Hello there!
Welcome to our daily scheduled post, the Daily Slow Chat.
If you want to just chat about your day, if you have questions for the moderators (please mark these [Mod] so we can find them), or if you just want talk about oatmeal then this is the thread for you!
Enjoying the small talk? We have a Discord server too! We'd love to have more of you over there. Do both of us a favour and use this link to join the fun.
The mod-team wishes you a nice day!
4 comments
So I’m currently in New Orleans for a conference. The New Orleans travelogue essay will come but there’s just something I really need to get off my chest first.
I ended up in a restaurant that had a TV on showing the latest episode of the Simpsons. Now to be clear, I was hugely obsessed with it when I was a kid but I haven’t watched a single episode that was made later than roughly the early 00s (and even that might be pushing it).
The plot of this episode was that Homer gets erectile dysfunction and ends up taking a whole load of drugs to deal with it that messes with his mind. How did the Simpsons get to the point where Homer having erectile dysfunction would become a major plot point??? Who the fuck is even still watching this shit?
I guess the Simpsons is the embodiment of “you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain”. It’s fine, it had a good run. No sitcom needs to be on air continuously for longer than I’ve been alive on this Earth. Just *let it die*.
[Here’s some winter scenery](https://imgur.com/a/S3CHZ9z). We’re having some amazing winter weather here (for my standards). Sunny, cold but not deadly freezing. It’s nice.
My husband was watching “Running Man” (the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger). I hadn’t seen that movie in ages, and watching with one eye, I realized that it feels a bit like a badly adapted book. I checked, and it turns out that it was by Stephen King, but way back when he wrote as Richard Bachman. He wrote a bunch of novellas under this name, so I decided I would read them all. And the first one was Rage, which I finished in one afternoon.
The book is written from the point of view of a troubled teen who decides to attempt a school shooting, but after he shoots two teachers, he instead takes his classmates hostage. However, they don’t seem to be too horrified by this and nobody really tries to tackle him or escape. He doesn’t seem like he will actually kill anybody (and he doesn’t). He uses the situation to put the authority he despises in a difficult situation, show them who’s in charge, and what starts out as a hostage situation turns, in true King style, into a group therapy session of emotionally neglected American working class suburban kids (sorry if the order of adjectives is wrong, feel free to correct). It was actually rather cool. If King can write one thing, it is teenagers. I mean most of his iconic books are coming of age books masquerading as psychological thriller. After hearing his story, the classmates sympathize with him. Nearly all of them have similar stories, after all. One girl even leaves to visit the restroom and comes back afterwards. The whole situation is pretty fascinating.
Now, the even more interesting thing is, this book is near impossible to get in English. There’s a German translation available as a used book, but the English version isn’t included in the Bachman anthology, and there’s no independent print, either. My friend in the US wanted to read it, and she could only find a used copy in Etsy. I managed to find a pdf somewhere. It turns out that after a series of school shooters either had the book in their possession (and one even said he deeply identified with the protagonist) or a similar MO, Stephen King felt uncomfortable and let the book fall out of print. It’s been out of print for decades.
Does this mean that you could never write a book like this? I mean any teenager would identify with some of the things that the protagonist is going through, and if someone writes such a book again, they may be accused of, if not directly causing anything, putting their thumb on the scale, so to say. Now, King self-censored, nobody asked him to take the book out of print. But I guess it is one of those things that people will maybe refrain from writing? If you think about it, there hasn’t been such a book since then.
So, this is all we have time for today. Please remember to like and subscribe for more weird and niche book reviews, and let me know in the comments: is self-censorship a good thing when it comes to certain sensitive themes? Or is it a slippery slope?
Currently I’m looking for books for my reading list. I will be stuck with them on my commute, so this is always a bit of a process. Last time I got some Strugatsky books/Soviet fiction. This time I’m specifically looking to throw a couple Canadian books on there, preferably urban fantasy if I can find it. I have read Canadian authors before (Guy Gavriel Kay and such), but nothing actually set in Canada, so this should be interesting. Currently going through recommendation lists to find something suitable.
On the non-fantasy front, I did see some intriguing stuff centered on Quebec, could branch out and give that a try. In that case I might also add a book from France, that could make for a nice contrast…
How do you guys go about picking out books?
I swear every time I pay an invoice I get a new invoice from somewhere else, how do I make it stop? It’s just a constant stream of invoices all the time. It’s really annoying. Why can’t I just get services for free and not get billed?