October 2023 – Page 4 – INANIMATE CARBON GOD

The Blind Owl

Book #12 for 2023, The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, which I read in the above recent Penguin edition (which uses different spellings of both name and title). In a certain way, this is not a million miles removed from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground, at least if that book had been a lot more drug-addled. Beyond that, I’m a bit stumped. Hedayat is considered the pioneer of literary modernism in Iranian literature, which is a field I know nothing about so I’ll defer to those who do… Hedayat’s technique comes across clearly in translation (along with some choice phrases and images that are presumably why Hedayat’s work is STILL banned in Iran 70+ years after his death), rather more so than his intention; the book’s propensity for repetition of phrases and events (insofar as there are any) becomes obvious fairly quickly, lots of echoes and resonances and all that between the two parts of the book, but the reason for these things… I don’t know. One of the longest-feeling 100-page books I’ve read, I can see I’ll need to have a second go at this in future if I’m to get anything from it.

It’s oh so quiet

Yeah… so much for the Voice. Referendum voting day was today, and, well, the trend for referendums to absolutely tank (there hasn’t been a successful one since 1977 because the Constitution makes it near-impossible for them to do so) only continued in the end. There will be recriminations, of course, lots of soul searching about how and why it failed and what the fuck is wrong with Australians, and I have no particular desire to engage in them myself… except perhaps for the so-called “progressive No” lot. There were indigenous folks opposed to the Voice cos they thought it wasn’t enough, and I respect that viewpoint (needless to say, that respect doesn’t extend to Warren Mundine or Jacinta Price whose opposition to the Voice was rooted in Liberal policy and selling their useful idiot souls to a right wing that despises them). I respect it, but… if we couldn’t get up something as comparatively small as this, how the fuck do you think something actually bigger like a treaty is going to happen? Blak sovereignty? Fantastic, I’m sure. Not going to happen within any of our lifetimes, though, is it? Not if we can’t get something as comparatively simple as the Voice. Bah. Back to business as usual in this country, then… sigh.

Important images 3

I’m really going to have to step up my posting rate for this series. I did a quick calculation and discovered that if I maintain this once a week thing, it’ll take about thirteen years to exhaust the stack of pictures I’ve currently lined up to post. And that further presumes I don’t add to it any further, which… will not be the case. This fucking thing could well outlive me and possibly also human civilisation. Either I need to up the frequency of posting or the number of pictures in each post…

Anyway, here’s another selection of 20 pictures behind the cut. As usual, beyond this point be nudity.

Continue reading “Important images 3”

Worst person making great point, etc

All I have to say about the current bullshit in Israel is that I am opposed to civilians, especially children, being used as military targets. By anyone.

Others have offered more finely detailed and nuanced takes on that abysmal situation:

And Ben Shapiro offered an equally subtle comment, which earned a… surprising response:

I mean… I would absolutely expect someone to call out the hateful little shit on this matter, but I would not have expected ANDREW TATE to be that person. And yet there he was… he was also pretty snippy towards Peterson as well, although I gather that’s actually part of an existing enmity between them; the two have apparently been mutual non-fans for a while even though they do both share the professional misogyny thing (though I think Jordibles just lost his inexplicable Islamic fanbase while Taint retains his). I just find it a bit perplexing, cos I wouldn’t have picked him as anti-war for some reason, but I’ve been wrong about things before… I just hope he’s not singling out Shapiro cos the latter is the Pope of the Jews and Taint is a good (?) Muslim boy, but somehow I think he’s actually not doing that… and I do think the point he makes about the likes of Shapiro and Jurr Durr being hawkish from the comfort of a safe distance is not exactly wrong as such. I’m just confused by the whole thing. It’s that meme in real life.

That’s him told

Yeah, the Kennedys are not happy about Bobby Jr splitting off from the Democrats, but I couldn’t see him doing much else; he’s become so removed from them that they couldn’t have let him run for them. The question now is how much damage could he do to the Democrats by splitting the vote, and because he comes from THAT family which he’s kind of also abandoning, but he could be be equally harmful to the Republicans cos he’s probably drawn off a bunch of the far-right antivax dickheads they’re relying on. I don’t know. Maybe he won’t have much if any effect in the long term.

Well hurray for that

So, as noted the other day, when you post a news article link on Twutter it no longer shows the headline, leaving open the possibility of the user coming up with a completely different one in the post. This is not one of those cases. I saw someone post it on Mastodon and was obviously immediately struck by it, and I also didn’t believe the bit where they said it was real… but it was; had to dig down into the timeline a few days to find it, but indeed it turned out not to have been faked. The above is my own screenshot of the thing. Curiously enough, the headline of the actual article is something else:

…and the bit about the “perverted sexual behaviour” only appears in the second-last paragraph, 16th out of 17. I can only assume that whoever manages the FT’s Twitter felt the lede was being buried…

The Serpent’s Shadow

Book #11 for the year, Daniel Braum’s The Serpent’s Shadow. He and I have a mutual friend (hi Duane) on Facebook who also knows on FB pretty much everyone in the SF/fantasy/horror field, and who oftens posts when one of these people has a book going cheap on Amazon. Thus it was he drew attention to Braum’s book when the ebook was 99 cents on US Amazon about a week ago; I checked local Amazon, found the local price was similar ($1.54 in real money), and decided to invest.

Our hero is a young man, David, spending Xmas holidays in Cancun in the mid-80s. (The book is somewhat more recent than the Kane book from the other day, having first been published in 2019.) In the course of said holiday, he meets a young woman called Anne Marie and the two soon discover some of the old ways are still alive in the Yucatan jungles, and they have their own parts to play in the events. Fairly short book, properly a novella I suppose, wherein perhaps lies its main problem, i.e. the speed at which things have to happen, it probably could’ve done with a bit more breathing space. I did, however, find the critique of the effects of colonialism on the area interesting, with the white outsider David being more bothered by the damage that the spread of tourism has done to the natural beauty of the area while the Mayan locals acknowledge that it potentially gives them something more than the old chicle plantations did. It’s not great but it only cost me a buck fifty (rather better than the nearly $24 for the print edition), and I liked it enough that I want to read Braum’s other stuff now.

Darkness Weaves

FINALLY, book #10 for 2023, Darkness Weaves by Karl Edward Wagner… which was originally published in 1970 as Darkness Weaves With Many Shades in somewhat bastardised form before being republished with the shorter title in Wagner’s preferred version. I presume, therefore, that the Gateway Essentials I just finished is actually the latter one… Whatever, though, this was quite a lot of fun. Our “hero”, Kane, is to all intents and purposes the biblical Cain, a feared and fearsome warrior cursed with immortality yet not completely indestructible, living in a Conan-esque prehistory (though there are apparently later Wagner stories featuring him in the modern world) with a vaguely Lovecraftian tinge to things as well. I haven’t read a lot of sword & sorcery or heroic fantasy or whatever it’s called, so this is not uncharted but still rare territory for me… one thing I did not care for was the dialogue, which tended towards the anachronistic; I dislike overdoing archaism in fantasy settings as well (looking at YOU here, E.R. Eddison), but the reverse seemed just out of place. Good story, though, and some very crunchy battle scenes. Will read more Kane.

Important images 2

Another random selection from the picture library. Again, I don’t know how to explain why I find some of these images “important”; just accept that they are. Copyright in anything posted in this series obviously remains with whoever the original rights holder(s) may be; the latter can contact me at any time if I’ve posted something they’d rather I didn’t and I’ll remove it.

Beyond this point be nudity

Continue reading “Important images 2”