#277

I just saw that he wrote a run (two volumes worth?) of Moon Knight. Have you read it? Was going to check the library this afternoon. I was a fan of Lemire’s indy stuff, didn’t know he was working on Marvel stuff now. Moon Knight has always been a character that befuddled me. I think it could be a good book though.

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#278

It’s still going and is excellent. Really focused on mental illness as a metaphor. Good series.

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#279

I lost interest after Ellis dropped Moon Knight, but I’ll give it another go. I have a Marvel Unlimited subscription, which I love.

#280

IMO, the Lemire Moon Knight is better than Ellis.

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#281

Cool. I’ll dig back in. Thanks for that.

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#282

You should also check out Lemire’s new ongoing series called Black Hammer. Really good.

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#283

Just finished reading Daniel Clowes Patience. It’s quite fun in its take on the old time travel theme.
Nothing really new in how he solves the big ol’question: what happens if someone goes back in time to change events? But it still surprises you with the ending somehow. There’s maybe too much text in it, but that’s Daniel Clowes (and European/American, authorial graphic novels in general) I guess. Anyway, it was an enjoyable and enticing read, as most Daniel Clowes is!

http://www.danielclowes.com/Covers/PatienceWeb.jpg

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#284

I just finished Maylis de Kerangal’s Mend The Living, which is far out in front for ‘book of the year’ for me. I don’t want to say too much here, and most of what I would say is covered by M John Harrison’s review for the Guardian. Suffice to say: poetic, singing, and bursting with empathy and sympathy; sentences that go on for pages and dart around consciousness; incredible lingusitic play, and a stunning piece of translation.

(American readers: Réparer les Vivants has been retitled The Heart for your territory, because subtlety is dead).

#285

I’m also a big fan of Warren Ellis! I also read a couple of his novels: Gun Machine started great but ended just okay, but Crooked Little Vein was excellent!

Just finished Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and now enjoying the crap out of The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie.

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#286

a classical composer from vienna, herbert zipper started an illegal orchestra at dachau
with no instruments, clandestine built violins etc…
while there he composed the 'dachaulied

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#287

I have just finished Cosey Fanni Tutti’s art sex music (faber) a diary based chronological account of her time in the various incarnations of Coum , Throbbing Gristle, Chris and Cosey plus her work in the sex industry and the ways she turned this into her various fine art projects. Found her writing style quite flat and monotonous- though the periods covered and the scenes describes are quite fascinating if you grew, like me, with TG being one of your first entries into the avant garde, noise and art. I didnt come away from the book with any great insights into the music, their thinking or ideas and there isnt much detail about their equipment and processes. At first her exposing of Genesis P-O as a bully and hypocrite is rather delicious. ( I think we had guessed the egomaniac part already) but 200 pages on this theme gets a bit tiring. The whole XTG saga reads as quite a depressing one ending in lawsuits and debts.
In the light of her frank discussions on sex and working as a stripper and porn model I thought there might be some conclusions about the sex industry but she keeps it all quite anecdotal. I also thought she might have undertaken some re-evaluation of TG stuff- was any of it over sensationalist or irresponsible ? Cosey doesn’t seem to reflect on any of this. The little girl photo on the cover of their DOA lp gets mentioned a couple of times- but no suggestions that this might have been going too far- or at least acknowledging that this kind of shock tactic comes across very differently today , post Jimmy Savile. I felt it was a shame she didn’t get into any of these kind of issues.

The Nick Cave quote on the back ‘I love CFT’ is quite telling - it neatly side steps whether her writing is any good. But reading the book you do find your self loving her and admiring all she has done. her work ethic was amazing and she has been under represented and under estimated. She has also been through some really horrible times , bad health and some awful family situations and there is a definite honesty to the way she portrays all this.
I suppose it wasn’t the book i hoped it would be- and I generally don’t like autobiographies anyway- so you don’t take my criticisms too seriously. If you ever liked TG, Coil, C&C, PTV there is loads of fascinating background details to pick up on.

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#288

Had a weekend away and finished:
Christopher Priest: A Dream of Wessex = fantastic very dream-like story about a collective lucid dreaming experiment conducted in a bunker beneath Maiden Castle in Dorset. Pastoral futurism. It possibly inspired Inception (Nolan made the film of Priest’s The Prestige) and definitely influenced If Then by Matthew Abuiata.
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy = I read it as an amusing satire of corporate anthropology, think tanks and agencies (not a million miles from my day job). Not much plot, but entertaining and short.

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#289

That’s a Priest I don’t know - by and large, I completely adore his work. Pastoral futurism definitely puts it on the list (and already is drawing correlations to Pavane for me).

I had to give up on Satin Island. It was too much like reading friends’ blogs.

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#290

I finished Murakami’s 1Q84 a couple of days ago. I think it was a bit too long, and I didn’t like some parts of it but it was not bad overall. Definitely not his best, though.

And I just started Europe In Autumn (The Fractured Europe Sequence Book 1) by Dave Hutchinson, because it was recommended by Warren Ellis in a recent newsletter, and so far I really like it…

I also read the Kindle preview of “H is for hawk” based on previous recommendations in this thread and I’ll probably get it at some point but right now the Kindle version is twice the price of the massmarket book and even more expensive than the paperback (seriously, what’s up with ebooks pricing ?) so it’ll have to wait for a bit.

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#291

Generation П by Victor Pelevin (available in English as “Homo Sapiens”)

It’s as if Burroughs meets with Murakami in Moscow.

Generation_P.jpg400×526 33 KB

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#292

best endorsement i’ve heard in a while. i’m in!

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#293

Sorry for the late reply. Regarding Hope in Dark,

Absolutely. I think everything she’s written is gold.

#294

Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki

I’ve been getting books on minimalism from my library and this one has been pretty good. People who have gotten rid of most of their possessions are interesting to me, and while I don’t see myself doing it to the extreme shown in this book, I think there are a lot insights to take from the minimalism movement. The book also relates it to a number of different factors: information overload, endless consumption, Zen in the Japanese culture, and recent natural disasters in the country.

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#295

Perusing this thread has added way too much to my future reading list. My contribution to the human project of creating, consuming, and digesting information over the past couple of months:

Recently finished for pleasure: Legimitation Crisis (Habermas), The Ethics of Ambiguity (de Beauvoir), Achieving Our Country (Rorty), Catch-22 (Heller), The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Clark)

Currently in progress for pleasure: Composing Electronic Music (Roads), The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), The Discourses (Epictetus), and rereading Ulysses (Joyce)

Recently finished for work: Quantum Hall Effect (Tong)
In progress for work: Mirror Symmetry (Hori, et al.)

Of course all of this is in between thesis writing and other project wrangling, and so the going has been too slow.

#296

Loved this and trying to get my head around the concepts. Brian Cox’s The Quantum Universe (And Why Anything That Can Happen, Does) covers the same material and is well explained. I find ideas resonate better when communicated differently ie two different approaches to explaining the same idea

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