amazon just recommended me a book on 'post-modern magick'

it is now saying i should buy alfred jarry's 'adventures in pataphysics'.

i sort of want alex owen's 'the place of enchantment: british occultism and the culture of the modern', from which this: crowley in the desert

I love Amazon's recommendations. I can play with it for hours.

Right now, St. Augustine's Confessions are top of the list, finally bumping off a translation of the Aeneid that Amazon knows isn't the one I own. Apparently I chose the wrong one.

maybe they just think you'd like another!

i just made a flurry of purchases that somehow resulted in being recommended like six borges books at once. the connection is obscure to me. i think i went through: season one of firefly, seasons one and two of arrested development, hertz's principles of mechanics, tolstoy's gospel in brief, some schopenhauer, some wittgenstein, and bakhtin/medvedev, 'the formal method in literary scholarship'.

not all that wacky but still hard to see the reason for. maybe i somehow happened upon a combination of things purchased by people who, in combination, also tended to purchase several different borges books.

it goes with recent stuff you looked at a lot - sometimes it recommends things based on yr looking at other stuff you were recommended. apparently looking at the crowley + the jarry + hakim bey = everything on amazon tangentially connected to the oulipo. (to which i was like: oooh, they have the oulipo compendium in stock again.)

josh how'd you like firefly? i watched all of that like last weekend.

Also based on stuff in your shopping cart.

The new Oulipo Compendium is indeed out and it looks fine. It's a bit expanded. Not so much that I felt like buying another copy. And now I'm not sure my 1st edition is worth the $150 or whatever it was going for a year ago. (Although my copy is damaged, so.) Anyway, get it.

i actually haven't received it yet. but my roommate happened to have independently bought a copy that he received the same day i ordered mine, so i went ahead and watched the first four or five hours worth. it was good so far, but i think i sensed a kind of customary joss whedon backing-off from the opening of the season into episodic time-marking, while he slowly set the tone and introduced some longer-term story elements (like the blue handed guys). i would like to get on to that stuff.

so far the moments of humor seem isolated - the ones that tend to revolve around play or around an extended exchange between the characters, i mean. i'm not sure yet what to attribute that to.

a kind of customary joss whedon backing-off : i think i had a more negative take on this, on it being "yeah you know joss whedon so i'm going to throw some pedestrian shit at you now, you know it'll get interesting around season three or whatever". to which the cancelling of it seems eminently sensible somehow. i still rather liked it. i kind of wonder whether he'll ever get to a point where he makes the western iconography work well at all, though.

i think when the recognisable buffyspeak-schtick humour shows up i feel kinda alienated by it, in the context. this was bugging me a lot less in the later episodes, when i was mostly comparing it to itself and not buffy.

the opening particularly suffered from a kind of 'guy from rushmore does star wars' syndrome. but i think that might just be me feeling mean to it.

you didn't think the western iconography worked??

it would have been nice if he had more time to complicate the political thought.

that's why the western iconography didn't work!!

well, probably.

The Law is for All is actually pretty interesting, the Book of the Law with Crowley's commentary. Eight Lectures on Yoga is pretty readable. I suppose the Book of Lies is worth checking out. The serious student will need to get to some of his other, heavier, writings, but I wasn't a serious student.

It's been a long while since I've read any of this.

Also his autobiography has some pretty funny and interesting things in it, but I don't know that I can recommend it in good conscience, since I don't think I got past the first half.

i ordered the oulipo compendium from the british amazon since the us amazon didn't have it but they've been hemming and hawing about actually sending me the one they said was in stock but is evidently not. : /

RS - maybe you can recommend the first half, then.

Oh, wait it sounds like they have cut some things from the Law is for All! I think I have an earlier edition.

If you like Oulipo, maybe you would like the Crowley collection Portable Darkness, which emphasizes kabbalah and language, and includes intros by Genesis P-Orridge and R.A. Wilson. I found it a bit boring, myself.

Order the Compendium direct from the publisher. They're having a sale where they throw in some 70s Aram Saroyan book if you buy three books. I can also recommend the Kenneth Goldsmith book, which might be the best book I've read all year.

AMAZON JEOPARDY

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Can anyone recommend/caution against this: http://www.amazon.com/Oulipo-Primer-Potential-Literature-French/dp/1564781879/sr=8-1/qid=1163717250/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-2342873-9545450?ie=UTF8&s=books

Should I just hold out until I can afford The Oulipo Compendium?

huh, the compendium seems to be not properly available on amazon.com. .co.uk has it, though, and not much more than the primer. which i think josh has.

and uh "is it alan moore?"

The Compendium is only like $10 more, surely? Anyway yes, the Motte collection is good and fine and has some longer essays and whatnot, but the Compendium is huge and encyclopedic. You could easily get them both AND the Oulipo Laboratory and have little overlap. But if you're going to get just one, the Compendium is by far the greatest delight.

(A quick search shows it's $40+? That's crazy. Still, it's a great book.)

it's like £10 on anglo-amazon!