Jamal

I don’t see what’s unhappy about this thread, and although I keep encountering the name of Bateson and am quite interested, I don’t know what to make ...

I don't think you've shown this to anyone's satisfaction except your own. I'm not saying you're fanatical just because I disagree with you. Having a c...

Whether you actually do or not is me to decide, 0 thru 9. :razz:

Cheese from the EU was banned here in 2014 or 2015 in response to the sanctions that were a response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. For whatever re...

I smuggled the Spanish cheese into Russia back in July.

Gracias. It was very far from the best lunch I've ever had, but definitely not the worst.

Your whataboutery doesn't answer the charge of moral untenability. It sidesteps it. You talk as if the mere fact that Israel seeks to justify the kill...

I think your true believer optimism is pretty brutal, not all that far from bloodthirsty utilitarianism (the ends justify the means). In the end, it j...

Fair.

Lunch: cabbage wrap. Shredded raw cabbage, sliced onion and grated manchego with garlic mayonnaise and dried chilis, all wrapped up in Armenian flatbr...

Not sure I’d recommend Crash for excitement, but fair enough. Thank you for your contribution. Next time I start a topic about a book you haven’t read...

If the horror/porn/thriller/gangster/ police /serial-killer/supernatural scene bores you, allow me to recommend…Crash.

Internally, Crash normalizes some crazy shit, but the result is to de-normalize what we take to be unremarkable in the real world: the inhuman landsca...

Forgot to reply to this. Although I haven’t read it, I’ve heard it said that Crash is indeed a development of some of the ideas in that book.

Totally agree. In fact, I think jaywalking was pretty much an invention of the car industry. They campaigned hard to entrench the idea that streets ar...

I know what you mean, although I’m struggling to think of a film I disliked that I later regarded highly. Maybe Eyes Wide Shut, but I’m still at the d...

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But if your grandfather had been my grandmother, now that would have been weird.

Margaret > Maggie > Meggie > Peggie > Peg > Leg > Log > Hog > Hoggie So, my grandmother Margaret was called Hoggie by her husband, who was also my gra...

That makes sense. Whereas I was dismayed by the relentless elaboration of a single idea, you were expecting it. It was the first of his novels I've re...

To add to the reply I posted above… What might be the case is that in his novels, he is free to let his imagination run wild. That sounds trite, but I...

I can’t tell if this is an eccentric local custom, a metaphor, or a common and well-known practice that has somehow passed me by.

Many people find the book engaging, and not only writers and critics. It’s quite popular and also highly regarded. What you’re pointing out is that my...

Good question. It needed to be unenjoyable (to me) to be what it was. What it was was unenjoyable in its bones. I don’t think it would have been the s...

I think he can be too sweet sometimes, like s’mores. Obviously I’ve never had a s’more, but my cultural learnings are as deep as they are wide.

Send me a pair please. I might need them in case I have to send Hanover’s back to him.

Great, that should get to me no problem. Nobody’s ever sent me free glasses before, so I’m pretty chuffed (informal British English for pleased). I ho...

Works for me, and now I’ve got it in writing.

David Cronenburg, who adapted it into a film, had a similar experience to me. He couldn’t finish it the first time he read it, and even after he’d fin...

Good deal. Tell me where you went. I need a new test and some glasses myself.

I tend to think that if only a few bits of a book or film are great, while the rest of it isn’t great, then the thing has failed. On the other hand I ...

I expect to be reading that soon, since I’ve been getting into Delany recently.

I always say I like Cronenburg but I haven’t even seen Videodrome, by most accounts one of his most important and original films. What you say makes m...

Go for it. Well I say go for it, but you already know I have mixed feelings about it. Following is a representative sample to help you make the decisi...

Maybe a monkey? Sorry I'm not taking it very seriously. It's a sad story and feels quite real. My favourite line. Concise, relatable and kinda funny. ...

That’s the thing: nobody is supposed to do this. It’s taken for granted that in telling a story about boredom, you shouldn’t be boring. But Crash is b...

Yes, I think that’s a good analogy: it is a bit like the experience of reading profound but badly written or abstruse philosophy (which is not to say ...

Your skunk/cat story is like a variation of the tragic story of Pepé Le Pew.

Damn, for some reason I thought it was the first 50, and after that plain sailing. Well, I’ll get around to it eventually, but it still feels too soon...

I’m guessing this is Yiddish for impenetrable. Otherwise, you have some chutzpah, I’ll give you that. You tell the story well.

I was definitely bored, exhausted and frustrated. I abandoned it a couple of times but went back to it because I wanted to have read it, to know about...

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I kind of know what a golem is and that there was one hanging about in Prague some time ago, but I’ve lost the thread with regard to chickens. Maybe t...

I resent your implication that I’m just making this stuff up. It was my soul that survived. Normally when you get eaten by a chicken in two parts—but ...

The chicken theme really helps me to understand American politics, so keep it up. If God was responsive for my recovery, I hereby say thanks, but why ...

The universe changed for me when I found out the hard way that chickens eat mice. And when I say I found out the hard way, yes, I mean I was a mouse a...

No, I would not watch something like that. I am a total wuss when it comes to horror, although oddly enough I do like a lot of horror films, up to a p...

I’ll respond to a couple of things and might come back to the rest later. As a reader of Crash you’re a voyeur at most. It’s not involving and the cha...

Not really, but decades later I do still clearly remember a scene from one of those documentaries of a wildebeest being eaten alive by a pack of hyena...

That’s the puzzle. One possibility that occurred to me is just that because I don’t usually read transgressive fiction, Crash shocked me so much that ...