grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

Writing Style / Character development:
Heinlein > Clarke > Asimov

Scientific Credibility (this is Sci-Fi after all):
Asimov > Clarke > Jules Verne > HG Wells > Danielle Steel > Heinlein

That's a Bradbury story, not Heinlein.

Hey, Heinlein's Space Cadet was hard, hard science. (Even the stuff about Mars and Venus being habitable was in line with what they knew back then.) He even spent time describing how the ship was spun up and despun.

When did he go off the rails, IYHO?

To Sail Beyond the Sunset's main message is, incest is great, so long as men don't catch teh ghey.

so...i am finding leo strauss to be fairly readable.

what's wrong with me?

This is the message of most late Heinlein. His pinnacle was that one story about the moon you may have heard about, but damn he had to work in polygamy and incest and Big Love into everything. I found it irritating.

I finally finished Sabatini's Captain Blood a few days ago, and I finished William Gibson's Spook Country today. The first was most certainly brain candy, but it was a good adventure story with well-written dialogue. The second was probably brain candy, too, although it did have quite a bit of commentary on how weird the world has become post 9/11.

I found Radicals for Capitalism the other day, so I guess that's next.

I've read a article that argued that Number of the Beast was a sort of writing anti-how-to by way of showing various examples of bad writing or plotting or whatnot, then bringing up various works of fiction that handled the "problem" at hand in much better ways.

I wish I could remember where I saw it...

I stopped caring about the Straussians a long time ago, because really they don't matter. However, there is hilarity to be found in the criticisms of Strauss/Straussians, because they're all very snarky and you can appreciate them whether you've read a lot of Strauss or not.

Also, it's only in America that Strauss is imbued with all sorts of cultish esoteric ridiculousness above and beyond his rather pedestrian status as a political theorist heavily influenced by Schmitt and Heidegger. It's also only in certain schools of American Straussianism in which Strauss himself is thought to be esoteric and thereby 'difficult' (as opposed to just difficult because his writing is bad, vague, and poorly-argued)

Amen.

I just received Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women by Ricky Jay. Although I'm upset by the shape of the book ("very good condition", my ass - it was wet when I pulled it out of the package!), I can't wait to get into it.

So I finally got Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. I started with the epilogue Why I am not a conservative (pdf), just to make sure and eliminate all doubts about whether I am one. God, was I scared about the prospect of being one. Good to know that I am not. Now I can also hold my ground when I defend myself against accusations of conservatism by my "liberal" friends at work. What a relief that article was.

I don't get the "manufactured" knock. The word is over 200 years old at this point. Sure, it's been used to mean several different things, but what politically descriptive term hasn't?

Ali, with all due respect, I do believe your talking out your ass.

The word is commonly understood to mean: Championing individual liberty by promoting peace and property with minimal government. But you don't like the imagery conjured up by the diphthongs?

What are the fresh and vibrant sentiments conveyed by "liberal" or "conservative"?

I finished Radicals for Capitalism today (or at least the main text; I didn't read the massive amount of notes). Unsurprisingly, it was a great book. It did a superb job of summarizing the philosophies of the major (and not-so-major) players, and the biographies were well-integrated into the flow of the book. I now have a much firmer grasp of the various names that get thrown around and their particular contributions to libertarianism.

Reading it right now was appropriate since it put into perspective the animosities underlying the Ron Paul issue. That is, it appears that libertarians have always been a bunch of infighting assholes, so expecting any cohesion to suddenly develop is probably unrealistic. Also, excessive worrying about public indifference is mostly a waste since agonizing about how best to sell libertarianism is as old as libertarianism itself.

I don't think they much see any aspect of it. Familiarity with the term is still pretty rare.

I'm also unconvinced that most people want either individual liberty championed or peace and property with minimal government.

But they can show boobs on tv, dhex. Boobs. Therefore, they're more free.

Or so they've told me.

Ah Stevo, but Freedom Is not Free, so If Europe = Free, than Europe cannot = Freedom.

Sounds like your basic Positive vs. Negative liberty confusion. This is a pretty common problem when talking with Europeans; also the people I work with.

I'm under the impression many people I work with think that the entire population of the city need to have a social worker. I think this attitude comes from spending too much time reading the DSM-4. Pretty much every person under the sun could be put into one or more categories from that book. In the wrong hands, that book is downright insidious.

I'm 1/3 way through Diamond Age. Me Likey.

Just found a book called Se7en Habits of Highly Effective Serial Killers.

(Not really. Just thought of it.)

Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice

Recently finished books
Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men
Heinlein's Starship Troopers

I started re-reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

Well, let me qualify that -- I never actually finished reading it the first time, due to fatigue. And this reading actually started about 1/3 into the story. I started off by just reading one of the "good parts" that I remembered, and just kept going. When I finish reading it this time (I'm almost done), I'll go back and read the beginning again.

This is kinda tempting me to tackle the rest of the Baroque Cycle after I'm done with this volume.

I'm halfway through Zodiac. I am grinding through Stephenson's body of work at a frightening rate. I've got the whole Baroque Cycle, Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash and Diamond Age read, and now I need to find those two short fiction compilations he worked on to complete the whole mess. My next project is to read all of Iain Banks Culture and Culture-Related works, because they are great., and I already read two or three out of a dozen or so novels. I like prolific writers, because I can get into their style and immerse myself in whatever they are trying to portray.

After Banks, it's back to reading everything Harlan Ellison has written. I'll see you in a few years!

Every time I see Ellison raving about something, I just want to pinch his cheeks. 'Cuz then he'd totally have to kill me, and I'd b famous.

Yeah, and I like it. it is HUUGE. 1400 pages or so IIRC. So there is probably some inessential content, but there isn't much that I didn't enjoy, and won't re-read.

Honestly I did. No army in history has probably functioned as efficiently and meritocratically, but Heinlein didn't come off as preaching that his model was the way things should be, just presenting the possibility. And the story was pretty much a satisfying war story. I probably liked it for much the same reasons I liked "Band of Brothers".

mircea eliade's giant survey of yoga and related tantric and vedanta material.

I recently felt like I needed to reread Hakim Bey's "Immediatism", since I've been thinking a lot about media, representation, and experience. Bey tends to be very esoteric, but there are good patterns hidden in the writing, if you get most of the references. Some of his writing on tongs could be applied to Grylliade itself, I think. And the best part is that Bey has explicitly permitted free reproduction of his work, so it's all easily available: http://www.left-bank.org/bey/hbconten.htm

I have not, but I own a bunch of Praxis material, which is heavily Bey-influenced. And whaddya mean, "Bill Laswell backing thing but it's not awful"? I like Bill Laswell. Not all his stuff, admittedly, but the guy who produced "Orgasmatron" gets a free pass for a lot of stuff, as far as I'm concerned. That reminds me, I have to see if that Science Faction album ever came out.

Fiction: Against A Dark Background by Iain M. Banks. It starts slowly and then improves; there's a good sense of building menace...knowing Banks, I'm almost cringing at what horrible revelation is going to occur late in the book. So far it's my least favorite of any Banks book I've read, but still damn good compared to a lot of other stuff. Note that this is not a Culture novel.

Non-fiction: Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens by Liz Goldwyn. Kind of a coffee-table book with a lot of photos and drawings (mostly costumers' sketches), with profiles of a number of stars. I'm glad somebody archived this stuff before it was lost, since a lot of the material comes from yellowing newspaper clippings and now-elderly people's scrapbooks. It's fun to see what's changed since 60 years ago and what hasn't (there are a few pictures that really reminded me of things I've seen in the last year) and to feel like part of a scene with a real history.

I finally finished Pynchon's V., and although it was good, I'm a little disappointed. It doesn't feel like he managed to wrangle all the threads into a resolution as much as it feels like it just collapsed under its own weight. I still think it was worth my time (and several attempts), but it wasn't quite what I expected from him (probably my fault for starting with GR and Lot 49).

because it's episodic; v is more like a giant bowl of what the fuck.

huh?

anyway, someone gave me a copy of these short stories by an author named murakami, and i feel bad because it reads like fiction you'd find in the new yorker and this sort of slice o' life with a side order of weird and quirky kinda gets on me after a while.

yeah it really is.

some of this short story collection (after the quake) is pretty good, and some of it is just "people have feelings but then they meet people/giant frog who help them figure out they have feelings"

Interface by Neal Stevenson and J. Frederick George. I'm in the first act still, but the writing and characters are great, just what you would expect from Stevenson's other works, without eight page discourses on European Trade Faires. Brevity, it would seem, is George's thing.

And what's with the three first names? If my last name was George, I would be tempted to name my child something like Anderson, or Jenkins, so at least his name would look right backwards.

*EDIT*

This explains a lot.

Somewhere I found Frank Chodorov's Out of Step online as PDF file -- probably it was at mises.org. I have copied it to my hard drive but haven't read it yet. Eventually I will.

These are, of course, connected. Are you shopping for a house in Innsmouth to be near family, perchance?

Something is very appealing in the writings of that generation. It could be the clarity and simplicity, yet power, of the ideas. Same with Rose Wilder Lane. I found some audio files on the mises.org website by LeFavre. These were interesting. No one talks like that any more.

Say what you say about Rockwell et al., I give them a lot of credit for the material available on mises.org. It is just sad that they are so hung up on the whole south confederacy issue. May be they are sincerely trying to make a point about liberty (they emphatically denounce slavery, but not the right of secession --see for example Tom Woods). I think they can make their case much better otherwise. Mixing that with other good stuff, especially Austrian economics, is quite detrimental I think. At least in the short run.

Just re-read A Wrinkle in Time. Now re-reading Watership Down.

Mostly inspired by walking through a B&N looking for a book that was of interest to the snackstealer. It was thought by the info folk to be on the required summer reading table. It wasn't obvious, so we had to search through it pretty carefully (to no avail), which meant I looked through the current crop of 'required school reading' books pretty thoroughly. Many were unfamiliar, having become school vogue since my exit from primary academia. However, many that I had read, or thought I had read, were only dimly recalled. When I got home, I happened to see my wife's copy of A Wrinkle in Time, and decided to go through it. I enjoyed it (although after getting used to books like Hyperion and Brightness Reef - and even the later Harry Potters - it was far simpler and shorter than I'd remembered).

bernie lewis' "the muslim discovery of europe."

too bad he's such a shit, huh? he's an engaging writer.

LIBERAL ARTS

i'm reading the buru quartet by pramoedya toer which was written in what one might call super hardcore conditions - it survived as a massive oral story he told his fellow inmates while under arrest in suharto's indonesia. in some ways it is a traditional post-colonial telling of colonialism, but it's ease of language undermines the more plasticky moments. i can't really see the supposed marxism - it was of course banned when first published in indonesia for that reason - beyond the whole "gee, these dutch with their warships and sugar farm serfdoms are total dicks, huh?"

but still, what a tremendous fuck you to an authoritarian government.

edit: i am not generally on the same page as tariq ali, but what he said about toer holds true - had he been a soviet dissident, he would have won the nobel prize.

McCarthy's The Road

Gooood book.

Are you sure you read the last book? I think your fears were right and you aren't.

I said "wasn't too bad" not "good". But I'd set the book aside as completely boring, and read something else. Then I came back to it and it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Went from complete waste of time to minimum-adequate.

I usually try to force myself through to the end if I'm that close, but I also stopped reading Blue Mars about 2/3 of the way through, and never came back to it, but I've since heard that I was right to do that.

Huh, I really liked the Nursery Cryme books I read by Jasper Fforde. But lots of his jokes are subtle and require deep knowledge of the base material. I could sense the jokes flying over my head, because apparently he appreciates nursery rhymes on a much deeper level than me.

finished the short story collection "death in midsummer" by yukio mishima. it was very amazing. i would recommend people try it if you want to try him and the sailor who fell from grace with the sea is unavailable or too daunting at 220 pages.

new dimensions put out a lot of wacky shit back in the day.