OT Go buy this book. Because I said so.

Michael Bywater - Big Babies Or: Why can't we just grow up?

It's currently half price at Waterstones.

Short article that gives a flavour here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Con.../arts/2006/10/22/svbabies22.xml&site=6&page=0

From the blurb

"Have you ever thought 'hold on, just what the hell is going on here
anyway? Have you ever had the creeping feeling that in some strange
way we are throwing away two and a half millennia of Western
civilization, but can't quite put your finger on why?

That bit by bit, day by day, our culture becomes increasingly
infantile? That we are more and more offered the quick fix, the
ticking off, the expedient lie, the jingle and the spin?

Have you begun to loathe the catchy slogans, the obsession with
safety, [1] the horror of risk, the fear of complexity [2], the
preoccupation with surface, the apportioning of blame, the instant
gratification?

Have you ever wondered what happened to grown-ups or why we are so
constantly treated like children?"

It's from the chap who wrote the marvellous 'lost worlds' that I had
my head buried in on last year's French Trip. 50 odd pages in, it's
rather good.

[1] maybe TOG should buy a copy for his H&S lady.
[2] waves at ogden

 

It might well be but it doesn't say much for the trip.

 

Might buy it for myself, actually. Got some book tokens spare, although
those are presently earmaked for the new Pierrepoint biography.

 

I don't imagine her posting was intended as a crtique of the trip.

 

So let me get this straight, you're advocating buying a book that tells
you things you already know and, it would seem to me, takes advantage
of the very things you appear to believe your rankling against to make
some money out a current phase?

I think you've been had.

 

snip blurb

What in the book do you already know? The blurb was phrased as
questions not statements, which he goes on to illustrate and discuss.

I'm advocating buying a book by a good writer (who incidently is
writer in residence at Magdelene, Cambridge) who takes a fresh and
humorous look at cultural studies and looks at the history of
Modernity and its outcomes. Given the recent 'the ratchet tightens'
thread I thought it was an apposite recommendation. Though perhaps the
'because I said so' in the subject line would have been better phrased
as 'it's for your own good' as it was intended as a comment on the
nanny culture.

based on what?

Where was I 'rankling'? I was quoting.

Should writers not make money then?

I think I've spent a pleasant couple of hours gaining a new
perspective, being amused and educated. If you see that as 'being
had', I pity your ignorance.

 

I think it reflects more on my anti social tendencies when I'm in a
reading frenzy than on the pleasant company I enjoyed when I did put
the book down. Or had it removed from me to find out what was
enthralling me so much.

Of course when I was actually riding the bike I wasn't reading, I've
yet to work out how to do that without crashing...

 

Talking books and an mp3 player.


--
Beav

VN 750
Zed 1000
OMF# 19

 

Whilst I agree with the thrust of the general argument so far as it is
outlined in the article, I suspect there is a touch of the Peter or
Petronella Pan (no tinkerbell jokes please) in more than a few UKRM
denizens on a 'personal level'.


--

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Pete Fisher at Home: |
| Voxan Roadster Gilera Nordwest Yamaha WR250Z |
| Gilera GFR Moto Morini 2C/375 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

 

Can we do clap jokes?

In all of us, I suspect. He goes into the 'what's in it for us?'
rationale, quite uncomfortable reading on occasion.

 

Geem, I don't know. You're damned if you use smilies and you're damned
if you don't.

 

That's listening, not reading. there's a big difference. The voices
you assign to characters and the pacing of the work for example.

 

Reading on French Trip

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=geem

You're an excited geek now?

I'm not in the best of moods atm.

 

What you need is an early morning surf in clear, 20 degree water.

 

I can't heaaarrrrr yooouuuuuuuuu!!!

 

Nah, relatives stopping being Old and Shite would do it.

Anyway don't they have killer jellyfish so you can't actually fall off
the board for fear of death?

 

That's up north during the summer. Not only no one fall of their board
they don't even go out because it would very likely result in death.
Here they just sting a bit, like a nettle.

 

Everytime I've been to Colorado [1] it's dumped down.





[1] Once.

 

Hmf. It's started snowing in the Pyrenees. At last.

 

Have you given it a go yet?

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