Category: Books

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I Love Shit Like This

I’ve been a David Shrigley fan for a while. In fact, I’m drinking coffee out of this as I type. Anyway, a few years ago he embarked on a new project that I found both hilarious and brilliant.

In 2017, a charity bookshop in Swansea, UK made headline news as a result of exhibiting several hundred copies of Dan Brown’s 2003 novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’ in its window with a sign requesting that no more copies of the book be donated as they had more than they could sell.

‘Pulped Fiction’ is a project by visual artist David Shrigley, who has produced a limited run of 1,250 copies of George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ made entirely from the pulped remains of unwanted copies of ‘The Da Vinci Code’.

In 2023, Pulped Fiction was launched at the very charity shop in Swansea that started it all. 250 copies were available to buy at an exclusive price. After selling out within the first hour, and making headline news, the remaining copies are now available to buy.

Throughout the journey David and his studio team were documented by filmmaker Jay Bartlett. Telling the story of how the project came to be and the numerous hurdles faced along the way, the documentary can now be seen online for the first time here.

And if you’re interested in picking up one of the few copies left, it’ll set you back £1095. Cheap!

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Another Beatles Book?

You’d think the Beatles and Dylan had been examined from every possible angle, but nope.  Here’s a chronological look at their careers in parallel, with plenty of commentary on their influence on each other, friendship, rivalry, etc. I’m about three fourths in, and I’ve enjoyed it.  Good mixture of things I know, things I’d known and forgotten, and things I’d never known.  It’s always interesting and moves along.  A few of the analogies seem a bit forced, but of course no two people will agree on everything.

As I’m biased towards music over lyrics, I might have preferred a book on the Beatles and Brian Wilson, but no doubt they had fewer interactions.

One minor peeve.  Like just about every other Beatles book, the quote about “Aeolian cadences” and Mahler’s Song of the Earth rears its ugly head like it’s evidence of the Beatles’ artistic viability.  I don’t get why these journalists who are obviously good at research never bother to examine that quote.  “Aeolian cadence “ has about as much meaning as “C major time signature” or “F minor drumstick.”  Or “the explosion left a 15 mph deep crater. “ It makes no sense.  And the song in question, “Not a Second Time,” absolutely does not end with the same chords or chord pattern as Song of the Earth.  There’s no room for debate on the matter, it’s factually wrong.

I can’t believe that quote is still getting recycled.  Just put it in the trash.

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Number Go Up

I’m only halfway through this book, and the author has already gone from innumerable parties of insufferable “crypto bro’s” and NFT suckers in the US  and Carribean (the funny parts), to the edge of Cambodian forced-labor complexes where victims of human trafficking are forced to lure marks into sending them bitcoin—so far the only successful real-world application for cryptocurrency (the unfunny parts)— to El Salvador, where almost no one will accept Bitcoin, despite the president’s naming it an official currency.  I got the Kindle edition after watching this interview.  The book is just as entertaining, if not more.  Highly recommended.

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Black Books

We’ve been re-watching this series from around twenty years ago.  Just as hilarious second time around. Very bastardly.  More highlights here.

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Throw Money At It

I’ll be watching Glass Onion, on account of I liked the first one in the series. Netflix blew $450 million on two installments of the Knives Out franchise, presumably because the initial film cost $40 million to make, and did over $300 million box office.

Good luck recouping your investment!

Netflix also shelled out $1 billion with a “B” for The Rings of Power, which is Tolkien content from his sparse writing about the Second Age. I can’t imagine how much The Silmarillion would set them back.

Anyway, as a true Tolkien nerd I’ll say it’s comically off. Not just “hey we’ll edit George RR Martin a bit and Game of Thrones will really zip!” but “we’ll compress centuries of characters into shit that never happened or makes sense and people that never interacted and throw Weta Digital and 20 VFX houses at it.”

Supposedly the Tolkien estate signed off on it but it’s hard to believe. Maybe as a non-Tolkien story it’s fine for some people, but I wouldn’t know as I already know who the major characters are and bring all that baggage to it.
[n.b. I realize you all hate Tolkien, but I love his prose and his attention to detail, layers, and backstory. The Elven languages were created because he felt that gave a “whole cloth” feeling to the stories. For me, it works. I appreciated LOTR more after reading The Silmarillion.]

Pitch Meeting, as always, succinctly captures whatever the hell is supposed to be happening.