Icons and Cockroaches

I've been meaning to write about 15 book reviews on here, mostly so I don't have to force people I know to listen to my opinions on books and people they couldn't possibly care less about. Less ambitiously, here is what I been reading: The three Russian criminal tattoo books put out by Fuel. As I get older I am more and more inclined to buy books that are mostly pictures, and these are the perfect mix of scholarly introductions (not too long and never boring) and photographs about a world I'll never come anywhere near. This world is the antithesis of America's world of "body art", where every provincial has dozens of meaningless ugly tattoos all over themselves. For some reason I think the KPRF and it's history are interesting. Maybe it's because American Communists are just so boring and awful, with a history of either being stooges or (after 1991)  generic lefties who think voting for Social Democratic parties is too extreme . I also suspect I am

  Above is the first image I saw from the new Limonov movie. 20 year old me would have been losing his mind over this but (slightly) older me is unsure. It is exciting that it's being made, the first film about his whole life (the Russian made Rosskoe was focused on a young Limonov) BUT: It's not just an adaptation of his life story but of the Carrere book. The fact that it took a book by a French bourgeois memoirist  to get a major movie about Limonov made is ludicrous. Someone should have made one years ago, hell, someone should have done a whole series of them years ago,  one for each of his major phases that a good film maker could create a complete aesthetic universe out of. You'd have Limonov the thief/poet in muddy and drab provincial Ukraine, Limonov roving through Moscow and partying with underground poets, the down and out punk years in violent 70's NYC (plus the fun challenge of casting Richard Hell and the Ramones), his time in Paris with the intellectuals g

Disenchanged Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev.  by Glen Cronin. Published by Cornell Press. High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism.  by David Wills. Published by Beatdom Books. Adventures in Overthinking: Reactionary Russians and the Fall of Gonzo    I think you're supposed to read new books occasionally but as some of the poorly constructed paragraphs in the entries below imply, I don't do that very often. I've read two newish books recently, one the Leontiev biography I was losing my mind over a few months back and the second one a biography/literary analysis of Hunter S. Thompson. The latter joins a long list of books that have tackled Thompson but this is the first one I've read in a while that actually seemed necessary for people who like his books and take them seriously. The world doesn't need the 20th memoir by someone who hung out in Thompson's kitchen and thinks they're some kind of insider because they share

I think I've felt disappointed in the ending of every Murakami book I've ever read. At the same time I always sort of miss his protagonists after I finish the last page. I almost wish he'd write a series of doorstoppers with the same protagonists so you could spend more time with his heroes and never really have to worry about finishing it. It would be like one of those mediocre fantasy series with 15 books- but instead of having to put up with an endless imitation of Tolkien you'd  tag along with a group of sad but cultured people as they mope  around Japan for thousands of pages. I guess Updike's Rabbit series would be a closer comparison, only like with those pulpy fantasy novels I never liked them. Unlike most of Murakami's main characters  I never wanted to spend more than a few minutes with Rabbit and his sad problems. The world of those books isn't as appealing or as real to me for some reason (or the American setting makes it more relatable and thus

 I recently spent a few days at one of those Getaway campground cabins that sit on top of trailers and had one of those awful travel moments where I didn't know what to read. I finished Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami  on my Kindle faster than I expected and wasn't really in the mood for the physical books I brought as back ups:  Simulacra and Simulation  and Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above 1928-1941.  The latter I read years ago and still think of as a classic and I will certainly read again at some point, but it was not the thing to read while trying to distract myself from the types of thoughts that usually creep in around the evening time.  I bought Baudrillard's book thinking it might be useful to read something different from what I normally have my nose buried in - but French post-structuralism wasn't the ticket to distraction either. His ideas aren't really difficult to understand and there's some clever lines of thought

For the first time in quite a few years I'm impatiently waiting for a book release. It's a rare event for a number of reasons, the primary ones being that most of my reading consists of 1 - biographies and novels that I've read a dozen times before and 2- as many already published books I can find on whatever topic I happen to be obsessed with at the moment (more on that in the future). Well the stars have aligned and a new release is overlapping with a topic that fit into that second category: Russian writer  and the subject of Cornell Press's Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev . For anyone interested in the history of Russian conservatism or just Russian culture in general, Leontiev is a refreshing and interesting figure because of his biography and the impossibility of categorizing him according to modern standards. A minor noble born in 1861, he developed an aesthetic approach to life and morality, prioritizing the picturesque over