Yeah, for me his non-fiction is the thing, though Animal Farm is a great fable. I like Burmese Days too though I don't think I'd call it a great novel.

Oh, New Sun is awesome. I just read it a year or two ago after being vaguely aware of it for a long time… truly deserves its reputation, in fact deserves a better reputation as a great work. Tricky, yes, but so deeply imagined and well-constructed; and I like that it's obscure and nothing is explained for you, it just…

That is a perfect take on my reading of the entire Dune series at thirteen or so.

I happened to reread Dune a few months ago, some twenty years after first reading the whole series, finding them then interesting but difficult. My take now is that it's a work of tremendous imagination yet not a particularly good book. Though in comparison to a lot of sci-fi of the era it deserves accolades. (I…

By my recollection it is absolutely erroneous. Of course maybe that is Pemulis being wrong, but it doesn't feel that way — it feels like DFW stumbled, which is surprising yet not impossible.

I wonder what you think of the Gould book — this is the first I've heard of it — because I've grown up reading his layman's material and he's definitely influenced me. Is it like a valedictory, or a critical argument, or what?

Coming to the end of Mason & Dixon at present, probably going to start over as soon as I finish. 18th-century picaresque suits Pynchon perfectly, I like it much more than Bleeding Edge. Not as funny as The Sot-Weed Factor though.

Rather in the line of the Disco Nap… 'three fourteen and i am high as hell and falling over people and about to pass out but holy shit there is noise and light and dancing and i am just going to sit against the wall for a bit…' - - - '…and hell yeah i had a little rest and it did me good and whats your name?'

Yeah that's the cool bit and what I was so pleased with myself for understanding as a twelve-year-old.

So I just watched the scene (about thiry-eight minutes in) and it goes:

Is this the movie with "I charged them, and shot them, under rule THREE OH THREE!" ? Why yes it is! (though I have the quote a little wrong)

Ever see Wax: the Discovery of Television Among the Bees? There's sort of an idea like that going on there… I ultimately read it as basically a ghost story though. An intriguingly weird movie worth checking out in any case.

Was it the Rio? I missed Up In Smoke, but I'm trying to remember where I saw Blonde Emmanuelle In 3-D, complete with red-blue shades… I kinda think it was the Rio. That and Pink Flamingos at the Nick are my standout recollections of movie-going in 90s Santa Cruz.

I suspect this applies to all preposition-using languages. It's certainly also true in French and German.

Clearly these should come with a mustache attachment.

Wormtongue is a nickname, though, given by those who despise him for his malicious influence. The book hints — in a pretty definite way I think — that he was a decent guy corrupted by greed, lust, power, etc.

There's a pretty interesting article in the New Yorker last month about Wonder Woman's origins. Bit more to it than just weird fetish stuff, though it may be even less likely that those other old threads will get woven into a Hollywood take.

Anyone interested in Salazar should read Hunter Thompson's contemporary "Strange Rumblings in Aztlán" (from Rolling Stone, collected in The Great Shark Hunt). One of the great Gonzo pieces.

I take Vile Bodies as his best early stuff — Dust is great when it's in England but all the South American stuff palls on me. And yeah Brideshead is odd — a fine book but sort of out of step with everything else.

"I think a lot of DJs are restricted to playlists of the most predictable and overplayed stuff. It would drive me nuts because I'd think, as a DJ, that part of my job was introducing people to new music."