Metal Reviews

About to finish Foucault's History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Read Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism over the weekend.

Starting Kingsley Amis' The Green Man today. Hope daddy is as good as son.

Read Laura Kipnis' Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America today. Really awesome use of the notion of fantasy to mount a sorta defense of pornography as a place where social issues are wrestled with. I now know more than I ever expected to know about tops and bottoms, transvestite magazines, the political economy of fatness and anti-porn feminism, but it was good.

Started writing my fantasy novel! It was a lot more fun than I expected. Writing usually feels like tearing chunks of my brain out, but this mostly made me giddy and excited.

Traditional fantasy? Swords and sandals, dragons and dwarves and such?Or something else?

I'm genuinely interested. As an aspiring, but perpetually procastinatory writer, I am always interested in people's writing projects.

Sorta. It'll probably be a lot less "fantastic" than most fantasy. There's sorcerors, but they mostly have one power that is very tough for them to use. Some are immortal, but since they live for ever they don't bother to remember much and spend their time wandering through various areas. The main character can shoot fireballs, but every time he does it, it feels like having his arm set on fire. There'll also be orcs who roam mountains and forests having intense battles and singing the history of their lineage in massive operas.

So far the story is that there's a father and son who live in a small town, but because a valuable resource is discovered nearby and violent treasure hunters are pouring into the area they need to run away, which leads them to start discovering the big wide world that the father always told the son stories about. Issue I'm having is what the resource should be. Gold seems kind of blah. Second idea was something necessary for making gunpowder, but I don't know anything about gunpowder or the chemicals/powders involved. Third idea was some kind of magic gemstones/mineral, kind of like gold but less blah.

Post it! I'd read that

Cool.



Do some research. That's some readily available information right there.

haha two of my coworkers said that today when I talked to them about my problem.

I guess something I didn't mention is that the structure will be that each chapter starts of with a myth/piece of history (the father is a historian, so tentatively stories he has told his son), then the second part is the main story. The myths'll pop up in the story but not in a consistent or systematic way. In general they'll be more grandiose and have more magic/fantasy/etc.

I'll post stuff here as it's completed since I am a ravenous attention/feedback fiend.

i'd totally read that.

just call it unobtanium like the dickheads in avatar

Just call it blackpowder and make allusions to it being combustible. A fantasy tale that drops charcoal, sulfur or potassium nitrate would be awkward.

I was thinking of calling it saltpeter since in Civ 3 that was the resource to get because then you could pwn everyone with musketeers if they didn't have it yet.

Nice!

or something surprisingly vital IRL like potash

Finished The Pale King. Back to reading Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor.

Work reading: Finished Kingsley Amis' The Green Man. It was OK. A hotel owner is trying to have a threesome with his wife and another lady. Then there's a ghost story too. Subtle and biting satire such as "I left, after having my offer to turn the TV set on rejected: she said she wanted to go on thinking." also included. I imagined it'd do well as a quirky movie for old British people.

Started Moby Dick and the first paragraph is already one of my favourite things.

Read Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Habermas, Bound and Wretched of the Earth by Fanon. Reading some more Fanon, DuBois, Said and Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste this week.

Reading so much stuff at the moment for several courses but the best thing is that I'm doing a linguistic course in comics, and it is fucking amazing. Reading The Dark Knight Returns at the moment, so much action from beginning to end.

This is what I'm going to read before summer:

Coetzee, J. M. Youth
Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People
Mofolo, Thomas. Chaka
Mphahlele, Es’kia. Down Second Avenue
Mzobe, Sifiso. Young Blood
Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm
Vladislavić, Ivan. Portrait with Keys
Wicomb, Zoë. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town
Berry Don. 2004. Trask.
Crave, Margaret. 1980. I Heard the Owl Call My Name.
Doig, Ivan. 2006. The Sea Runners.
Lopez, Barry. 2004. Field Notes.
Shakespeare, W., Othello
Shakespeare, W., The Winter’s Tale
Shakespeare, W., Pericles
Shakespeare, W., Macbeth

Plus, books that I'm reading on my "free" time:

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
From Hell by Alan Moore

Fucking love literature courses.

I love The Winter's Tale so much.

Fuck, Shakespeare is difficult. Especially when your professor wants you to use phenomenology to analyze feelings in Othello. Fuck again.