What are you reading right now?

[The Taco Santo!]

The Lonesome Dove series. The 1st one, in my opinion, is one of the finest American novels ever written. Streets of Laredo is a real downer. Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon are good.

 

[LordOfZhbagva]

After finishing his previous book on Kush, I've gone through Websly Derek's "Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims in the Middle Nile". The book shares just about all the flaws and boons of the previous book. Derek's clearly an expert and an enthusiastic one, but I frankly didn't care for much of the material written within the book (it's very cool that you can write for a page and a half when this specific random church in Mekuria was abandoned and that you can cite 3 different Arab explorers writing about it, but I still don't care). If you're interested in the area/period, it's good, tho expect a lot of archeology, which, I feel you can skip over a lot of and focus on the political, economic and social aspects.
I will take a bit of a break from Sudan, as I have a short booklet to read, but will get back to it with Kingdoms of the Sudan by O'Fahey and Spaulding, which is an older work from 74, but it should cover the remaining stretch of history until the Egyptian conquest of Sudan.

 

[Knee Heel No Womb]

After finishing his previous book on Kush, I've gone through Websly Derek's "Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims in the Middle Nile". The book shares just about all the flaws and boons of the previous book. Derek's clearly an expert and an enthusiastic one, but I frankly didn't care for much of the material written within the book (it's very cool that you can write for a page and a half when this specific random church in Mekuria was abandoned and that you can cite 3 different Arab explorers writing about it, but I still don't care). If you're interested in the area/period, it's good, tho expect a lot of archeology, which, I feel you can skip over a lot of and focus on the political, economic and social aspects.
I will take a bit of a break from Sudan, as I have a short booklet to read, but will get back to it with Kingdoms of the Sudan by O'Fahey and Spaulding, which is an older work from 74, but it should cover the remaining stretch of history until the Egyptian conquest of Sudan.

Any particular reason for the interest in African history? It's concerns much more modern history / politics, but I enjoyed Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, by Stearns. It's primarily about the Second Congo War. You should check it out if you like stories where things only ever get worse, even when you think things are as bad as they could possibly be.

 

[LordOfZhbagva]

Any particular reason for the interest in African history?

I couldn't tell you. I find it fascinating, and I think it's a very valuable, unique and interesting view into behavior of human states in the past epochs and I think people are sleeping on it by dismissing it as "niggers". And of course, I have a very strong view that if one wishes to get a complete view of today, one needs to understand what lead to it in the past.
Also, I'll challenge the allegation that I'm disproportionately interested in African history. Out of almost 40 history books I've read in the past few years, I think 8 were about Africa. I have a strong interest in history in general and wish to have a broad base of knowledge about most of the world, tho I'm focusing on the old continents first.

It's concerns much more modern history / politics, but I enjoyed Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, by Stearns. It's primarily about the Second Congo War.

Oh yeah, that one's in my reading list, I've heard it's great.

You should check it out if you like stories where things only ever get worse, even when you think things are as bad as they could possibly be.

This is also a thing I really like reading about. States in crisis, the human suffering and the breakdown is all so fascinating. Maybe it's why I liked "And quiet flows the Don".

 

[800 Chupacabras]

couldn't tell you. I find it fascinating, and I think it's a very valuable, unique and interesting view into behavior of human states in the past epochs and I think people are sleeping on it by dismissing it as "niggers".

I’m on the same wavelength with Chinese history currently. It’s an engaging and enjoyable mental challenge trying to understand the historical structures and ideologies of Chinese society. Many of the concepts and ideas are totally alien to me as a Westerner, a speaker of an Indo-European language, and an alphabet user.

My favorite realization so far, from taking on Spence, is the mistake of homogenizing the Chinese. China is really more akin to a region than a country, like Eastern Europe or Western Europe. Numerous ethnic and religious groups have existed in an interconnected region for millennia, with certain groups achieving dominance for periods of time. I could see the same type of structure in African history being present.

Do you have any recommendations for books on or historians of Benin?

 

[Knee Heel No Womb]

Maybe it's why I liked "And quiet flows the Don".

New rec acquired. I'll put it in with the rest of my tbr pile to be gazed at longingly for years to come.

Also, I'll challenge the allegation that I'm disproportionately interested in African history. Out of almost 40 history books I've read in the past few years, I think 8 were about Africa. I have a strong interest in history in general and wish to have a broad base of knowledge about most of the world, tho I'm focusing on the old continents first.

Have you been on an African kick lately? I've been lurking this thread, and I've noticed you reading more than one book about northeast subsaharans. It seems like you're kind of chasing down references between books too, almost like there's something specific you were trying to understand.

As for understanding history, I love your vibe, my dude. I also have a small passion for history.

Thread tax:
I got around to reading Dulce Base, by Valdez. Absolutely fantastic. I noticed a few apparent technical inaccuracies when the author tried explaining certain black projects / proposals, but nothing I couldn't readily forgive, and nothing that contradicts the main points he was trying to make.

 

[LordOfZhbagva]

Do you have any recommendations for books on or historians of Benin?

Unfortunately not. I've only started with Sudan and I intend to do the Horn of Africa before making my way across the Sahel into West Africa.

I’m on the same wavelength with Chinese history currently. It’s an engaging and enjoyable mental challenge trying to understand the historical structures and ideologies of Chinese society. Many of the concepts and ideas are totally alien to me as a Westerner, a speaker of an Indo-European language, and an alphabet user.

My favorite realization so far, from taking on Spence, is the mistake of homogenizing the Chinese. China is really more akin to a region than a country, like Eastern Europe or Western Europe. Numerous ethnic and religious groups have existed in an interconnected region for millennia, with certain groups achieving dominance for periods of time. I could see the same type of structure in African history being present.

I adore Chinese history and intend to finish going through it. I have the last 3 books of the History of Imperial China to go through, but the different authors and my (slightly less enthusiastic) view on the later periods of Chinese history have pushed it back in my reading list.

New rec acquired. I'll put it in with the rest of my tbr pile to be gazed at longingly for years to come.

I can't recommend it enough. The writer was a child soldier in the Red Army and wrote about the pre-war, ww1 and Russian civil war in his home region. It's vile, rude, harsh and painful. And I can't shake the feeling that he witnessed some of the more specific and gruesome scenes in the book.

Have you been on an African kick lately? I've been lurking this thread, and I've noticed you reading more than one book about northeast subsaharans. It seems like you're kind of chasing down references between books too, almost like there's something specific you were trying to understand.

Yeah, I have. I've been meaning to get into African history for a while, but the Sudanese civil war gave me the final kick to get going. If it hadn't gotten to my attention, I'd have delayed it further. And as for now, I simply desire to get an understanding of the regions' history from the antiquity to modernity.

As for understanding history, I love your vibe, my dude. I also have a small passion for history.

 

[Safir]

and the Soviets put a bunch of women in combat roles to communicate egality.

This is bullshit. We put women in combat roles because these women could fight and wanted to fight. Many had already had training in clubs and such. Some effectively paid for their training with donations. Some bought tanks! Soviets are not Americans, we're a different culture!

The USSR before WWII was an international pariah and our only line of contact with world powers was selling national treasures to Jews. We didn't give a shit about "communicating" any gay poseur nonsense -- why? to whom?

Does this or this really scream muhfeminism?

There were only 4 women in the Politburo: Absolute (oldtimey revolutionary), Furtseva (an aviator and homefront defense coordinator), and the two Gorby whores (Temu Thatcher and an actual pimp). BTW Absolute wanted to fight in 1941 (she was 67) but was rejected. We already were at the forefront of women's rights, being (among other things) the only country in the world that had banned rape, and the rest of the world hated us for it if they had any opinion at all.

We only sent two women to space, the first one for the achievement. Four others who trained alongside her didn't get to go to space at all (one of them was a thot, her penis set out to destroy the Soviet manned flights program in revenge, which soured them on the whole "women in space" idea). The second woman in space, 19 years later, was a world champion ace pilot and the unschooled daughter of the (street urchin, fighter pilot, war hero) Marshal of Aviation.

(Gay poseur nonsense started under Khrushchyov, and it was aimed the other way, at foreign social conservatives: "look, we too are a civilized nation, we too can produce luxury culture for westoid consumption". That was bad, gay, and embarrassing. See also: Olympic games, we should've stuck to holding the Spartakiad.)

 

[800 Chupacabras]

Unfortunately not. I've only started with Sudan and I intend to do the Horn of Africa before making my way across the Sahel into West Africa.

Let me know once you get into the history of Ethiopia and if you find any good works. Eventually I’ll read more about Benin and Ethiopia.

I adore Chinese history and intend to finish going through it. I have the last 3 books of the History of Imperial China to go through, but the different authors and my (slightly less enthusiastic) view on the later periods of Chinese history have pushed it back in my reading list.

I’m currently more focused on the bibliography of Jonathan D. Spence than any particular period, although his scholarship often pertains to the Qing Dynasty. I just found a good stack of his books for cheap at a couple local bookstores, so I’ll let you known which of those stand out most.

 

[Knee Heel No Womb]

This is bullshit. We put women in combat roles because these women could fight and wanted to fight. Many had already had training in clubs and such. Some effectively paid for their training with donations. Some bought tanks! Soviets are not Americans, we're a different culture!

The USSR before WWII was an international pariah and our only line of contact with world powers was selling national treasures to Jews. We didn't give a shit about "communicating" any gay poseur nonsense -- why? to whom?

Chill out dude. What I meant was that the Soviet Union featured women prominently in their propaganda* during WW2, for the very explicit reason of showing it's citizenry how modern and unrestrained by illogical traditions they were, and that the whole of their society was involved in the war effort. They were very famous for this around the world.

Also, USSR politicians did performative bullshit all the time for no reason. That's the same with politicians everywhere.

*Don't freak out about this word, you definitely know what I mean.

 

[verissimus]

I think there was another thread for book searches, but I will leave this here. I'm looking for a certain book or even just the author of that book. The book came out somewhere around the 2000s. It's non-fiction and has to do with what US foreign policy ought to be like in the future especially with regard to the Third World. Basically the author had an pro-interventionist mindset that to a certain extent comes across as neo-conservative. If I had to guess the page count, the book would probably have been about 350 to 400 pages long.

The author at the time would probably have been in his mid-40s to early 50s. I believe he actually worked within the GWB administration in the DoD, DoS, or National Security.

Edit : Never mind, I found both. The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas P.M. Barnett.

 

[cold comfort]

I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

We follow a girl who has spent almost her entire life locked in a cage with thirty-nine other women, since she was a baby. They’re fed, clothed, not tortured, not interrogated. One day, an alarm goes off while the guards are delivering food which causes them to rush off leaving the door open. The women escape and wander the barren landscape for many years. Every few months they find another bunker like the one they were imprisoned in. Sometimes they contain forty men instead of forty women but there are never any survivors. The women die off one by one until only the protagonist is left. She keeps exploring until she too eventually dies. I enjoyed the slightly surreal aspect of it, but didn’t think it was ultimately very interesting. There’s some minor conflict between the characters but nothing major. The girl is different from the women in the ways you’d expect considering how she grew up. She’s very curious but never finds any answers. Ultimately she finds some happiness in leaving behind this account of her life knowing full-well no one will ever read it. You can see the allegory, but I didn’t think there was enough to chew on.

 

[Knee Heel No Womb]

I think there was another thread for book searches, but I will leave this here. I'm looking for a certain book or even just the author of that book. The book came out somewhere around the 2000s. It's non-fiction and has to do with what US foreign policy ought to be like in the future especially with regard to the Third World. Basically the author had an pro-interventionist mindset that to a certain extent comes across as neo-conservative. If I had to guess the page count, the book would probably have been about 350 to 400 pages long.

The author at the time would probably have been in his mid-40s to early 50s. I believe he actually worked within the GWB administration in the DoD, DoS, or National Security.

Edit : Never mind, I found both. The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas P.M. Barnett.

Is that any good? As a rule, self proclaimed "Doctrinal Theorists" have an annoying tendency of repeating what they've heard others say without any real concern for whether or not it works (See Peter Zeihan, Ralph Peters, Ryan McBeth).

 

[LordOfZhbagva]

Ralph Peters

Leave my boy alone, Red Army was a great novel (and one I fully recommend).

 

[verissimus]

Is that any good? As a rule, self proclaimed "Doctrinal Theorists" have an annoying tendency of repeating what they've heard others say without any real concern for whether or not it works (See Peter Zeihan, Ralph Peters, Ryan McBeth).

I have no idea what you mean. All I'll say is that I remember being somewhat intrigued by Mr. Barnett's lectures/presentations on C-SPAN (I think) even if I pretty much disagreed with his conclusion. It's been a long time since I read his book, but I'm sure my opinion would be more or less the same if I re-read it.

I'm not exactly sure what else to say. Perhaps you should check out a few of his presentations on youtube first, then if you want, check out the book I mentioned (haven't touched his other books yet) if you like what you heard.

 

[Knee Heel No Womb]

Perhaps you should check out a few of his presentations on youtube first, then if you want, check out the book I mentioned (haven't touched his other books yet) if you like what you heard.

I've actually been doing exactly that. Don't read into my ramblings too much. I guess all I was trying to say is that some people only write their books so they can brag to others that they're a published author.

Leave my boy alone, Red Army was a great novel (and one I fully recommend).

I think his fiction is great, even if he's allergic to happy endings. Also, I'm pretty sure Red Army was released a month or two after the dissolution of the SU, which makes the whole thing more enjoyable in my opinion.

 

[verissimus]

I've actually been doing exactly that. Don't read into my ramblings too much. I guess all I was trying to say is that some people only write their books so they can brag to others that they're a published author.

Hmm, I think I see what you mean. I think it's safe to say he doesn't fall under that umbrella.

 

[Safir]

Chill out dude. What I meant was that the Soviet Union featured women prominently in their propaganda* during WW2, for the very explicit reason of showing it's citizenry how modern and unrestrained by illogical traditions they were, and that the whole of their society was involved in the war effort. They were very famous for this around the world.

Don't you motte and bailey me, you fucking ESL. You wrote:

and the Soviets put a bunch of women in combat roles to communicate egality.

Women in pre-war and wartime Soviet propaganda are

• professional uplifted working women ("What the October Revolution gave women:")
• mothers, wives, homefront workers, the anthropomorphic personification of Motherland
• doctors and nurses
• guerrillas ("fritzes are already taking your mleko, jajki, and virginity, might as well fight back"), 10% of guerrillas were women

The Soviets NEVER sought out to recruit women for actual frontline combat in the GPW, not for any practical reason and especially not for gay American muhfeminism. Women were drafted for anti-air defense, comms, and logistics; the most deadly female profession was medicine. You're just buttmad and trying to pin 2026's faggotry on the first country in the world that considered women to be people.

 

[Pomniman]

Shadow Ticket. Pynchon is probably despised here and he does get way too twee for his own good sometimes (I still haven't managed to get through Against the Day despite having finished all his other books, and Vineland was complete slop despite having a couple of interesting ideas) but him almost stepping on James Ellroy's toes (albeit with no use of the NIGGER word thus far) with this one is an amusing angle.

 

[somercet]

All right, I'm giving up on Dhalgren. I caved in and read the synopsis on Wikipedia. It looks like I'm not going to miss much. It's more degeneracy (bisexual triangle involving two adults and a 15-year old boy), amnesia, writing poems that we never get to read and no action to speak of.

It was quite the read. Lotta weird shit with the holographic jeweled chains and jumping from infinitely burning buildings to poetry readings at fancy dinners. I felt obligated to finish it. When it literally wrapped right back around to the beginning of the story I literally went "Oh this is bullshit."

A post I never, uh, posted:

A correct version of Dhalgren is probably a fool’s errand. The author is dyslexic: he called a political science department “Poly-sci” on page 33 (as a teenager I too believed in that imaginary grounding in multiple sciences) and used “defraction” for “diffraction.” But he also uses lots of obscure words and insists on very correct Standard English (probably to compensate for the dyslexia, to ensure his writings are still accessible to his fellow mortals), even as he peppers his dialog with impenetrable regional dialects and obsolete slang. He also mixes Anglo and American spellings: both the Bantam and Vintage printings each use “whisky” (Anglo-Scots) and “whiskey” (Irish/American) in equal number. And all the deliberate misspellings and other typographic experiments littered about. (Delany wrote part of this novel in London, and employed local typists to create the typescript; many American authors mix in some Briticisms, but the extensive mixing can probably be blamed on the typists.)

Dhalgren is labeled science fiction, but it really looks more like the Old Testament (or, more closely, Wagner’s Götterdämmerung) filtered through a lens of: high literature; pulp fiction’s re-grounding of magic and fantasy in science (cf. half the works in Jeffro Johnson’s Appendix N, the literary history of Dungeons & Dragons, particularly Vance and St. Clair); and intersectional Marxism (called, at the time, the “New Left”), which was, when this was written, then self-assembling into the “social justice” of today, cf. Black Widow’s monologue in the rubric on page 833:

“It’s not that men and women are identical, it’s just that they are so near identical in all but the political abuses and privileges that are that are lavished on the one and visited on the other that to talk of ‘innate’ differences as significant, even to childbirth, is to hold up the color of the hair, the strength of a limb, a predilection for history over mathematics or vice versa, as a pre-determining factor in who shall be treated how, with no appeal; while to ignore those abuses and privileges is to ignore oppression, exploitation, even genocide, even while these are shaping conscience, consciousness, and rage.”

(Remember, kids, holding the door open for a woman is genocide!)

Well, if we discard all literature with politically unsavory beginnings, then 90% of world historical literature needs burning. The Vedas? A record of ethno-tribal religious war. The Tao Te Ching? Written by the archivist to a king who was fighting to protect his own royalty against the coming Qin empire. Shakespeare, the “premier Tudor PR flack”? Are we so mean as to deny a man his lauds as the only Marxist to contribute actual genius to American literature since Malcolm Cowley took a break from defending Stalin’s show trials in The New Republic to point out that the first, 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass was a pure record of a genuine satori experience, later buried under thousands of lesser authorial revisions?

The most important parts of a man’s life take place out of doors.

The disaster that reduces Bellona, and all its epiphenomena, is utterly unexplored. No explanation is given for the sun in chapter V.2, no more than we have for the sun and moon that hung over Gibeon as the Israelites fought. No one in America is paying any attention to Bellona, aside from the misfits who show up there. (If this is meant to be an allegory about Vietnam, the hippies, or race relations, it is an insensible one, since America spent most of the 1960s talking about nothing else.) We meet an astronaut, but do not be gulled: Dhalgren lives in The Mythos, where “the heavens themselves blaze forth,” but in a rather dry, literary part of that magic realm. Set in a city where the infrastructure became instantly (but never quite completely) decrepit, it may be the missing proto-cyberpunk link.

Dhalgren compares to Grand Theft Auto III on the PlayStation 2, the original Star Wars trilogy, and Fripp & Eno’s (No Pussyfooting). Liberty City was so big that it contained vast, open, empty spaces; Lucas’ Empire contained whole empty worlds; “The Heavenly Music Corporation” drones across a whole LP side (twenty-one minutes) until it lifts the auditor into the celestial pleroma. The city of Bellona is big enough and empty enough to pull the reader into much the same isolation. Once the initial excitement wears off, Dhalgren starts to seem maddeningly repetitive, circular, and boring. But to those readers open to its decidedly peculiar charms, that quickly becomes an indelible part of the ride. A lot of your life is empty, after all, even after you discount the one-third of it you will spend asleep. Bellona recreates that peculiar timelessness you experience when you leave your parents and move into a run-down house with 5-12 of your closest friends, with no particular plans to improve yourself, and a minimum-effort job that just covers your food, tobacco, alcohol and pot requirements.

Near contemporary Gravity’s Rainbow also uses a book-ending circular structure, but in Dhalgren circular patterns are structural. Dhalgren as a whole really knocks GR into a cocked hat. I read the latter three times, twice with the book of annotations; it didn't help, and it only served to break me of novel-reading for my entire life. One of the most hated bits of reading a novel is listening to the groans and squeacks as The Author, behind a curtain, drags plot furniture from one scene to another. Delany accomplishes one major feat with this book: when you hear the plot furniture being dragged, rest assured Delany means for you to hear it.

“I think it’s stupid, but it’s… fun. There aren’t very many mistakes in it… I mean the ones the people who put the type together made.” (p. 706)

Delany uses few brand names, but he tends to do violence to them: Scotch tape and Pepto-Bismol are misspelled. Willys was a car manufacturer and his name does not have a possessive. The Bantam edition used “levis” as a name for denim trousers, while the Vintage edition tried using “Levi’s” ... but only for about half the occurrences. Before the “designer jeans” of the late 1970s–early ’80s, “levis” (without the possessive) was a genericized trademark for what we now only call “jeans.” This is not corrected by Ring’s errata.

Please enjoy Dhalgren, which was written:

Kid looked up at Bill, frowning in the pause —“To construct a complicitous illusion in lingual catalysis, a crystalline and conscientious alkahest.”
“… again?” Bill asked.