sometime between Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and this book chuck got a whole lot fucking sexier.

He still looks like Corey Haim to me, but yes, much sexier.

How's that book vs. SD&CP?

it's the sweater

But if you liked SD&CP or if you've ever read any of the columns he's done for publications, you'll like it.

Started reading "Against The Day" yesterday. only a few pages in but it has some sure fire signs of being quite an interesting read. just in the first 10 pages a collection of men are flying to chicago in an airship powered by a purpetual motion device. avoiding the ku klux klan, they aquire a new member and sail on. they also have a dog that is currently reading some sort of anarchist novel/story. he can speak to the crew by barking and they understand him. he (the dog) also pisses downwind while on the airship, in turn covering people on the ground in pee.

its pretty fucking interesting.

i heard this book was pretty awesome. someone recommended it to me when i became an economics major.

Variable Star - Robert A. Heinlein, Spider Robinson

When Bob's widow died a "lost" outline for a Mid-'50s Juvenile was found, Spider was asked to flesh it out & update the physics & etc. Pretty good so far, at the start it felt like more of a roughly 50/50 collaboration, but it's becoming more & more of a Spider book.

Started reading "Against The Day" yesterday. only a few pages in but it has some sure fire signs of being quite an interesting read. just in the first 10 pages a collection of men are flying to chicago in an airship powered by a purpetual motion device. avoiding the ku klux klan, they aquire a new member and sail on. they also have a dog that is currently reading some sort of anarchist novel/story. he can speak to the crew by barking and they understand him. he (the dog) also pisses downwind while on the airship, in turn covering people on the ground in pee.

its pretty fucking interesting.

My avatar is glad you are enjoying it.

I've been thinking about reading this. Any thoughts on it?

Pagan Kennedy -- confessions of a memory eater

What a great cover. Stiff's been sitting on my shelf for ages just, you know, getting stiff.

Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages brimming with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man, city boy, and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!" Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the epicenter of comics' golden age.

But Joe Kavalier is driven by motives far more complex than your average hack. In fact, his first act as a comic-book artist is to deal Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the first issue shows the Escapist delivering "an immortal haymaker" onto the Führer's realistically bloody jaw.) In subsequent years, the Escapist and his superhero allies take on the evil Iron Chain and their leader Attila Haxoff--their battles drawn with an intensity that grows more disturbing as Joe's efforts to rescue his family fail. He's fighting their war with brush and ink, Joe thinks, and the idea sustains him long enough to meet the beautiful Rosa Saks, a surrealist artist and surprisingly retrograde muse. But when even that fiction fails him, Joe performs an escape of his own, leaving Rosa and Sammy to pick up the pieces in some increasingly wrong-headed ways.

More amazing adventures follow--but reader, why spoil the fun? Suffice to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the Escapist busts locks. Previous books such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys have prose of equal shimmer and wit, and yet here he seems to have finally found a canvas big enough for his gifts. The whole enterprise seems animated by love: for his alternately deluded, damaged, and painfully sincere characters; for the quirks and curious innocence of tough-talking wartime New York; and, above all, for comics themselves, "the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could." Far from negating such pleasures, the Holocaust's presence in the novel only makes them more pressing. Art, if not capable of actually fighting evil, can at least offer a gesture of defiance and hope--a way out, in other words, of a world gone completely mad. Comic-book critics, Joe notices, dwell on "the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." Indeed.

Hey, how is that one? I remember really liking A Handbook for Maturing Hipsters.

Brian K. Vaughan also wrote a couple issues based on Kavalier and Clay's The Escapist. If you enjoyed the book, check out the series. it's really good.

What thoughts would those be?

Right now I'm on

So update on Against the Day...buy this book. I'm about 90 pages in, reading at a steady but slow pace and so much shit has happened but it's all so interesting. Pynchon doesn't seem to hold back on his own personal thoughts, throwing them right into his characters. awesome book at just around 1/10th done.

So update on Against the Day...buy this book. I'm about 90 pages in, reading at a steady but slow pace and so much shit has happened but it's all so interesting. Pynchon doesn't seem to hold back on his own personal thoughts, throwing them right into his characters. awesome book at just around 1/10th done.