you are all terrible people, but that prompted me to a rather spurious purchase of nic sheff's "tweak". there's more to th title, but it's in the front stowaway somewhere. sheff was all new-yorker before trainwrecking if memory serves, so it's fairly well written. not my world by a long shot, but it's a good way to figure out the tweaked-out mind that once had something going, unlike a rose sister. for those of us who are never going to embrace that route, it's well-written and fairly illuminating, simply because i don't think he shot every synapse in his brain to shit unlike most of that cadre. airplane, beach reading. i'm now committed to reading a bunch of dideon. the year of magical thinking is the singular best book written if you've lost anyone period. forgot it in my must read section, not for everyone but just fucking good, if not niche

Cocaiinsm 2 unreal mot a book but best speeding tunes ever

Just finished Savages by Don Wilson. I am left with the Feeling that the Author just took a huge steaming shit on my brain.



It might make for a nice Oliver Stone movie but the book pissed me off to no end. I wanted and interesting tale of the drug business, instead I got an author enamored with his own writing style, some mumbo jumbo political diatribes and characters taken from a B movie.

narconews.com and mark bowden of the atlantic's staff and the guy who wrote "killing pablo" is where i'd look. mind that you're going to get well-researched attempts at the full story with him, but it's not going to be real-time material. but if you wanted a good treatment of 80's central american drug trade and the politics that accompanied it's fast and pretty fun like most of his shit.

The Naked And The Dead by Norman mailer.

Custer Survivor, by John Koster. The story of Frank Finkel, who according to Koster may be survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn/Custer's Last Stand. Without dispute, an August Finckle served as a second sgt. in Tom Custer's Company C. Many years later a prosperous and highly-regarded farmer in Dayton, Washington claimed that he was Sgt. Finckle, and had kept quiet since he feared accusations of desertion in the face of the enemy. Five or six modern handwriting analysts believe that the signature on Sgt. Finckle's enlistment documents was a match to Frank Finkel's signature. The great Sioux warrior Rain-in-the-Face and other Sioux and Cheyenne witnesses claim that a trooper from Tom Custer's Company c in fact escaped alive.

Thanks. Will have to put that on my list. Am reading John Keegan's The American Civil War. Love to see a great English historian cut through all of the sentimental drivel in contrast to Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote. It is frankly even better than James McPherson's well-received one volume civil war history.

What makes you so stupid to think an Englishman's perspective about why the North or South fought the War is more valid?

Swap the shoes. Is an American author more qualified to write about what happened in Iraq? Just because they lay the BBC production values, accent and linguistic idiosyncrasies on it doesn't make it more accurate.

I have read Catton and Foote, and McPherson twice. Keegan is a better historian, I have read his volume on the First World War twice, and recommend to any intelligent person who would like to understand the course of the 20th century. His volume on the American Civil War only confirms my belief in his pre-eminence as an historian. If you choose to respond, would it be possible to reference your familiarity with the relative merits Catton, Foote, and McPherson, based upon your own readings rather than the rather irrelevant generalities contained on your post?

I'll never go beyond generalities with the likes of you, until you can at least address the generalities. Address them and we can go from there. And in my own due time.

You already spent 15 minutes or more composing a reply. This definitely goes on my timeframe now that I see how you are straining with thought on it, and it's going in a different thread. We aren't going to trash a Burglar (RIP) thread with the vitriol that is sure to follow.

Am impressed with Keegan's objectivity (ability to avoid emotionality and subjectivism that has all too often pervade the writings of Catton, Foote, and McPherson). and his economy of language (Catton and Foote in particular wrote as if they were being paid by the word). From reading your last post I have no doubt but that your response in due course will demonstrate in detail your mastery of the subject.

I would be greatly pained indeed to learn that the Burglar is indeed deceased, as our exchange of views would pale in significance were that to be the case. I take it that a man of your erudition is cognizant of John Donne's famous poem dealing with the condition of human mortality. Your inclination to monitor the amount of time that it took me to respond to your prior post leads me to wonder whether you might indeed be the reincarnation of Frederick Winslow Taylor.

dude, from what i remember of donne he was always writing poems and eulogies about unpleasant shit. i can't even guess a specific poem about mortality, half of them were.
which i guess since there's nobody from that period but shakespeare that makes it into your college anthology of brit lit, writing was still more or less shit. mannerist/metaphysical poetry=2 allegories, brutally formulaic. but again, writing remained shit until george eliot or sam c. and milton was shit but once you're in the cannon it's impossible to yank crap.
but burg is not dead, thankfully.

many of us have purchased norton's anthology and if you're actually buying individual donne books rapaciously it's fair to say tenured english professors would find you weird. we can all get into a circle-jerk of erudition, but these days i'm content to point to the metrics of "scoreboard"

i'm saying bornyo's correct in positing the issue of the writer/subject. think about caesar's gallic commentaries and how there's a natural issue of accurately observing something from a position of outsider with natural biases. you have to make sense of an unfamiliar culture and you start into greedy revisionism, lumping things together as neatly as possible. which ends up totally out of whack compared to what we now know about the gauls. brits in pith helmets writing about africa, etc. none of it's truly reliable.

The John Donne reference was to the poem containing the lines "no man is an island...ask not for whom the bell tolls..." etcetera.

Have you read John Keegan's volume on the first World War(which required Keegan to deal with the Cultures of England, Hohenzollern Germany, Romanov Russia, Habsburg and Ottoman empires, and various minor states in Europe) or anything else he has authored?

If so what would lead you to think that Keegan engages in superficial revisionism?

M. Saiai - Pornocalypse



So far it reads as some semi-incoherent xpt rant...

i've read some keegan, excellent regarding western europe, again he simply didn't have the kind of access to things in the ottoman empire-language included to the best of my knowledge. thin on russia, but that's no more fault than Julius C. not catching things like coinage and relatively established trade in what would become called Gallia Narbonnensis(sic)

that's the problem with relying of any work of history which lacks a counterpart of similar quality and scholarship from the other side of things. i mean, the first greek to call himself a historian instantly goes and writes everything from really a pan=athenic perspective, the dialogue with the island athens killed all the men and enslaved the women and children was about as skewed as possible. but it's what survives, who was literate, and to what level at a certain place at a certain time. not to say the history of the pelop. isn't incredibly valuable, same as keegan, but nobody is ever going to be deep in the mix of all sides of something at the highest strategic levels with perfect understanding of language and years of living in the culture. just too hard.

Seems that you are raising the issue of what is termed historiography; in the most general terms how can the reader know that history he is learning from a particular book approximates reality or "the truth". One answer is to read more than one author.

Specifically, in McPherson's volume on the American Civil War, in the first chapter, he goes into great detail as to how the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 inflamed Northern public opinion against the south, for example imposing a fine of approximately ten thousand 2011 dollars upon anyone who obstruct the return of a fugitive slave. OTOH the military historian Keegan merely describes the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law in general terms, omitting such details.

Shadowplay by Tad Williams

Tad Williams - Shadowrise

I been kinda flipping this book for the past week:

Enjoyed Mark Twain's THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER and Other Stories. Favorite line: "When they came it was as if the lord of the world had arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along; and when they went they left a calm behind which was like the deep sleep which follows an orgy."

Just finished reading this one:

^^^Forget it, Alex. They're not going to give you a show wherein you travel the world in search of trash can cuisine.

Read all Stephenson's words. Had put this one off until last week.

Its metaphysical grace notes will ring in your mind for life.

I enjoy reading good travelogues. Jim Soliski's DOES YOUR METER WORK? is a funny, interesting first-hand account of his bumming around South-East Asia after saving up money teaching English. He visits the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and a few other places.

One informative chapter is entitled HAND JOB PARK.
Each day spent in present day Vietnam includes the following conversation from a cyclo driver:
You....YOU...MAN...where you go? You want cyclo?
No. Go away.
You. YOU! MASSAGE? Fucky? I take you. Where you go?
Cyclo drivers know what men want; they just lack a little diplomacy. However, native Vietnamese men generally don't have the money for the full service, so they have their own place to park.
Now, back up in history.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, the French took a crack at their own little empire, for the most part failing, but they still managed to leave behind a few reminders of their sojourns into Indochina.
Two magnificent keepsakes, a Catholic Cathedral and the Post Office styled in grandiose Old European flavor out in the center of Saigon. Behind the Cathedral is a green area two blocks square.
Back to today.
You'll find leafy old trees, weedy grass that always needs cutting, iron benches, and vendors who sell snacks, smokes, and postcards during the day. Next time you see that old footage on History Channel of North Vietnamese tanks crashing through the gates of the palace, and soldiers erecting a flag to signify the fall of Saigon, look behind the smiling victors and you'll see the park.
Beginning early evening after sundown, you'll find ladies sitting by themselves scattered about the park benches. Soon, a horny toad joins one, pulls down his pants, puts an arm around her to get real close, and she leans over. Any further movements come from the girl's arms. Facing the park with their backs to the street is their attempt at discretion. I sat waiting one night for a friend to never arrive and, upon my eyes from across the two-lane street, in less than an hour, a girl pulled four tricks.
During each trick, pedestrians passed by at a consistent canter, others slowed to a crawl for a quick peek-a-boo over a shoulder, then carried on leaving the pseudo-lovers to carry on.
The first three clients didn't last long. No sooner were they done, the girl jumped to her feet and walked to another bench with her tote bag over her shoulder and tissue paper wiping and cleaning her hand...you do the math. The men bolted equally quickly, fastening their britches as they went.
Not atypically, rain exploded with the usual marble-sized droplets. While everyone scrambled for shelter in restaurants and beneath the overhang of buildings, our little enterpriser whipped out her fluorescent yellow rain poncho and remained open for business. A young man bicycled up, peered inside her tightly drawn hood, spoke a few words, then they assumed the position. The giggling audience of vendors, women, children, and whoever found themselves staying dry, loved it.
Her little shoulders went up and down and up and down - he wouldn't pop. Twice, like a boxer sitting in her corner between rounds she stopped, then her bell would ring and she'd be back into the business at hand. Finally, she relented and they were none too happy to move on in their respective directions, soaked to the bone. The guard who I'd made friends with over the weeks reported fees for services rendered in Hand Job Park at 5,000 Vietnamese dong ($1USD = 12,5000VND). (Book was published in 2004.)

Napoleon: the Rise to Power or something like that.

Samantha Bee's I KNOW I AM, BUT WHAT ARE YOU?. She does funny stuff on The Daily Show.

i thought that was a panzer post for a second.

REading Castro's Final Hour by Andres Oppenheimer. Raul is a stone killer.

How to Lose a War: More Foolish Plans and Great Military Blunders (Edited by Bill Fawcett)

Peter the Great. Robert Massie

Radio Handbook, 19th Ed. (1975) by Orr, W6SAI just the oscillator and coupling parts mostly.

Holidays on Ice. David Sedaris (Yes, I know it's April, not December.)

Core Performance (again) by Mark Verstegen. If you wanna work and don't want to do zillions of weights, pick up one of the newer editions of it...

^^^Ooooh, that will be my next book. I heart lifting.

Been a busy few weeks, but finally finished Keith Richards' 'Life'.

Don't know if it's been mentioned here already, but I'm recommending it.

I read it, and agree- it's a good read.

Just picked up Prodgal Father Pagan Son by Kerrie Droban