Jason Bakker

I finished this book a week ago, and loved it. Now, I'll just come out and say it: I hadn't even heard the name Cromwell before; I've got smatterings of historical knowledge regarding certain eras, but my knowledge of Henry VIII's reign consisted of knowing that: one of the Henrys had a bunch of wives at some point the Church of England was established I don't even have a third dot point. So, coming to this book from that perspective was pretty cool; I had no idea that this base-born Cromwell fellow was going to rise to the station that he did, or that he'd play such a pivotal role in history, and learning about that rise as it "happened" was very enjoyable. I purposefully kept away from Wikipedia while reading, so only afterward found out that Cromwell is usually painted in a negative light, and More positive, which offends me probably overly much, as from my perspective Cromwell is identifiable, big-hearted and well aware of his flaws, while More is just a dick. Actually, I have a question for the people here who do actually know something about the period - how fictional exactly is Mantel's take on the events that occur? I realise that a lot of the details were probably estimated (for instance how Mantel has mentioned that she put two and two together regarding Cromwell's crying being partially due to the loss of his wife and daughters), but can I give it a similar level of credence I'd give another source of information on the topic that's labelled "non-fiction"?

Just started listening to this based on your recommendation, and it's amazing. The voice-work in the pilot is a little patchy, but it's fine from the next episode onward. Delectable. Thanks!

After seeing electricblue mention the podcast Selected Shorts in the Cosmicomics Book Club thread, I thought I'd change this topic to be about audible short fiction in general. Does anyone have any other recommendations? The Selected Shorts podcast: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/selected-shorts/id253191824?mt=2 XML: http://selectedshortspri.pri.libsynpro.com/rss

I keep forgetting to jump on here and mention it, but a lot of the discussion around Sim City really reminded me of Donald Antrim's reading of Donald Barthelme's "I Bought a Little City", the second (I think) episode in the podcast. Whenever someone on Thumbs or 3MA would say something like "I created my city" or "I just had to keep bulldozing suburbs" it'd jump into my mind. I'd love to play a game that dealt with city management in the way it's treated in Barthelme's story.

I'm similarly unsure of whether my feelings about this are fair, but I definitely noticed this while reading and felt it was a shame to have all of these stories be from a slightly antiquated male-centric perspective. The story that reached the furthest away from this was maybe The Aquatic Uncle, where Qfwfq's partner seems to take an active interest in how living underwater works - however, she ends up partnering with the Uncle and falling back into that role of possession. There're probably a lot of reasons why it'd be harder than I imagine it to be, and it's hard to know how essential the male-centrism and focus on possessiveness is to Calvino's work, but I would have loved it if some of the stories were either from a female character's perspective, or contained women that felt more like characters rather than objects.

Interesting post! Do you have some examples of the Aboriginal myths that you mentioned? I'd like to read them. I think that your dislike of the character/writing is valid, but it seems to me an illogical step to assume that Calvino himself didn't like his own writing, especially considering that a lot of people (including me) do like the writing style in Cosmicomics. For my part, Qfwfq didn't seem like a consistent personality across the different stories - in some of them the narrator's thoughts and emotions seemed to come to the fore, while in others he disappears into the background after the introductory paragraph. It seemed to me more that Qfwfq was a being that contains the memory of several distinct lives - a different one in each story. To me, the last Dinosaur is a distinct character from the protagonist of The Distance of the Moon, who is distinct (though similar in some respects) to the narrator in The Form of Space. I don't want to suggest that my reading is the correct one - I'd be interested to hear how other people read the character of Qfwfq and how intact/separate he seems to them.

We're around. You guys still in the park? Say baboo!

Myself and a Thumbsian colleague are here for the week - we'd definitely be in for some kind of get together!

Finished the collection a few nights ago, and it was a fantastic reading experience for me. Calvino's rich prose shoots up past the clouds into the eternal, while simultaneously being grounded in these familial or small community relationships. I enjoyed all of the stories, but one that really struck me while reading was The Light Years. While I can see how it relates to life in a small community, with everyone watching, judging and being judged by everyone else, it seemed incredibly prescient in regards to social networks. The constant effort expended to display your life as you wish it to be perceived, the unforseeable (and possibly adverse) effects of what you actually choose to display; these are all issues that have come to the fore recently in regard to networks such as Facebook and Twitter. And on a more literal front, the way communication is broadcasted out from planets instead of directly passed from one to the other (even if the information is only really meant for one receiver), and the "character limit" of the signs, which affects the style of communication displayed upon them, is incredibly reminiscent of Twitter. The Distance of the Moon, the first story in the collection, may still be my favourite, but another that really intrigued me was The Form of Space. It was such a pleasing surprise to discover that Calvino was using the very words he was writing to express how these characters could move around while existing in only one dimension. In any case, I've moved on to Wolf Hall, but I bought a copy of The Complete Cosmicomics, so I have Time and the Hunter and the rest of the stories within to return to at a future date.

I started reading Cosmicomics about a week ago and am really enjoying it so far. If I had a recommendation for people reading it, it's that it is a collection of short stories, and thus should be read that way; one at a time, each as its own story. If you try to rush through them, you might find it a little fatiguing, particularly the little stylistic elements that are repeated in each story. It's an obvious point to make, but I'm mentioning it as I had a little trouble with it myself. After remembering this fact and slowing down a bit, I'm getting a lot more out of the collection than I otherwise would have been.

Definitely agree with you there. Over the past couple of years in particular Ubisoft have really established themselves as a leader in the field of overwrought storylines filled with extraneous detail. The Assassins Creed stories (at least the ones I've experienced) seem to have been written by a conspiracy nut.

I don't think the Assassin's Creed games would have existed without some portion of the team being very into history. Whether the impetus to add the future layer came from within the team or external we'll probably never know. When you're dealing with millions of dollars spent in development and marketing, you can see people choosing to hedge their bets. Which is unfortunate - the part of AC that's historical is the most interesting to me as well, and the futuristic elements really detract from it. On the board game front, Lords of Waterdeep is great. Another shorter form game that has the "easy to learn and difficult to master" thing sorted is Citadels. It's a hidden role card game where the roles change every round. It's expertly balanced, and full of bluffs and second guesses. Definitely recommended to people who are interested in dipping their toes into the board gaming world.

Just started reading Cosmicomics, and loved the first story. Stylistically it reminded me of the Bruno Schulz short story I heard read on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast - Father's Last Escape, from his book The Street of Crocodiles. From what I've heard it's a similar style of work, lying somewhere on the spectrum between short story collection and novel. In any case, based on the one "chapter" I've experienced from The Street of Crocodiles, I think it'd be a good future book-cast pick.

I really enjoyed this book, even though like others I found it a bit of a hard read. I had to force myself several times to go through a description or sentence multiple times, to make sure that I understood it, and especially early on I would be puzzling over a sentence for a minute or two before realising where the threads joined up. But all the way through, the tone, quality of writing and storytelling held me tightly. A few dozen pages in I was curious as to when it was written, and it actually blew my mind to find out that it was written in the mid sixties - I'd thought that it was far more contemporary than that. I'd just read The Great Gatsby, which very much feels, from a thematic and moral sense, a product of its time, whereas Oedipas' story felt intensely modern, and it's crazy to me that Gatsby is only two Cryings worth of years away. There are clues to the fact that it isn't, of course, but a lot of these probably flew over my head due to how little I know about the zeitgeist of the sixties (and the locations the novel is set in). Is San Narciso a real place? Speaking of which, I love how you guys were talking about conspiracy, and how the fundamental flaw of conspiracy is that it requires all of these external forces to be incredibly focused on the information that you are receiving - in essence, the conspiracy must orbit around you. You could say that believing in conspiracies is then fundamentally, shall we say, narcissistic? Ha ha! I also knew very little about Thurn and Taxis, and this really helped make the false history that he mixed in with the real all feel congruous. I'd never even thought about what happened before governmental postal services existed, and it's a completely fascinating area of interest - definitely something that I'm going to be researching further into. Finally, I think it's indicative of how much I got into this book that the first thing I did when seeing the link to this board game was click through, open up the largest resolution image of the cover that they had, and searched it for signs of a WASTE symbol or the Tristero. Damn you Pynchon.

Thanks for the detailed response - I've been meaning to respond to this for a while but wanted to wait until my thoughts had settled. After reflecting a while, I think I simply shouldn't have dove right into Tanner's Introduction after finishing the last page of the book. It is clearly designed to be of interest to someone who loves The Great Gatsby, has already read it multiple times, is really into the symbolism and wants insight into every minute detail and quirk that went into the writing of it. And for someone in that position, it's probably a valuable read. Also, I think I may have incorrectly understood some of his interpretations - he may not have actually meant that the East and West Egg represent the political right and left - more that West represented new money and East old, which is probably a pretty universal takeaway. In any case, lesson learnt - for future reads, I'm definitely going to let the book percolate in my mind a couple of days at least before getting into the ephemera surrounding it.

Love that D'Angelo moment up there. Thought I'd share my experience reading The Great Gatsby. I went into it fresh, having never read or studied it. The extent of my knowledge was a trailer from the upcoming film, which didn't really seem all that representative of the novel. Anyway, I enjoyed it quite a bit, but at the same time, even though it's rather embarrassing to admit, missed a lot of the allegorical elements, and wasn't really thinking of Nick as an unreliable narrator. Some of that stuff did come through of course, but I didn't stop to think about it, and it ended up being (on the unreliable narrator side) more of a general feeling of mistrust towards Nick, and a sense of the wishy-washy nature of his character. An example of this is the green light - I was definitely on board for Gatsby's discovery that by gaining Daisy's presence he'd lost something that couldn't be reattained, but the green light at the end of the dock was just that, an slightly odd-coloured light, a rather pointless (but perhaps grounding) little detail. This wasn't really a problem until I read the Introduction to my Penguin copy by Tony Tanner, which really dives into both of those elements; by the end of his Introduction, I felt somehow cheated by Fitzgerald, in that, by not having cottoned on to the fact that I should have been contemplating the symbolism and exactly how much Nick could have been re-contextualizing the story (Tanner suggests that we basically can't - and maybe shouldn't - trust anything), I had missed out on a significant chunk of the experience. The biggest examples of this include how Gatsby (apparently) symbolises America at that time; the West and East Eggs symbolises the political left and right; Daisy represents the America's future, the dream being perfect, the reality fatally flawed; Jordan Baker represents the automotive industry somehow (apparently her name is an amalgam of two brands of automobile popular at the time...) It's strange; usually I try as best I can to go into an experience totally naive to it, but I think in this particular case, my enjoyment of the novel would perhaps have been increased by having heard something about symbolism, allegory or unreliable narration beforehand, just to have those concepts on the mind while reading. In any case, it was good to hear the cast say that the symbolism isn't nearly as essential to the book as I'd thought after reading that Introduction. My misgivings about the allegorical elements aside, it still stands as a great piece of writing with some real emotion and pathos to it.

I've been learning Blender recently in order to create simple models for use with Unity - I've never actually used the game engine side of Blender. At the Melbourne Global Game Jam there's usually a Blender dev (I think) that makes games using it (ie. whirlstrom, GGJ 2012), but that's all I've heard about games developed with it.

Glad my post was useful! This morning I heard David Seradis reading Miranda July's "Roy Spivey", which somehow managed to both crack me up and be really affecting.

I don't know. Usually when I read a book I'm completely swept up in it, so much so that if I do spend a few moments not reading the page and thinking about what's occurred, I don't realise that I do so before continuing to read. I think the fact that I don't really stop to think and re-contextualise while reading means that I am less critical of a work than I could be. On the plus side, a good book to me is the most immersive fictional experience there is, more than film or even games, I think.

This is a couple of years old now, but I've recently really gotten into Mike Patton's Mondo Cane, an album of mid 20th century Italian pop music covers: It combines a baroque style with a core of honest emotion and personality that is just a really enjoyable listen.

Man, thought I'd posted in this a while ago. Anyway, I'm rodomont/Jason - been listening to Idle Thumbs for a few years, and my claim to fame is that I actually got to meet Chris, Jake, Sean (and bonus Nels!) at GDC this year, at a dive bar in the Tenderloin. Chatted to Sean and Chris a bunch, got to show them the game I was working on (which bugged out, of course). I already can't really remember much of what we talked about, but my overriding memory is that Jake was super tired due to crunching on The Walking Dead, and I think I made him a little sick by calling him Big Bird. Sorry Jake. Anyway, good to meet you all

Regarding Veronica, I feel like her inscrutableness is maybe part of Barnes' point - she's a part of Tony's past and we (and Tony) find her as impenetrable as the truth about his past. It seems a bit of a leap to say that because we can't ascribe motive to her in a way that makes sense to us, her actions can only be interpreted as a literary device. I think it comes down to how much faith you place in the author. I really loved the first cast. It was great to hear you guys voice your opinions and discuss the novel. An interesting facet of The Sense of an Ending that wasn't discussed as much on the cast is how the act of suicide is portrayed in such a positive, or at least non-judgemental light in the book. I found it fascinating how deftly Barnes brings you on-side with Tony's view that Adrian taking his own life was a noble, even altruistic act. I don't think that the point is to make the reader think that suicide is okay, but it certainly made me think a lot more about the varied reasons people have for killing themselves, and exactly how much our instinct of self-preservation takes a part in our disparagement of the act of suicide. My copy of Cloud Atlas is in the mail - looking forward to next month!