I'm almost halfway through Stranger in a Strange Land.  It's entertaining, but not as thought-provoking as I expected (I've never read Heinlein).  Some of the character interactions are REALLY cheesy, I'm talking like anime romance cheesy.  You've got this innocent, socially inept dude from Mars who captures the attention of about 4 beautiful women who all happen to live in the same mansion.  It's like Tenchi Muyo.

i know, isn't it hilarious? i love the first mention of sexual activity:

"Presently Smith reached out and touched her right mammary gland."

genius!




but they reason they love him, anyway, is cause he's a fucking MARTIAN. i'd be in love with any half-attractive martian woman, i'm sure.





the book can be a huge drag at some parts. your anime romance, his characterization in general, the large section of futuristic legal/political intrigue in the beginning-to-middle, when jubal harshaw becomes the main character for the middle 400 pages or so, etc. that said, i thought it got much better by the end. once the action leaves that mansion it starts getting really good actually. i finished it for the first time about two weeks ago and a lot about it has been sticking in my head ever since.

as awkward as heinlein is with women, he actually has insight on sex. the relations between the characters are silly, but the book has more to say about HUMANITY and SEXUALITY than with PEOPLE and SEXUAL ACTIVITY. so... stranger in a strange land fails dramatically but the ideals are sound... some of them anyway.


at least i think so, but maybe i'm just into group sex.


"Sister lovers
Water brothers
And in time
Maybe others
So you see
What we can do is to try something new
If you're crazy too
I don't really see
Why can't we go on as three."

farnham's freehold is the most sexual one of his, you should really check it out

his ideas about sex seemed old-fashioned revolutionary back when I read his books so maybe you just agree with him. he is definitely more idk, inventive with sexual themes than probably every writer I've read besides uh james joyce. which is a reason why I think of heinlein as the forefather of the modern erotic fanfiction movement

that's a pretty common transformation and I don't think it's a coincidence

common according to what standards. for every trotskyist turned into neocon there is 2 marxist leninists  turned into oil magnates and 10 maoists becoming glorious international buisnessmen

common according to what standards. for every trotskyist turned into neocon there is 2 marxist leninists  turned into oil magnates and 10 maoists becoming glorious international buisnessmen

Common by the standard that a lot of prominent neocon ideologues in the us were trotskyists.

Perhaps those other transformations were no coincidence either niiiiiiiice try marmot

finished infinite jest

way to go

im reading broom of the system right now. wallace is such a great. seriously, i am p. sure i am getting a collection of his short stories for chirstmas and im sure ill plow through that too. he just rocks.

it's funny though; reading broom, he basically lifted the concept of some totally irrational manmade NOTHINGNESS (which was a key point in jest, got a lot of attention, though i forget what it was called... it was the big nothing where the president moved all the garbage and waste or whatever? some no mans land. you know what im talkin bout if youve read it) from broom

forgivable, just strikingly obvious. i feel it's a concept he found very funny, and was not able to flesh out to satisfaction in broom. jest, however, is over twice brooms size, so there he had plenty of room with which to work.

you guys should recommend me other authors. i like dfw. i like authors. run with it.

i am reading the idiot by dostoyevsky. i am liking it all right. the prince lev is a nice guy but i don't see what the whole big deal is with natasha fillipovna...guess i'm not a pure soul. i just don't get it.

I am currently reading Battle Royale by Koushun Takami.  It is fucking awesome.

I'm reading Andre Gide's 'The Immoralist', which is pretty good but not really what I want to read at the moment so I'm more trying to finish it off by this point. What a horrible way to do things huh but I already have a depressing amount of books around where I lost interest halfway through and never got around to finishing them so.

Also DietCoke or someone what's a good place to start with Slavoj Zizek? I picked up 'The Metastases Of Enjoyment' today and am kind of enjoying it and liking a lot of the ideas but as I don't know Hegel or whoever at all a lot of passages are kind of beyond me. Is there some kind of entry-level BABBY EDITION of this stuff with chewable cardboard pages and bright pictures of balloons or should I try to suck it up and start trying to read the dudes he references?

lol i watched Zizek! and then forgot abotu that guy

do better than this if you're gonna discount guys nobody really knows two hecks about

i've been listening to him lately and i dunno what to think yet but this is doing nothing but making me get annoyed at the fact i'm listening to him which i don't deserve so: smell my feet

Man I'm horribly ill-read in all this stuff so I have no idea if he's........canon lol or not in these circles. I liked a lot of stuff in the book and some of it about the uh 'postliberal' fetishisation of the Id in terms of the culture of Enjoy Youself ;) and the connection with fascist fake politics and spectacle seemed really good. Maybe he's just paraphrasing someone else though?? Gimme all opinions. Lets open up a dialectic in this motherfucker. I'm gonna watch that Zizek! thing tomorrow maybe.

im read catch 22