Geoff > Recent Status Updates

Seriously though, trying to avoid hyperbole - Chapter Three was one of the best things I've maybe ever read. Okay that's probably hyperbole, but, gawdamn.

Shades of Kinbote here...

Also, I'll be carrying around this pompous book reading it in a pompous fashion in pompous places like cafés (with the accented e) while affecting a pompous posture of pomposity. Pretentious!

And anyway I'm only reading Hegel so I can read Zizek on Hegel.

Rumors of my being prepared to read this have been greatly exaggerated.

Sunday mornings with beautiful sound waves, approaching the most beautiful ever made on 6 strings, in this humble nobody's opinion. Snoozer Quinn "Lover Come Back To Me/On The Alamo"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKsMt...

Yesterday I had to have my cat, Mingus, my best and most consistent friend for 17 1/2 years, my entire adult life, put to sleep. Groping about yesterday evening, I grabbed this to distract me. Sebald's dream-like melancholy texts are maybe the most appropriate of book-things to help fill absences, when great empty spaces suddenly open in your life.

I think this is too much, too dark for me right now. I'll come back to it soon, as what I did read felt vitally important. I just need to breathe some lighter air.

Only a little ways in with this this Saturday night - and I can already tell this is big I Important

Being that myself and many of my friends on GR will soon be residing in President Trump's America, is it not our duty to make 2016 the year of reading Leftist theory? And viciously satirical novels? Let this be the year of theory and hysterical laughter!

"Everyone's being especially punctilious here because of an accident that occurred recently at an execution over in Missouri... Only writer William T. Vollmann, who was covering the execution for Spin magazine, walked away unscathed."

Grasping for any time at all to get to read a single goddamn sentence of a book. It's amazing to me, more than amazing, totally baffling, that humanity has organized itself in a way that intentionally takes every good hour of the day away and sells it to someone else. Astounding.

Days when only In Utero loud as hell on the headphones can make the world tolerable.

How they detected gravitational waves is pretty badass
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/element...

Looks like Ferrante's novels are getting the TV treatment. Which reminds me - whatever happened to Soderbergh's Sot-Weed Factor?

Already got my tix to Hail, Caesar! this weekend. New Coens? Stoked. "A parallel film to Barton Fink"?? Exponentially stoked! http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/...

It can't be especially good that when I get up, get some coffee, turn on the iPhone, and check in on the world, the news, Goodreads, the whole whirlwind of opinions and people freely expressing themselves out there about all kinds of things, I sometimes think "What we really need is the draft and a big war."

Happy Birthday, Jamesy.

Goethe. Faust. Translation. Recommendations. Bitte. Merci.

Happy Birthday Virginia Woolf

Hey DC, ready to be snowed in for a few days? Time to get some serious cozy-time reading done... As long as things don't go all The Shining up in here...

I adore this. Is all Dickens this charming? I'm so charmed.

People who aren't interested in books or music - what's up with them? What goes on, as Lou Reed asks, in your mind? http://youtu.be/kym3xgrEISA

Spending my MLK day off organizing my library in some newly installed shelves in a new house. Not exactly a celebration of civil rights, I know, but kinda a celebration of the freedom of thought.

When you see numbers like the new Oxfam report, reach for your Marx! (...and so on and so forth and then your Zizek) http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/17/news/...

Looking at the Oscar nominations - What an incredibly weak year for movies! The Revenant got the most nods, but kinda sucked. I mean, technically and visually it was great, but it still kinda sucked. Mad Max was totally amazing. But best picture kinda amazing? I dunno. WEAK ASS FILM YEAR.

Something else this book is reminding me of, in an offhand way - Barbara Wright's translations of Queneau.

Fans of harDCore, don't miss the new pressing of Bells Of's 00/85 - seminal recordings from the early days of DC hardcore just now released after being "lost" for like 30 years - and on clear vinyl !!

So, Pynchon's penchant for absurdist names - that comes straight outta Dickens, yes?

"From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time- they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of Genii"