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O's Book Club

2002-07-20 11:55 am

it seems that i've fallen into a once-a-week-update schedule. saturday mornings seem to be the best times to sit myself down, after several cups of coffee and a couple of hours of news broadcasts from various countries (i subject myself to cnn, greek news, and bbc),and produce a couple of paragraphs worth of omegaserpentisms.

a few days ago i finished reading silverberg's "dying inside". a most unconventional sci-fi book about a psychically gifted man who progressivley loses his power of pre-cog. its not so much a sci-fi book as it is an honest attempt at postmodernist lit using sci-fi concepts as allegories and symbolic devices. which is what good sci-fi should be. only problem is that "dying inside" falls short of its mark. the protagonist is very dostoyevskian- a kock-off of the underground man, who in this case has an exaggerated self-relaization/awakening in the form psychic powers. "exagerrated" is a word you can use rather frequently to describe the main character- exagerrated melodrama, self-pity, self-loathing, cynicism, ect. but thats not the problem. the big letdown with this book is the author's approach to his objectives. mr silverberg, i don't want the protagonist to TELL ME that he is alienated and isolated. instead why don't you attempt to show me these things through the plot, through the character's words and actions. you either think that, i, your audience, am stupid, or you are incapable of adequately (no need to even go as far as "masterfully") using prose for your artistic purposes.

i'm now 100 or so pages into the Greek translation of "Foucalt's Pendulum" by Eco, and its great stuff so far. i think i'm also going to read the english translation because i have a feeling that there will be a different quality to it as the language changes. greek seems to work beautifully for the occult images of the book.

thats all i have for today. i should be meeting malraux and an aquaintance from the previous place of employment( which shall be known only as the Hell of a Thousand Bitchy Middle-aged Greeks and Jews) for a game this evening.

-end of transmission-

from dust - from ashes

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