Kevin Carson > Recent Status Updates

Chapter 22. The techies, with their enthusiasm for actually doing and learning stuff, would fit perfectly into watershed culture. But Zealand holds them in contempt because they're interested in constructive activity instead of playing dominance games with the Gordon Gekko wannabes. If they decided to walk out and contribute their skills to the watersheds, the human tapeworms upstairs would starve within a week.

The Bet's parties sound like heaven. Zealand parties sound like hell.

"...the gods created life to try and make meaning. It’s ultimately hopeless, and even gods die, but the effort is real. Will always have been real, even when everything is over and no one remembers.”

Almost finished with the first essay. The authors make some legitimate points, if they could write straightforward language, and in shorter paragraphs with clear topic sentences and subsequent sentences that clearly develop the topic sentences -- instead of Continentalese. Why the f**k does anyone intentionally write like this??? They've obviously got a hardon against positivism, so I guess it's a signaling device.

Finished Sophocles, and pausing to read something lighter before I move on to Euripides.

Just finished the tragedies of Aeschylus. I'm taking a break to read something lighter and more recreational, before I resume with Sophocles.

Something about this guy's writing style makes me imagine everything in the voice of a 1950s newsreel announcer.

"Let me ask you something. In your house, if you get mad, does anyone ever say to you 'Count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram'?"
"No. No, man. No, man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin somethin like that, man."

Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come.... That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.

He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of
roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to
him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back
and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music
on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.

Just started volume 2 a couple of days ago

It's a really great story. But the viewpoint character, Brooks, is cringe AF. He doesn't talk -- he gushes and blurts.

Duke Goga and his hunting party in the tile mural, haggard and wasted from a hunt that will never end, remind me of "Ghost Riders in the Sky." Appropriate, since the song inherits a chain of tropes going back to "Wild Hunt" legends, with Wotan and other Indo-European Sky Father figures heading the party.

"For much of that day I had been secluded in my room, intently pursuing
a typical activity of my early life and in the process badly ravaging what
previously had been a well-made bed."
*clears throat*

I'm not really into slashfic, but I enjoyed the superhero plot and getting to know the characters. It's not hard to tell it's a first novel, but I've seen some of the recent short stories Kingsley has written on superhero themes and how she's grown as a writer, and it makes me eager to read Allies and Enemies and see how the story develops.