Artylo > Recent Status Updates

Don't even get me started on this running joke about the fucking crofters of Shetland Isle. This is the least illustrative example of a microcosm of social values to ever be printed onto paper.

I'm trying to take this book seriously, but it keeps not letting me:
Women's friend groups are apparently nothing like men's friend groups, because unlike the mutual respect of individuality men have for each other, women merely exchange tales of childbirth and cooking recipes; "deriding the men's desires or clumsiness, questioning the moral and intellectual superiority of their husbands and men in general."

If all that Goffman writes is true and completely ordinary, then I am the one who is dead from the neck up. If every man and woman in my life is so transfixed, gazing into my eyes, only so that they may see their own reflection, then I'm sorry, I cannot play this game of infinite pretense. If I am to only see myself in what others think of me, then put the bullet in my gun and let me have my peace, you animals.

If there ever was a book to signify that death is the only appropriate response to life, this would be it. Erving Goffman's work is as dry as sawdust, and rejects the true presentation of the self as possible or anything remotely valuable. Layers of approximations upon simulacra - masks and performance art - disingenuous pursuits of social status. Re-define as many words as you want - you're dead from the neck up.

I've gotten to the part about Attitude. There was this bit before it about writing using only nouns and verbs - avoiding adjectives and adverbs. This was posed as a challenge, but I feel like I'm already avoiding a lot of descriptors as it stands. That and apparently experimenting with point-of-view, which I have been doing for some chapters of FON and some of my critique. Sometimes it's you, sometimes it's me.

There is a character called Vegel and this book, and his disappearance is referred to as "the Vegel matter." lol lmao even

We're 3/4 through, and they've just introduced an evil Mesopotamian artefact of unspeakable body horror - this is the fucking シルバー事件 again and I am here for it. Victoria Ash would call me a smart boy and I'd expire instantly and be refused entry into heaven for all the unchristian thoughts that'd enter my head. The only minus is Malkavians not being weird and prophetic enough.

I'm not super in love with this, despite it being sexy 90s goth vampires. It's a little bit too heavy on description of things, places and actions, where you'd think the conversations with immortal Cainite vampires would be *the* interesting thing here. A happenstance conversation I had with a Spaniard reading these clan novels told me Toreador it was a slow start. I guess we'll see.

Don't even get me started on the biblical interludes. I was just, finally, getting my spirits up as Margarita enters the scene, only to be forced to bite the curb with two back-to-back episodes of Judas and Matthew Levi's wild ride.
If you want to read theological fan-fiction with extra steps, there are many great ways to do so. Well, three... there's three - Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

I look to this book and naively expect it to do its sole advertised function - fend of boredom - and every time, without fail, I act surprised when it manages to only intensify it.
It is becoming more and more apparent that mischief is the driving force behind all these events and there is no motive - they happen for shits and giggles. It's like watching someone else have fun instead of having fun yourself.

I-is... is... is that a character?
Is there an actual fucking character in my book? With stuff to do?
Someone who isn't just there to be a vessel for bizarre freak-show incidents to happen to them?

Only in Russia can you justify writing a 400-page book making fun of the socialites and the intelligentsia - it's why you lovely people like blowing up churches on Christian holidays.

Margarita you beautiful bitch!

Holy shit, there's a part two...

I've already suffered loss as a result of this book. I'm being evicted. My things are on the street. I've had a restraining order filed against me. She also beats me to within an inch of my life anytime she sees me.

Yet, I continue on reading - against my better judgement. Six more pages of lion-shaped epaulettes glinting in the sun. One more drop of poison for breakfast. Merry Christmas!

I am bouncing off of this book harder than the ball in an entire season of MBA Moscow Women's Basketball matches, so I have made the executive decision to change the language I'm reading it in, in the hope that it will stir something in me. It is incredibly annoying how it is only seldom funny.

I'm on Ch. 6 currently, and there's already a mild anxiety setting in as I get introduced to at least 10 new characters per page - given, middle and surname - and I don't remember a single one of them. I'm THE shy guy at parties, but this is worse. I would say I've never wanted a bomb to drop over Moscow, so that I don't have to worry about all these Russians any more, but that would be the third time this week.

Reading this as penance for making people read Roadside Picnic through sheer aura of fanaticism.
So far, in the first two chapters, I have read more paragraphs describing the colour of people's skin and/or the exact colour of their hair than whatever crypto-christian divine-comedy-esque self-flagellation is going on. Can't wait to see what the plaque under my cat's left tooth thinks about our lord Jesus Christ.

Next thing in a string of disappointing biographies: Daigo Umehara is born, goes to school, decides that he will in fact play video games very seriously, goes to an arcade in Tokyo, becomes Japanese Champion, somehow gets sent to America to fight Alex Valle, becomes World Champion, quits to work in a mahjong parlour for three years. The glue? Working real hard.

God bless Daigo, but this is a self-help book.

It's losing a little bit of momentum, but I'm still having a good time. There's only so many ways you can describe trudging through a tropical jungle, but I suppose you do tend to do that a lot over thirty years of guerilla warfare.

I am, however, no longer laughing at my shitty Werner Herzog impression, so it's taking a little bit out of the whole experience.

This is already great, but I can't stop laughing because I keep reading it in his voice and it cracks me up. I love this man so much.

"I grab him by the shoulder belt and tell him exactly what he is and just how his mother conceived him" is how I'd describe leaning in and whispering "Иди своей дорогой сталкер" softly into your ear.

Just read Ellison's review of the original Star Wars, and it's fun to think how on-the-nose he was about most of his observations. It being a western, dressed up in the guise of science fiction, about its influences in Flash Gordon; the works. What was most entertaining about his review was "the dispensers of mass information" all proclaiming in unison that "entertainment is back", like it's year of our lord 2025.

The more I read Ellison's reviews, the more I don't like them. He's very clear about exactly what he wants a review to sound like at the start of the book and he wasn't lying. That just so happens to be listing out a bunch of names and shoving a really acute kind of pedigree for film knowledge down your throat. It's disingenuous to say that that's all he does, but at times it certainly feels like it.

This book is fun. The Voice of Reason and Lesser Evil are obviously why they keep using quotes from this book in every subsequent media adaptation - the English translations are just that good.

I feel like, in the span of time it's taken me to read twenty more pages, I've become at least twice as opinionated on how unshakable in my style of writing I am.

Reading this for like the fifth time in the last decade and it still hasn't occurred to me that Wiedźmin (the short story) is one fifth of this whole book.

Slowly going to blow my brains out with how little I'm getting out of this book, and I mean that in both intellectual stimulation and entertainment. Unlike Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, there is no attempt to draw conclusions from what is written - allegedly left to the reader.
But the broad strokes conclusion I'm reaching is that philosophy is just science that is now proven wrong and left as a joke for the reader.

I've gotten to the part where this book just becomes a bunch of reviews for films I've never seen, and I feel this might put me off going further. I really wished it was more of those essays on review-writing and critique, with which it had so entertainingly started. If nothing else, I've got more movies to watch, I guess.