M.S. Vernon

I agree, as a Bowie hater and a Walker lover.

We love to see Lispector. I also picked up Lost Lambs recently, just on a whim because I hadn't heard of it and learned after the fact that it's causing a bit of a stir amongst like...popular literary fiction circles I guess? I'm too deep into shit nobody cares about to ever see trends.

Finished Ellmann's Joyce. Absolutely phenomenal. Tremendously funny, sad, and insightful into Joyce and his work.

RIP.

"Occasionally he had a rush of energy, and during one of these he vaulted over a wall, but fell because his sight was poor on the other side, hurting his arm"

Perhaps the funniest book I've ever read. Not ready for Ellmann's biography of Joyce to be over.

Yeah, visual design undermined a lot of the original, sound design ruined a lot of the atmosphere, the new graphic style in general was ugly and garish to me, and they made some level design changes that undermined it as well.

but even just 10 years ago it was kind of the thing to dunk on a lot of comeback bands trying to cash in on their young legacy and doing it very poorly.

anyway one day I will write the definitive academic history book on first wave black metal.

So seeing this still really young thing evolve just over the last 20 years has been a trip, and it's also a style that's so driven by youth particularly. Will that change? Certainly there are still many older bands doing comebacks and doing them really well (Coroner's new album slays),

We're always getting new subgenres and scenes and such all over the board, I mean look at Rate Your Music ten years ago vs. today and there's an immensity to the amount of categorisations that wasn't there previously, but have there been any huge innovations in style as big as extreme metal's?

It's thinking about stuff like this that really makes me want to study extreme metal academically. It's still such a young genre of music at a turning point in music history, and I just don't know if there are many other huge leaps in musical change as big as that from heavy metal to extreme metal.

But for someone younger than me, does it invoke a different reverence? I enjoy thinking about this.

Right, like that's crazy, yeah? I obviously don't have it from the beginning like many others, but yeah, like an album that came out in 2009 still feels like "the new shit" to me, because I was boots on the ground in the community and involved when this was coming out.

(And yes I know Master of Puppets is not a death metal album, but just seeing this post reminded me of this thing I'm always thinking about).

Like, are there people these days for whom an album released in 2010 feels as essential and ingrained in death metal history as Altars of Madness did for me in 2005?

It still always gets me how young extreme metal genres are. This is only 7 years older than me. When I was first getting into death metal, the genre was only 20 years old. I've been an avid death metal fan for over half of its existence.

A remake would be very much not ideal. The game is perfect as is. Better performance is all that it needs. And especially if a remake would be anything like the Demon's Souls remake, we don't want that.

Having a bad run with reading right now. The Hours by Michael Cunningham, just terrible. Daisy & Woolf by Michelle Cahill, very boring. The Idiot by Elif Batuman, just...nothing-y?

I need to read something that will inject some fucking life into me so I'm going back to Joyce.

Americans love to respect their soldiers so let me make this clear: their military is an imperialist bully-squad, deployed worldwide to remind various parts of the world of America's military might, and always ready to kill whichever non-white people are in the current administration's crosshairs.

Also strongly recommend his old blog post about world building (web.archive.org/web/20080410...), and Farah Mendlesohn's book Rhetorics of Fantasy if you're interested in the theoretical construction of fantasy as a genre.

I suggest you also read M John Harrison's Viriconium novels and stories.

I've only heard unsavoury things about him since from people I trust, and nothing but gushing praise for his Hyperion books from people I don't, which is enough to make me not want to read his work again.

I've only read one book by him, Summer of Night, and while I don't recall it being too ~problematic~ in any political sense, it was problematic in quite another way: it was really quite bad.

It's an all-timer, for sure. Extremely excited for the new one.

dan simmons, author of multiple, deeply contemptible works of racism fiction, has died. congratulations, and no, hyperion was not as good as the obituaries will say it was

Why would there need to be an otherwise?

Only now just learning that the "writers should read" discourse was started up again by Aaron Gwyn, and remembered good times when he blocked me for suggesting Judge Holden was supernatural in some way, then unblocked me when he found Cormac McCarthy saying the same thing.

Twitter used to be fun.

Did I see somewhere you were coming to Melbourne as well?

"Spell-binding. A meditation on [theme], like [author] meets [author]. Read this book."

Have been reading Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce and it's just as good as everyone has said it is. That Joyce fella was such a little cunt, I love it.