No puzzle this week I could go all Joliet Jake and blame everything and everybody but I’d be lying, I’m just lazy. On a side note, when I cut and pasted that speech I watched a clip of the scene on to make sure the transcript was accurate, half the comments under the clip were people making digs at Trump or Biden. “Hurr durr he sounds like TFG” or “Derp derp he makes excuses like dementia Joe” … politics has ruined a whole lot of people.
On to book talk – Last week Mojo asked us if we prefer character driven or plot driven stories. I hadn’t really thought of that distinction before but in a similar vein I think of author as either ‘writing to tell a story’ or ‘telling a story to write.’ The former would be authors like Alistair McClean or Michael Crichton, guys who seemingly write for the express purpose of having their novels turned into movies. The later would include James Joyce and I assume Thomas Pynchon even though I’ve never made it through one of his books, Umberto Eco would also fall into this category, guys you can imagine parsing every word and phrase like Billy Crystal in Throw Momma From the Train.
Obviously most author fall somewhere in between the two extremes and some may even have written some books at one end of the spectrum and some books at the other end. Personally I prefer books closer to the “telling a story to write” end. I don’t mind simple action novels and some of the “wrote to become a move” books are very good, but I find a bit of cleaver writing now and again gives a book that extra something. It’s what makes Ken Bruen one of my favorite authors, while some of his novels have been movie-fied his style isn’t quite captured by these adaptations.
So what do you think? Quick and easy fluff or boring intellectual slogs, or somewhere in between, or maybe none of this makes any sense, In which case talk about whatever you want.
Reminder – Next week is What Are We Reading (WAWR) week, so send in your submissions to heybuddystopdoingthat@protonmail.com
I feel like previous articles posted by Hype have been love letters to me which I need to address. No. No I will never sleep with you.
Gatsby is a good balance of both C and P.
(But my fiction shelf is small; don’t ask me.)
If you know the characters well enough, you can let them loose and see what happens. That doesn’t always work out to a good story. I like to have some idea of how I’m going to hit the idea notes I’ve come up with, but have to be flexible enough to let the course of the story change and find a different place for anything that no longer fits.
I don’t know how you write by numbers to fill in a plot.
I usually have a beginning, middle and end. Everything else is what the characters want to do.
If I don’t know my characters well enough yet, I need to contrive a beginning to introduce them to me, and the reader.
I was just talking to a neighbor about books. We have similar patterns – heavy books followed by a brain cleanse. There are plenty of story-driven books that aren’t fluff, but sometimes fluff is just what the doctor ordered.
I have struggled mightily with some of the “telling a story to write” authors. It may sound weird, but I sometimes feel that they are wasting their readers’ time. So obsessed with their (obvious) talent that they are doing it more for themselves than their audience.
Like a 15 minute guitar solo.
I know what you meant. It’s like linguistic masturbation, and they want you to watch.
*pulls down shade*
*zips up*
Relevant.
(also works with comments about Louis CK)
Dont listen to Mountain Jam by The Almond Brothers.
Always sage advice. No song needs to be longer than 10 minutes, especially if most of it is the same droning riff, yes I’m looking at you Santana.
…and don’t trust autocorrect.
Just finished The Fountainhead. It was a surprisingly engaging read despite/in spite of the walls of text. A little disappointed with the rape element though – very unnecessary to the character IMO.
Going back to Vinge and Marooned in Realtime for my next work [re]read.
It was Ayn Rand’s thing. Rough sex turned her on.
She’d have loved the mating between Firsters. It leaves you sore and chaffed for days afterwards.
Sounds vaguely familiar. That still would have been fine elsewhere in the story, but the literal rape element kinda breaks the NAP concept.
Whatever that says about the author, she didn’t consider it a rape scene, and hence not a NAP violation.
“Rape” fantasies are actually fairly common among women, though it is verboten to talk about.
Yes. Also, amongst actual rape victims (although I don’t understand the psychology of that).
I read an article back in college, IIRC, which proposed that some fetishes spring from the mind eroticizing a past trauma in order to safely bring it from the unconscious into the conscious mind and confront it. Similar to black comedy/gallows humor, I suppose.
I feel so good
Magic Sam’s great and all but giving him credit for John Lee Hooker’s song is beyond the pale.
Holy crap. Block just shot a hole-in-one.
He gets a car now, right?
Nah. They didn’t get the insurance so it was for display only.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article267263387.html
Husband, aka Lazlo Hollyfeld, says the dealership is lying. And he would know.
Linked site keeps throwing up roadblocks. Whose husband??
Yours?
My husband’s side hustle is entering (and winning) contests, sweepstakes, suchlike. He is very familiar with contest rules and who sponsors what and how all that works, (There are companies whose ONLY business is administering contests for companies.)
Anyway, the “Lazlo Hollyfeld” is a reference to a character in the movie Real Genius who enters a contest and has calculated his chances of winning. You should watch it. It holds up.
Yeah, I was both busy and broke the year that came out, so it got past me (as many movies do.) 😄
Just saw Forrest Gump yesterday. Husband posted it on FB and got reamed for never having seen it. It came out in 1994. Oh, let’s see, what was I doing in 1994? Working full time, going to school fulltime, and then my dad died.
So, yeah. Movies were not at the top of my to-do list. (Also, I’m not necessarily a Tom Hanks fan.)
I know it’s much beloved hither and yon, but Forrest Gump is such overrated schmaltzy schlock I’m surprised Spielberg wasn’t attached. Best picture over Shawshank and Pulp Fiction at the ’95 Oscars, with best director for Zemeckis and best actor for Tom Hanks, just in case anyone had any vestigial respect left for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
That was obvious to me in commercials at the time.
Successfully not seen ever since.
I enjoyed Forrest Gump.
I also enjoyed Shawshank and Pulp Fiction.
I have never really seen the logic in picking a best between such wildly different genres.
Ditto for Shakespeare in Love over Life is Beautiful and Saving Private Ryan.
The real shame is Blame Canada didn’t win best song.
How else are you supposed to signal who is part of the Hollywood in-crowd while throwing a party and rubbing the plebs’ noses in it?
That The Kinks aren’t in the Rock n Roll HOF tells me all I need to know about these groups that give out ‘awards’.
Anyone can be in the Rock and Roll hall of fame – if you’re willing to go to Cleveland and pay admission.
The Cleveland part is the most challenging.
https://www.foxnews.com/sports/arkansas-man-sunk-hole-in-one-win-golf-clubs-challenge-files-lawsuit-prize-withdrawn
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/characters/nm0340973
Joke as Mo’s husband like to enter contests.
Love the Lazlo reference.
Lol.
That golf course is fucked.
I can’t imagine a private country club being so hard up for cash that the $50k to buy the guy another truck to make up for their fuckup with the dealership was worth the loss of reputation from making national news for welching on a prize that they publicly offered.
That was my first thought too.
Although I find it hard to believe the course was willing to give them “display” space. I’m thinking they screwed the golf course too. Probably should have settled with the guy and sued the dealership.
NDA and a $50k check and try to collect from the dealer.
Any car he wants with a top-10 finish payday.
He gets a lifetime supply of pudding.
I am just going to vent here.
Dogs killed the sheep that i bottled fed last year.
Got them in our backyard.
Now i have to bury “baby” and find her child and take care of her.
This stuff is hard at times.
THank you.
Whose dogs did it?
It’s tough even with livestock.
Sorry to read that.
Sorry, dude
I did that once when I was 15, bottle fed the lamb after the mama has died. The lamb and dog bonded and chased each other around, came in the house with no coaxing. Cow’s milk. By fall the critter was big and went off to another grandpa’s farm and 3/4 Score had $15 jingling in his pocket.
I too would be upset if a dog wandered in my yard, hell-bent on destruction and took out my property
Oh, no. I’m so sorry.
::shudders:: Poor little sheep! And poor shepherd! I’m so sorry, ‘bodru!
So sorry to hear that! Especially after you invested time and emotion into raising her yourself. I hope you can find the lamb quickly.
Was it a pack of feral dogs, or are they “owned” by someone?
I say this as a dog lover; I hope you got at least one of them. Even the sweetest family dogs can decide to get murdery when it comes to livestock. If you had to shoot someone’s family pooch that’s on the owner.
Oof, that is rough.
god speed.
Ooof. That sucks.
So as a followup….
Owner has been found. 1.9 miles away.
Kid in a hoodie.
Kid across street says that kid who supervised dogs has a history with drugs…
Mom on her way, with a sheriff (our request) to give them dogs.
Probably end up in small claims court.
3-4 week old baby was looking for mama tonight. Did not capture her, to skittish. Will get a product called “creep” so she can eat before fully transition to grass.
Thanks for the kind words. This has been a learning lession.
MY GAWD
THAT’S THE BRO’S MUSIC…
JFC. Pretty sure the Celtics have already started playing golf.
As far as the question goes, I prefer big, literary books. Corman McCarthy, Joseph Conrad, Maugham, Eco, Murakami, writers like that. Reading is my primary form of entertainment, and I like to be challenged. That said, Pynchon is still shit. It is just pot head potty humor, ever since Crying of Lot 49.
Anyway, have some Otis Day and the Nites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rfnwsb-dg0
I really need to get to Cormac McCarthy, just about every author I like name drops him, likewise Conard, Maugham I tried and found it him a bit too much of a slog, Eco I dig, Not familiar at all with Murakami.
The older I get, the more and more I am convinced that the be-all, end-all of the novel is Conrad. He covered so much ground, both figuratively and literally. Sailing in the far east, spying in Europe, romance, action, ruminations on age and youth, all with a focus on the human condition, mainly that sense of who you are, and more importantly, who you are not.
Would you recommend “Heart of darkness” or “Lord Jim” or a lesser known work as a starting point.
I would start with Youth. Heart of Darkness is a great sit down and finish in one night book, and is in my opinion the greatest novel of all time. Others will disagree.
Also, Maugham wrote some of the best spy stories, collected in Ashenden. They reflect his experiences in WWI as a secret agent, and they have that ring of truth to them. Murakami is hard to pin down, but not only are the translations of his books quite beautiful, he is probably the only writer who attempts to wrestle with Japan’s actions in WWII re Manchuria, and how subsequent actions have played out, such as the Sarin gas attacks in the subways.
With McCarthy, I would start with the Border Trilogy, then Suttree and finally Blood Meridian. His language takes a bit to get into, as he doesn’t use much punctuation, but once you get into the rythim of it, it flows really well.
An Indiana man is dead after a grenade found in a grandfather’s belongings exploded
How hard is it to not pull the pin?
I had the responsibility for several years of a weekly report to the head of the Army out here letting him know of EOD responses that might hit the news. I was amazed at the amount of “boomstuff” that came home from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. At least once month the family of a dead veteran would report finding live claymore mines, grenades, mortars. Who knows how much stuff was quietly passed down to a new generation.
The locals out here know not to pull a pin.
Additional note. If the found grenade was from the Vietnam era if would have both a safety clip and and a pin.
Additional Additional note. From my experience departing the Southwest Asia TO post Desert Storm and departing the Iraq TO multiple times for Iraq 2.0 it would be very difficult to get a grenade (or any other boomstuff) out of Theater.
In between those two, i have no idea what X-rays or sniffing was done, but the customs inspection was 10% shakedown at best. Clearing a qualification range was more hands on.
“Hey, those CLS kits we just distributed? We need you to pull out the auto injectors. Those weren’t supposed to be handed out yet.”
I agree. We did an in-between wars deployment to work with the Kuwaiti army. It was easy to get stuff in and we could have brought back stuff with no real issues.
Now we know why that leak about Burns and Epstein happened. I was right.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/seymour-hersh-something-else-cooking-ukraine
“ The one saving grace for some in the community, I have been told, has been CIA Director William Burns.
Burns was ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of State and is seen as someone “who has come around” in opposition to some of the White House’s foreign policy follies. “He doesn’t want to be a rat on a sinking ship,” the official told me
Morning.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gsdjZi0CIjU
🎶🎶🎶🎶
Good morning, Sean and Ssccrruuffyy!
I…got nuthin’. ::slurps coffee::
Morning.
Good morning, U! How’s it going?
Well, I’m in the office.
One more work week and then I have a week off.
🥳
I want to use that week to get something written (Ideally something major) and perhaps make significant progress on my entry for the june painting contest. The hound I sent you pictures of is the simplest of the components for the painting project.
That creature was a ….. hound??? 😳
Well, properly, it’s a Flesh Hound of Khorne*
*The god of blood and slaughter in Warhammer
I’m not sure I want to see what their house cats look like. 😨
The faction is allied to the rat men, so I only found One cat.
Ummm….nice kitty! ::backs away slowly::
It does look like it’s about to swat something off the shelf, though.
😄
Heh,
what a craptastic weekeend.
I hope today’s a much better day for you, ‘bodru! 🙁
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/jordan-neely-2-0-passengers-intervene-as-security/
Oh, the “elites” ain’t gonna like that.
I hate that the media celebrates losers. 😒
https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/john-fetterman-senator-depression-shorts-pennsylvania-politics/
Nobody is making you do it. Some of us expect our leaders to be a little more competent and impressive.
Competentist!
Exactly this
It’s a sign he should be doing something else.
I’ll tell my boss that when I wear my pajamas to the office, it’s a sign that I’m working at peak performance. 🙄
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/cherelle-parker-philadelphia-mayor-black-voters-socialism-centrism-20230522.html
Philadelphia trending conservative? 😂😂
https://www.nj.com/gloucester-county/2023/05/bystander-rescued-cop-placed-in-chokehold-by-unruly-mall-patron-police-say.html
Chokeholds for everyone!
Mornin’, reprobates!
Good morning, ‘patzie! Gotta fly! 🏃🏼♀️