Black Cat Bone

A really excellent read, discussing and explaining the inner workings of twelve businesses with a combined age of almost 5,000 years.
Fascinating to see what all of them have done to continue operating, and seeing off all manner of change and competition.

K wrote:
Utterly amazing.

That's a wild book.

I've been on a rare not-reading thing this last week or so. Haven't really gotten much into this, as a result.

K wrote:This is brilliant.

I've mentioned this before, but I've known Jeff for a long time, and he plays on my hockey team. He recently gave me a copy of one of his newer books, 'Roughneck', which I'd also highly recommend if you like the Essex County stuff.

I've never heard of Tom Robbins before, but this is one odd book, I only picked it up because it had a recommendation from Thomas Pynchon on the back. I mean, I don't like Pynchon, but his opinion might be worth listening to. The main plot appears to follow a newly-wed mismatched husband and wife as they travel across America in a winnebago modified to look like a turkey. The sub-plot appears to follow a spoon, a stick, a can of beans, and a sock, as they attempt to reach the Holy Land to restore a temple in honour of the Phoenician Goddess Astarte. So far it's half farce, half classics lesson.

Strangest thing I've read since that Cory Doctorow novel about a bloke whose parents were a washing machine and a mountain.

Darkness_Fish wrote:

I've never heard of Tom Robbins before, but this is one odd book, I only picked it up because it had a recommendation from Thomas Pynchon on the back. I mean, I don't like Pynchon, but his opinion might be worth listening to. The main plot appears to follow a newly-wed mismatched husband and wife as they travel across America in a winnebago modified to look like a turkey. The sub-plot appears to follow a spoon, a stick, a can of beans, and a sock, as they attempt to reach the Holy Land to restore a temple in honour of the Phoenician Goddess Astarte. So far it's half farce, half classics lesson.

Strangest thing I've read since that Cory Doctorow novel about a bloke whose parents were a washing machine and a mountain.

Very like Pynchon! He was really popular about 25 years ago - there was even a film of one of the books - and some of them were great. The covers were quite stylish then; I'm not sure who designed the one above.

I enjoy d that one - and the other Robbins novels I’ve read too.

It’s an Airstream not a Winnebago by the way - these deatails are important!

The subplot about the Israeli and Palestinian restaurant is especially topping cal these da s.

Actually, that book was pretty good. I'm not sure the spoon/sock/beans surreal side-adventure was strictly necessary, though it was an interesting way to deliver a lecture on the history of the conflict between Islam and Judaism. It was properly sprawling, occasionally funny, often disconcertingly fixated on genitalia.

Now about to start:

nev gash wrote:


http://www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies

Ahead of the curve. Again.

Hemingway’s ‘Winner Take Nothing’ which begins depressingly with hideous, detailed descriptions of animal slaughter. I always forget that element of his work. Maybe the cover, which features two hunters carrying a carcass should have been a clue...

Snarfyguy wrote:

How's the book? I saw it in the shop recently and considered buying it.

The thread on "Screenadelica" made me finally open this up- a really wonderful explanation of the process for the Disney animation, from Mickey Mouse (actually before that with Steamboat Willie, Mortimer etc) through to the 90's "Hercules". This is an updated version of the original, produced in the mid 50's (and now worth a pretty penny).

If you like Disney and/or animation.... you should try this. The detail around the actual drawing/filing etc is tremendous, but there's also quite a bit of info re the company, the people, the business and the politics too.

Robert wrote:

Snarfyguy wrote:

How's the book? I saw it in the shop recently and considered buying it.

Very good, but also infuriating and depressing. There's an interview and excerpt here, if you'd like to check it out: http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/04/ ... mond-trump

Currently on this. The title really says it all - a series of journalistic essays in which the author has immersed herself into the worlds of various social groups, and examines her own reactions and experiences within them. That sounds fairly dry, but it's quite interesting.

Just watched a tv show on London Writers during the blitz. I need to pick up The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen and The Walls Do Not Fall by H.D. The latter seems like it could be a blast

H.D. wrote part of TWDNF while living in London through the Blitz (1940–41). The poem opens with the speaker walking through the devastated city after a bombing raid, a landscape of collapsed roofs and settling ash. In this opening section H.D. begins to powerfully layer the speaker’s impressions of the Second World War with allusions to past civilisations and world mythology. Inspired by H.D.’s visit to Egypt in 1923, London’s wrecked buildings remind the speaker of the ruins of ancient Egypt or classical Greece: ‘there, as here, ruin opens / the tomb, the temple; enter, / there as here, there are no doors’. Like many modernists, H.D. uses the classical past as a frame for the disordered, fragmented present.

In the face of this destruction, however, the poem is pervaded by a sense of hope: ‘the frame held: / we passed the flame: we wonder / what saved us? what for?’. We have faced death, the poem tells us, but all is not destroyed. The summoning of ancient ruined architecture and surviving myths further strengthens the sense of endurance against the odds. The speaker’s personal response is symbolised by their transformation from shell, to worm, to butterfly.

TWDNF is as much a poem about war as it is about literature and the role of the writer. Or, as H.D. terms it, the struggle between the ‘Word’ and the ‘Sword’. Writing is a creative, regenerating act amongst destruction; ‘through our desolation, / thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us / through gloom’. H.D. casts the writer as a silk worm who consumes detritus and spins silk. She challenges those who declare ‘poets are useless’. To those who say, ‘so what good are your scribblings?’ she counters, ‘this - we take them with us / beyond death’. Her message is that literature and words endure, underpin civilisations, and bring order to chaos:

remember, O Sword,
you are the younger brother, the latter-born,
your Triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over,
in the beginning
was the Word.

A Brexploitation novel! Actually it was published in 1972 but the edition I’m reading is a revised version from 2011.

War, disease and famine in Africa have sparked a mass exodus from the continent and migrants begin to arrive in the UK by the hundreds of thousands. With the country nominally governed by a hard-right, overtly-racist party which was originally a tory splinter group, a three-way civil war breaks out and society breaks down. Hungry bands of crusties roam the home counties. The narrator is a feckless college professor who is forever shagging his colleagues and students, and the dissolution of society at large is reflected in the break-up of his own family – they lose their home and become refugees in their own country, and then one night armed thugs invade their tent and kidnap his wife and daughter. To sell them into prostitution, he suspects. He sets off to look for them. Things come to a sticky end – literally.

I’m assuming the revision tones down the shlockier elements of the original – “unreconstructed” forms of discourse, or language now deemed to be racist… I dunno. And in what way exactly is the island darkening? But in light of the Windrush scandal and Britain’s embarrassingly bungled attempts to disengage itself from Europe it has a lot of relevance to contemporary events in the UK, no doubt about it. It’s almost visionary. And severely challenges the assumption that isolationism makes a place safer: it’s all very well to pull up the drawbridge but if the real undesirables are already in the castle – and in fact turning the wheels that raise the bridge – then no help can be expected from the exterior. It’s very good stuff and I think I’m going to read Priest in chronological order. There are a couple of his titles in the SF Masterworks series, which is really good.

echolalia wrote:

A Brexploitation novel! Actually it was published in 1972 but the edition I’m reading is a revised version from 2011.

War, disease and famine in Africa have sparked a mass exodus from the continent and migrants begin to arrive in the UK by the hundreds of thousands. With the country nominally governed by a hard-right, overtly-racist party which was originally a tory splinter group, a three-way civil war breaks out and society breaks down. Hungry bands of crusties roam the home counties. The narrator is a feckless college professor who is forever shagging his colleagues and students, and the dissolution of society at large is reflected in the break-up of his own family – they lose their home and become refugees in their own country, and then one night armed thugs invade their tent and kidnap his wife and daughter. To sell them into prostitution, he suspects. He sets off to look for them. Things come to a sticky end – literally.

I’m assuming the revision tones down the shlockier elements of the original – “unreconstructed” forms of discourse, or language now deemed to be racist… I dunno. And in what way exactly is the island darkening? But in light of the Windrush scandal and Britain’s embarrassingly bungled attempts to disengage itself from Europe it has a lot of relevance to contemporary events in the UK, no doubt about it. It’s almost visionary. And severely challenges the assumption that isolationism makes a place safer: it’s all very well to pull up the drawbridge but if the real undesirables are already in the castle – and in fact turning the wheels that raise the bridge – then no help can be expected from the exterior. It’s very good stuff and I think I’m going to read Priest in chronological order. There are a couple of his titles in the SF Masterworks series, which is really good.

Sounds really interesting. I've loved the few Christopher Priest books I've read, but I never seem to stumble across anything by him in any of my usual haunts. I'd love to find the original, rather than the edition, if they have toned down the language. It seems unethical to change something of its time in that way, regardless of current sensibilities.