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Hey guys, my cousin published a book last year and I made an animated trailor for it. It's his first book.
It's about a guy who gets tired of office life in Canada and moves to Europe. Once he meets the monkey the entire story becomes hilariously absurd. I wouldn't say it's a great book, but it's a good first book. He's drafting his second book about his father's crazy true life adventures as a Mennonite growing up in the Soviet Union. If you could let me know what you think of the book trailer I made that be great, and what would be even better is if you read my cousin's book and help out an aspiring writer. Cheers! Six Bosnian Marks - by John Friesen https://youtu.be/ncW2t22_Z0A |
 Revival Stephen King So far so very good |
I AM BRIAN WILSON - Dude's crazy.
GOOD VIBRATIONS: MY LIFE AS BEACH BOY - Mike Love - Dude's just as crazy, but can do a fair impression of a normal person, so most people don't notice. He divides his time between transcendental meditation and being a complete asshole. CHAPTER AND VERSE - Bernard Sumner - Some amusing anecdotes, but not the most introspective guy. An entertaining but shallow read. |
i tried reading a thick book about mushroom identification but it was too heavy. i need something more basic. like, mycology for morons, or something.
i'm not a moron (or maybe i am), but since i can only give this a tiny portion of my attention (too busy learning to play video games) i need something really easy to assimilate in this area. already saw the mushroom documentary in telluride etc. maybe wikipedia is where to start. |
so, I finished that Chirbes book, it was really good. Now I find out not only is he no longer living, but that there are not many of his books that have been translated, so that leaves me out.....
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I'm still reading the weird sci-fi series by Ann Leckie about the millennia-old android soldier that I was talking up a while ago. The second book (Ancillary Sword) was nowhere near as good as the first (Ancillary Justice), but there is still just a shit ton of weirdness and bizarre plot developments that make it a worthy thing. About to start the third book and I think its set-up is promising. When a series spans a couple thousand years and the main character is a piece of a fractured consciousness fighting both an evil empire and an alien race that preys on all things, it better goddamn well end on a high note.
I also read The Revenant by Michael Punke. I'd skimmed it a few months ago, and found the story and narrative to be pretty interesting, so I grabbed a copy at Target for a few bucks and read the whole thing. I haven't seen the movie and have no real desire to, but the book is short and well-written. A nice way to kill off a Sunday afternoon. |
The last thing I read in 2016 was Locke & Key 1. Really enjoyed that and looking forward to getting the second volume soon. Right now though the first thing I started yesterday was Jerry Stahl's Bad Sex on Speed.
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 Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys - Lol Tolhurst Cure fans will like it, but then Cure fans probably know everything already. Some funny scenes involving urination and he seems like a cool dude. Damn near nothing about the music. Made me yearn for a memoir from Smith. |
 Set the Boy Free - Johnny Marr Considering how much I was looking forward to this, a bit of a disappointment. I didn't really get any new insights into how he created the Smiths music. Very, very little about Morrissey. And after a while the book becomes a "I did this, then did that" sort of thing. Also, he's not much of a prose stylist. Hell of a nice fellow, though. It made me flip through Morrissey's book, if only for some well-written sentences. Turns out Moz and Marr differ on a few historical facts. Marr says he and Andy Rourke landed the Rough Trade contract. Moz says he was there, not Andy. ??? |
 Not Dead Yet - Phil Collins Why not? A charming, self-effacing man who can tell a good story. But again, not much about the music. Maybe that's for the best. Still, I wonder how on earth he (de-)volved in that area. The book ends with the promise of a comeback, so that's a thrill. |
 There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll - Lisa Robinson A journalist trusted by John and Yoko as well as Dr. Dre. High quality gossip. The larger than life characters actually become human after awhile. Impressive stuff. |
 Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? - Steven Tyler Are you kidding? You're fucking with me, right? I picked this up as a lark and dammit, it's one of the most entertaining things I've read in awhile. I almost hate myself for how much I like this book. Steven fucking Tyler wrote a fantastic book. A better one than Johnny Marr. Unbelievable. But true. |
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Great review, Rob. Sounds like a total head fuck of a book.
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it is indeed. shit twisted my melon man. Thanks for reading.
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Yeah, great review Rob. I tried reading Jerusalem before but gave up quite early into it. Your review's inspired me to give it another try.
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I sent a copy along with a handwritten letter to Alan Moore care of hs publisher. Alan Moore does not do the internets.
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At the moment this... along with a couple, y'know, actual books. But this is what I'm super pumped about, since it just came in the mail today.
 Volume 1 of Walter Simonson's epic run on MARVEL's The Mighty Thor. He started out as an illustrator only, but took over chief writing duties for this long running series, and the result is generally considered one of the greatest creative runs in comic book history. Almost unanimously believed to be the "definitive" Thor. Like Frank Miller and John Romita Jr.'s work on "Daredevil: the Man Without Fear", Simonson's take on Thor is the high water mark for the character. I know Thor's kind of B-list (a bit... you know he is) in terms of comic book characters, and is in many ways just an extremely unoriginal answer to Superman, but I have only heard amazing things about this "book" (goes on forever), and I've been trying to get more into MARVEL back-stories and break my habit of reading all-DC-all-the-time. I can already tell the scope of this story is massive. It has space opera elements, fantasy/mythological elements, and spans the Seven Realms, "Heaven," deep space and the streets of New York City in 1983. So. Yeah. Sounds fairly fucking epic so far. I also read smart guy stuff though! |
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good to see you interested in "provincial" british topics now :D :D :D |
for class....
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don't know yet. trying to read something today. and play games. and do nothing.
hmmmm.... |
 Finishing the(so far)trilogy. |
 My father is a huge Updike fan. He's read the entire "Rabbit" collection multiple times. Normally, I like to distance myself from my father when it comes to literature of choice (obsessed with the Algonquin Round Table and James Thurber/New Yorker society, he's become quite the insufferable cosmopolitan know-it-all, to the extreme chagrin of all those closest to him) but I've been in a bit of a "great American novel" kind of mood lately, so I let him talk me into this. I really want to read Moby Dick, but I heard somewhere (probably here, or, actually, from my fucking father) that no one under the age of forty is capable of truly understanding that book, and for some goddamn reason that stuck with me. So Updike it is. |
some time ago i downloaded buckminster fuller's OPERATING MANUAL FOR SPACESHIP EARTH from robigator's blog
so i'm finally reading it today! about halfway through it. extra-interesting given current events |
now, about this book i mentioned above
the first part and the whole history of the world until ww2 i got, even if i thought that he was stretching metaphors and oversimplifying a bit. but okay. he's all about the value of generalists. so i'll allow it--great pirates, fine, i get your meaning. but when i hit the chapter about general systems theory however i felt like i was being conned by a flimflam artist. i don't know what the fuck he's really saying. it's like he makes these leaps of thought and we're supposed to follow him because he's being obscure. i don't think so. so i'm taking a detour and started reading about general systems theory on the side, to see if he's making bullshit claims. i'm okay if he wants to stretch metaphors for a reason, but he seems to get overly esoteric on this chapter for a proclaimed "generalist" and i can't trust what he's saying. hmmmm.... needs deciphering. |
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Funny. I picked up an Updike book over the weekend. My Updike collection is now at 49 books. This number drives me nuts, so I may order something today. Yes, just to have a round 50. ---- Moby Dick does get better with age, but anyone who says shit like "no one under 40 will get it" thinks they know more about life and literature than they actually do. I'd feel bad for such people if I so strongly did not feel bad. |
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Thing is, I read Moby Dick -- at least a fair chunk of it -- when I was in junior high. But, along with a lot of the other classics I put away during that time (The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre), I've forgotten more than I ever knew, so for all intents and purposes I've never read the thing. Just being honest. Maybe 40 is a bit high for a minimum age requirement, but 14 is probably a little low. Honestly, how much can you really know those books when you understand so little about everything else, one self included? Anyway, I forgot where I heard that "nobody under 40" thing, but it feels like the kind of thing my "look-at-me-I'm-a-literature-guy" father would say. But it stuck with me, and I thankfully still have some time before I hit that age. If anyone wants to offer me a compelling reason to ignore the advice and read the book now, I'm all ears. |
so after skipping the bullshit conman chapter about GST bucky fuller goes into "synergy". which was more meaningful back in the 60 than after it got incorporated into corporate lingo.
but there you can see where he's trying to go with things. earth as a spaceship, sure. where it gets interesting is in his theory of wealth and in the transcendence of scarcity and the inadequacy of the gold standard (cue tesla). he makes leaps of thought so 1/2 of it comes across as bullshit and 1/2 of it makes a kind of intuitive sense. but redefining wealth is not a bad idea at all from the perspective of the planet as a whole. and his mockery of "the cost of things" and how that gets thrown aside when there's war is great. hmmmm.... gotta finish the rest today if i get a chance. im thinking w/ the polar caps melting this is becoming timelier than ever. |
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Hah. I had to read "Spaceship Earth" in grad school. I had a similar reaction. It wasn't the focal point of any in-depth study or even extended discussion, but was instead used as a supplemental text for a Systems Science seminar. Some people got really into it, others didn't bother reading it at all. I was turned off by the by excessive use of metaphor and simile, but I think I "get" the purpose of using this book as a jumping off point for a discussion-based class on systems. There's also an almost creepy prescience to some of the suggestions made in this book. I think we have ourselves a bit of a "Great Pirate" dominating much of the world's attention at this very moment, for instance. Ah, but what the hell do I know. |
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Why skip General Systems Theory? It's not a long book, and I think if there's a lynchpin, it's probably in this chapter somewhere. This is the one with the chicks, yes? It's unrealistic, especially now, to think there's any hope for an interconnnected, regulated "crew" for this ship. But I think we ultimately have the capacity to get there, as long as we, y'know, "think big." |
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the chapter seems to be designed to persuade you that the guy knows what he's talking about so you believe him. seems to me there's nothing in it that is required to understand the rest. shit like this quickie epistemology for example: Each experience begins and ends--ergo, is finite. Because our apprehending is packaged, both physically and metaphysically, into time increments of alternate awakeness and sleepness, as well as into separate finite conceptions such as the discrete energy quanta and the atomic nucleus components of the fundamental physical discontinuity, all experiences are finite. Physical experiments have found no solids, no continuous surfaces or lines only discontinuous constellations of individual events. An aggregate of finites is finite. Therefore, universe as experientially defined, including both the physical and metaphysical, is finite the emphasis is mine, because that's so much bullshit. it's much like saying that because integers are finite, the series of integers is finite. yes, so we perceive in packets. can't draw such huge conclusions from that. but that's not all. he proceeds with this gem: It is therefore possible to initiate our general systems formulation at the all inclusive level of universe whereby no strategic variables will be omitted. There is an operational grand strategy of General Systems Analysis that proceeds from here. It is played somewhat like the game of "Twenty Questions" but G.S.A. is more efficient--that is, more economical--in reaching its answers. It is the same procedural strategy that is used to the computer to weed out all the wrong answers until only the right answer remains. he seems to be claiming that because "the universe is finite" (somehow) we can incorporate the whole of it into our analysis and somehow arrive to "the right answer" (to what question?) via successive approximations. it's so much bollocks, to my ears. he seems to be saying that we understand everything already and therefore can plan it all. like there's no chaos and everything can be predicted. sure, this seems to be a salvo against free market advocates and economists who warn us of unintended consequences, and that's not a bad thing in itself, except that it's totally made up and unprovable. i tend to side with the socratics who only know they know nothing at all. or at least that any truth we have is only partial. but the general drift of the book (just not this chapter) is rather inspiring, up to a point. |
Return of a King
 Afghanistan/India/Iran/Chechnya in the 1820's. Russians/English/Persians/warring families. Gives real good background to the clusterfuck happening there now. |
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Hahaha... yes, well, it's all rather self-serving, and man oh man does he take "general" to some pretty goddamn ludicrous extremes. But he was a dude standing behind a theory (for, like, everything), that is not testable in the scientific sense. Freud did the same thing. Which is why I tend to read this kind of stuff as a philosophical writing. When I approach it that way it tickles my gag reflexes a little less. I just thought that General Systems Theory/analysis chapter would serve as a pretty good breakdown of the basics behind the general systems. But it's certainly got some pockets of hot air floating around in it. I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation of what he's saying as stated in this post, but I don't have the book on me and I only read it once, years ago, so I certainly am in no position to offer a counter-interpretation. I do think there might be a bit more of a cohesive flow to it than you do, but it gets quite bogged down in metaphor and meta-speak, so I'd have to revisit to even attempt to untangle. Anyway, it's not bad for a lecture given to a bunch of engineers in the 1960s. Hahah. |
it's downloadable from robigator's blog. go get it!
as for me, i'll be looking for bertalanffy on the actual subject but i'll finish the spaceship book anyway |
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There's a very high chance that it'll be a helluva lot better than whatever you considered reading instead. |
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i think he's more of a flat-earther okay, maybe a pirate (certainly not "great") catering to the flat-earthers the whole definition of the great pirates was that they were invisible and manipulated nation-states for their ends. and supposedly (as of 1969) they had died off with world war I then again we're in a new gilded age here trumpet wants to put all the gold in his burning ship. but who knows what he'll really be doing though. the fucking con artist. go read today's larry summers think piece on the washington post. i'm speeding up my alpacalypse preparations. |
awesome, sounds cool
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yeah, it's part of the duclo "learn about the rest of the world" project, ongoing. It is a very well written contemporary history
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so the final chapter was pretty great with his call for a universal basic income and the use of renewable energy and the ideas behind the open source movement, a prediction of the "sharing" economy, etc. etc. and in laying out the foundations of "star trek".
i find the little book pretty great rather than "obsolete" in the sense that we have to really think globally and not as flat-earthers. one often needs reminders. evolution is 2 steps forward 1 step back and we're in the middle of the back-step with preznit trumpet. so. yeah. hmmm... gotta do something about it next instead of just talking |
Trying to complete Bolaño's bibliography, at least the English translations
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