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past couple of days i was reading this academic article (but a good one, no bullshit) about a book of stories from the mexican revolution (cartucho). had to do with the multiple spanish editions and the bad english translations and how good and important the book was, feeding masterpieces like pedro páramo or 100 years of solitude.
anyway in there it's mentioned how one of the condemned to the firing squad loved reading the three musketeers. which i haven't read since i was 10. i know i was 10 because we moved that year and my book stayed behind. so i decided to reread it... but in the original french. it's in the gutenberg project and kindle has a free french dictionary. holy fuck! i'm so out of practice, it's a long slog. but thank fuck for e-books which lighten the burden of dictionary searches. --- ETA: ok here i go again, a few more pages |
New Neil Gaiman not that good. Norse Mythology... supposedly made fresh by Gaiman's highly capable touch. But I'm pretty sure the original stories, wherever they are, are equally if not more interesting.
Cut the shit Neil. Write a real book. This thing is a glorified short story collection, and it's all based on old ass shit. Weirdo. |
I think the new Gaiman is aimed at 12 yr olds.
I contacted Perter Godfrey-Smith's publisher and I have received an advanced-review digital copy of OTHER MINDS: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Gonna be fucking awesome as I love octopi, consciousness, and the oceans!  I am like a "real" book reviewer and shit now. |
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so THE KRAKEN is real? ha ha-- did you ever read russell hoban's "the medusa frequency"? it's a funny book. featuring the kraken in the place of deep consciousness. oh yeah. you should like it. i think it's probably your style. lots of mythological references in everyday life. a bit of a hallucination. yeah. |
reality is for the cowards....
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The Other MInds book is super cool. The Octopus and Cuttlefish have compound lens eyes, evolved wholly separate from mammalian eyes, and about 200 million years earlier. They have very intelligent brains. Octopi have 80% of their neurons in their ARMS! They have mini-brains in each appendage! Cuttlefish are some of the most intelligent life on Earth yet they only live a little longer than 2 years. Insane.
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but for real, funny book. reminds me a bit of illuminatus but at a small scale. also features vermeer. oh man! i really liked that book a lot. reading the 3 musketeers in french is HARD. i wonder if i should switch to a translation. it's more of a language lesson than an actual novel so far. ufff.... |
I tried reading Don Quixote in Spanish when I was 13. I needed the dictionary eevry few paragraphs. (and that is with me as a native spanish speaker!)
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okay, im sold. i will look for another french-lesson book and read los tres mosqueteros en español o en inglés. --- as for the brain things: makes sense that their neurons would be in their many arms. didn't know about their cuttlefish cousins. intelligent how? how is it defined/tested? clever aliens |
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Feh. It feels that way, yeah. But it was heralded as a "Modern Classic" as soon as it was released by all the major outlets. Bah! Reading Marvel's "The Mighty Thor" comics is more challenging/interesting. Quote:
Good for you man! |
It is wild shit. not only do cuttlefish and octopi have advanced problem solving skills, they have been shown to recognize the faces of people they "know", and this has been tested with experiments where three people are all wearing the same clothes and the cuttlefish recognizes the one face he knows from it's care and maintenance. Cuttlefish have each one of their motor and sensory neurons running directly from their location on their skin or muscle into the brain, with no connective neurons. This allows for lighting fast reflexes, color changes, and skin texture changes. Humans, and most any mammal, have ganglia and neurons connected throughout the body, slowing down the reflex time, response times to sensory stimuli.
Octopi, even small ones, are sick smart. They are known to squirt water outside their aquariums at the lights above so as to short circuit them and turn them dark. That takes a certain level of cognition that only dolphins, some higher apes, dogs, elephants, and us humans have been shown to have. |
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i didn't know this |
an octopus is one of the trickiest animals man. https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...s-philip-hoare
In lab experiments, octopuses attain good results, able to negotiate mazes and unscrew jars containing food, using visual cues to achieve their goals. They also show a sense of craftiness – squirting water at researchers they don’t like, for instance. One celebrated aquarium-kept octopus proved its skill when staff noticed fish from a neighbouring tank had gone missing overnight – CCTV revealed the smooth operator. The octopus was lifting the lid on its own tank, slithering over to the fish, claiming its prize, then crawling back, covering itself again as if nothing had happened. But Godfrey-Smith finds another anecdote more revealing: an octopus at the University of Otago in New Zealand learned to turn off lights by squirting water at the bulbs; brightness annoys an octopus. Cephalopods are not only aware of their environment; they seek to manipulate it. |
Octopuses are actually extremely fucking smart. Read studies about them. They've shown they can plan and manipulate and learn quickly. Seriously, they're pretty awesome.
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Finished up Schopenhauer's Essays & Aphorisms. http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...en-all-my.html
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I feel that the field of philosophy is one where the individual great thinkers should be studied, not for the truth they uncovered about the world, but for how they saw the world they inhabited. Too many pedantic people get fixated on one philosopher whose ideas about existence so mirror their own ideas that other philosophers are neglected. This is the sign of a closed, simple mind, one that cannot comprehend that it is in their best interest to read widely, think deeply, and then to come up with their personal ideas about existence. This is the best way to read philosophy. It is a map to human thought, not a set of rules to live by. 😂😂😂 i love the bluntness of those opinions man! calling people closed-minded and simple-minded ha ha ha ha j'accuse also, nice choice quotes now, he said some horrible things about women, didn't he? e.g. Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted—in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word. Consider how a young girl will toy day after day with a child, dance with it and sing to it; and then consider what a man, with the very best intentions in the world, could do in her place. haaaa haaa haaaaa. i do feel that way, i do, when it comes to comparing my wife's talents with kids vs mine. but i think it's because she's smarter and i'm stupider. |
he was writing in 1850, and his views on women are colored by the fact that I think he was asexual at a time when that was not even understood. he gives the women props as to what he sees as their gifts, but he definitely still was working through a prism of prejudice on that front. he did say that as a whole, a woman is greater than a man.
"I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the masses, or rather raising herself above the masses, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man." |
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I thought i was being diplomatic! |
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Can I quote you on the review blog? hahahahha gonna do it either way. |
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done
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plain insult = rude
insult + laugh = don rickles |
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Yaaaasss |
Finished Andrew Robinson's book on Thomas Young, British polymath. http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...verything.html
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Finished reading Jim Dodge's Fud and Philip Roth's Plot Against America.
I had never been too fond of Roth, but that read was great. Dropped Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song ten pages into it. Have to say that I don't want to order books on the internet, and there's only one bookstore where English written books can be found, and they come by sparsely, so my version was a translation, and a poor poor one (one shouldn't translate "across the table" that way...) Currently reading Bernard Moitessier's La longue route. He was a sailor, on his way of completing a race when he decided the whole thing was stupid and went on a second world tour peacefully. Beautifully written. AND... that race is starting to make quite an impression on me, considering that it was the same race Donald Crowhurst ran, that another competitor sunk 2000 miles from the finish line to hang himself a couple of years later... The Crowhust story, a man whose only options were terrible ones, here (English) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jILxbWupWLg |
so THIS happened today....
A few months ago I read and reviewed Alan Moore's novel Jerusalem. ( http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...-contains.html ). I had requested a galley/review copy of it from Mr. Moore's publisher and was sent one to my surprise. Having read it, I printed out a copy of my review and sent it via snail mail to Alan Moore's publisher, hoping they would forward it to his home/office. This was several months ago. (Alan Moore does NOT use the interwebemails ) Today I open up my mail and see an email from a "Joe" who introduced himself as Alan Moore's personal assistant, and in the email was an attachment, that Alan Moore had asked Joe to send to me. I nearly shit my pants. |
dammit, rob, you making us proud...
my sincerest congrats. not for the public glory or anything, but in actually communicating in a meaningful way with a writer whose work you admire reading for comprehension is an awesome thing. few people do it these days. everyone glosses over shit in order to fill some sort of mental checkbox. like people taking selfies at a place instead of actually being there. but not you with this. that is very good. |
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Incredible. To get something like that, and from Alan Moore of all people is something else. Nice to see all the hard work you've put into this blog isn't starting to pay off and getting recognised. Kudos. |
Fucking hell Rob, a letter from Alan Moore, and a friendly one at that! There can't be many of those in existence anywhere. Congratulations. You deserve it.
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Its almost like getting a letter from JD Salinger. Moore is very reclusive and does not do many interviews
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try Great American Novel. It's absolutely hilarious. |
Congrats Rob.
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That's literally (literally!) the only thing by Roth I've never read. And I own it. |
As a fiction reader with a weird love for erotica, I know many of the places to find them, but I'm always searching for more and happy to find a new spot, that has been unknown to me. Recently I found a new gem for free erotic stories, that I'm currently going through. As always, a number of the stories there can be found on other sites too (meaning I know them already), but a few of them are surprisingly well written are new to me. Makes me happy. ;)
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Is this spam? I can't tell if this is spam. Certaintly better written than the usual spam but it looks like spam. |
erotica spam. they want our sonic cocks to be turgid and our sonic vajay-jay's to be swole and wet. This shit is woke.
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What am I supposed to do? Not spamming? :p As everyone here is posting links to stuff they read, I thought I post one as well. I hope you can forgive me. :o:cool: |
No prob. Just checkin. No one uses Literotica no more?
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Haha nah it's not that. Just weird someone is so into that. Well maybe weird is the wrong word. |
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