Alastair

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Alastair

  1. Idle Book Club Episode 7: By Blood

    I spent the first third of the book mildly anxious that the Zodiac twist you joked about might actually happen. It was a tremendous relief when the narrator himself entertained the idea, effectively ruling it out, in one of his feverish moments. That said, it did inspire me to read about the actual history there, and this artist's rendition immediately started informing my mental image of the narrator. Regarding ridiculous number of layers: I wasn't particularly bugged by the broader concept (plenty of amazing books have asked for that suspension of disbelief, and as The Argobot said, parts of this could certainly be amplified by the narrator) so much as the structure it took. Case in point: the adopted mother recounting the day she rummaged through the father's files. Tiny details and time-wasting missteps, in slavishly chronological order, building up to a big truth. Neither memory nor oral storytelling work like that (we want to start with the truth, then backtrack with details), so to have that indulgence compounded twofold, relayed via the patient when time is clearly of the essence, was just too much. It was tough to push past that point, though I'm very glad I did. Anyway, thanks for another great 'cast. A very respectful reading of a book that did a lot of things very, very right, even if it didn't quite exceed the sum of its parts.
  2. Yep. The Complete Cosmicomics is great value, but for book club purposes you can stop once you finish "The Spiral" (page 151).
  3. Idle Book Club Episode 7: By Blood

    Here's the , for those yet to hear. The one-line declaration at the end is just gut-wrenching. Vimes, I definitely agree about the tidiness of it all. Coming so soon off Foucault's Pendulum, which is built around the very concept of reverse-engineering connections, and Lot 49, where the connections are a delightfully hazy fever dream, it was slightly jarring to find everything lining up so neatly. Especially as the Professor's research was, by his own admission, very flawed. I was expecting him to find more dead ends, perhaps misleading the patient instead with outright lies. Speaking of straying expectations, this line at the end of part threw threw me off entirely. Did anyone else mistake this for a massive and disturbing tonal shift? That moment gave me shivers, so I was a little disappointed to find matters progress as before. But again, there is a lot I'm willing to forgive for a satisfying ending, and I have nothing but love for the final page.
  4. I have to say I've really loved the extra little audio flourishes and "wait, what?" moments of the last few episodes. That mild cheekiness in production, combined with the slow, inevitable reemergence of running gags, has really made the show feel more confident; very much in line with the show's original run. Please keep it up. Don't be afraid to go all Video Game Baby on us from time to time. We can take it.
  5. Since recovering from the Star Wars EU fandom of my youth (I got better, I swear), I have also loved revisiting Wookieepedia and saying "...what?" a lot. There's no better way to expose the absurdity of a decades-long, multi-author continuity than to simply recount it in a dry and factual manner. (See also: Books, Comic.) So yes. This episode really Resonated. Thank you.
  6. Idle Book Club Episode 7: By Blood

    There were points that really bugged me, but what worked for me really worked. I also found the framing story a lot more interesting than the core story. It was strangely powerful to experience the patient's life through the professor's ears. As readers, we're used to feeling curiosity and concern over very private matters, and that's fine; the characters exist purely for our entertainment. But here it feels voyeuristic and wrong in a way sure to resonate with anyone who's ever cast a stray or glance or thought where it didn't belong. The problem with a story-within-a-story structure is that it usually pushes things to the edge of believability, especially when we get into Russian nesting doll territory with written recollections of spoken anecdotes of other spoken anecdotes of journal entries and so on. Readers are often happy to forgive it in classics (Heart of Darkness, Wuthering Heights) while calling it out in modern popular fiction. While the patient's therapy sessions had their high points, I have to admit it really put me off how much her spoken words came across as written prose. She'd describe tiny details and time-wasting conversations I just couldn't buy as oral storytelling, let alone under the constraints of a one hour therapy session. Sure, it's playfully acknowledged ("oh, why did I waste time on the details?") but it pushed me completely out of a novel that had previously so effectively drawn me in. As for the World War 2 segments: No doubt there are far rawer, more authentic first-hand accounts out there; perhaps a better-read person would find nothing new at all. For me, though, these little moments offered a small but important amount of texture, filling previously empty gaps in my knowledge with detail and understanding. Accurate or not, some of history's most difficult-to-comprehend horrors are now feel just that little bit more real. I'm very grateful for that. Also important are the patient's musings on what it means to be adopted. For all the pros and cons of that plot line, it left me with a really strong appreciation how lucky I am to belong to a loving family; to belong anywhere. The mindset of an adopted child is now slightly less alien. Again, a distant but vital bit of appreciation I might never have otherwise gotten. This is why I'm willing to forgive some pretty major issues. Parts of this book are now a part of me. Well, that and my weakness for abrupt but thematically conclusive endings.
  7. Jeff Goldblum

    I trust you're all keeping up with the sage advice of Blumbot on twitter? My favourite thing about this bot, besides his beautiful existence, is the identity of the one person he follows.
  8. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Kurt Vonnegut

    Wow. That's high praise coming from Adams, who by all accounts would struggle, um, ah, pace about the room, begin, stall on, scrap, restart and ultimately run a bath to avoid writing every single sentence. Each of which, in finished form, came across as spontaneous wit.
  9. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Kurt Vonnegut

    I recently finished Breakfast of Champions, which was a pleasant surprise. My previous Vonnegut experiences, Slaughterhouse and Galapagos, had prepared me for the formula: a heavily foreshadowed outcome, a narrator only peripherally involved as a character, and a story that gradually fills in the gaps until complete. This was fine. He's welcome (if I may unfairly and not-at-all-seriously exaggerate for a moment) to write the same book over and over. It's a very good book. But this one really threw me off. By the time the foreshadowed event came to pass, the focus of the book had shifted entirely to a different character, rendering the big event almost a background detail, and casting everything that led up to it in a whole new light. After quickly coming to appreciate Vonnegut's work as literary comfort food, it was nice to be so completely blindsided. Clearly, the man has many more tricks up his sleeve.
  10. Books, books, books...

    Yeah. You guys are great.
  11. Not to speak for the readership (being such a bright and literature bunch), but personally, this podcast / forum / broader community have been my gateway drug into that world. Without this thread, I never would have known The Art of Fielding existed. If the chance for an offhand reference or recommendation ever comes up, please don't hesitate. I guarantee it's going to make someone out there very, very happy. It is a hell of a book.
  12. Seconded. Richard Morant's narration was just spot-on: warm, articulate and world weary. I did regret not being able to stop and take notes (well, iPhone photographs) of some of the more memorable passages, but it really added a wonderful extra dimension to the experience.
  13. It's a great relief to hear there's more on this, ah ha ha, "easy" level. Thank you. This experience - as well as reading Greg Brown's review of Gravity's Rainbow - has had an interesting and happy side effect: Infinite Jest is suddenly a much less daunting prospect. It feels like a huge weight has been lifted, actually. I have to admit I knew nothing about Pynchon before this book club episode, and in fact assumed he was a long-dead writer. Learning Lot 49 was the product of a young man somehow made this book less elusive, and I can't quite put my finger on why. It's been fun to read up on the man's history (or lack thereof) and his endearing aversion to being photographed (which at times feels less like a neurosis and more like a running gag he's willing to push as far as the press will let it slide). And I love that, of all places, he chose to reveal his voice to the public in latter-day Simpsons, Hearing the man speak, I can now imagine his characters as even more frantic and energetic than they come across on the page.
  14. Just shamelessly coping and pasting from my Goodreads review to save coming up with another clumsy simile. I particularly loved this episode of the 'cast (which, it bears repeating, is honestly my favourite part of the Thumbs revival). It was a bit of a relief to find so many of my own weird thoughts, struggles and favourite passages turn out to be the norm. And, as Sean "Bestseller" Vanaman said, this show can make you retroactively enjoy a book that little bit more.Alongside Foucault's Pendulum, I got a weird (probably less justified) Catch-22 vibe from a lot of the character interactions. The broader conspiracy felt like the "game" from Foucalt's Pendulum viewed from the other side, with no insight into its creation. The characters, likewise, feel like products of Joseph Heller's world, stripped of that satirical context you need to make sense of it all. More tangibly, Oedipa's walk through San Francisco left me with almost exactly the same feeling as Yossarian's walk through Rome. Relentlessly bleak, but so well written you can't help but be uplifted by the delivery and payoff. If Pynchon's shortest, most accessible book is this much of a struggle, I can't say I'm all-caps PSYCHED just yet to take on Gravity's Rainbow. However - to steal a very important, eye-opening word from the podcast - Pynchon has won my trust. I feel like a major mental block has been removed, now I've seen for myself he knows exactly what he's doing.
  15. I like that Greg Brown is basically the unseen third/fourth/fifth Thumb by this point. All that's missing is the endearing nickname.
  16. I was lucky enough to escape this novel in high school, so it was much easier to accept this book at face value. Reading this on my own terms - oblivious to curriculum-mandated metaphors, and rapidly approaching Nick Carraway's age - felt like the perfect time. I was more in love with the storytelling more than the story itself (such beautiful economy!), but it really did pay off wonderfully near the end, where an apparent blank slate of a narrator found a voice of his own. The "I'm thirty" moment really resonated, almost uncomfortably so, and had me staring at the ceiling at 2am, hours after finishing that amazing final page. That kind of reaction can't be downplayed. It is pretty great.
  17. Plug your shit

    I'm really, really proud of how this turned out. What started as a friend's microblog post creating haikus from words on shampoo bottles evolved into a lavish relaxation tape parody. Writing and narration is by Andrew McIlvaney, with additional voices by Chad McCanna. I handled music and production. Close your eyes, take a deep breath and rinse your anxiety away.
  18. Books, books, books...

    With this in mind, I'm planning to shake things up by trying his shorter non-fiction, with Six Walks in the Fictional Woods at the top of the stack. (That stack has gotten measurably taller since starting Pendulum. That book alone is a long-term commitment. Why not take it all the way?) It sounds like he infuses his lectures with beautiful prose as much as he infuses his beautiful prose with lectures. You people have gotten me far, far, far too excited about starting Wolf Hall now. As with Infinite Jest, it's hard not to spend a little time on these forums without feeling pre-emptive exhilaration by proxy.
  19. Books, books, books...

    Just one third into Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, I'm taken aback at just how darn clever it is. This is what happens when a very, very smart person applies his powers to storytelling. I've come to return to the book every day like an old friend, but I still have no idea what I'm getting into. One chapter it's an unusually literate thriller; the next, a beautiful and intimate journal fragment of a supporting character; the next, a pretentious word game; the next, quick-witted bar conversation worthy of a stage play; the next, a sincere historical lecture; the next, an on-the-nose parody of the lunacy of conspiracy theorists. Even when Eco halts the narrative momentum for a history lesson, part of my brain (a part only ever exercised by books like this; books that truly make you work for the payoff) finds it gripping stuff. Wherever this is going, Professor Eco, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
  20. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay seems to be the most widely loved.
  21. Just preemptively, based on the synopsis: I am so happy to see Spaceteam get a look in. In fact, I came here intending to start a thread about it. As a party game it ticks all the right boxes, and then some. (For a tiny but crucial bit of extra fun, I recommend raising your phone to the heavens as you beam up. Your friends arms' will follow with telepathic synchronicity.) Massive side-note: I'm weirdly startled to see the episode's Far Cry 3 banner feature several cassowaries. The bird was a local icon in the Daintree Rainforest, where I grew up, making it very disorienting to see outside that context. (It's the same sense of incompatible worlds colliding as, say, your spouse walking into your office, or of bumping into an old friend on the other side of the world). I love the creatures dearly and actively campaigned for their conservation as a child, helping plant the bizarre blue fruit that would invite them back into cleared land. Heck, my big creative outlet as a 12-year-old was a comic strip about a dysfunctional family of them. The cassowary is so fundamentally entangled in my own sense of identity that even digitally harming one is out of the question. If they are, as the banner suggests, a threat in the game, it's going to be... interesting. In fact, the promise of that very personal moral dilemma - and the stories that would come of it - make me a lot more eager to play Far Cry 3.
  22. It also helps that Opal was the one who instinctively recognised Flash was in love. Misplaced love with horrific consequences, but love that was, at least from his end, genuine. I assumed that from this, she was able to hold on to the idea of Flash as a human being making a human mistake. Fos, on the other hand, only learned all this after the fact. Without that context, his friend's actions must have seemed monstrous. I'm glad the 'cast covered that nice little detail of Opal continuing to write. I'd largely overlooked it, and just dwelling on it now is enough to bring some of the book's incredible warmth back to the surface. Oh, man. This book. For those who have read more Marianne Wiggins: which book would you recommend next?
  23. Do you stop to think?

    I've recently found the perfect compromise between acknowledging a memorable moment / phrase and keeping the momentum alive. I now take a phone photo of the paragraph. It's only a minor pause, and I can move on knowing the quotes will always be within reach, free to be revisited, analysed and internalised at a more appropriate time. It certainly beats stopping to take notes. I had to give that up when I realised I was rewriting Wodehouse verbatim.
  24. Infinite Jest

    Thanks for the advice. I'm settling on a madcap multimedia mix: the hefty hardcover with two bookmarks as a primary source, a kindle edition for outside reading, and the footnote-free audiobook on standby if I ever feel stuck and inclined to push things forward while driving/walking/etc. (though these passages would need to be revisited afterwards). All that remains is to... well, start. It's the Southern Hemisphere and I have a month off. Infinite Summer, here I come! I'd be very curious to see if and how the Book Club would take this on. (One month for pre-discussion, the other for an episode proper? A standard monthly instalment with earlier warning?) I hope the length isn't too challenging to work around, because it really would do readers a world of good. I've also grown to love the idea of worn-out books as trophies, particularly if it's a cheap paperback I've travelled with, where a certain degree of damage is unavoidable. Since filling my bookshelf with oversized hardcover books (each big enough to kill a man), the urge to collect/protect/display has been channelled elsewhere, leaving paperbacks - within reason - as fair game. But you're still dead to me if you dog-ear a borrowed book, Ian in fourth grade.
  25. Rest assured a reaction as intense and personal as yours is one of the most interesting and welcome things anyone can say in response to a book. Has anyone followed through so far with the desire to read Moby Dick? To be completely honest, the length daunts me, but I'm willing and eager to be convinced it's worth it.