody-loop shuddered with a sense of the sublime, the awful unknowable majesty of the world.

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Re: New now reading

Postby Jastreb_J21 » 28 Jul 2018, 09:28

RIght now I'm pretty bummed, because when I was reading the news for during breakfast, Google recommended me this article. Turns out the apartment my brothers and I are buying in Athens is located in a terrible place and that we got, pretty much, ripped off. :roll:

Sooooo I guess I'll go back to reading Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, it takes my mind off that crap while I'm digesting it. The antics of family relations in 50s/60s Italy puts any political thriller to shame.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 30 Jul 2018, 09:29

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Crime thriller set in the bustling metropolis of Old Sawrey in the lake district. I wondered how it would capture the scenery and feeling of the lakes, and manage to create a convincing, gripping crime thriller. So far, I'm still wondering.
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Re: New now reading

Postby echolalia » 01 Aug 2018, 00:31

Was:

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It’s heady stuff, and not always easy to read. Basically what Soja does is interpret Marxism from a geographic, not historic, perspective – the politics of space. Anyone who chose geography over history at school will sympathize. He owes a lot to the “mystical Marxist” Henri Lefebvre, apparently – I want to read Lefebvre now. Also, it’s a good summation of the whole postmodernist “project”. The text of history is a narrative, and the text of geography is a map, and we need/use more of the latter in our increasingly simultaneous world. So there.

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More imperilled cities… nobody takes the train in this one cause they’re already on it - and it's always late. I’ll read the next Christopher Priest soon – he’s very more-ish.

Am:

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I’ve just started this and it looks promising. The deep sea diver is a professional dreamer who makes his living by bringing back stuff from his dreams which is highly prized as art. Where it’s all going I don’t know but the first chapter, an account of the diver’s heist of a jewellery store in the underwater world, was completely fucking fucked up. “In the dream life you need a rubber soul.”

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Re: New now reading

Postby Diamond Dog » 01 Aug 2018, 12:13

Just into the last chapter of this :

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A fascinating in depth analysis of the great film...... by our own Matthew Spektor (who used to post as either The Leviathan or The Electrician - I think?).

Great read if you love the film - it certainly opens up a few possibilities I've not previously considered.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Jimbly » 01 Aug 2018, 20:49

Diamond Dog wrote:Just into the last chapter of this :

Image

A fascinating in depth analysis of the great film...... by our own Matthew Spektor (who used to post as either The Leviathan or The Electrician - I think?).

Great read if you love the film - it certainly opens up a few possibilities I've not previously considered.


The Electrician was Hugo that wrote the 33 1/3 book on Low.

Leviathan was Paul from Edinburgh.

i think
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Re: New now reading

Postby Diamond Dog » 01 Aug 2018, 20:50

Jeemo wrote:
Diamond Dog wrote:Just into the last chapter of this :

Image

A fascinating in depth analysis of the great film...... by our own Matthew Spektor (who used to post as either The Leviathan or The Electrician - I think?).

Great read if you love the film - it certainly opens up a few possibilities I've not previously considered.


The Electrician was Hugo that wrote the 33 1/3 book on Low.

Leviathan was Paul from Edinburgh.

i think


Yes I have the Low book... and I think you're right on The Leviathan too Jim!

So - who was Matthew Spektor on here?!
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Re: New now reading

Postby Diamond Dog » 01 Aug 2018, 21:02

He was, apparently, m spektor!
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Re: New now reading

Postby echolalia » 01 Aug 2018, 22:35

He also wrote American Dream Machine (good) and the introduction to Eve Babitz's Slow Days, Fast Company. Good to see he has a new book out.

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Re: New now reading

Postby never/ever » 04 Aug 2018, 11:41

https://mma.napubcoonline.com/cgi-bin/m ... ------1---

This is brilliant!

NR- Trans Oceanic Trouser Press October 1977
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Re: New now reading

Postby Snarfyguy » 04 Aug 2018, 23:50

never/ever wrote:https://mma.napubcoonline.com/cgi-bin/mma?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=TRA&ai=1&e=-------en-20-CRE-1--txt-txIN-creem-------1---

This is brilliant!

NR- Trans Oceanic Trouser Press October 1977

Holy bananas, that was my favorite thing when I was a teen. Still got the whole set in a closet somewhere. Thanks!!!
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Re: New now reading

Postby Diamond Dog » 09 Aug 2018, 12:49

echolalia wrote:Image

The looks, styles and products of the world’s first-ever consumer boom (1955-65). It covers architecture, interior design, cars, labour-saving appliances, nuclear fallout shelters etc. It’s fascinating, if you like this kind of thing.

The illustrations are great – some of them amazing. The adverts for the products were often more interesting than the products themselves.

It’s well-written and quite witty in places. You can tell Hines loves his subject deeply, and nothing is too trivial to mention. One innovation of the populuxe period, apparently, was the corrugated potato chip, whose form was borrowed from structural engineering, the idea being to make it stronger and therefore able to scoop up more dip. But that’s an exception – in most instances the look was pure styling, with no practical function. Not that it was empty – it embodied a “fantasy”, usually a positive and optimistic perspective on the future.

The dominant visual motifs were borrowed from jet planes and rockets (most manufacturers of consumer goods were also military contractors). Stuff was curvy yet angular – both acute and obtuse, as exemplified in the “leaning forward” look that appeared in cars in about 1957. Rectangles which were perfectly happy just to sit there became parallelograms, itching to go where they were pointing. The tailfins tend to attract more attention but there was plenty of evolution at the front ends of cars too, such as the introduction of useless conical protuberances synechdochically termed dagmars after the actress of the same name. Some fronts are really beautiful – chrome bumpers that break forward and backward with the voluptuous rhythms of a Borromini façade. But not all designs were successful and one model with a curiously-shaped radiator grille was especially unloved – “like a great gaping minge bearing down on me,” as one English visitor described it.

The ability of a design element to embody meaning sometimes determined its inclusion even at the expense of functionality. He’s quite close to Americana-loving French intellectuals like Barthes and Baudrillard in his semiological approach here. So push buttons became ubiquitous features on household appliances during the period, often when a dial would have done the job better, such as setting the temperature on a washing machine or whatever. Maybe the appeal of buttons lay in their binariness and the way this prefigured the “digital” age. It was a terrible decade for the rheostat, anyway.

I want a formica-topped blob table now!


Great review from you there Echo... I bought this on the back of it and it lives up to all you posted.

A really good overview of the subject (consumerism from 53-65) which, if you have any love of the subject, you really ought to get hold of.
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Re: New now reading

Postby Snarfyguy » 09 Aug 2018, 17:14

^^^ I'm sold, except the paperback edition is weirdly more expensive than the hardcover. (I prefer the paperback format -it's smaller and lighter.)
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Re: New now reading

Postby Darkness_Fish » 09 Aug 2018, 21:40

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A book that Jeremy Corbyn AND Boris Johnson can get behind.
Like fast-moving clouds casting shadows against a hillside, the melody-loop shuddered with a sense of the sublime, the awful unknowable majesty of the world.


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