Top Ten Books

[Corpsey]

E.g. mouth fetishism

 

[borzoi]

There is very obviously huge room for artistic growth in the games industry, but at the same time there is a psychic and emotional need for wish fulfilment in the world, these crude and effective kicks that games provide. By effectively outlawing that you don't make the need disappear, you just frustrate it.

dungeons and dragons just did this, they're removing the concept of good and evil races from the game. but ofc the foundation of the entire game is having races with immutable physical and mental characteristics. so now it's this weird thing where everyone has a rich inner life and contains multitudes but all dwarves are still crafty, all orcs are still brutish and strong etc. not that it matters cos you can play it however you want in practice but the fantasy genre is always twisting people into these loops bc it's reactionary at its core.

 

[borzoi]

same w/ this stupid twitter thread about making a batman movie where he fights corrupt cops with the power of mutual aid and community centered policing. obviously these are all things i believe in but it's just so cringe when you try and warp a power fantasy for children to fit your worldview. it betrays a lack of trust in people and in your professed materialist beliefs too. if you read between the lines this person is just saying "i grew up liking batman and i still hate the police, but clearly most people are too stupid and need to be shown the way". media shapes our ideology but not like that!!

 

[IdleRich]

E.g. mouth fetishism

Great film that completely proves me wrong in what I said above. Particularly that section. I actually read the short story it's based on by... (I had to look it up) Pieyre de Mandiargues who also wrote Girl on a Motorcycle.
Borowczyk was a great director though, he started off making art films and by the end of his career sadly he was pretty much making straight up soft porn, but in the middle there was a kind of sweet spot where he made Immoral Tales, La Bete and Dr Jekyll...
Have you seen La Bete @Corpsey? If not get on it now it's really quite something.

 

[IdleRich]

Some great pictures from La Bete online but I don't want to spoil it for you so I'll content myself with this one

Based on a short story by Prosper Mermee who also wrote Carmen (the inspiration for the opera), but the story merely hints at what Borowczyk displays in all its messy detail.

 

[luka]

E.g. mouth fetishism

thats fucking disgusting i want to puke

 

[Corpsey]

He gets his finger right in there. It's his cousin or something. He declaims arrogantly about philosophy and makes her suck him off. It's a thinking man's deep throat.

 

[IdleRich]

You missed out the main thing. It's about the tide, that's why it's called La Maree - the bossy cousin guy is obsessed with two things, her "untouched" mouth and the tide, he combines both obsessions by forcing him to suck him off in time with the tide so that he will come in her mouth exactly at the moment high tide is reached. Remember he has that bit of paper with all the tides written on it, he puts it under a rock, I guess so he can refer to it and check on her progress.

 

[Corpsey]

Oh yes I remember all that now.

I didn't even attempt to think about what that might all mean, for obvious, horrible reasons

 

[luka]

Barty was telling me yesterday he's developed this inability to bring himself to orgasm without a kind of fist pump, yes! Just to get him over the finish line so to speak.

 

[craner]

Barty was telling me yesterday he's developed this inability to bring himself to orgasm without a kind of fist pump, yes! Just to get him over the finish line so to speak.

That's getting into the spirit of the Trump era!

 

[luka]

No, I never saw it. Had a quick look now. You said something up thread, and in Fantasies, about the cliché nature of fantasies. I've often said the unconscious manifests as cliché, that dreams are embarrassingly derivative and uninventive. Of course, there is the Jung archetype take on this. But beyond, not limited to this Jung-man's reading two questions crop up. Is the unconscious, its trite gnashing gimp mask tabloid power-sex nature, a reflection of traditional power structures' insidiousness or are these dominant forces in culture so because of our selfish and base selves? Neither prospect is a comfortable thought for 'liberals'.

I'm not here to protect the gentle dogmas of liberalism but do you think these are the only possible explanations?

 

[you]

I'm not here to protect the gentle dogmas of liberalism but do you think these are the only possible explanations?

No, I was just trying to draw out a nature/nurture question in the dynamic of fantasy and life.

 

[luka]

I don't know the answer. Which way do you lean?

 

[you]

I don't know the answer. Which way do you lean?

 

[luka]

View attachment 4088

You should tell us your top ten fantasies on shiels' thread. He's really proud of that thread, he considers it his best work.

 

[poetix]

Yesterday I finished the audio book of God Emperor of Dune. I have to salute the voice artists for never once letting on how colossally bored they must have been of the whole thing. "Oh great, another six pages of gnomic dialogue about the lessons of history and the cosmic mysticism of the Big Worm Guy's bloody Golden Path..."

Anyway, there's a scene where Duncan Idaho, who Herbert's constantly telling us is an almost spiritually irresistable hunk in spite of having been grown in an axolotl tank by the feelthy Tleilaxu, is climbing a wall, a feat of very manly daring and physical prowess, and Nayla, a Fish Speaker who Herbert keeps telling us is dim, violent and built like a brick shithouse, is watching him raptly and wishing she could participate in the Big Worm Guy's eugenic breeding programme with him. She starts wondering if she'll have an orgasm, but she doesn't...until she sees the rope he's thrown down after reaching the top.

There was a reason for me to tell you this, but I've forgotten what it was.

 

[version]

One problem I run into with books is I struggle to say I like something if I think some of it's shit and I think there are shit bits in basically everything I've ever read.

When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on “Ulysses,” with a little help from “Dubliners.” You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of “Paradise Lost.” Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (“As You Like It” is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with “King John” or “Henry VI, Part III”?

Proustians will claim that “In Search of Lost Time” is unimprovable throughout, despite all the agonizing longueurs. And Janeites will never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings (I mean “Sense and Sensibility,” “Mansfield Park,” and “Persuasion”). Perhaps the only true exceptions to the fifty-fifty model are Homer and Harper Lee. Our subject, here, is literary evaluation, so of course everything I say is mere opinion, unverifiable and also unfalsifiable, which makes the ground shakier still. But I stubbornly suspect that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are.

 

[voliviavv24]

The City of Dreadful Night (technically a poem) - James Thomson - great book!!!

 

[craner]

I can't believe nobody pushed Nomad on why exactly 'Margins of Philosophy' was one of her Top 10 books of all time, not just one if her Top 10 Derrida books.