User Profile

We all have a Cafe Conde in our past somewhere - the eternally perfect place because it maybe only existed for a moment, was solid in time and place as well as in the people around us. The grass was greener, the light was brighter, by friends surrounded. Maybe life was better twenty or however many years ago, or maybe it's that you were twenty and carefree and now you are neither. Whatever characters there are in this novella, they are overshadowed by the echoing rain-soaked or sunlit streets of a mythical Paris that probably never existed, maybe not when Andre Breton was trying to make it dance like a circus bear to the tune of Surrealism and not in the desperate years after the 1940-45 War, but possibly in the 1950s when Queneau (who mentored Modiano's early career) was writing about Zazie in the Metro, and Boris Vian played …

 Gabe Henry's book can be repetitive as after all a lot of people tried to do basically the same thing, but it also underlines that there is a strong link between comedy and spelling reform - Gabe is a comedian himself so there may be a bias, but the link is there e.g. the Phunny Phellows, who included Mark Twain, and who Gabe suggests were the first ever stand-up comics. 

Why spelling reformers would want to abolish j I don't know. J is almost a counter-example to the 'no fixed sound for a letter' rule - it has basically one sound (with a few, usually loan-word, exceptions) throughout its uses.

I'm intrigued by SoundSpel which is maybe the best one I've seen. It was championed by "Uncle" Ed Rondthaler (1904-2009 and yes that is correct.) and is fairly close to my proposed new spelling (PNS) of a while back. It …

Brief stories about several of the artists who have improved our way of seeing the world via perceptual shifts and breakthroughs. A good book for dipping into and reading one or two at a time. Holds the interest very well. 

Massively OTT thing that would probably count as Bizarro if it had been published in a later decade, postulates that A.H. was an author of pulp fiction and postulated - in some kind of post-nuclear world - an uebermensch rebellion in keeping with the later excesses of Warhammer 40K which probably borrowed a lot from it. Memorable for its existence alone. 

Very late Amis presumably although he was still in his 60s when he wrote this. I probably disagreed with most of it at the time. 

Tommy Tester is, as any Black man, on the wrong side of the police and just about everybody in 1920s New York. Then he gets a peculiar commission from a mysterious individual. All hell breaks loose. Literally.

An enjoyable rewrite of, or sequel to, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath in which the protagonist is a woman from Ulthar - the dreamers' side. It parallels DQOUK quite a bit, with trouble with ghouls and ghasts, a sea-voyage, and Vellitt Boe is an excellent character, an ageing adventurer turned academic who sets off on one last adventure. And being a mirror image of DQOUK, a refreshing view of our world and the possibly not so utopian Dreamworld in contrast to it. 

A very slow read. Reading it really only for the Basic English bit - Wells, like Eric Blair, was a fan of BE but later realised it could too easily be used for state control of the population. There is a lot of speculation here, much of it fairly accurate, especially about its own near future (it was published in 1933), but by this point in his life the Wells of the Time Machine, War of the Worlds, Island of Dr Moreau, and even Kipps and the History of Mr Polly, was gone, and he had become weary and crushed - something I remember my dad saying many years ago, specifically about the very late Wells work Mind at the End of its Tether. He was at the end of his own tether and no longer what he had been. 

An excellent and moving story of people discovering what it is to be human, or something beyond it. Set in a spacefaring world where humans are far from the dominant race, it's in a way a low-key story but also one full of incident and character. The various races/species are well and amusingly drawn - the exploration of alternative biologies and e.g. a five-sexed species is entertaining. 
Didn't really see that it was an 'LGBT' etc. novel but there is the multiply-sexed species who can change sex, and Blue is asexual which I liked. Not every relationship between a man and a woman has to involve sex.
I had this on my (electronic) shelves since 2017, and somehow managed not to read it until now. I'm glad I finally opened it. 

Read this at school, and I mostly remember the title story which is about a shipwrecked sailor, whose sole word to his rescuers is "Shqipra!" Which is the country otherwise known as Albania, at the time a mysterious place behind its own iron curtain, and possessed of a language that Alan Coren (I think it was) described as looking like a losing hand at Scrabble. (he also suggested in the same piece that Albania didn't actually exist but it might as well have not done at the time). Things are different today, and while they're undoubtedly better for the Albanians, are they better all round? Another matter entirely.

Fun and not too serious crime fiction by HSK, featuring several loosely interlinked stories and the usual cacophony of HSK characters - imagine an alternative Chicago Damon Runyon universe. HSK has a reputation for being batshit crazy but this really isn't too bad.
More seriously he has a peculiar reputation for being racially insensitive. Yes, he doggedly transcribes dialect; but considering he was writing pre-WW2 he was ahead of his time in giving positive portrayals of ethnic minorities, and mixed-race couples (which, being in one, could get you lynched in some places at the time). He was fascinated by Chinese culture and it is usually quite evident even if he isn't above poking fun at it as well. He does have an unfortunate propensity for making 'down on his luck man who wants to marry a wealthy / influential woman' his go-to plot driver, but it doesn't always end the …

ON THE P*** IN THE NIGHT LAND

I awoke me and mine thinking-parts did hurt. I had reminscence of visits to several drinking-places, in which we imbibed several ales. I had also reminiscence of a Maid to whom I paid court in many ways including taking her into a secluded court yard and removing her troublesome nether clothing. I did not recall her name, nor may I ever have askt it. I bethought me to mine Naani of whom I had not thought while the Maid was cooing over mine great physical strength and while I was rogering her so soundly she hoppt off the ground at the top of every stroke of mine impressive shagging-parts.
In the morning I bethought me of this and also of the dis-ease that the Master Monstruwacan hath warned us against, and that I did not take precautions against. And sure enough when I …

tl;dr this is what happens when you let misandrists dictate on the response to (genuine) men's issues.

Missing White Woman Syndrome, the short story.