Finally have internet installed & it's super fast. Weirdest T-shirt slogan I've seen so far "Big Pussy Christ Lives". Best bar I've been to BYG (thanks to David Hoenigman). This blog - Morbid Anatomy - provided the illustration. Go visit, you'll find some interesting things there. I found it via boingboing. Favourite places so far - Kanda & its bookshops & the Sumida River. A review of Love Hotel City in the Japan Times. & how about Stewart Home versus David Cameron.
Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones: Sorry, couldn't finish. Got halfway through. Boring. Really. The prose is stodgy - could be the fault of the translator - but I struggled. Needs a strong editor. & I was looking forward to it.
China Miéville - Perdido Street Station: Been meaning to read this for years. Miéville's novel is supremely crafted - as in all good fantasy/science fiction, the imagined world (New Crobuzon) is fully realized & ever so slightly familiar. The geographical space of London warped to a steampunk future - sort of like Dickens crossed with William Gibson.
Yasunari Kawabata - The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa: A novel about my new manor. The narrative begins about two blocks from my apartment and then proceeds past my window & into Asakusa's mean streets. A fragmented narrative about the area & its prostitutes & thieves, its writers & con-artists, its actors & geishas. Not tried Kawabata before but I'll read more.
Bernard Stiegler - Acting Out: The pre-eminent post-Heidegger philosopher's take on why he is a philosopher, his post-bank-robber life, & his analysis of a world in which humanity struggles with our push to the post-human - an analysis of the loss of us, the atomization of the me, the proliferation of I in the crazy-mirror world of we. Worth it if you can find a copy.
Larry McCaffery (ed.) - Storming the Reality Studio: An omnibus of cyberpunk fiction and postmodern thought. Fiction from the likes of Acker, Ballard, DeLillo, Gibson, Rucker, & Sterling followed by the thoughts and theories of people such as Derrida, Jameson, Lyotard - even Timothy Leary gets a few words in. Good intro to cyberpunk & late 20thC critical theory.
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow: I read this novel when I was about 16. I carried it around with me like it was a security blanket, a pomo bible, or a can of Stella (or Enjuku these days). It was the Picador edition with the missile head grafted onto the stockings-&-suspender-belt-wearing bottom half of a woman's body. The second time I read it was at university - probably around 1986. Third time around, I'm about 100 pages in. I remember the denseness of the plot but not the slow concretion of the sentences. I bought a new copy because of Frank Miller's soon-to-be-classic cover. Plus check out Zak Smith's illustrations to GR.
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