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Just finished Craig Ferguson's fantastically candid and funny memoir American On Purpose.

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"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews

The Children Of The Arbat

About to start The Master and Margarita book. Went to see the play so now i'm interested in the origins. Incredibly complex.

Killing Pablo

The hunt for and assassination of the world's biggest drug dealer.

That's one I've always wanted to read.

Here's what I've finished since my last post*

The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne (re-read)
Epidemic Disease and Human Understanding: A Historical Analysis of Scientific and Other Writings by Charles De Paolo

school reading:

Linear Algebra: A Matrix Approach by Lawrence Spence et al.
Calculus: Early Transcendentals by Jon Rogawski.


*Not all of them were started recently

Bangkok Tattoo

Been hitting up some of the lines recos. And lo, they have been good



The King of Trees by Ah Cheng

An interesting take on the 'Cultural Revolution', with the emphasis on personal relationships built during that time, and all the depravities and excesses cast merely as backdrop. The first of the three stories struck me as more of a parable, and was in some ways the least effective for all that (I don't think even the hardiest soul can kick a whetstone in two). The idea of recreating that time with a 'ground level' approach is still pretty effective though.

(+)

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The Golem by Gustav Meyrink

A febrile dreamscape so organically jagged and convincingly twisty it's like being lead down a wrong path in Aleister Crowley's mind. The opening sections were such a well executed mesh of thunderous, sibilant, morphing aspects that I almost jumped out of my skin and didn't come back. Glad I did though, as it's many things this story. A series of conspiracies, told amongst architecture lit by gas lamps and the glow on eyes and skin. A story peered at through many windows.

If it has downsides they stem from the author's own strengths. A man that thought the philosopher's stone could be found in the sewers beneath Prague can conceive of some fairly fanciful things. For all the descriptive dexterity on show many of the conceptual tracts terminate in gnostic nonsense. One 'chose the red seed' strand even had me thinking of the Matrix. But on the plus side, he really plumbs some human depths, all while conjuring up a fantastically dark ride.

++

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"Yellow Kid" Weil as related to WT Brannon

Although not quite a bedside shot at redemption, these recollections of Joe 'The Sting' Weil should still be considered 'too much of a good thing'. There are cinematic levels of adventure here that beggar belief: from conmen fleecing conmen in a parade of party dress and silky subterfuge, to failed escapes ending in slides down oiled lift wires (towards giant enraged victims), and 'seat-of-your pants' improvisations that spin gold out of a mess.

It is possible these tales are on the money, as the rest of Weil's time is spent in the involving minutiae of setting up a job. That side certainly comes across as plausible. He also paints a convincing portraight of the life of a conman - spending big to maintain not just an illusion of respectable wealth, but to fuel the momentum of a life lived on the edge. Planning meticulously ahead, but enjoying the delayed hedonism of success all the more when it comes. What feels less rife with fidelity is his habit of spinning cons as nigh moral actions, exacted exclusively on greedy swine. It's pretty clear that he didn't spend his twilight years as a fund-raiser for charities purely because his criminal persona had been exposed. The man felt guilt. And that's doubtless because his cons also require him to extend the 'help me out' hand of collusion for them to work. (Plus not all his victims were 'Reich colluding' non-patriots and the like - some were just wealthy & trusting old dames. Which in fairness is info he does also share).

Regardless, this is a great slice of history & wonderful delve into the art of the con. He sashays through an era when a sign saying 'Bank' was nigh all you needed to get going in finance & anti-scam laws only protected hicks from out of town. He also shows a talent for innovating legit business practices, demonstrates the 'power of authority', & generally pulls the levers of psychology & society with aplomb. Plus any book that describes a 'telephone headset' inside a guru's headdress, connected to metal heels that interlock into the bottom of a 'meditation couch', is covering all the bases that I want from a 'magical' real-life tale.

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

War In The Shadows: The Guerilla In History

Wasn't impressed. Just random non sense offering hardly any story to follow.

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Am about one-third into this one:



...after having recently finished this:



...and this:



And I'm sure all this has nothing to do with the fact that I've been watching back episodes of this from the mid-1960s:

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Glad you enjoyed these, especially The Golem. What an odd, arresting novel that is. I'm currently reading an essay by Gershom Scholem ('The Idea of the Golem') that mentions Meyrink's novel (which he contrasts sharply with the historical legend/biblical roots but still gives high marks for imaginative appropriation).

It's kind of a proto-Philip K. Dick novel.

Sounds interesting, thanks for the review.

I've been doing a lot of reading lately.





Poetics of Cinema - Raul Ruiz
Now Wait for Lat Year - Philip K. Dick -
Camino Real - Tennessee Williams
The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
A Canticle for Leibowitz - by Walter Miller

(it doesn't feel right giving Kuhn any sort of "popcorn" rating. It's not that kind of book).

'As an encore he proved black was white and got run over on a zebra crossing'. (Agreed on the story being weak, but it reads better when you realise it came from episodic radio plays - where even he didn't know what was coming next. Taken like that you can enjoy his imaginative leaps a bit more. But to each their own )

Totally. The opener notes were a great grounding for it - what with his mental breakdown & genuine imprisonment/persecution. But the thing really takes flight. Shame it ends on an almost ridiculous note in some ways, but kinda shows it has a bit of everything - with the consistent Dick-style paranoia the one true constant. Powerful work and an intriguing guy.

Artistically it has none of the soaring of something like Meyrink, but it feels like a conjunction of story & history, made all the more real coz of it's clunkiness at points. There's 'dialogue' in there that's awful, but you feel someone might have bought it, because of the social story it came wrapped in. A mechanical tranche of yesteryear ultimately, but with a nefarious curly moustache stuck on

Could you summarise your feelings for it in five lines tho?

Angela's Ashes. I was expecting it to be dreary and depressing, but it's funny, sarcastic, and full of life. Still a bit on the depressing side, but not overwhelmingly so.

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"You, me, everyone...we are all made of star stuff." - Neil Degrasse Tyson

https://shawnsmovienight.blogspot.com/

Instead I'll ask five questions I had while reading the book that I'm still scratching my head over.

Science progresses in the sense of moving away from what we already know, not towards what we wish to know ("the truth").
But if science can't explain the world in truths, can history give us truths about science?

Is that even what Kuhn is trying to do here?

Or, is it analogous to Wittgenstein's attempts to practice a philosophy without general theories? (and if so, does it extend W's critique of philosophical theories as necessarily "pseudo-scientific" to the natural sciences?)

Of the case histories cited in this book, many assume fairly esoteric knowledge not just of concepts but of their history. As an example of one that caused me to scratch my head, the author cites the 20th century mathematicians, who in response to Einstein tried to make Euclidian geometry consistent with a curved model of space. But mathematicians had been using non-Euclidean geometries (including spherical geometry) since the 19th century, so why would later mathematicians still feel the need to fit the universe into a Euclidean model? There are lots of technical of questions like this that are left wide open for the non-expert.

Kuhn writes about QM and "classical" physics at length (though not as much as you might expect, considering that he trained as a physicist before studying the history of science) but I would like to know if he considered these an example of two paradigms coexisting. At one point he states that there are rare instances, but I don't remember him giving specific examples. If so, does this imply a crisis of the sort that is the topic of the book?

Overall I liked The Structure of Scientific Revolutions plenty, it deals with an exceedingly difficult but important problem, but there aren't any pithy explanations and its detail-oriented approach makes all its big ideas look somewhat mundane and unsexy (not a bad trade-off imo).

Lonely Planet Books

Read a number of books over the years. Stephen King and Dean Koontz are among my favourites.
One of my favourite books of all time is Dean Koontz's Winter Moon.
Anyone into sci-fi-aliens mixed with mystery and a touch of horror will like it. Can't believe it hasn't been turned into a movie yet either.

The late and very great Michael Crichton is by far my top favourite writer though. Some of the stuff he's written over the years is incredible.
Like most of my generation that actually reads novels, it was Jurassic Park that got me into reading his work and I was surprised at how much his work has shaped modern storytelling and modern movie ideas.
Top bloke, shame he went so soon.

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I like all of your authors, obviously for different reasons.
My favorite Stephen King book has to be the Stand. I like his prose, just like I like Ray Bradberry's prose and I love James Lee Burke.