Brodzky Books

While I have a handful of articles halfway done, I’ve been unable to finish ‘em to satisfaction.  I’m going out of town for two weeks, so I’ll be able to dedicate more time to this site when I’m back.

The cool thing to do is to pledge to read 52 books, one a week, and then do it.  I enjoy reading and will freely admit that sometimes I just don’t keep at it as steadily as I’d enjoy.  I figure this is as good a spot as any to solidify a path for myself, not so much because I want to make a pledge or whatever, but solely to map out what books I’m gonna tear through next.  Having gotten a Kindle for Christmas, opening up glorious vistas of public domain works, and more, my choices are almost overwhelming.  To keep myself sane, I’ve decided to burn through some of my more recent physical backlog.  I own a huge amount of books and I’d like to check off as much as I can in terms of having read all those things on my bookshelf.

So, it’s just about two weeks into the year and I’m already ahead of schedule.

Finished:
1.  Mask of the Other, Greg Stolze
2.  Tall Tales of Felony and Failure, Warren Haustrumerda
3.  Stories of your Life and Others, Ted Chiang

In Progress:
4.  True to Life:  Why Truth Matters, Michael P. Lynch
5.  God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert

Up Next:
6.  An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage
7.  A History of the World in 6 Glasses, Tom Standage
8.  The Magicians, Lev Grossman
9.  Griftopia, Matt Taibbi
10.  The Song of Percival Peacock, Russell Edson
11.  Big Boy Rules:  America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq, Steve Fainaru
12.  DEBT:  The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber
13.  Who knows???

That should do for the first three months.  A fairly decent mix of scifi, fantasy, food anthropology, smile breaking real world stuff.  Some Russell Edson, too.  This is just a rough menu for what I plan to read in that time, and it might change.  DEBT, in particular, is a huge tome that I just dunno if I’ll have the cohesion of mind to take on so quickly after Griftopia, which is said to be a pretty frustrating and depressing read.  As for the 13th book of the quarter, and possible replacements for anything I opt out of, I’ll probably swap some Bertrand Russell or Sam Harris in.  If I can continue to maintain my lead, I should be able to claim 52 in a year pretty easily.

Now, because I really should be focusing on writing as much as reading, I’ll probably be doing write ups on some of these after I’ve finished them and had time to contemplate.  Ted Chiang’s ‘Stories’, and the rest of his work I’ve read, certainly deserve the proper attention.

Even in the event that I don’t hit my goal here, just putting this all down should help focus my year somewhat.  I’ve never been good at that.

Having just read Warren Haustrumerda’s debut book, Tall Tales of Felony and Failure, my mind keeps telling me to sum it up with a single phrase.  A complete reversal of the “life is pretty bad sometimes, but you can sometimes find peace” stylings of Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five, one can corrupt an oft repeated phrase from it and capture the essence of Tall Tales perfectly:  Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts.  Upon finding that particular phrase with which to launch the rest of my thoughts about the book from, everything fell into place quickly.

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If you are visiting from Party Dogge’s fantastic LAMEZINE party, I’d like to welcome you to my website.   Welcome!

If you are visiting from somewhere else, I would like to suggest at this time that you check out LAMEZINE with an open heart and mind.  There are plenty of cool people contributors like myself, including KC Green and J. Chastain, as well as my dumb friend Brandon Kirkman.  It’s probably not safe for work or home but I contributed one unit of ‘fiction’ so how bad could it be?

Stories about ‘this dream I had’ are almost universally terrible outside the realm of being casually entertaining with how absurd they are.  That specific sort of real-feeling incoherence dreams have is due to the way your brain works while you sleep.  I could make an analogy using computers or television, but it’s not important.  I had a dream a short time ago.  In this dream I was on the top floor of a hotel and I was in a room I’d checked in to.  I had just dropped my luggage onto the bed when I realized that this was not luggage I owned in real life.  I was then observing that the room had a color scheme that was unfortunate:  a burgundy shag carpet, white walls, and a pale green baseboard separating them.

There was a counter that drew my attention because of its paint job, though not because of the color.  It was a dark bluish-grey with white speckles, of a type that I only know to come from rattle cans, and something I had not specifically seen since I was maybe five years old.  This isn’t an important detail outside of the fact that it shows how deep my dream was pulling memories from at this point.  There was an insect on the counter.   It was flat, dark, and wide, with a segmented body and oily wings.  At that moment, the realization that I was not going to kill it was more sudden than the impulse to do so.  I was just on the vaguest cusp of being lucid that I realized this.  I was going to continue with the dream hotel room without letting even the most intangible hint of violence interrupt me.

Even in my sleep state, with my brain’s rhythms unspooled like a broken cassette tape, this was a decision I made.  If I had woken up then, I might not have remembered that choice.  What ended up happening though, was that as I was going to focus my dream on some other aspect of this terrible hotel room, the insect began to shake.  It was giving birth.  Its cloaca, which had not existed in the dream for me to notice, was opening to reveal a second insect, the exact type and size as the original.  I noted that it should have been laying an egg of some sort, just as I was realizing that soon I would have two of these angry looking bugs in my dream.  It was then that, without thinking at all, even with whatever neurons my broken-down sleepy brain could manage, I began to attack.  The fight or flight aspects of my ancient brain took over, and I was going to crush the insect, while it was giving birth, with a drinking glass I’d found.  It was a counter top, it made sense for there to be a drinking glass to smash an insect with.

I woke up, and felt some small amount of shame.  Not that I had intended to do dream violence to a dream insect, but merely because in some part of my brain, that violent caveman instinct exists, despite how long I’ve starved it.

An excavator tearing up dirt and rock ton by ton and dumping it into a machine that blasts it with water and shakes it down a sluice box, separating the heavier material across a series of riffles, and the gold flakes eventually being sifted down into a thin layer of synthetic ‘moss’ to be collected later.  A scoop of dirt and rock being carefully panned by hand, swirling the water gently to gradually reveal whatever small bits of precious metal are hidden beneath.  I could have used any number of metaphors to display the disparity between brute forcing one’s way through as much material as possible, or taking time to handle an individual project with a bit more focus- a shotgun blast versus a precision rifle, fast food versus fine dining, a hammer and sickle, whatever.  I’ve been watching Gold Rush: Alaska lately.

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While I’ve supported quite a few projects on Kickstarter, mostly things Greg Stolze is trying to bring into the physical world, the site’s premise of “solicit funds up front to produce cool stuff” attracts people of the Ponzi-scheme mindset.  While there’s a great deal of general DIY enthusiasts trying to get their projects off of the ground, there’s just enough people who are trying to get money for things that don’t need or deserve it to make browsing the site amusing in some of the worst ways.

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I was doing laundry at a turnkey laundromat a few years ago. I specifically use the phrase turnkey laundromat to denote that it was a coin-operated one rather than any other type solely so this story isn’t berthed into the mind of the reader that I have more than a trivial amount of money. I was doing laundry, by way of washing machine, while I was across the street at a 7-11 purchasing chips. I didn’t leave my clothes attended because the probability alone of someone finding them valuable enough to steal was absurdly low. Further, someone that would find them valuable enough to steal would almost certainly have some sort of completely irrational mindset that simply could not be dissuaded by my presence alone. Regardless, for lack of anything more interesting to do, I returned to the turnkey laundromat.

To pass the time, I skimmed through the magazines that were stacked on top of the turnkey soap vending machine. They were all damp copies of Analog from the mid-eighties. I read two time travel stories and six advertisements for digital wrist watches. There was a printing error in the magazine I was holding at the time; pages 6 through 14 had been inserted into the magazine twice. Pages 15 through 23 were missing. If I had not noticed this, I would have read four time travel stories and twelve advertisements for wrist watches. This would have been poignant to some, but it was all just patterns of matter to me.

I didn’t have my phone with me, and I didn’t remember not taking my phone with me. There was someone else, in the opposite corner of the turnkey laundromat. They were sending text messages from a phone that was the exact model and color of my phone. At the time my phone was three years old, and at the time I purchased it, it was three years behind the times. The probability alone of someone having the same exact phone as me was absurdly low. I became intensely curious as to if this phone was mine, or his. I wouldn’t resort to physical confrontation beyond simply asking for it back, if I needed to. I wanted to know the truth of the situation more than anything. My curiosity was satisfied completely when someone called the phone and he answered with “‘Sup girl?”.

Some time later, after I’d finished eating my chips as quietly as possible, my laundry had finished being washed, and then dried. When I left, I stole the misprinted Analog magazine from the mid-80s. This would have been poignant to some, but it was all just patterns of matter to me.

(Written in response to this.  When I saw it, I realized that I too had a laundromat story.  It’s possible that almost everyone does.)

The developers of one of the iPhone’s biggest non-bird-themed games has done an astounding zig-zag with my expectations and hired a legitimate author to put out a novella based on their intellectual property in the form of an ebook called “Infinity Blade: Awakening“.  While plenty of games have book tie-ins, there’s a lot of of hurdles to be cleared when trying to conflate some of Infinity Blade’s specific game mechanics and lack of a protagonist with a coherent storyline.

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DF Talk 17 is out.  It discusses playstyles central to Dwarf Fortress, based on the definitions defined in the previous article.  After contemplating further, after reading the thread’s responses, both before and after the Talk was posted, here’s my follow up thoughts on the issue.

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