Benjamin Fasching-Gray > Recent Status Updates

"Four's a family, five's a crime " as we say in our kindergardens. 🤣🤣🤣

Sehr hilfreich, schon am anfang. Glossar ist super!

would set any eagle scout's heart racing

"Son of Man Temple" where the community school was sounds very interesting. Some googley ai thing was trying to tell me it was the mormons but that doesnt fit with what it says here.

Jaguar Christians!

starting "nobody knows my name"

I am just as perplexed as Elizabeth and can hardly think of anything beyond my own astonishment at Mr. Darcy's unexpected appearance and welcoming behavior!

New Orleans chapter went hard

Loving this! They finally met!

Detroit chapter was very exciting

Took almost a third of the book before she has sex with an alien, and even that was simply "communicating by touching his sexual organs." There was also some reproduction involving grafting a worm thing to her side but so far the most thrilling were the centipede like creatures that farm some animal for its hallucinogenic blood.

finished "abolition" now starting "feminism"

ack! my copy is missing pages 21-28! someone just tore them out! very uncool.

"If your effort or practice does not have the right orientation, it will not work at all. Not only will it not work, but it may spoil your pure nature. ... Your mind will be filled with rubbish; your mind will be stained." That is exactly what is happening to me.

The voice in my head when I read this sounds like Yoda. When Lawrence Kasden or whoever wrote the first Yoda dialog, this was definitely the inspiration. I can see myself asking, what are you talking about? Blue mountain, white cloud? And then getting whacked with a stick for an answer.

So much fun! The theoretical gems are thick on the ground, exactly the kind of anthropology I love -- the kind that kicks the foundation out from under the other cold, clammy social sciences. Also love of course the examples and ethnographic details. How I made it this far in life without encountering the Balinese Rangda Queen of the Witches is beyond me.

Reading this in German, it's super helpful actually. I think some of this stuff I was doing already either as a coping mechanism or because I like the dark side, but then these Tibetan traditions she's explaining offer the other half that I was missing, like, what to do after you blame yourself for everything and inhale all the suffering of the universe.

Mostly just confused, but I suspect that first chapter was more difficult than what will follow.

Every word is perfect! This is a laugh a minute! Finally had the meet cute and I want to cry with joy!

Starting a chapter on women artists associated with the PRB. Exciting!

I went to the FB Kunstgeschichte in Hof 9 to borrow this. I had to crawl around in the Kompaktus, which was terrifying. This book now feels like a treasure I borrowed from the imperial cellars. Also, only 30 pages in, it's already amazing.

socialist consciousness loading ...

Keeping it djinn

looked up "trope" in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Dictionary of Untranslatables, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, and Encyclopedia of Postmodernism. So I didn't know it means something totally different to Derrida-heads like HL Gates then it means in either old-school rhetoric or in philosophy. i learned the word in its Jewish meaning, where a trope is a bit of melody for singing the torah.

We've had some funny and spicy moments with the PRB and now we have Morris teaching himself pre-industrial work methods... he's dying his own yarn, weaving tapestries... this is such cozy reading, perfect for nights when the novels are too disturbing.

I'm surprised how fascinated I am with a chapter about comintern debates around self-determination and nationalism. Turns out these same arguments are repeating themselves.

dictionary required

Beating my already hyped expectations! The disabled torturer, reenacting his trauma and asking himself "why" is an amazing character, and then using him as a "i was once like you" mirror for the spoiled aristocrat is delicious. The barbarian chapters are solid fantasy and his communication with spirits is an absolute delight. It's giving Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison. Love the slow burn world building!