Vincent > Recent Status Updates

“We will go downstairs and smoke, it is time to dissolve” yuppp i know that’s right

Love that one of the stories is just a thirty page reddit post written by the final boss of rich techie millennial incels

Fun to read on edibles in bed

https://share.google/7gLlZs7JoeUsUTGV7

Completely unrelated to this book but they added half and quarter stars so I’m gonna be annoying and redo every review I feel needs it

“If Earth had been hit by plague, by fire, by war, by radiation, sterility, a thousand things, you name it, I’d still stand by her; I love her; I would fight every inch of the way there because my whole life is knit to her. And she’d need mourners. To die on a dying Earth—I’d live, if only to weep.”

“What is this poop place?” -Ignatz Thugg

First story down, pretty fun, very pulpy (I mean Conan is like THE pulp guy), incredibly violent. It really does feel like reading Frank Frazetta’s artwork. Also incredibly mired in racist views that even of its time feel a bit absurd. Race is clearly an obsession for Howard, although he’s apparently less overtly racist than Lovecraft. It doesn’t rear its head a ton but when it does, yeesh it’s bad.

Reading the recently released 50tg anniversary version and not this one, can’t find that version on the app tho might still be too new

Love that the upon hearing of a machine that can travel through the time the H.G Wells self insert character suggests for its use “to discover a society, erected on a strictly communistic basis.” And also that apparently an earlier iteration of this story was a thinly veiled metaphor about class warfare. Did not know Wells was like that.

Guys Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t THAT complicated you just need a solid background knowledge of: tarot, Kabbalah, the Weimar Republic, 1930s business cartels, drugs, chemistry, actual rocket science, physics, advanced statistics, Pavlovian psychology, the German genocide of the Herero people in Africa, seances, Hansel and Gretel, the extinction of the Dodo bird, secret societies, Vietnam, JFK, Nixon, and some others.

Love that Pynchon wrote Slothrop’s ancestor William Slothrop to be his own ancestor accused of heresy William Pynchon, the bit about the pigs and the comparison to those passed over by God in predestination is some of the closest this book has gotten to love which it otherwise is fairly absent of. Also the bit where a tree starts talking to Slothrop was fun.

Pökler :(

WOOOOO HALFWAY

In a book chock-full of passages and sections I could call some of the greatest writing I’ve ever read, pages 319-334 stand as maybe the most clear cut example so far.
“The history of the old Hereros is one of lost messages.”

Forcing myself to actually read Pilgrims Progress and Robinson Crusoe in college paying off lmao

Finished part 2 much more straightforward than part 1, lots of great scenes and humor, on to the real meat of this book in part 3.

Every old white Argentinian anthropologist used to be like “we locked these native people up in a cage and put them on display and they’re depressed and don’t rly move around a lot. That must mean their whole race is naturally depressed and lethargic.” And everyone else was like wow that’s fascinating, let’s use this to “scientifically” support our genocide of them.

The funniest, most dense, confusing, paranoid, and insane 180 pages I’ve ever read

So far this has reinforced my avoidance of golden age sci-fi and the whole notion of science fiction creating a better future is bullshit, new wave is where it’s at

Treating as sort of a joint read with gravity’s rainbow cause I can only handle so much of that in one day, excited to learn about something I have only vague ideas about, first chapter is already incredibly insightful and I am a bit out of my depth but you don’t learn how to swim without getting in. Clearly written with a lot of love.

Page long description of Slothrop’s desk, feels so good to be reading Pynchon again I feel like I’m being drugged while reading this. Not as lost as I thought I might be tho

Le Guin is Le GOAT

Van Vogt simultaneously writing a satirical critique of hypermasculine attitudes in the Diamondian settlers yet also (so far) sincerely writing the prostitute revolutionary who “can only use sex to get men on her side” as someone to be seemingly saved by marriage to the main earth man is certainly something. He was born in 1912 so that checks out ig. Also rly funny that payphones exist in the year 3819.

Finished Empire Star, the novella attached to the book in the double. I don’t know which he intended to be read first but I picked Empire Star cause it was shorter. It’s a neat little romp about Comet Jo a “simplex” man and his journey to deliver a message to the galactic capital and into multiplexity which involves recognizing multiple POVs and a cyclical, disjointed view of time. Looking forward to Babel 17