Whatcha reading?

[Kory]

New audiobook:

I've read this before—it's fantastic; most people here, I think, would dig it a lot—but I'm listening in part to see if something jumps out as an idea for a lecture. I thought about something on American punk more generally, but I already have one of those in one about music scenes. But I'm thinking now about a lecture on independent record labels in the 70s and 80s. I've read a few books and articles on English indie labels, so maybe a comparison of the US and UK. But, anyway, this is a great book on the US underground in the 80s.

I've seen this on so many shelves but never picked it up for whatever reason. Perhaps now I will.

[Dr. Medulla]

New audiobook:

I've read this before—it's fantastic; most people here, I think, would dig it a lot—but I'm listening in part to see if something jumps out as an idea for a lecture. I thought about something on American punk more generally, but I already have one of those in one about music scenes. But I'm thinking now about a lecture on independent record labels in the 70s and 80s. I've read a few books and articles on English indie labels, so maybe a comparison of the US and UK. But, anyway, this is a great book on the US underground in the 80s.

I've seen this on so many shelves but never picked it up for whatever reason. Perhaps now I will.

You won't regret it. I can hook you up with a pdf if you don't want to spend the cash. You might also like a similar book, Eric Grubbs' Post, which looks at (loosely) post-hardcore. A lot of bands I know you like are covered in there.

[Kory]

New audiobook:

I've read this before—it's fantastic; most people here, I think, would dig it a lot—but I'm listening in part to see if something jumps out as an idea for a lecture. I thought about something on American punk more generally, but I already have one of those in one about music scenes. But I'm thinking now about a lecture on independent record labels in the 70s and 80s. I've read a few books and articles on English indie labels, so maybe a comparison of the US and UK. But, anyway, this is a great book on the US underground in the 80s.

I've seen this on so many shelves but never picked it up for whatever reason. Perhaps now I will.

You won't regret it. I can hook you up with a pdf if you don't want to spend the cash. You might also like a similar book, Eric Grubbs' Post, which looks at (loosely) post-hardcore. A lot of bands I know you like are covered in there.

I'll check 'em out! After a couple experiments, I find that I don't have the brainpower for PDFs. I need to hold a book or the info goes right through me.

[Silent Majority]

New audiobook:

I've read this before—it's fantastic; most people here, I think, would dig it a lot—but I'm listening in part to see if something jumps out as an idea for a lecture. I thought about something on American punk more generally, but I already have one of those in one about music scenes. But I'm thinking now about a lecture on independent record labels in the 70s and 80s. I've read a few books and articles on English indie labels, so maybe a comparison of the US and UK. But, anyway, this is a great book on the US underground in the 80s.

Great. I'll give that an immediate listen.

[Silent Majority]

39) Thatcher Stole my Trousers - Alexei Sayle. Kindle. The second and more interesting of Sayle's memoirs. This details his rise through stand up comedy and attempts to keep a left wing revolutionary bent as increasing fame and fortune came his way at the same time as the government inflicted merciless defeat on the vanguard. One of the last chapters is called "The Workers United Will Frequently Be Defeated."

An extremely good read. As a Rik Mayall fanboy, I was charmed to learn that Rik liked to spend his personal time watching videos of his own shows and laughing exactly like the world's biggest Rik Mayall fan.

[Dr. Medulla]

One of the last chapters is called "The Workers United Will Frequently Be Defeated."

Ha! Oh, wait, fuck.

[Silent Majority]

New audiobook:

I've read this before—it's fantastic; most people here, I think, would dig it a lot—but I'm listening in part to see if something jumps out as an idea for a lecture. I thought about something on American punk more generally, but I already have one of those in one about music scenes. But I'm thinking now about a lecture on independent record labels in the 70s and 80s. I've read a few books and articles on English indie labels, so maybe a comparison of the US and UK. But, anyway, this is a great book on the US underground in the 80s.

Great. I'll give that an immediate listen.

Oh, I've read that. You shared a PDF link in 2012 and I read it on the laptop when I lived in Spain. So, my consumption of the book was even better than immediate, it was retroactive.

[Dr. Medulla]

New audiobook:

I've read this before—it's fantastic; most people here, I think, would dig it a lot—but I'm listening in part to see if something jumps out as an idea for a lecture. I thought about something on American punk more generally, but I already have one of those in one about music scenes. But I'm thinking now about a lecture on independent record labels in the 70s and 80s. I've read a few books and articles on English indie labels, so maybe a comparison of the US and UK. But, anyway, this is a great book on the US underground in the 80s.

Great. I'll give that an immediate listen.

Oh, I've read that. You shared a PDF link in 2012 and I read it on the laptop when I lived in Spain. So, my consumption of the book was even better than immediate, it was retroactive.

Your efficiency is superb. We're moving you up to middle management (new title, more responsibility, same desk, same pay).

[Silent Majority]

New audiobook:

I've read this before—it's fantastic; most people here, I think, would dig it a lot—but I'm listening in part to see if something jumps out as an idea for a lecture. I thought about something on American punk more generally, but I already have one of those in one about music scenes. But I'm thinking now about a lecture on independent record labels in the 70s and 80s. I've read a few books and articles on English indie labels, so maybe a comparison of the US and UK. But, anyway, this is a great book on the US underground in the 80s.

Great. I'll give that an immediate listen.

Oh, I've read that. You shared a PDF link in 2012 and I read it on the laptop when I lived in Spain. So, my consumption of the book was even better than immediate, it was retroactive.

Your efficiency is superb. We're moving you up to middle management (new title, more responsibility, same desk, same pay).

"Sweetheart, I'm going to take an old dress of yours to the launderette!"

[Silent Majority]

40) Gerald Ford: Ambition, Pragmatism and Party - Scott Kaufman. Audiobook. Don't you love the assumption that adherence to any of the three words in the subtitle is worthy of praise. Read by a guy who has apparently set out to make Jerry sound as dumb as possible in his quotes. The aim of the book is to convince you that Ford was a bright, hardworking, physically graceful individual and that Chevy Chase was full of shit, man. It doesn't succeed. Ford comes out as a fellow more interested in a balanced budget than in justice and his ham handed attempts to do politics might have been funny if the prose of this book hadn't been so turgid and workmanlike. The guy got a reputation as being decent and then got a bum rap after choosing to pardon Nixon and that's basically all anyone needs to know, apart from the continued expansion of American power abroad.

[Dr. Medulla]

40) Gerald Ford: Ambition, Pragmatism and Party - Scott Kaufman. Audiobook. Don't you love the assumption that adherence to any of the three words in the subtitle is worthy of praise. Read by a guy who has apparently set out to make Jerry sound as dumb as possible in his quotes. The aim of the book is to convince you that Ford was a bright, hardworking, physically graceful individual and that Chevy Chase was full of shit, man. It doesn't succeed. Ford comes out as a fellow more interested in a balanced budget than in justice and his ham handed attempts to do politics might have been funny if the prose of this book hadn't been so turgid and workmanlike. The guy got a reputation as being decent and then got a bum rap after choosing to pardon Nixon and that's basically all anyone needs to know, apart from the continued expansion of American power abroad.

Ford was a caretaker kind of president during a time of turmoil. Not clearly malignant like Nixon, but so ill-suited to the times. There's something of a Theresa May to him—a person who inherited a really tough situation and was exposed as not having the chops to surf those waves.

[Silent Majority]

40) Gerald Ford: Ambition, Pragmatism and Party - Scott Kaufman. Audiobook. Don't you love the assumption that adherence to any of the three words in the subtitle is worthy of praise. Read by a guy who has apparently set out to make Jerry sound as dumb as possible in his quotes. The aim of the book is to convince you that Ford was a bright, hardworking, physically graceful individual and that Chevy Chase was full of shit, man. It doesn't succeed. Ford comes out as a fellow more interested in a balanced budget than in justice and his ham handed attempts to do politics might have been funny if the prose of this book hadn't been so turgid and workmanlike. The guy got a reputation as being decent and then got a bum rap after choosing to pardon Nixon and that's basically all anyone needs to know, apart from the continued expansion of American power abroad.

Ford was a caretaker kind of president during a time of turmoil. Not clearly malignant like Nixon, but so ill-suited to the times. There's something of a Theresa May to him—a person who inherited a really tough situation and was exposed as not having the chops to surf those waves.

Hell, but that's a perfect comparison. 10/10.

[Dr. Medulla]

40) Gerald Ford: Ambition, Pragmatism and Party - Scott Kaufman. Audiobook. Don't you love the assumption that adherence to any of the three words in the subtitle is worthy of praise. Read by a guy who has apparently set out to make Jerry sound as dumb as possible in his quotes. The aim of the book is to convince you that Ford was a bright, hardworking, physically graceful individual and that Chevy Chase was full of shit, man. It doesn't succeed. Ford comes out as a fellow more interested in a balanced budget than in justice and his ham handed attempts to do politics might have been funny if the prose of this book hadn't been so turgid and workmanlike. The guy got a reputation as being decent and then got a bum rap after choosing to pardon Nixon and that's basically all anyone needs to know, apart from the continued expansion of American power abroad.

Ford was a caretaker kind of president during a time of turmoil. Not clearly malignant like Nixon, but so ill-suited to the times. There's something of a Theresa May to him—a person who inherited a really tough situation and was exposed as not having the chops to surf those waves.

Hell, but that's a perfect comparison. 10/10.

*reaction gif*

[Dr. Medulla]

Bedtime book (starting tonight):

Something to do with finding a cure for dying and how everything goes to fuck because of it. Yay, dystopian fiction in our time! I quite liked his other novel, The Hike, so we'll see how this goes.

[Dr. Medulla]

A chapter from Momus' The Book of Jokes that made me laugh (out loud even):

The Murderer was essentially middlebrow in his artistic tastes; he once declared that there were few tales which would not be improved by the addition of the phrase "suddenly, a shot rang out.

In fact, so enamoured was he with this phrase—the salutary burst of adrenalin he experienced on encountering it never seemed to fizzle into apathy, no matter how predictably the spurious shot was unleashed into the narrative—that he used to insert it into his copies of classic books. The moment the phrase would occur—accompanied by its acrid whiff of gunpowder—marked the exact point at which the Murderer's pathetically short attention span had given out, and his lust for adventure taken over.

The Murderer's copy of Anna Karenina, for instance, began:

"All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy in its own manner. Suddenly, a shot rang out."


His copy of the Holy Bible started:


“The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Suddenly, a shot rang out."

His copy of Ulysses opened with:

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Suddenly, a shot rang out."

Proust's À la recherche begins, in the Murderer's version:

"For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say'I'm going to sleep.' And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that suddenly, a shot rang out."

(The Murderer seems to have had a higher tolerance for Proust than other writers.)


The peculiar and remarkable thing was that, in staging these interventions in other people's narratives, the Murderer made them his own. While his eyes continued to scan the lines of the text as they were printed, one sensed that his mind, spurred on by a sudden, urgent adrenal fizz, was racing ahead with scenarios involving idiosyncratic detectives, gory autopsies on the main characters, ballistics reports, the pursuit of maniacal, unambiguously evil culprits, confrontations throwing the narrator into mortal danger, and the final return of order to the world.

Passing a cinema, the Murderer never failed to stop and admire any poster featuring a gun. "Capital! Suddenly, a shot rang out!" he would exclaim, and enter the fleapit to watch yet another banal, formulaic thriller. His favourite national cinema was, of course, the American one. Here, for sure, ringing shots were never long in coming.

In the darkness of the theatre the Murderer would sit, fists clenched tight with anticipation, waiting for the first crack of a pistol. "Come on, come on!" he would whisper, to the annoyance of other patrons, "come on, my beauty!"

If no shots rang out within the first few minutes, the Murderer would begin to fidget. "The pace is slow," he’d mumble, "something had better happen soon or … or …” The threat was left unstated, but it was a serious one. The Murderer had been known to carry a real pistol into a cinema, pull it out and fire it into the ceiling if his patience was tried. Several times he had been obliged to dash for the exit sign and run off down the street, with the hysterical sound of the cinema management calling "Police! Police!" behind him.

The Murderer's love of firearms in narrative didn't stop with Hollywood movies. He would insert gratuitous shootings into just about any story he told. It relaxed him and, in a sense, protected him from the dull complexity of the universe. Paradoxically, the constant reminder of violent death operated like the very opposite of a memento mori; it allowed him to gloss over death entirely. Evoking bullets penetrating human flesh was the Murderer's way of shielding himself from all sense of his own vulnerability.

It also exempted him from the responsibility of telling the truth. One day, for instance, the Murderer witnessed a crime. He was riding a bus. There were only two other passengers, an old lady and a teenager. This delinquent got up as if to dismount, pressed the button to open the bus door, then turned and grabbed the old lady's handbag, dashing off down the street with it.

The bus driver called the police—by this time they had already captured the boy, it turned out, as he tried to dispose of the handbag. When the two officers arrived, the Murderer was asked to make a formal witness statement.

"Well," the Murderer told the policemen, "the lady was sitting here, and the young man—wearing jeans, trainers and a purple hooded top with a white stripe down the arm—was here. When the bus stopped and the door opened, he grabbed her handbag and ran off. Suddenly, a shot rang out. The young man fell to the pavement, blood gushing from his head."

"Wait, wait," said the lieutenant, "there were no shots fired. The young man was not injured. We have him in the police car."


"I tell you a shot rang out!" insisted the Murderer, stubbornly. "I saw the thief fall. It was the old lady herself who shot him. A sting in the tail for the young miscreant, and an unforeseen twist in my tale! There are few stories which are not improved by a sudden shot ringing out."

The police decided the Murderer was psychologically incompetent to provide a witness statement, and released him.

The train was now arriving at its destination. Suddenly, a shot rang out.