Derik Badman's Journal

• Cometbus, A Punkhouse in the Deep South: The Oral History of 309
• Cometbus, I Wish There Were Something I Could Quit
• Zola, The Masterpiece
• Mossfegh, Lapvona
• Moore and Campbell, From Hell

Adding search to my website (via Algolia for now)... just because. Converted my old static archives to markdown from the html so I could then send them to be indexed. It seems kind of silly considering I haven't posted any new journal entries in quite awhile, but also it was something that was missing from my site for a long time now. And since I'm not working this week it was a good time to do some coding.

Forgot that From Hell kind of brings in the whole "all time happening at once" thing that Moore uses much more thoroughly in Jerusalem. You just see it pop up at times via Gull's visions and his pre-death vision in Chapter 14. Campbell's colorization is sometimes effective and sometimes atrocious. He often uses a kind of naive photoshop style that must be purposeful but looks really awful against the beautiful line work.

Saw lots of reviews of Lapvona that seem really negative and a little... wrong. A lot of overstated generalities that miss the actual experience of reading the book. It is a weird almost fairy tale like book, vague in setting (very generic medieval), with touches of the supernatural that have no fantasy-like systematic explanation.

The Masterpiece dragged at times, but there is a lot to like in it. Like apparently a lot of Zola, much of it is a kind of sociological exploration of an arena of contemporary life. Just the sections concerning how the French painting "Salon" worked made me understand it a lot more than I've ever elsewhere read, the whole system of traditional and power and favors that entrenched who was in and who was out.

Woke up early enough for sunrise this morning. The rise itself was obscured by clouds, but almost in recompense there were dolphins jumping about in the ocean right in front of where the sun was rising. Just seeing them made me so happy they were out there.

As evidenced above, I'm a little stalled on the "giant novels" reading. I do have Bolano's 2666 on the way, which is very long. Otherwise it's a lot of long but not that long books on deck like another Balzac and another Robinson... is that too obscure... another Kim Stanley Robinson.