mustinvestigate

Woe is me: I am out of Tobolowsky files. Have bookmarked this for next round of impulse internet shopping. Am officially a raging fangirl.

He's pretty much the ultimate hey-it's-that-guy character actor since Vincent Schiavelli's passed (who I briefly met when he and the entire crew of a wee independent film crammed into Funk's Democratic Coffee Spot on a rainy night, but that's another story), and several of the podcasts are behind-the-scenes on Heroes, Glee, Groundhog's Day, and the like. The bulk of the stories, tho, are taken from his life, and I've been more sucked into them. He's taken to ending these on cliffhangers, and the last one was a humdinger around the birth of his first child. I'm left like, cannot go to imdb or wikipedia, will get spoiled! ...for real life!

So, until the next Tobolosky File appears, I've got Virginia Woolf's Night and Day cued up. Or possibly The Dilbert Principle. Plus, I've got an actual dead-tree book on loan, The Fry Chronicals, which probably won't take more than a weekend when I finally get started. And I want to have another go through How We Became Posthuman since it's got a chapter on Snow Crash...

...I have a madwoman's to-read list.

Since my job is primarily data-diving and refining my antisocial skills, I decided to take a break from listening to so much Tom Waits (honing those aforementioned skills a leeeetle too keen) and crack out some classic public domain audio books.

I started with the Sage of Baltimore’s In Defense of Women, and, uh…let’s just say, with a defense like that, we don’t need attackers. I made it through about half the chapters, and to sum those up: women must be smart because they cynically con men into marriage despite the institution being bad for men in every way, and men aren’t even allowed to beat their wives any more; also, women are uniformly ugly, shaped “like a dumbbell run over by an express train.” I can’t say it’s a bad thing you’re all but forgotten in your home town, H. L.

Then, Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, read by someone with a Benzaie-esque French accent. Turns out there was a passionate anarchist school of communist theory before the revolution, after which Lenin purty much squelched it. Like most pinko theory, great job deconstructing the faults of capitalism, not so great on the faults of humankind that make real existing socialism such a mess…this, speaking as someone who makes Upton Sinclair look like Rush Limbaugh. Nonetheless, his plans for how an anarchist commune would function make the Smurfs look like a fungus-based Rapture, and it’s damn soothing learning how everyone will get the basics of their meals from a communal kitchen (allowing the “housewives” to add their preferred finishing touches), and that other food, houses, and clothes will still remain a person’s personal possessions. And there’ll be no shirkers when everyone has meaningful work! What a picture.

So, I’m 1 for 2 so far. The experiment continues.