Simon > Recent Status Updates

The chapter on militia leader Randy Weaver is way more evenhanded than I thought it would be, Ronson (who is himself Jewish) spends a lot of time dispelling the popular conception of Weaver as a Neo-Nazi since Weaver didn't get along with the Neo-Nazi segment of the militia movement at all. (Weaver's experience being that most Neo-Nazis start with astute criticisms of capitalism but then blaming that on the Jews)

This is full of interesting information about modern Japanese art I've never encountered before. For example I learned about a lot of explicitly left-wing popular art movements in the interwar era that were suppressed brutally by the Japanese authorities in the 1930's, and the Gutai movement who were the most important and influential art movement in Japan just after the war, basically an Asian equivalent to Fluxus.

Found out there are A LOT of volumes of Henk Kuijpers' "Franka", a comic book series about a red-haired woman private detective that has been running since the 1970's, that have no reviews on here. I have to correct that.

bought this from a friend a long time ago and flicked through it but gave it a dedicated read until now, will correct that

There are also some interesting call-backs to earlier Maigret novels, like in one chapter he has a flashback to Porquerolle, the fictional fishing village on the Riviera in "My Friend Maigret".

This one has a bit more complex a mystery at its heart as well than most of the other Maigret novels I've read, and requires more deduction and investigation to solve.

Finished re-reading my anthology of Robert E. Howard's Conan short stories and they are WAY better than I remembered so it definitely needs a new review. Yeah some of them have issues and REH tended to recycle plots in order to crank out as many stories for a paycheck just to make a living, but at his best he was one of the finest pulp authors ever.

I can understand why this is my mother's favourite Maigret novel, we get way more insight into the inspector's private life and his overall thought processes outside of work here than in the others since it follows him on vacation. UNTIL a murder is committed at the resort where he's staying!

I also like that it explores many of the unique social/economic structures peculiar to resort towns like Vichy in France.

AND around here Keel alludes to the homemade nuclear fallout shelter that Danish UFO contactee Knud Weiking and his Universal Link movement built in 1967 because aliens told Weiking via telepathy that nuclear war would break out on Christmas Eve that year.

Something else that strikes me on reread is how much contactee Woody Derenberger and his meetings with Indrid Cold, a human alien from planet Lanulos, takes up.

Decided to re-read this because winged humanoid stories have become a popular topic again in the Fortean subculture. There are some interesting anecdotes here like how Mothman witnesses often ended up feeling physically ill with similar symptoms as those frequently reported by UFO witnesses.

Interesting to read the rejected first draft of "The Phoenix on the Sword" and yeah it's nowhere as good as the version that was eventually published in "Weird Tales". Quite a few things in the plot aren't explained sufficiently, and Howard wasn't yet quite sure whether to make Aquilonia resemble Imperial Rome or mediaeval France more. (in the finished version Aquilonia is clearly a stand-in for ancient Rome)

Noticed a lot of internal continuity nods that I didn't on first reading, like how the demon Thog in "Xuthal of the Dusk" seems to belong to the same race of beings as a demon briefly glimpsed by a fleeing Conan in "The Scarlet Citadel". Or how the titular building in "The Tower of the Elephant" is briefly mentioned in "The Phoenix on the Sword" (which Howard wrote first), to pick another example.

Er ved at genlæse den her, fordi tidligere på året så en film der hentydes til i et af kapitlerne. ("Emanuelle i Amerika", der populariserede mange af vandrehistorierne om snuff-film og inspirerede David Cronenberg til at lave "Videodrome") Kan huske nogle af vandrehistorierne, men andre er nye for mig.

Beskrivelsen af internetkultur er meget sen-1990'er/tidig-2000'er, tingene er noget anderledes i dag.

It's really strange how REH's handling of ethnicity and gender constantly swerves between surprisingly progressive for the 1930's and then falling back into common prejudices of his era, at least he tried to transcend them unlike say H. P. Lovecraft.

I am also continually surprised by how many ideas he could pack into a single story, "Queen of the Black Coast" ends in some VERY strange places for a pirate adventure.

Decided to re-read this, Robert E. Howard could be hit-and-miss but when he was ON he was one of the best pulp authors who ever lived. It's amazing how "The Phoenix of the Sword" manages to in just 30 pages juggle cloak-and-dagger political drama, swashbuckling action and cosmic horror of a similar type as REH's friend H. P. Lovecraft trafficked in. The ancient Greek/Roman inspired setting is also a nice touch.

This is my favourite album in the series yet. Has the girls go back into the Stone Age to encounter giant ground sloths, giant flightless birds of prey, Lovecraftian eldritch abominations, various Native American tribes feuding over messianic prophecies, yet another time traveller faction (the woman who in this story invented time travel) and so so on. I love that I genuinely NEVER know what happens next!

I am starting to really enjoy this, gone from one of my least favourite Maigret novels to one of the best. Simenon pushes the limits for how many dysfunctional and toxic relationship dynamics you can depict in a novel that's less than 150 pages long. (it's about a guy who thinks his wife is conspiring to murder him... and everyone involved turns out to be involved in an incredibly convoluted love dodecahedron)

I am giving this a re-read. I remember this as one of the less interesting Maigret novels but I am really enjoying it this time. Similar atmosphere as Henry Miller's "Quiet Days in Clichy" in that it depicts the darker and more dysfunctional aspects of mid-century Paris except here it focuses on people who still have to keep up appearances of normality and respectability.

This has a really well-written portrayal of a small town in Southern France and the different people living there, their internal conflicts and dark secrets which start spilling out as the investigation continues. Reminds me of the French equivalent to the small towns in the Southwestern US where Ross Macdonald and Jim Thompson frequently set their novels, now that I think of it.

Picked up a bunch of Georges Simenon's novels about Inspector Maigret a while ago and decided to dive into them, this one has him called to a small fishing village on the Mediterranean coast to solve the murder of someone who claimed to know Maigret but he had never heard of. Perfectly captures the social dynamics and atmosphere of the Riviera in the early 1950's, and how jarring all that was to a Parisian.

Learned A LOT about Argentina's history from this, especially the fact that Britain and Spain fought over it (the seeds of the Falklands War in the 20th century) with the indigenous population not considering either of those 2 European colonial empires better or worse than the other.

I wonder if Milo Manara and Hugo Pratt were inspired to write this from Francois Bourgeon's "The Passengers of the Wind"?

Interesting combination of serious character-driven drama with outright pornography of the type that I thought went out of fashion after the 1970's but I guess it stayed popular in Italy well into the 1990's? Also shows an impressive level of attention to historical accuracy while we're at it.

for the most part less interesting than "Last and First Men" since so much of it's given over to the not-very-exciting private life of a WW1-era ambulance chauffeur after the war ends, but it has an interesting digression of a civilisation of intelligent lemurs who developed a complex religion (and another about a hyperintelligent but physically weak mutant human subspecies) that's classic Stapledon worldbuilding

I like that one of Inara's clients is an Alliance officer out to avenge war crimes committed by an Independent military unit that Zoë belonged to, and Jayne gets as many really funny moments as he got in the TV series.

The sequel to "Last and First Men" where a member of a distant human-descendant species millions of years in the future undergoes a type of trance regressing through his evolutionary history, and inhabits the body of a man living in 1930's Britain allowing author Olaf Stapledon to satirise contemporary British society in much greater depth than in any of his other books. Curious to see where this goes...

this is MUCH more interesting than the other "Serenity" comic book I read, "Those Left Behind", this one explores a lot of aspects of the setting that were at best shown briefly if not only hinted at in the TV series and the film

Re-reading this it becomes clear to me that Moebius' main background as a comic book artist was in the Western genre, under his birth name Jean Giraud. Both this and his other SF comics like "Arzach" and "Edena's World" are full of picture compositions straight out of a film by John Ford or Sergio Leone.

Another of Stapledon's predictions that are unintentionally comical to read in 2026 is that in his estimate manned spaceflight would not take place until millions of years in the future, by which humanity would have evolved into a race of telepathic giants. (genetically engineered by brains in vats commanding a elf-satyr-like slave caste) Who would conquer Venus and evolve into bat-people.

likewise it is first on this 3rd read or so that I pay attention to the role played in the chaotic and labyrinthine plot by the Bakallites, an enigmatic order of mystics who compete with both Major Grubert and Jerry Cornelius for dominion over the pocket universe hidden within a hollow asteroid where the story takes place

Giving this another reread, it's fascinating that I consider different things important about "The Airtight Garage" every time I read it - today the Gnostic Christian allegories and anti-colonialist political subtext aren't what I pay most attention to like they were last time I read it

the Martians who appear halfways through seem to have been the inspiration for the alien in the recent film "Nope", now that I think of it