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doorjamb

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Posts posted by doorjamb

    What are you consuming right now?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    I've been doing lamb hearts the last couple of weeks. Proper lush cheap meat.

    I got home from work this morning and slow cooked three of them in a stock I made from the last ones I cooked. It's reduced red wine with beef stock and a whole garlic, then after slow cooking the last last lot, I forced the garlic through a sieve back into the red wine and stock and heart juices. 

    This afternoon I sliced them up and made a giant batch of stir fry with veg and rice and sliced heart pieces. Lunch/dinner for the next few days.

    baphometcrypt.jpgThe-Heart-Rippers-Were-Persistent-2.jpg:flower:

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. Includes my two favorite Conan stories, “Tower of the Elephant” & “Queen of the Black Coast.” Some really great Lovecraftian bits in these, too:

     

    “Conan felt his soul shrivel and begin to be drawn out of his body, to drown in the yellow wells of cosmic horror which glimmered spectrally in the formless chaos that was growing about him and engulfing all life and sanity. Those eyes grew and became gigantic, and in them the Cimmerian glimpsed the reality of all the abysmal and blasphemous horrors that lurk in the outer darkness of formless voids and nighted gulfs. He opened his bloody lips to shriek his hate and loathing, but only a dry rattle burst from his throat.” Fucking metal.

     

     

    Next up for me is a long overdue revisit of the Gormenghast trilogy, which is bloody magnificent.

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Thanks guys! Hadn’t heard of The Fisherman; will definitely find meself a copy of that one. Not too optimistic about Adam Nevill based on the excerpts I just read, but I’ll give him a shot.

     

    About halfway through Powers of Darkness (the translator-tweaked Dracula I mentioned above). Turns out it’s really different. Lots of details and weird occurrences that give it sort of an Irish/Scandinavian folklore feel, to my mind—nothing heavy-handed, just reads a bit less modern Gothic in tone (Henry James, Mary Shelley stuff). It’s also got loads of footnotes which are occasionally interesting but mostly not. Good for a dreary evening or two in any case.

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Alright fellas, help me put together a kickass pile of spooky books to read this autumn.

     

    I dug out Stephen King's Cycle of the Werewolf last night (it was next to a bunch of old Goosebumps books—hell yeah), and before that I reread Alan Moore's From Hell. Plus I got this thing called Powers of Darkness, which I guess is what happened when Bram Stoker's Icelandic translator for Dracula decided to blood-and-gore things up a bit. So that could be fun. or crap, but maybe fun crap.

     

    Suggestions? I hunger for fresh blood

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    I've only had time to get a few chapters in to The Box Man but so far it's devastatingly good. Best fiction I've read in years, new or old.

    Kobo Abe is that dude for real

     

    I grabbed The Box Man at the library yesterday on the strength of this recommendation. For some reason I was expecting something more… I dunno, like, Ishmael Reed’s Hocus Pocus-esque, or something—maybe just because of seeing the interspersed news articles & images when I flipped through it. Still, I’m intrigued enough to push on with it, unlike Franzen’s Purity, which I sat and read about a third of before putting it back on the shelf. Boooring.

     

    Recently read:

    • Rendezvous With Rama (Clarke) — SF classic. Groovy cover art, too.
    • Riddley Walker (Hoban) — One of my favorite SF books of all time. I actually read this twice in a row this time, cover to cover.
    • The Weirdstone of Brisingamen & The Moon of Gomrath (Garner) — YA fantasy. Absolutely crammed with wizards, dwarves, goblins, all that good stuff, plus they’ve got some truly frantic, frightening sequences for children’s books. TBH though I only reread these because I’ve misplaced my Taran Wanderer series books (Alexander), which I adored as a kid.
    • The Invention of Morel (Casares) — Really good read, though it’s kind of hard to know  whether to attribute its awkwardness to deliberate stylistic choices or naive/outsider artistic status on the author’s part. Weird & cool, & for whatever reason reminded me that I’d like to watch The Lobster again.

    Next up: The Death of a Nobody (Romains), Locus Solus (Roussel), & Voice of the Fire (Moore), if I can get my hands on a copy.

    Can you play cassettes?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Still hands-down my favorite audio delivery/storage mechanism:

    1. Charmingly cheesy & plasticky, without being fatally delicate (viz. vinyl)
    2. Portable, but not too portable (pro tip: cassette Walkman is for rollerskating, CD Walkman is for rollerblading)
    3. Easily manipulated & recycled
    4. Cheap as hell
    5. Ideal fidelity for 80s thrash metal, shoegaze, & pop (incidentally also the most abundant genres to be found in discount cassette bins)
    6. I generally record all my own stuff onto cassette & only later record to digital (initially because of limitations of my shitty setup; later out of habit & simple fondness)
    7. Only working part of my first car’s stereo system anyway
    8. When they inevitably go bad, the results are awesome or hilarious instead of frustrating (again, viz. vinyl/CD/corrupt digitals)

    I actually just scored a Technics RS-B18—along with an SA-200 & an SLD-5—for free last week! :w00t:

    Cycling bikes

    in General Banter

    Posted

     

    btw since i last posted in this thread i picked up an 85 pink trek that i had converted to single speed as my day to day commuter. nearly 2k miles on the pink pony

     

    tumblr_oeee5fs59d1sne56no1_1280.jpg

     

    looks like fun!

     

    I’m constantly torn between upgrading parts (nicer wheelsets, stems, seats, etc.) & worrying more about my baby getting vivisected while locked up somewhere. So I still roll the same shitty stock wheels & blister my butt on a sub-par seat; at least that way I can leave it outside while I’m at work or whatever.

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted · Edited by doorjamb

    i'm trying to read j r by gaddis but holy fuck is it tedious. 

    Yeah? I enjoyed A Frolic of His Own. Been meaning to get around to JR or Recognitions.

     

    Right now it’s Graham Greene’s End of the Affair & random poetry to decompress from a couple endless editorial slogs.

     

    I discovered Zbigniew Herbert recently via this collection & some of it makes me very happy. I definitely prefer watching an artist fail in hopeless, naïve earnesty & being able to relate over the alternative of being successfully razzle-dazzled but coming away feeling more or less empty.

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

    I finally got around to reading some Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky & have thus far found it exceedingly enjoyable. Next on my bucket list is to try (yet again) to make it through Tristram Shandy in one go.

    Tomorrows Harvest - Today

    in Boards of Canada

    Posted

    The album feels shorter than it used to, too. Always a good sign.

    What an interesting point. (about perceived duration)

     

    Their most cohesive 'statement', if not their best album.

    Agreed, it’s very much ‘of a piece.’ I would actually say the same of Geogaddi too, though there it’s less apparent at first because:

    (1) so many tracks are perfectly capable of standing alone as well as meshing with the album proper, and

    (2) TH’s cohesion is on par with a cinematic score; the nature of its tightness is dramatic/illustrative, as though it were conceived as complementary to some absent visual or narrative corollary piece. Whereas Geogaddi’s cohesion is paradoxically grounded in a global abstraction, an omnipresent sense of doubt or disbelief akin to magic (n/either angelic n/or diabolic). TH coheres like an operatic suite; G hangs impossibly together like a fever dream.

    Now Reading

    in General Banter

    Posted

     

    one of you sci fi geeks please advise: having read Neuromancer, would I be foolish to skip the middle one before reading Mona Lisa Overdrive?

     

    coincidentally I just started reading Count Zero last week, seems ok so far.

     

    I alway seem to be disagreeing with Keanu

    but I loved the Pattern Recognition trilogy

    So much so that I bought a signed copy of PR

    WG's newest book is about a post-apocalyptic performance artist

    Which sounds awesome imo

    Tanks guise. Picked up MLO at a garage sale last week, but reckon I’ll hunt down CZ first.

     

    Gibson’s not a priority at the moment anyway; this time of year it’s all about the old school spooky: Poe, Stevenson, Lovecraft, James, De La Mare… Stuff to listen to haunted house SFX by :fear:

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