What are you reading today/book club

[hharrissonn]

I'm reading Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty right now and am really enjoying it. Very cool insights into the mortuary industry/cultural landscape of death in the West taken from working in the industry. References a lot of ethnography/anthropological study that I read while in school so that's kind of an added bonus. This is sort of perfect moment for me to be reading this while I'm preparing myself for the first death of one of my grandparents. It has been a bit cathartic. The writing is very easy to digest and not at all pretentious or jargon-y; it's pop-sociology kind of stuff.

She has a pretty good YouTube series called "Ask a Mortician" that's definitely worth watching if you're bored.

I also finally read Breakfast at Tiffany's a couple of weeks ago, and I'm surprised it took me so long. Capote's In Cold Blood is one of my favorites. Definitely a neat read, especially if you like Burroughs/Vonnegut.

[dakaf_fal]

I also took a little too long to read The Life and Death of the Great American City and just finished it a few days ago. I was surprised how modern the book felt considering that it’s over five and a half decades old. I enjoyed reading about housing density in cities and diversity of street life. The idea of implementing a sliding scale rent-to-own system for public housing was also very interesting, particularly since the author’s primary example for implementation was Baltimore rowhomes and I live in a Baltimore rowhouse. I’m also curious to know how much of this book’s dogma has been adopted into popular planning theory. Some bits seem easy enough to implement with proper incentives for new development and zoning laws, but other ideas presented by the author seem inherently difficult to implement unless city districts are given much more power to conduct their own affairs independent from city government.

[mittens]

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[can-]

has anyone explored neal stephensons works outside diamond age and snowcrash ? what are the hits? I probably wont read cryptonomicon.

[rjbman]

read most post-snowcrash but baroque cycle which was too stuffy for me to get into. havent gotten to the dodo one yet

- cryptonomicon is multiple parts, some ww2 stuff and some "modern" (90s) financial manuevering. was a decent read but it's been a while
- anathem is pretty cool, the premise is that there are monks but they study science and math instead of religion. then aliens are spotted.
- mongoliad is a long saga (4 books?) set in the mongolian era (wow shocker) cowritten with a bunch of other authors. very swordy. i liked them.
- reamde is a modern day thriller, very techno friendly (social networks, gold farming, etc). i didn't love it.
- seveneves - moon shatters and destroys earth, with some folks being saved by launching a spaceship. 3rd act is a millenia later.

usually the 3rd act is batshit crazy and not as connected to the rest. my biggest suggestions would be anathem and seveneves, in that order

[kickingthefly]

need a sci fi nerd @rjbman, some leguin etc dealt with the idea of a garden right? (coming at this via donna haraway who refers in passing).
any other notable gardens ? whats that 70s sci fi film with hydroponics spaceship where things go wrong..

[julius]

I've been having a mafia movie stint recently and so decided to pick up The Godfather by Puzo. It feels like I'm running through it, and I'm unsure if it's because of how much I like the book for itself, or if it's because I'm having the movie do a lot of the imaginative heavy-lifting. What do y'all think about the experience of reading a book after watching a movie or vice versa. I'm not so interested in the "better than" debate, but instead, how the experience of one affects the experience of the other.

[kickingthefly]

@rjbman yeah thats the one thank you. still need to read some leguin.

julius, i read the godfather i think after seeing the film and found it pretty much a potboiler? dont recall any of hte physical poetry of hte film. i think bad books make good films is a decent rule of thumb (solaris, stalker etc)

[Ques]

PSA to anyone who likes scifi: the three body problem series by liu cixin is virulently sexist, but it doesn't really crop up until the second book, at which point you've already invested 600+ pages of your time, which makes the realization all the more angst-inducing; AVOID

[soko]

anyone know what I should read if I liked both of Ben Lerner’s novels but moreso the first one??

[surfdude69]

Currently got all these on the go. I will probably start Journey to the End of the Night again as I started it ages ago and forgot a lot of what's happened so far. Hunger is fantastic though

[GeorgeT]

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

[Copeland]

I'm writing a short story, can someone read it and be brutally honest with me?

[Copeland]

Posting what I have so far, please judge:

I woke up in the middle of the night from a commonplace nightmare. I was running through a tunnel that was either sinking or closing in. In order to keep my body afloat I stood up in my bed, still delirious, and started clapping in beats of two, hoping that the gesture would lift me to ground level. Some (an unknowable amount of) time had passed before I stopped and realized I was conscious. My bedroom was pitch black and unreliable. The tunnel went away shortly after. In the morning I was left with nothing but the memory of a bizarre instance of sleepwalking.

Two weeks went by and that remained my best moment. I treated it as a dance exercise, freeform, “Express yourself through a series of movements.” The truth is my everyday motions are quite controlled, often restrained, because of my awkward gait and bad posture. Clapping in panic was refreshing. If only I had held onto the details when they were readily available. It became another reminder of my receding memory - not from advanced age by any means but a natural regression from peak functions. Not unlike the 40,000 milestone on a travel vehicle. The capacity to recall oneiric motivations had nothing to do with short or long term memory. Different faculties of the brain, I imagine.

The day after my episode I told my assistant what happened. When I arrived at the office this morning he handed me a lavender folder,

“Anything new?”
“No”
“No dreams?”
“No”
He nodded and left.

My work revolves around the accumulation of capital. Information, financial, cultural. Not long ago It occurred to me that the nature of my assignments was corrosive. Information, when absorbed in large quantities, becomes devalued by its abundance. It possesses a special kind of causa sui, unable to exist without the very act of its own accumulation. After our crunch at the end of last year I began having trouble recalling the names of common plants. On our servers were thousands of clusters, pivot tables, latent variables, laid out like an electrical grid, completely flat; in hibernation, beckoning for a polyglot from the future who can decipher and disseminate the lexicon my colleagues have constructed. In a different time my profession could be described as cultural anthropology. We deal in systems of exchange and symbolic operations. Our primary clients are mega-conglomerates and statist institutions, entities that thrive off of the future.

The lavender folder contained photos of traffic patterns observed last week in Lagos. They were gathered by local traffic engineers for infrastructural maintenance. The data has no ostensible value as the city is not prone to conflict. I was to transcribe the patterns using our algorithm. Traffic jams tend to occur at cloverleaf interchanges. A shape found in industrial nature. Traffic jams on four lane highways tend to form an hourglass when observed from above. The aggregation of these aerial shots generate motifs. The cloverleaf is no longer a cloverleaf but a recurring element, alluding to meaning that has yet to be assigned. The lavender folders become text awaiting exegesis.

I brought the assignment to my boss. She is forty-five, a careerist, favors Jil Sanders suits and clear acetate frames. She was on the phone and motioned me to sit. It was a personal call. Five minutes went by. I stared out the ceiling height windows behind her and saw the first drops of a summer shower. The sky appears lower and thicker in polluted first-world cities. She hung up, smiled at me as if I shared her frustration, and asked about the folder.

“Where are we on this?”
“It’s almost finished, I just have a few questions.”
“Shoot”
“How do our clients want the charts presented?”
“Neatly”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. They are first-timers. They do not have a preference.”

I looked down.

“What is this for, long term?
“To improve infrastructure …To create a narrative …To fortify the panopticon.”

She paused.

“I’m kidding about the last part.”

I didn’t react.

“Do you really believe that?”
“I have very few beliefs, most of them are aesthetic. I do think they are unsure about what they want it for, only that information is important to have.”
“Right”

I thought for a moment, got up, and left.

Our offices sit directly across from the Gaussman plaza. The exterior looks like a Brutalist Berghain. The interior is lined with black cinder blocks. The walls of the atrium are covered in oversized projections of news broadcasts. My office is on the upper floor. The lobby below houses a bricolage of vintage Roche Bobois furniture next to a row of enormous tapestries held together by metal trusses. The synthetic fibers of the tapestries, woven together, digitized, serve as a bulletin board. The directory is displayed on the center canvas. The tapestries on either side by the entrance are programmed to show a single word, the same word, enlarged and with a neutral typeface. Today’s word is “Parallax”. My boss designed the layout. The proposal mentioned wanting to evoke a sense of reverence.

After a weekend of rest I went to work the next morning and remembered the tunnel was endless. My assistant had already asked about the design. The substructure was standard - reinforced concrete, steel railings, pedestrian walkway, commissioned to free up traffic from the roadways above.

I suspect that the dreams come from a collective unconscious conceived out of lavender folders. I know this because I’ve examined many tunnels and culverts, passages above and below. The motifs can be found in every assignment. The Mayans and the Manchu both shared the same symbols for fertility. Our datasets have their own collective archetypes. Aside from the physical design of the bridge ramp, why does rush hour traffic tend to form a cloverleaf?

[JewTurk]

Anyone read Stoner by John Williams? I can't see what the fuss is about. The sexism is a bit much/I'm not seeing the point in it.

[kickingthefly]

copeland, i read this quickly but i like it! a few thoughts tho
-reads a bit grad student-y, even 'cerebral' writers (say, tom mccarthy, elvia wilk) do a lot more 'show not tell', yknow? like tom was once saying he thought about making the protagonist of remainder an artist- but then the whole thing would just be a normal day's work. if you make the surface more blank, it might force you to 'see' more interesting stuff too.
-feel dialogue sounds stilted, which is perhaps intentional, but i still dont feel it. perhaps to do with the above, like people saying 'clever' things?
-lagos traffic patterns, man i have seen that stuff a lot.
-its sander not sanders dude

[kickingthefly]

copeland, i read this quickly but i like it! a few thoughts tho
-reads a bit grad student-y, even 'cerebral' writers (say, tom mccarthy, elvia wilk) do a lot more 'show not tell', yknow? like tom was once saying he thought about making the protagonist of remainder an artist- but then the whole thing would just be a normal day's work. if you make the surface more blank, it might force you to 'see' more interesting stuff too.
-feel dialogue sounds stilted, which is perhaps intentional, but i still dont feel it. perhaps to do with the above, like people saying 'clever' things?
-lagos traffic patterns, man i have seen that stuff a lot.
-its sander not sanders dude

[popcorn]

Anyone read Stoner by John Williams? I can't see what the fuss is about. The sexism is a bit much/I'm not seeing the point in it.

There are a ton of spoilers in the next sentence, I guess. The plot events and drama of the book are not very important. I read it 3 years ago when I was just getting into general fiction and remember only a few key images:

Spoiler:

descriptions of Stoner's parents; him looking out the window at a courtyard defined by lights after dusk and modernist architecture with broad columns; the interior of the tiny room where he stays with the student he has an affair with; the outburst in argument with another professor; and the description of him basically projecting through his life on his deathbed?

I think of Stoner as one of those novels which puts on the guise of being drearily modern so that it can have a painfully beautiful psychedelic effect in a few choice scenes. The plot and the themes of the book are pretty regular: struggle, existentialism, fulfillment, death, family, the arbitration of success. I'm not sure how true any of this is but it's how I remember the book.

Someone recently wrote a biography of John Williams which constantly returns to the book's recent assumption of the "perfect novel" title. I read the first chapter of that book and it's very funny, it stresses how particular and crotchety Williams was, how his aspirations were very neatly about writing and literature, how dissatisfied he was with the politics of his university. That chapter at least lends a lot of life to Stoner. I've never studied literature though and don't know in what aesthetic theory Stoner is the perfect novel, but I can say that Stoner is very brotherly to a modernist novel like Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, and seemed to me like a novel written with hindsight by a very tired person.

[INNIT]

-reads a bit grad student-y, even 'cerebral' writers (say, tom mccarthy, elvia wilk) do a lot more 'show not tell', yknow? like tom was once saying he thought about making the protagonist of remainder an artist- but then the whole thing would just be a normal day's work. if you make the surface more blank, it might force you to 'see' more interesting stuff too.

this reminds me of pynchon's introduction to his short story collection "slow learner," where he says that he dislikes his story "entropy" because he began the story with lofty themes rather than interesting characters or something along those lines (the story's plot mirrors the process of entropy in thermodynamics and cybernetics and the characters only exist to push this theme along). that said, i still think it's a good story (there's nothing inherently wrong with having a grand theme in mind from the outset), but it's definitely less fun to read than the zany adventures of his later works. you also don't come away from it with much more than "yup, entropy is real, heat-death is a thing"

[bels]

I like the Copeland's story overall. Nice bit about the 40k mileage thing. That's how I feel every day.

I think I would be disappointed if there ended up being "a plot" about "what the data is for". Better to leave it opaque

[kickingthefly]

nobody is saying a plot is needed, u netflix teen

[Copeland]

Thank you all for the feedback. I've got a couple more pages I'll post soon.

[zevolution]

I've been reading some really grotesque books lately, mood pieces if u will. Funny, but it's really difficult for me to keep concentrated on most tasks, especially reading books that require sustained attention to themes and scenes that don't have a lot of, like, shock value to them. I expect that'll change sooner or later but RN I'm preeetty deep in.

Just finished The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (really appreciated a perspective on relationship horror that wasn't my own, ha-ha) after I saw it used as a prop in the movie Bad Timing (1980). It has similar philosophical conversations as one might expect in a Camus novel (I'm not a comparative flaxy expert, tho) but I found that Bowles is way more invested in describing the literal scenes in which his characters struggle than Camus, who seemed to write in narrative form as though it were simply a vehicle for his philosophy. Tell me I'm wrong!

THEN I just finished Child of God and Blood Meridian by McCarthy because I am really taken by the abjection that he's pushing. I don't have much to say about these novels that hasn't been said, but I will say that I've never thought of books as guilty pleasures before reading these last two...

[popcorn]

Gonna try and write a post here even though I'm not sure I have something worthwhile to say plus + I kinda have to overcome my own resentment for the way I write casual sentences.

Over winter break I had the weird idea of habituating myself more towards reading. I had a literal month to just be a NEET so I was playing path of exile and listening to philosophy lecture series. I dive-bombed through The Second Sex, a couple of critical theory books (finally read some of the Horkheimer essay collections), Sartre's Nausea, Baldwin's the fire next time, a couple others.

One day in a bookstore I was actually looking for Freud's Civilization & Its Discontents so I could take a quick look, I'm reading Eros & Civilization by Marcuse for a philosophy independent study that I forced into existence kinda just so I could read Eros & Civilization. They didn't have Civilization & Its Discontents, but they did have Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, so I finally took a looksie at that. I had only really understood Deleuze as philosophy's last great boogeyman.

So, the very short of it is that I'm overwhelmed. Anti-Oedipus is exactly as weird/discomforting/alien as I expected, it is a stylistic jackhammer to the brain. It's also worth the time, and it is a great deal of time, which it takes to process. The foreword to Anti-Oedipus, written by Foucault, is the mortar for the book; Foucault's language is plainer, his goal is to make the book come forward about its goal of addressing the paranoia of fascism (that is, the paranoia that fascism takes advantage of, paranoia that produces fascist behavior). It makes the book out to be the object in the world that has an answer to the concerns which critical theory put forward. Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse all seem to be only concerned (in different ways) that our actions in the name of science, logic, psychology seem to be creating impediments to real human progress and[, instead of producing the ethical guidance we need, away from fascism, towards a community which absolves itself of its most senseless material possessions and exists in a gratification of ideas, unions, differences, explorations, changes, notions of self which defy categorization,] claiming to be """""""depolitical.""""""

And now I suppose I might want to open up the toolbox and start explaining away the concepts, so that I don't sound ridiculous. Here is that, made radically brief: Deleuze reconceptualizes ontology and life until you can really start to image a person like a puppy (in Freud's language, as "polyamorous perverse") in healthy behavior and like a fascist, a desk-murderer, a technocrat, a number-cruncher, a person with a healthy "work-life division" only because they have been forced that way in particular circumstances. Deleuze's concept of the subject - that thing which is "I," "Noah," "moi" in a certain instance and fast-frozen in writing - is more truthful than I could believe one could get across. But this is really beside the point of the message, I just wanted to make a post that says "if you've been hiding from Deleuze, you should want to stop doing that," and the sooner that you take the time to let him scramble your conception of self (out into millions of little threads and statements and images and plans) the better. It's weird reading, but both exemplifies and produces the case for weird reading, and why reading is not simply a matter of taking crude, inert knowledge and putting it in your brain-as-box for perpetuity.

Anyway, I'm about half through Anti-Oe, I read Eugene W. Holland's companion ("Introduction to Schizoanalysis"), and my next reads on my desk are the last 100 pages or so of Eros and Civilization, Butler's Gender Trouble (yeah), and Difference & Repetition (assuredly, I'll have to go find a companion for that as well). Life is weird and awesome, thinking about things can sometimes make things different.

[INNIT]

snip

i find it really cool/impressive that you picked up anti-o and started reading it. it was always my least favourite book by deleuze and, because he's taking shots at so many schools of thought that i'm not overly familiar with (lacanian psychoanalysis being the big one), i always found it difficult to follow.

the common conception of deleuze as "philosophy's last great bogeyman" is somewhat misleading. a lot of weird gatekeepery deleuzians propagate this myth even though, imo, deleuze is actually much easier to engage than derrida, heidegger, hegel, etc. i think that most of the confusion surrounding deleuze comes from the fact that he was inspired by early 20th century process philosophy (simondon, bergson), as well as spinoza's vitalism, which necessarily gave way to a different way of thinking that wasn't common in the context of late twentieth century philosophy and cultural theory. his strange vocabulary becomes infinitely less cryptic when one goes back and reads bergson (actual/virtual, image, duration, etc.), spinoza (affect/affection) and simondon (individuation). you start to realize that deleuze, like any philosopher, is just offering creative interpretations/reworkings of the philosophies that he was inspired by. e.g. deleuze's cinema books (which are imo his best books and probably the best place to start) are essentially just very sophisticated interpretations of bergson's philosophical trajectory. the "introduction to deleuze" that i recommend to most people is: elizabeth grosz's explanation of bergson in "the nick of time" (unless you want to read "matter and memory" and "creative evolution") and then "the movement-image" and the "the time-image". but, obviously, if you're enjoying anti-o stick with that; experiences of deleuze may vary.

you've already nailed it in the sense that you understand deleuze is primarily concerned with ontogenesis/morphogenesis (the nature of becoming and the processes of emergence) rather than ontology (the nature of being), so no need to feel intimidated by a book! we're all just as smart as deleuze

[popcorn]

the common conception of deleuze as "philosophy's last great bogeyman" is somewhat misleading. a lot of weird gatekeepery deleuzians propagate this myth even though, imo, deleuze is actually much easier to engage than derrida, heidegger, hegel, etc. i think that most of the confusion surrounding deleuze comes from the fact that he was inspired by early 20th century process philosophy (simondon, bergson), ... you start to realize that deleuze, like any philosopher, is just offering creative interpretations/reworkings of the philosophies that he was inspired by. e.g. deleuze's cinema books (which are imo his best books and probably the best place to start) are essentially just very sophisticated interpretations of bergson's philosophical trajectory. the "introduction to deleuze" that i recommend to most people is: elizabeth grosz's explanation of bergson in "the nick of time" (unless you want to read "matter and memory" and "creative evolution") and then "the movement-image" and the "the time-image". but, obviously, if you're enjoying anti-o stick with that; experiences of deleuze may vary.

To be perfectly clear I think my beginning with D(&G) was actually much like what you suggest someone could find in a writing like cinema 2! I had heard a podcaster talk about a "Deleuzian conception of time" (my sense of it was that the present is consisting in images of the past and future which force being into change) and was always haunted by this (even though they had constructed this conception with few quotes, few of the concepts, and little clarity of which books you glean it from). I absolutely had not heard Bergson's name before hearing it in conversation of Deleuze, nor the term process philosophy before reading you term it that way, but it would seem that we credit him for setting the ball rolling with this anti-Platonian, anti-present trend that has given Difference & Repetition a real aura to me. And as I read more about the period of classical philosophical thought which reckoned with the imposition of writing - idea formation, freezing of thought, meaning in reservation, sometimes calling on inert matter in the real world - it seems more and more that this reconceptualization of being as becoming is an achievement actually worthy of history. The written word obviously struggles with becoming, the most it can do is suggest for a performance of becoming outside of the text itself.

I think I find anti-oedipus more worthwhile than I might otherwise because of how terrified I am of the psychiatric element of [our American] culture. At risk of being more sentimental than this thread suggests: since high school my interpretation of myself as 'smart but unable to focus and so impotent toward my own goals' had always been present at the saddest moments and realizations of my life. You can imagine it was a rush of blood to the head when Foucault asserts that this re-conceptualization of the human being as warm, energetic, and unjudgmental in health, holding its experience as not a cheapened version of an ideal but something specific and unheralded [in itself and at one with its becoming] is also the key to an anti-fascist imagination of civilization. It kinda closes the book of critical theory, perhaps philosophy will not be a ladder of dialectical syntheses that turns and negates its own contradiction until it arrives at the truth value of the universe; this kind of truth cannot be held, will not be at all.

[bels]

Trying to read deleuze on my own reminds me of when I was 10 or 11 years old, I thought I could "decode" the french language into english by working out the relation between the letters in different words (so if "dog" in english is "chien" in french, trying to work out a transformation of the letters D O G to provide C H I E N and then applying the same rules to C A T and expecting to get C H A T). I can't remember how long I spent trying to work out a cypher but obviously, when I tried to use it to write a text it came out as completely garbled scrambles of letters with no meaning in french, english or indeed, any language and my teacher made me do it again. Except that with deleuze there is no teacher.

[popcorn]

what you're describing is Derrida though, reading Deleuze is more like when someone tries to make an extended analogy of a task you need to do to something you do in a video game, and so for the rest of your life you end up referring to bottles of soda as gratification pods and vaping as organic lightning maintenance

[Benson]

What's everyone reading right now? Are you reading more or less during the pandemic?

At first I wasn't reading at all but now that parks are open I'm pretty much sitting on benches and reading whenever I can. I read Conversations with Friends and Normal People earlier this year, and now I'm 700 pages into Michener's Hawaii (finally) so I'm going to need to find something new soon.

[106-2]

I've just handed in all my final essays at uni, so in conjunction w being furloughed I've got essentially nothing else to do. It's really changed the way I've been reading, knowing that I can do it solely for educating myself/following my own interests rather than confining research to the parameters of whatever project I'm working on.

Since finishing I've read Ellen Meiksins Woods' 'The Origin of Capitalism' (good, quite dry but interesting in parts and provides a solid historical grounding), Anna Tsing's 'The Mushroom at the End of the World' (can't recommend enough!!! I've never read anything else like it, with how it seamlessly shifts from anecdote/narrative to more abstract and theoretical), and I'm about halfway through Kathryn Yusoff's 'A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None', which is (predictably) really dense, but it's full of these moments of really brilliant clarity which have totally changed my understanding of the anthropocene/geology.