I've got this one, dated 1953, Ace Star edition, all the names have been changed, "for the protection of the guilty, as well as the innocent"

I'm a big Herbert Huncke fan

Lol. I was about to say, “You’re reading the wrong ‘Junky’ by the wrong William!” then I remembered it was first published under a pseudonym.

Do you actually have this edition? Probably maybe worth some scratch... (also likely worth nothing).

Definitely not reading this edition, I just love the pulp artwork of it. My cover is much more bland as its just the Penguin paperback, but mine does have an introduction written by Allen Ginsburg.

And finished Fellowship of the Ring. Likely won't officially start The Two Towers until next weekend, but I consider it started as of tonight.

Fellowship is my favorite and has been since the very first time I read it in a sparsely populated advanced language arts class in like 1995. I think it hits all the right buttons, and creates a sense of bigger-than-life tension and danger and sacrifice without getting bogged down in the attempt to execute all that stuff. It’s the impression of danger, not the danger itself, that has always appealed to me about LOTR. Heading into a storm with no idea what to expect other than almost certain death. The other two books have to grapple with the characters actually getting into those situations, and while I still ebjoy them, they lack the sense of wonder and dread that Felllowship has.

Two Towers is a good read. Return of the King is my least favorite, because I’m weird.

You hang out on a Sonic Youth forum, I assume you're a little weird by default, and that's not a bad thing by any means :D

i’ve no idea about moore, cheeto seems to be our resident expert on the man.

besides, it’s not an either-or thing. you can be borgesian and leftist because borgesian usually does not refer to a political position but more of a stylistical/structural thing at the core of the fiction itself, having to do with realities as structured by philosophical or mathematical ideas.

e.g., we take the self as a reality, but what if the self is a fiction and “the other” is “the same” (entity). or, what if we had a concrete visual or physical experience of the abstract concept of “infinite.” and so forth.

in the case of moore it has to do with metafictions— fictional documentations to support a fictional world, added as footnotes or commentary or some other form that’s presumably “outside” the story. this is actually as old as don quixote! at least, because 1) don quixote is supposed to be a translation from arabic, and cervantes likes to refer to the “original” author here and there, and 2) in volume 2 don quixote reads his own book telling of his adventures. but whatver cervantes did borges stole it well and turned it into a real 20th-century art form that made you dizzy with unreality vertigo, and spawned all manner of imitators, from highbrow shit to comic books.

anyway what i meant by 3rd world readings of superheros is that traditionally the latin-american right has been installed by/ supported by/aligned with the USA post-Monroe Doctrine, and so it has no problem integrating into the empire. the “left” in this scheme has been either nationalist or marxist or both, and in either case is the one that sees the US as an adversary, hence it’s the one that criticizes superman and hollywood and so forth while the other side eats it up.

moore being presumably a well-read person would have come in contact not just with 3rd world critics of north-american ideology, but also with 3rd world right wingers like borges who famously congratulated pinochet on his communist extermination campaign (no joke, it’s true.)

what i meant previously was that just because the thirld world is poor/oppressed/whatever it does not follow that it is a political monoblock. not every latin-amrican is a zapatista/che guevara/whatever, and borges himself was an anglophile and europhile who asked to be buried in switzerland— howver, when i say “3rd world critiques of american superheroes” it’s implied they’re 99% “leftist”.

Fuck man, this is some interesting shit. I don’t have time to reply right now but I don’t want to forget that we talked about this. I find it illuminating, and also somewhat terrifying as it reminds me how small and incomplete my understanding of the “third-world” realities is. :(

I've nothing concrete to back this up but I can Alan Moore fluctuating somewhere between anarchist and libertarian.

Pretty sure he's said that himself. I know there was a guardian interview a coupla years back where he said that.

That sounds right.

It also sounds... positively insufferable.

Moore does not have a big social life. he col' chills. hahahha


I am not aware of his politics, although I know alot about his personal views on things and his relationship with what we term reality....

he did say this in the letter he sent to me after I sent him my review of Jerusalem.

" I hope it’s not inappropriate to extend my deepest sympathies at your nation having apparently elected a giant orange Nazi baby. Our hearts go out to you, although pretty clearly we have our own populist problems right now with an electorate who’ve been whipped up into a misinformed frenzy and have voted for something which is very probably impossible. Perhaps we can take consolation from the fact that in the sprawling township of Eternity, this era doesn’t amount to more than a slender and solitary gutter."


hahahah! soo true. Big orange baby indeed.

he is not a fan of Brexit. haha

On Friday I started reading The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patrica Highsmith.

the movie is very fucking good as i recall

Finished Fragile Objects by Pierre Gilles de Gennes, about the science behind soft matter and the education of students to guide them to become researchers and scientists. http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2018/0...nd-how-to.html

Yes. Didn’t Matt Damon win an Oscar for that?

Then there was a sequel with John Malkovich taking over the roll for some reason, but yeah it was good. Very creepy. Very Hitchcockian.

The Swap by Joseph Finder.

dont know much about oscars but he was great in it. you can google i guess

anyway, re: reading. you’re gonna love this chick

https://www.americamagazine.org/fait...on-catholicism

oh yeah, sorry to inform you she’s already married so it will have to be strictly platonic. but yeah. just found her in a newspaper.

i don’t share her ideology, but she writes very well

i keep coming back to the VALIS series when i can't think of what book i want to get into next. i fell asleep while listening to the audiobook and had a strange dream as you can imagine.

are there books out there that dissect VALIS? now that i've read Radio Free Albemuth, i'm curious about the differences between the two, and with Transfiguration and Divine Invasion, and maybe his actual exegesis and statements.
i was thinking about looking for some books to familiarize myself with the lesser known historical figures, but if there is already something out there like that, that would be killer.