Speaking about Habsburg monarchies? I feel like I am back in high school...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the oppression of the Hapsburgs is still keenly felt in parts of Poland, I know. What'd you think of Accelerando? D'ya like it? D'ya hate it? D'ya pop a chubby when they were doing it in space in each other's body? I did.
What'd you think of Accelerando? D'ya like it? D'ya hate it? D'ya pop a chubby when they were doing it in space in each other's body? I did.
Interesting, very interesting. I feel unconvinced by some of the directions of development of posthuman society but otherwise great book.
Also, aineko rules.
Jack Vance's Bird Island, which reminds me more of Jeeves than Cugel.
EDIT: Hey, Doodlebug, that's another Wodehouse reference for you!
Yes,
Yeah, good book.
Jack Vance's Bird Island, which reminds me more of Jeeves than Cugel.
EDIT: Hey, Doodlebug, that's another Wodehouse reference for you!
I caught it. I still don't completely understand it, but I caught it.
Just got back from Hay on Wye, which hosts a book festival around this time of year. There were a lot of lectures/presentations/gigs, etc, but I also hoovered up enough 2nd hand books to keep me going for a while. Amongst other things, I managed to get hold of a reprint of a 1940s Soviet partisan's handbook (translated), The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, by Ben Watson (about Frank Zappa's music), a load of really krutty Conan ripoffs and Women on Top, by Nancy Friday, as a sort of antidote to the Conan ripoffs and not because it looked like an entertainingly dirty book at all certainly not.
I might start blogging about the ripoffs, since some of them are so gloriously bad they deserve a wider audience, but that sort of thing takes time and effort. We'll see.
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Limey, I know I'm always blathering on about it, and may well have mentioned it to you before, on this very thread, but if you're looking for a female antidote to Conan's thud and blunder check out the Alyx the Adventuress anthology by Joanna Russ. Totally worth it, but sadly out of print..
Thanks - will look out for that when I'm out & about.
Interestingly (?), one of the other books (that's open in front of me now) is Saber & Shadow, by SM Stirling and Shirley Meier, a novel with two female protagonists, both of whom seem to be Lesbians; that isn't something I've ever come across before, especially in a Fantasy book, but perhaps I've been looking in the wrong places.
OOH OOH, The Northern Girl by Elizabeth A. Lynne has a full on lesbo protagonist. At the end of the book, she even goes to a castle in the north and saves a princess from a fate worse than death; it's awesome!
EDIT: it's the third book in a trilogy The Chronicles of Tornor, and the first two are a little bit all over the place, but still very emotional.
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I caught it. I still don't completely understand it, but I caught it.
Bird Island (aka "Isle of Peril," orig. written under the pseudonym Wade Alan in 1957) is written very much in the Wodehouse style, so it's about 1/4 mystery and 3/4 farce. I'm about 2/3 of the way through -- it starts off slow, but I was keeping Mrs Gersen up late last night with hysterical laughter at parts of it.
Example: It's spring, and Milo has heard somewhere that you can get $5,000 an acre (1950s dollars, bear in mind) for raising ginseng, so he figures he'll be rich in six months! He sends away for seeds, plants them in his backyard, and waits in vain for them to grow. Then he receives a letter in the mail:
"Dear Sir: Through an unfortunate oversight we neglected to enclose planting instructions with your shipment of ginseng seed. We take this means to repair the omission.
"Sow seeds 1/4 of an inch apart, 1/4 inch deep in a mixture of moist mold, sphagnum moss, and fine Coraland Brand sand (obtainable from us). Let germinate in a hothouse at a constant temperature of 82 degrees Fahrenheit and at a humidity of not more than 70%, to protect the delicate seedlings from Soporilla mortephytes type fungi. Soil must be moist but never wet. When plants are two years old, transplant to shady, well-drained, slightly acid soil on a site protected from wind. Spray plants against aphids, chinch-bugs, cutworms, and ginseng moths, with special Genseng Protective Liquid (obtainable from us). Protect these delicate plants from frost during cold months by using Little Giant brand gensing-type smudge pots (now in stock). When plants are eight years old, harvest with the Double-Action Gensing Root-puller (obtainable from us)..."
Milo carefully laid the letter in the fireplace and retired to his study, where he spent the afternoon mixing drinks at the bar, setting them on his model train and sending them around the room to himself.
After that, Miss Picket's boarding-school angels want sexy fun-time with their Stanford boyfriends and cause a scandal.
Only Superhuman by Christopher L. Bennett. So far, it seems a little juvenile, and not in a YA way. But I've barely read a dozen pages....
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Bought a lot of books at the local library sale yesterday. Even though I haven't read all of the ones I bought last year. Or the year before...
Anyway, this year I at least justified buying massive amounts of McPherson and Foner by saying that I'm going to peddle them along with copies of the Galtic Worker, but I also picked up a few goodies for myself, including a history on the origins of modern Germany (to fill in the gap) and Peter Gay's The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism which I've had my eye out for for years based on his way awesome Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist.
Anyway, I was just reading the preface to pass the time and ran across this:
What, after all, does Hume, who was a conservative, have in common with Condorcet, who was a democrat? Holbach, who ridiculed all religion, with Lessing, who practically tried to invent one? Diderot, who envied and despised antiquaries, with Gibbon, who admired and emulated them? Rousseau, who worshipped Plato, with Jefferson, who could not bring himself to finish The Republic.
--
Not often that I side with Tom over JJ.
Anyway, I was just reading the preface to pass the time and ran across this:What, after all, does Hume, who was a conservative, have in common with Condorcet, who was a democrat? Holbach, who ridiculed all religion, with Lessing, who practically tried to invent one? Diderot, who envied and despised antiquaries, with Gibbon, who admired and emulated them? Rousseau, who worshipped Plato, with Jefferson, who could not bring himself to finish The Republic.
The ability to do a Kilroy Was Here drawing in the nude. :)
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Yes, well, um...
Exercised some willpower and didn't let myself get drawn hither and thither by every cheap history book that flashed me some skin. No, went ahead and, after much lollygagging and procratstination, finally finished the Gord the Rogue books!
All of you who are still playing games set in Greyhawk:
Also, this Revolutions of 1848 book is awesome.
Every page is beautifully written and has some crazy story or detail from the inner workings of the Austrian secret police or the fluctuations in the rate of venereal disease in Paris. And I haven't even gotten to Italy yet. And every review on Amazon is a 5-star review. (Although there are only 5 reviews.)
Who is this Priscilla Robertson, writer of awesome revolutionary history and why have I never heard of her?
I stole this book from my hetero life partner's shelf. He had it from some leftie class he took back at UMass. It's like a mid-90s Princeton University Press cheapo reprint of a 1950s book with hardly any info about the author, no modern introduction, no essay by a protege trying to keep her memory alive, nothing.
I look around on the internet and I find an entry in something called Philosopedia and an article from a magazine I guess she used to edit called The Humanist. The latter, I read on wikipedia, is the magazine of the American Humanist Association (although the AHA was founded decades after the magazine, if I'm reading this right) among whose honorary presidents, I read, were Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut. Isaac Asimov was mentioned somewhere in all of that, too. Hmmm.
She seems real familiar with "The Left" and nary a chapter goes by where she doesn't have a quip by some bigtime revolutionary legend like Marx or Proudhon or Herzen, but all I get from skimming her articles are a stint as an organizer for Southern Tenant Farmers Union and literary/academic controversies involving Corliss Lamont and Sidney Hook.
Some kind of New Deal Democratic Party social democrat, I'm guessing.
Now reading a collection of Isaac Asimov's essays. Time made some of them inaccurate but others are still possible... Martian colony before 2080 perchance?
Finished the Austro-Hungarian section of The Revolutions of 1848, am almost finished with The First Ten Years of American Communism and, for more exciting TSR action, started Red Sands: An Arabian Adventure by Paul B. Thompson and Tonya R. Carter.
It's better than Gygax. But not by much.
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Finished the Cannon book first.
Here's an essay some might enjoy:
Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Vatta's War series by Elizabeth Moon.
Excellent female protagonist (she has a bit of a psych problem- she finds out she's a killer- in the sense that she discovers she derives emotional pleasure from killing. She has to struggle with that demon while trying to defeat the space pirate/corrupt corporation that killed her family.)
Good stuff.
Just got my copy of the latest Civil War Monitor today. It's been a hundred and fifty years and we're coming up on the start of July, so they went deep into the weeds and somehow pulled together an entire issue on a desperately obscure battle that has generated almost no interest from the general public or the academic community. I honestly don't know how they even found material to solicit papers from, let alone the people to write them.
Quite the letdown from last issue, which had half the features by bloggers I read and really solid work all around.
There's also a piece on how you get to become a licensed battlefield guide which makes the guys who camp out for the latest Apple product seem downright apathetic. The first round is a 250 question test. The top 19 or 20 candidates advance to the next stage. I guess in a typical year, that's the space between one guy getting five wrong and another getting eight wrong.
I think I've already posted my McPherson story about Soviet historians visiting Gettysburg during the American bicentennial and the Steve Earle song about fighting with Col. Chamberlain, so...I've got nothing new to say.
:(
Also, I really liked Red Sands: An Arabian Adventure back when I was 13.
Twenty-three years later...not so much.
'A Clash of Kings'
- I read 'A Game of Thrones' a while back when the TV series first came out (I wanted to read the book before watching it's adaptation), yet the first book I found terribly boring. About a week ago I ended up finally watching the first season of the TV series and it got me hooked again. Since then I have been plowing through 'A Clash of Kings' and I am loving it!.
'The Black Company'
- Being a huge fan of Steven Erikson (Malazan Book of the Fallen) I picked this one up after he commented on it being an influence to him. To be honest, I am a third of the way through and not really enjoying it... just has not grabbed me - I suspect it is the characters. I just do not find them engaging.
'The Dark Tower'
- Started reading this because everyone seems to rave about it. Nearly finished it and I do not think I will pick up the sequal(s). I guess it is just not my cup of tea. Anyone else have a similar experience?
'The Bone Hunters'
- Love Steven Erikson. Love the Malazan series. Books 1, 2 and 3 were particularly excellent (which fan doesn't say that?). However, I also really enjoyed book 4 and somewhat book 5. I had a break mid-way through book 5 (series fatigue I guess) but finished it a few months back and want to get back into it. Started 'The Bone Hunters' today.
'ScareCrow'
- I picked this up as a freebie to burn some time... and before I knew it I had churned through the first 40 pages and was hooked. Easy read. Candy for the brain and full of action. After doing some quick research I found it is the third Matt Reilly book for the Scarecrow character - but it reads like a stand alone. I should be finished it pretty quickly. A fun time filler.
'A Clash of Kings'
- I read 'A Game of Thrones' a while back when the TV series first came out (I wanted to read the book before watching it's adaptation), yet the first book I found terribly boring. About a week ago I ended up finally watching the first season of the TV series and it got me hooked again. Since then I have been plowing through 'A Clash of Kings' and I am loving it!.'The Black Company'
- Being a huge fan of Steven Erikson (Malazan Book of the Fallen) I picked this one up after he commented on it being an influence to him. To be honest, I am a third of the way through and not really enjoying it... just has not grabbed me - I suspect it is the characters. I just do not find them engaging.'The Dark Tower'
- Started reading this because everyone seems to rave about it. Nearly finished it and I do not think I will pick up the sequal(s). I guess it is just not my cup of tea. Anyone else have a similar experience?'The Bone Hunters'
- Love Steven Erikson. Love the Malazan series. Books 1, 2 and 3 were particularly excellent (which fan doesn't say that?). However, I also really enjoyed book 4 and somewhat book 5. I had a break mid-way through book 5 (series fatigue I guess) but finished it a few months back and want to get back into it. Started 'The Bone Hunters' today.'ScareCrow'
- I picked this up as a freebie to burn some time... and before I knew it I had churned through the first 40 pages and was hooked. Easy read. Candy for the brain and full of action. After doing some quick research I found it is the third Matt Reilly book for the Scarecrow character - but it reads like a stand alone. I should be finished it pretty quickly. A fun time filler.
On the Subject of The Dark Tower: I read that book when it was first published as a series of novellas in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction back in the 80s, and actually thought the series went downhill after the first book. I'm not trying to change your mind, but the later books are different, and you might give them a chance on their own merits.
'The Black Company'
- Being a huge fan of Steven Erikson (Malazan Book of the Fallen) I picked this one up after he commented on it being an influence to him. To be honest, I am a third of the way through and not really enjoying it... just has not grabbed me - I suspect it is the characters. I just do not find them engaging.
I felt the same way, except I went past bored to actively repulsed. That can be fine with the right situation and right author, but the first book pushed me past not caring and past enjoying seeing them suffer into just loathing them so much I didn't even want to see them in pain. I just wanted done. Shame, because I liked a lot of the ideas.
I felt the same way, except I went past bored to actively repulsed. That can be fine with the right situation and right author, but the first book pushed me past not caring and past enjoying seeing them suffer into just loathing them so much I didn't even want to see them in pain. I just wanted done. Shame, because I liked a lot of the ideas.
Interesting... after posting this I went and picked up the book again, and decided to start from the beginning. I have read 115 pages thus far and find it far more enjoyable than last time, yet I am undecided on it. I enjoy the story and characters, but the writing is difficult to get used to. At the same time, because of his writing style the action and story progresses quickly which keeps you involved.
Being in the military I can empathise with some of the themes. I can also certainly see where Steven Erikson's influence came from!
I guess I will keep at it and finish it soon - if only to say I have read it. Depending on how I feel at the end will determine if I continue with the remainder of the series.
Being in the military I can empathise with some of the themes.
I suspect we're reacting to the same things, but going in opposite directions. I'm not a big fan of military fiction.
In other news, finished The American Interest in Cuba. Since I broke my rule and did not put fiction between it and Fateful Lightning except for about 50 pages of Wyrd Sisters (ended up not liking it at all) I'll have to find some new make-believe to read before I dive into *braces self* probably William W. Freehling's The Road to Disunion: Seccessionists Triumphant.
Also in the unlikely event someone else is boring enough to like this kind of thing, the present issue of Civil War Monitor has a great article about how one becomes, or more often fails to become, a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg. (Long story, but the main thing is after the '93 movie they had way too many applicants to ever fairly check them all so they use an insanely hard test instead, then check out top 19-20 scorers every two years.) Other good articles too, but that was a pleasant surprise.
When it comes to Glen Cook I favor Garrett, P. I. and Dread Empire over Black Company but I have only read a few first books of the last one.
Reading some of Rudyard Kipling's old horror stories ("The Phantom Rickshaw"), and re-reading Clive Barker's Everville -- damn, I sure wish he'd written the "Third Book of the Art" he kept promising, because Great and Secret Show and Everville are awesome, on a par with Weaveworld and almost up to the high bar he set with Imagica (and hasn't met since).
Outlaw of Gor, by John Norman
and
The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, by Ben Watson.
One of those books is very good indeed.
Outlaw of Gor, by John Norman, and The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, by Ben Watson. One of those books is very good indeed.
I once read one of those Gor books, (Outlaw, in fact, IIRC) and it was very bad indeed, so it's not hard for me to guess which of the two is the good one.
Kinsey and Me by Sue Grafton.
The Tyranny of the Night by Glen Cook. Love it so far.
Amo, Amas, Amat and More by Eugene Ehrlich. Always learning.
Six-Legged Soldiers by Jeffrey A. Lockwood. Fascinating!
Brian
Have yet to manage to find fiction I want to tear into, which is worrying because I have 1200 pages of Ordeal of the Union making sexy eyes at me. I read some for the blog today and got a strong case of the first dose being free. It knows it has what I want, the saucy tease, wiggling around in its skimpy little readable journalistic prose and letting its educational value bulge out so obscenely. Shameless!
Has she finished the whole A-Z series yet?Kinsey and Me by Sue Grafton.
No, it's a collection of short stories about Kinsey Millhone. I think it might have some essays or something in its Part 2.
Finished up The Revolutions of 1848 a couple of days ago. It was awesome.
Finished up Red Sands this morning. It wasn't.
Next up is going to be Barabara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which, as my comrades were so quick to point out, was banned from the Bedford, NH school system.
Also, found a fun new blog to read: Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist. Lots of fun, here's an article of possible interest to Comrade Samnell.
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Next up is going to be Barabara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which, as my comrades were so quick to point out, was banned from the Bedford, NH school system.
I've read that book. It's pretty typical Ehrenreich, but certainly not worth banning.
Fun facts: 1) They were teaching it in a personal finances course.
2) Bedford is by far the wealthiest community in NH with a median househould income of over $100,000 (over twice the national median).
3) The same family that disliked Mrs. Ehrenreich, also objected to Water for Elephants.
Also, found a fun new blog to read: Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist. Lots of fun, here's an article of possible interest to Comrade Samnell.
The cant (Marxist and academic both) got a bit heavy going at times. Certainly there's a lot of racist scholarship about slavery, not just from practitioners like Calhoun or Samuel Cartwright but also from pioneering historians like Ulrich Phillips. Phillips was, I think, the first historian to take the South and slavery as his specific subjects and very heavily influenced most treatments running up into the 50s and 60s, when the neo-abolitionist school busted the proper caps in the proper asses. Some cranks are still at it, of course. I understand that Thomas Fleming has just published, or soon will, a deeply stupid argument that amounts to a very uncritical repetition of all that crap. I don't know what his rep is in the academy, but he's not a Civil War or slavery historian and I confess I gave up on him years ago after a very unimpressive accounting of himself on CSPAN. The words "old Tory hack" came immediately to mind. He does, however, look a bit like Tywin Lannister.
Anyway, I think there are a two entangled questions when it comes to the status of slavery vis-a-vis capitalism. To me, it's always seemed like the epitome of relentless capitalism: if everything else is for sale, why not people? If you can invest in everything else, why not people? On most successful plantations, the slaves held more value than the land. Terra firma amounted to a sort of recurring expense, like seeds or maintenance. Planters manged their stock accordingly, but that usually only included pretty self-serving and selective kidness. Fewer slaves and higher latitudes usually meant less brutality, but professional slave-breakers were at work as far north as Maryland and the Missouri River. But I have a very expansive view of capitalism as essentially "anything that happens in markets and pertaining to the production, transfer, and consumption of goods and services".
The second question is whether or not the owners thought of themselves as capitalists. On the East Coast, one was not supposed to. You were supposed to live like English gentry with enough money that you never needed inquire about the cost of anything, let alone your own accounts. People who actually ran their businesses like that failed with great regularity and often ended up shopping around sons and daughters to families that still had cash...even Yankees.
That attitude reached its peak in the South Carolina lowcountry, which liked to pretend that Charleston was its little London, but old money Chesapeake Tidewater sorts could come a close second in everything but anglophilia. The ones who wanted to keep living that way in public had to have well-thumbed ledgers in private, of course. If the Master of the domain didn't keep them himself, than a skilled overseer, bright relative, or wife probably did.
Out West (meaning the Mississippi valley and Gulf Coast) things were a lot less genteel and a lot more rough and tumble crass capitalism. Just the sort of thing that respectable gentlemen were not supposed to engage in. They were generally more enthusiastic about the future, since they had the virgin soil and plenty of room to grow. That made them big fans of things like railroads, canals, and stealing other countries instead of schemers for a permanent slaveholder minority veto over national policy.
Both groups, of course, wanted to make piles of cash and thought the most awesome way to do so involved stealing the lives of brown people. So far as that goes, the differed mostly on whether the pie was big enough to make every white man a slaveholder and thus a king in his castle, or rather if the pie was already all eaten and poor men of both colors needed to accept their betters. But just to complicate things further, most big planters ran informal little patronage and welfare operations for nearby poor whites which encouraged them to buy in and look to them for leadership rather than try to develop an independent political voice and identity. Of course there was also always the fact that however miserable a poor white dirt farmer might become, every misery inflicted on a slave boosted his status a little by comparison.
The cant (Marxist and academic both) got a bit heavy going at times.
Yeah, I didn't even read it. Tossing around Time on the Cross, Genovese and Eric Williams, though, thought'd you'd be interested. Looks like you might've been, too.
Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin.
Rebus is back, the complaints are on his back, and his new boss is called James Page (also called Dazed and Confused, Communication Breakdown, and a few other Led Zeppelin song titles as the book goes on).
Hard Magic by Larry Correia.