i'm happy to see your dedication is starting to pay off beyond sheer personal satisfaction and building an audience and being noticed by publishers, and i'd like to say this to your blog

Wow Rob. Congratulations, man! That's fucking incredibly cool. Seriously, you should feel very good about this. Uncorrected proofs, no less! Likely to be a collector's item at some point (it is supposed to be Moore's final work, and the man still commands a hell of an audience). So, double awesomeness for you!

Hey Rob, you wanna be my blog mentor? I all but abandoned by skattered, piss poor attempt at microblogging when I got a full time media job. I crawl back to it every so often for no good reason, and it's hilarious to me that my year of experience on the editorial staff of a newspaper has done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to make me a better or more effective blogger. I managed to get better responses when I was doing it for fun, and to moderate the depression of being unemployed.

Teach me.

republicans' and trump trollz twitter feeds.. this shit is epic good read

blogs are a fickle thing.. i have read some great blogs that have few followers, and seen some total crap with a huge following. is what it is, sort of a hit or miss thing but then again isn't that true of all art?

obviously i'm not rob, ha ha, but i'll tell you what i see in his blog

it's a labor of love. i don't know if he's actually got plans to dominate the world through it or some other ulterior motive, but it looks to me like he does it primarily because he likes it.

he's been writing this blog for years-- if he expected something in return other than the work itself, i think he would have quit ages ago.

having said that, he always promotes it-- not in a marketing bs kind of way but he just shares it. i remember once he announced here that people were reading him in a bunch of other countries and someone said those are probably just bots and don't get his hopes to high. i don't know if rob cared or not but he just kept going. good for him.

and i think you can see this in the writing. he's 100% enthusiastic about what he does. this is most refreshing in a media climate of infinite snark and everyone thinking "sarcastic" (not even understanding the word) equals smart.

I started writing the blog because I would talk peoiple's ears off about the book I just read and thy would tell me I was going over their heads and giving them too much information. My wife specifically! ha! She told me to write down my observations on what I read.

I have seen it grow. I only track "new" hits. Originally I was stoked to see 10 new hits a week from around the world. Now I get upwards of 100 hits a week. All for a blog reviewing books that no one gives a shit about.... ha!

It is tricky to begin, but once the ball is rolling, and you are writing about things you love, it becomes second nature.

I share the latest review on the book and here and on twitter but not a lot of actual marketing.

still, mine gets a good amount of traffic for an esoteric blog about paper books. I get a thrill out of seeing anew country listed in the "audience." Places like Belarus, Turks & Caicos, Malaysia, etc.


Thanks for checking it out guys...

2/3 through Claw of Conciliator. Gonna read the whole book of new sun though before I post about it.

That's the second book! You're still on the second book?! It's like 150 pages!

Ack!

Yeah, I started mine because I'd do the same thing with my music talk. Nobody really wanted to hear it in my "real" life. Not even my girlfriend. But it's hard to talk to people about music when most people are kind of only passively into it. I, on the other hand, am downright fucking obsessive about it and always have been. Throw in the fact that I have such strong opinions about so many different types of music, and that half of the genres I listen to sound like shit to so many people, and it becomes extremely frustrating. I put a lot of work into it the first year, and got some nice responses, but I think I actually put too much time into it. I was letting things in my life lapse. So I backed off out of necessity, and because none of it was very good.

Meh.

The Cult of the Seer was 1300 pages man! That shit sucked up my reading time. fools here at UH would comment sarcastically about my "light lunch reading."

you just got me interested in the buckminster fuller about the great pirates and i downloaded the pdf last night

i've heard a lot about him in 60s stuff but then it's like he vanished

i believe he gets mentioned in the illuminatus trilogy yes? ah ah ha ha.

anyway, thanks!

Robert Anton Wilson and Vonnegut were the ones who would talk or mention R. Buckminster Fuller and his futuristic ideas. I have read two of his works. One is highly dense and, frankly, over my head, but the one you mention was more digestible.

Fuller was the man though. He was sick of the bullshit.

Gonna look into Ligotti. Have never read any of his works.

Finished this the other day. Love it.

You know, you'd be done with all the BOTNS books by now if you'd just read them instead of veering off into other things and turning each novella into a multiple month undertaking.

...

Just saying. Great way to avoid letting other books get in the way of the books you're reading is to finish the what you're reading before you start on anything else.

How can you be as absorbed by the story as you say you are, and still allow a freaking mushroom picking guide to distract you from finishing it?

START DOING WHAT I THINK YOU SHOULD BE DOING!!!! :)

fiction is secondary to me.

I am a non-fiction reader mostly. Fiction I can take or leave, drop it off, and pick it up, no biggie. Made up shit doesn't affect me as much as actual data.

I LOVE MYCOLOGY

That's all well and good. I get that. I have a massive (truly, just gargantuan) collection of science books myself. They don't even need to be relevant for me to read them.

But I thought you were going to read this thing straight through. Remember, I've only ever managed to get ONE person to read BOTNS in full. It would just be super cool to hear your thought on it, and see it reviewed in full on your blog. Really, you're still in the story's embryonic stage. So.. I WANT!

The boss's autobiography. I would consider myself merely a casual fan but this book is the shit. Wise and actually quite funny. A cliche but its true I couldn't put it down. Tore through 200 pages after dinner last night.

the Vegetarian



just finished it. descent into madness along the line of an updated Korean
Yellow Wallpaper. Really good


http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...the-vegetarian

hey rigoberto how come you haven't reviewed anything in a month and a half?

i went snooping there for something fun and realized you've been idle

I am 600+ pages into Alan Moore's new novel, Jerusalem. It is 1280 pages long. Shit's been hectic at casa instigator and at work so my reading time has been cut down. Should get back on the horse after this weekend (wedding anniversary on friday)

1280 pages!!! looking forward to your review

meanwhile, getting your take on the golden bough, which i haven't read in ages but still remember. hilarious digs at the anti-science crowd there!

well i should continue

==

ETA--good intro and summary, i enjoyed it

btw you MUST watch THE WICKER MAN. original version. the one in blu-ray you can rent from netflix. it's all there. all there. check it.

THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY by Boethius
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1432...-h/14328-h.htm

ripe for the annus horribilis that begins today

How was Book of the New Sun? Clearly you're done with it by now.

I don't think we have a dedicated comic book thread. Maybe we should. Assuming others would post in it as well.

Uhhh... yeah.

not sure if "uhhh... yeah" means "yeah good idea! I would discuss comics with you!" or something sarcastic?

As usual, this thread.

Th'Fuck dude, really?

Sorry, I thought we'd been over this. I am a well documented comic book culture obsessive.

"Uhhh... yeah" means YESLETSFUCKINGDOTHAT!"

I knew :D

Brilliant so far. It does kinda highlight how the ridiculousness of 'The Thick Of It' is incredibly close to the bone.

Currently reading Flann O'Brien's 3rd Policeman.

right now:
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry
Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson

...

(inspired by robigator's blog)

NORTH AMERICAN MUSHROOMS
a field guiide to edible and inedible fungi

a bit boring, this one. mostly a long list.

new Freud bio out, I've read the long one, so doubt I'd get too much out of the new one, but it did inspire me to reread Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents, which I think were his 2 best (in reverse order)

There's a new Freud biography?

Don't tell any of my former profs or the folks who think of me as a hard-science stickler, but I've always LOVED Freud, and been fascinated by his life and "theories," not to mention his unintentional contributions to popular culture. In fact I once did a semester-long literature review of Freud, and it was a blast.

I absolutely agree that Civilization and its Discontents is essential and extraordinary (as is Totem and Taboo, to a lesser extent), especially if taken as a philosophical text... it's certainly not a psychological or psychiatric one in any way shape or form, but that should be immediately obvious to any reader who is familiar with proper scientific theory, and I think it's a real shame that the scientific community largely disregards it.

There's a lot of interesting ideas (no, not data, but ideas) about the nature and dynamics of social and cultural conflict. It's not like it should be taken as gospel, but it's worth reading for anyone with more than a one dimensional interest in understanding how the world works.

Sorry I got to babbling ... what's the bio like?

yes, Sigmund was a deep thinker. Civilization and is a critique of society at large and has a lot of parallels to Nietzsche. Much there about religion, tribalism, law and other societal concepts.

new bio is here, I don't think I'm going to get it as I have a lot of other books on my shelf now.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.p...=9780674659568

one I've read is this'n

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393328619/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

currently in this one to about 200 pages, it is pretty fantastic. Spain during the nadir of the downturn in a small insular community with deep ties to Franco and organized crime. Protagonist is slowly drowning in this. It has some really dark humor and I recco it HIGHLY.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/bo...l-chirbes.html