Category: Bitching
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Winner/”The Deep”/What Actually Frightens
Well, that was a bit bleaker than I had anticipated, but the winner is, ironically, “You Can’t Win”, so that is next on the list. While I was waiting, I started Nick Cutter’s “The Deep”. I read “The Troop” and “Little Heaven” a bit ago; and I remember the gross killer tapeworms of “The Troop”…
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“The Pallbearer’s Club”/Booktube/A Definite Title
A couple of anecdotes: A little bit ago, I was wasting time watching YouTube, which is something I do a little too much of, if I am being honest. There was a video on the movie “Incident in a Ghostland” which I saw some length of time ago, and decided to watch. The youtuber appeared,…
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Hating Will Shortz/Cleverness/”Ella Minnow Pea”
“Everybody’s clever nowadays” -Oscar Wilde Clever is a difficult thing. It’s fairly easy to write something without being clever at all. We’re going to have to define our terms a little bit here: on it’s surface, clever is a synonym for ‘smart’— but when I hear the word, I tend to think of something that’s…
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Illness/”Moby Dick”/Cough/No List This Week
I have had a rotten cold for three weeks or so, which has slowed down my reading pace somewhat; I have advanced to chapter 23 in my Moby Dick re-read, so we’re onboard the ship, Starbuck has appeared, and the narration has done one of the weird shifts it does. Melville does not use a…
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“A Descent into the Maelström”/What I am reading
I read “A Descent into the Maelström” this week in addition to finishing “Vamphiri!” and working on a couple other things that I’ll mention below. It’s a story about a whirlpool, and the narrator’s failure to die in it after figuring out that the larger an object, the faster it gets sucked down, so he…
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Attention Span/What I am Currently Reading
Periodically, I’ll read in a bar. I know there are some folk who think that’s a bit silly, but honestly, relaxing in a corner with a couple of beers and a good pulp-y novel can be sublime. I wouldn’t recommend reading “Gravity’s Rainbow” in a bar (although getting wasted just might be the key to…
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Lazy Week/85% of “The Recognitions”/“Naked Lunch”/“The Unfortunates”/Creators who are Assholes
I didn’t do a lot of reading this week. It happens sometimes, and I don’t really beat myself up about it. I know some booktube types claim they read for like four hours a day no matter what; normally I spend around 2 or so, give or take. During the early part of the pandemic,…
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“The Sirens of Titan”/“Player Piano”/Developing Artistry
“Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?” -Andy Warhol At the start of this year, I got the idea that I would re-read (and in come cases, read for the first time) the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. It was originally going to be the entire focus of this blog, but…
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“Bottom’s Dream”/“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”/Finishing or not finishing something you hate
“Tekeli-li!” I got a copy of “Bottom’s Dream” on the secondhand market; Dalkey Archives sold out ages ago. The book got a print run of 2.500. My copy was still in shrink-wrap, unopened. No one had read it. I once remember reading a review of Morton Feldman’s “Second String Quartet” which was released in a…
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HP Lovecraft/Friday the 13th vs A Nightmare of Elm Street/“Stage Fright”, again…
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me” -Palmer, The Thing. It’s the stated policy of this blog to spoil things. It’s part of the process. I’m re-stating it here. Everything mentioned in the title will have the fuck spoiled out of it, so if you want surprises, I quote Lord Humungus: “just walk away”. Horror has…
The Lithole 