Posted by El Spaniard on Mon, Dec 28, 2009 @ 11:22 AM
Most of us are now reading the next book - Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. First off, the jackass who won our last challenge chose a hard cover, which should immediately be outlawed. It's like taking a dump in a dirty bar bathroom - it's a total pain in the ass, everything about it kind of sucks, but at the end you still enjoy the experience. Nevermind, it's actually not like that at all, so this book better be good.
Early review after 6.5 pages is not good. The cover is lame - some glossy picture of a surf shop that is far too cliché and drawn by some dork who smoked weed once, watched Surf's Up, and now thinks he knows what surfing and the 60's were all about. In the first 6 pages you also get introduced to about 97 different characters, all in some hazy 60's-speak-lingo, so I have absolutely no idea what is going on.
Worst part is some chick came in and I can't determine if she is wearing a bikini top with shorts, or a bikini bottom with a shirt. I can't get past this and it is affecting everything else I'm doing with my life. If nothing else, I need to have the images of these literary chicks straight in my head. I still dream about Sheeni from Youth in Revolt, even if that book blew. If the chick who plays her in the movie is not as hot as what I have dreamed up, she will be ruined forever.
That is the biggest issue I have with movies - the destruction of literary female fantasies. Imagine how hot Sandra Bullock could be in a book if someone described her but you never actually had to see her? Or Shaq? Or the hot chick with the tail from Geek Love. Not sure what I would actually do if I discovered a chick had a real tail while we were in the sack, but I'm pretty sure it would somehow involve me wearing a cowboy hat and chewing tobacco.
Either way, what the hell is this with this chick in Inherent Vice? I actually don't know her name either, I think it's either Shasta or Sanchez, but not sure since there are so many weird names being thrown around already.
Another issue I can't get past. It's like trying to go to Whackytown with a Readers Digest. At this point, I'm just hoping for a shark attack since I know there is surfing involved. Pretty much the savior of any/all books is include a shark attack in some way/shape/form. It's kind of like chanting U-S-A! U-S-A! during any argument - guaranteed winning shot that can't be beat. Next time you're in an argument, just say that whatever the person just said was un-American and start chanting U-S-A! Other people will pick up on the chant, and game over. Try it.
Posted by El Spaniard on Tue, Dec 22, 2009 @ 11:57 AM
As noted, Shackelton was the alpha male book club member this month and took down the challenge thus winning naming rights for December. Here's a look behind the curtain at what goes into one of his picks:
________________________________________________
from Shackelton
to Tanaka
cc Spaniard,
Undead,
Scorp #8,
MC Trouble,
Slayer,
The Judge
date Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 11:58 AMsubject Re: WHERE THE F IS THE BOOK SELECTION?
Book Meat Below.
Take a look and get back to me if anyone has read any of these or had bad experiences with Pynchon, which means it could be a great selection.
-Shackleton
Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon (384 pages)
Pynchon sets his new novel in and around Gordita Beach, a mythical surfside paradise named for all the things his PI hero, Larry Doc Sportello, loves best: nonnutritious foods, healthy babies, curvaceous femme fatales. We're in early-'70s Southern California, so Gordita Beach inevitably suggests a kind of Fat City, too, ripe for the plundering of rapacious real estate combines and ideal for Pynchon's recurring tragicomedy of America as the perfect wave that got away. It all starts with Pynchon's least conspicuous intro ever: She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to-she being Doc's old flame Shasta, fearful for her lately conscience-afflicted tycoon boyfriend, Mickey. There follow plots, subplots and counterplots till you could plotz. Behind each damsel cowers another, even more distressed. Pulling Mr. Big's strings is always a villain even bigger. More fertile still is Pynchon's unmatched gift for finding new metaphors to embody old obsessions. Get ready for glancing excursions into maritime law, the nascent Internet, obscure surf music and Locard's exchange principle (on loan from criminology), plus a side trip to the lost continent of Lemuria. But there's a blissful, sportive magnanimity, too, a forgiveness vouchsafed to pimps, vets, cops, narcs and even developers that feels new, or newly heartfelt. Blessed with a sympathetic hero, suspenseful momentum and an endlessly suggestive setting, the novel's bones need only a touch of the screenwriter's dark chiropractic arts to render perhaps American literature's most movie-mad genius, of all things, filmable. Inherent Vice deepens Pynchon's developing California cycle, following The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland with a shaggy-dog epic of Eden mansionized and Mansonized beyond recognition-yet never quite beyond hope. Across five decades now, he's more or less alternated these West Coast chamber pieces with his more formidable symphonies (V; Gravity's Rainbow; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day). Partisans of the latter may find this one a tad slight.
The Humbling - Philip Roth (160 pages)
What happens when a man loses the one thing that defines him as a human being? With nods to Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Shaw, Roth's grim new novel explores this question-with varying success. While the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post praised Roth's elegant writing and caustic wit, other reviewers found the novel superficial and oddly lifeless, citing flat characters, undeveloped plot contrivances, a lack of humor, and a hostile portrayal of homosexuality. Even the graphic sex is "coarse" and "dull," according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Though not his best work, The Humbling may appeal to faithful Roth fans; others should pick up one of his earlier novels.
Mason Dixon - Thomas Pynchon (I think this author is Scorp-worthy - 784 pages)
A sprawling, complex, and comic work from one of the country's most celebrated and idiosyncratic authors, Mason & Dixon is Thomas Pynchon's Most Magickal reinvention of the 18th-century novel. It follows the lifelong partnership and adventures of the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (of Mason-Dixon Line fame) as they travel the world mapping and measuring through an uncharted pre-Revolutionary America of Native Americans, white settlers, taverns, and bawdy establishments of ill-repute. Fans of the postmodern master of paranoia will recognize Pynchon's personality in the novel's first phrase: "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs," a brief echo of the rockets that curve across the skies in the writer's masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow.
The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem (528 pages)
Projected through the prism of race relations, black music and pop art, Lethem's stunning, disturbing and authoritatively observed narrative covers three decades of turbulent events on Dean Street, Brooklyn. When Abraham and Rachel Ebdus arrive there in the early 1970s, they are among the first whites to venture into a mainly black neighborhood that is just beginning to be called Boerum Hill. Abraham is a painter who abandons his craft to construct tiny, virtually indistinguishable movie frames in which nothing happens. Ex-hippie Rachel, a misguided liberal who will soon abandon her family, insists on sending their son, Dylan, to public school, where he stands out like a white flag. Desperately lonely, regularly attacked and abused by the black kids ("yoked," in the parlance), Dylan is saved by his unlikely friendship with his neighbor Mingus Rude, the son of a once-famous black singer, Barnett Rude Jr., who is now into cocaine and rage at the world. The story of Dylan and Mingus, both motherless boys, is one of loyalty and betrayal, and eventually different paths in life. Dylan will become a music journalist, and Mingus, for all his intelligence, kindness, verbal virtuosity and courage, will wind up behind bars. Meanwhile, the plot manages to encompass pop music from punk rock to rap, avant-garde art, graffiti, drug use, gentrification, the New York prison system-and to sing a vibrant, sometimes heartbreaking ballad of Brooklyn throughout. Lethem seems to have devoured the '70s, '80s and '90s-inhaled them whole-and he reproduces them faithfully on the page, in prose as supple as silk and as bright, explosive and illuminating as fireworks. Scary and funny and seriously surreal, the novel hurtles on a trajectory that feels inevitable. By the time Dylan begins to break out of the fortress of solitude that has been his life, readers have shared his pain and understood his dreams.
The Drop Edge of Yonder - Rudolph Wurlitzer (304 pages - could be too similar to Blood Meridian / Graham Greene but maybe a 2010 selection)
Known for 1969's Nog and the 1973 script for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Wurlitzer delivers a mystic western possessed of anarchic charms and incantatory beauty. Mountain-man, trapper and opportunistic beast Zebulon Shook starts the tale by getting cursed by a half-Shoshoni half-Irish woman. Doomed never to know whether he is in the spirit world, the real world or just dreaming, he departs from his homestead along the Gila River in New Mexico to sell pelts. After meeting up with his adopted brother, Hatchet Jack, and losing at cards to Delilah, a beautiful Abyssinian courtesan, Zebulon is shot during a barroom dustup and sets out for California, where the gold rush is gathering steam, bringing with it the law and order that threatens the mountain doin's that he loves so dearly. Zebulon is pulled ever deeper into the era's bizarre historical footnotes: immortalized as a notorious outlaw by a reporter; narrowly missing joining the Walker expedition to colonize Nicaragua; reconnecting with Delilah at a San Francisco opium den; and finding the law and order forces dogging his heels to the last.
Posted by SCORP #8 on Mon, Dec 21, 2009 @ 03:22 PM
It truly is the most wonderful time of the year. And, in the spirit of giving that the season encourages, SCORPIONS have momentarily decided to set down their books, put aside their competitions, and open up their photo vault from Christmas Parties Past. Enjoy!
Caption: MC Trouble getting ready for the party in 2008. "What a waste of wine," you might be saying, to which MC Trouble would say, "don't be an idiot. I'd never do that with anything over 10% alcohol. That's scorpion blood. For the ladies."
Caption: All the SCORPS agree that the mushrooms & tequila kicked in at the exact wrong moment for "The Judge" in 2007. Every other SCORP got through the Yankee Swap without a problem. As for "The Judge," it took 12 men and a tranquilizer gun before he had his figgy pudding.
Caption: The Spaniard was a little late to the party in 2005.
Caption: Christmas piñata, SCORP-style. Feliz Navidad, motherfuckers.
Caption: In 2006 Mickey Rourke decided to drop by and let the SCORPS know the "Reason for the Season." It was a little awkward-until we got him a shot of whiskey and told him to pipe down.
Caption: Unidentified SCORPION. This photo was time stamped 12.29.08. The SCORPIONS party began on December 20 in 2008.
Posted by El Spaniard on Tue, Dec 08, 2009 @ 03:57 PM
It's early December. Kids are writing out their lists for santa, your girlfriend is dreaming of a ring and Scorp #8 is asleep in a gutter with a reindeer sweater and a black eye.
But early December also means another thing. For those not in polite society it means an official, sanctioned Scorpion book club meeting. Little did Shackleton realize when he picked The Raw Shark Texts written by Steven Hall on October 7th that the Scorps would break the existing time record from book choosing to book discussion. A lot has gone down in the past 2 months that has prevented the Scorps from gathering including, but not limited to:
- the spaniard losing his shirt in an underground poker game
- the undead killing his previous employer and starting fresh across town
- tanaka having an affair with tiger woods
But we're back and we are ready to go. We've already been contacted by Hall who is looking for the secret to joining in the un-space. Look for some pictures and stories in the next couple weeks. OR maybe we won't post anything. Either way we're meeting tonight and we'll be pouring the first beer on the ground for SLAYER who is with us no longer.