The Cornelius Chronicles by Michael Moorcock

Selling Price: I'm not certain but I'm sure I lost $1.00 on the sale Is this the turning point?

As of last month it was over a year later and this project was still running itself nicely. Only making a couple of dollars a month but it was still nice to see the shipping notification show up in my inbox occasionally.

I think I read most of the first two Cornelius books. They're an interesting mix of Spi-Fi fantasizing and a typical New Wave SF fondness for ennui and curious stylistic experiments. Moorcock calls it a quartet instead of a quadrilogy: it's not one long story, it's the same story told four times with minor alterations. In the first one super spy Jerry Cornelius is albino, but in the second he's black. Also in each iteration reality seems to be falling apart more severely.

I read these quite a while ago, but Jerry is a space captain in the Moorcock book I'm reading by audiobook now, Doctor Who and the Coming of the Terraphiles, which strikes me as a bit pornographic now that I've typed it out. Yes, Jerry's in this story too I'm told, but I havent gotten there yet. Moorcock can do that, as he's built a huge mythology around elevating his characters to archetypes.

Cornelius is recommended, but one is enough for the most part. As for his venture in the Whoniverse, a subject close to my own heart, well, it's a bit silly.

[Thanks to Prof. Faustaff for fact-checking. ]

The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley

Grade:	A (Excellent)
Status:	Sold
Sentimental Value: Selling Price:	$333.93  $39.98

The Book of Lies: Which Is Also Falsely Called Breaks: The Wanderings of Falsifications of the One Thought of Frater Perdurabo (Aleister Crowley) Itself Untrue


I picked this up, along with a pair of Corcoran boots, in Greenwich Village on my first trip to NYC. I immediately removed the dust jacket, as it didn't do anything for the aesthetics of the volume. 


This is a very strange book, full of obscure Qabalistic riddles and inside jokes, and purportedly contains the key to the 9th degree of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Crowley alleged that Theodore Reuss immediately inducted him to that degree after reading ch. 69: "The Way to Succeed; and the Way to Suck Eggs."


The initial page gives the complete, ridiculously long title of the book in all its glory:

The publication data on the next page goes on to tell us "There is no joke or subtle meaning in the publisher's imprint." I can't recall whether I ever found it, but I believe it may refer specifically to the first edition of the title. 

Finally, to give you an idea of how crazy these little poems are, here are the first and second pages proper. Elsewhere referred to as "The Soldier and the Hunchback":

It's not so much a book that you read from cover to cover, but very useful, for example, for bibliomancy. Or you could immerse yourself in qabalistic knowledge for a decade or so, in order to understand (most) of the jokes contained therein.

The game players of Titan by Philip K. Dick

Grade:	D (Didn't Read)
Status:	For Sale $old
Sentimental Value: Current (Sane) Market Value:	$220.00 (which a couple of fools are selling these for) $38.49

The Game-Players of Titan (The Gregg Press science fiction series)

I'm hoping I get a chance to read this one before it sells. I borrowed it from my college library right before going on a leave of absence, and when i got back there was no record of it on my library account. Eminent domain? I think the statute of limitations has run out at least.

Anyway I hear it's mad.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Grade:	D (Didn't Read)
Status:	Sold
Sentimental Value: Actual Selling Price:	$6.99 $1.25

I wasn't sure how I was going to review a book I didn't read. Fortunately Reading Rainbow did the job for me:

Reading Rainbow Banned Book Review #1 - watch more funny videos

Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius by Gary Lachman

Grade:	A (Excellent)
Status:	For Sale
Sentimental Value:	$93.23

Gary Lachman (aka Valentine), the keyboardist from Blondie, is a deeply cool guy. He's written about the Gurdjieff work in a very astute yet personal way, and here he unearths all the juicy occult stuff from the little corners it's hidden itself in in 1960's culture, all clearly well researched and referenced.

Some of my weird and mind-bending favorites from the book:

"At a seminar "On Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, LaVey served the amputated thigh of a young woman, donated by a Berkeley physician, perpared by his second wife Diane following a Fiji islander recipe for puaka balava, 'long pig'. The most satanic of his audience in the early days was the film-maker Kenneth Anger, who introduced Marjorie Cameron, Jack Parsons' widow, to LaVey ... Susan Atkins, who stabbed the pregnant Sharon Tate to death, was for a time a dancer in LaVey's tawdry Topless Witches Revue that played in some of San Francisco's seedy venues. She would later claim it was LaVey who put her on the road to murder. And as we will see, Bobby Beausoleil, another member of the Family convicted of murder, starred in an early version of Anger's Lucifer Rising. Tate's husband, Roman Polanski, was the director of Rosemary's Baby, which features LaVey as the Devil."

So really that last part is a myth, which is weird because I really thought I remembered seeing LaVey as the Devil but it never actually happens. Zizek would have something to say about it, I'm sure. But the occasional misstep is worth it for such a journey through the hidden underbelly of 1960's stardom.

Later Anger falls in with the Stones through the witch Anita Pallenberg, but I don't want to spoil any more of it. It's like Anger's own Hollywood Babylon, but for Rock 'n Roll.

Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius by Gary Lachman

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

Grade:	A (Excellent)
Status:	For Sale
Sentimental Value:	$19.99

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

So, first up on the chopping block. I actually wrote my final paper for phil on this one. Hume breaks down the source of all morals and human feelings with merciless precision, explaining how and why they come about in an almost phenomenological way, describing how they arise in the mind and make reason "the slave of the passions.”

I compared Hume's analysis of morality with Singer's hypothetical scenario, in which you are walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it. The problem is, you just bought these pants today, and they were really expensive. Do you risk getting the jeans muddy just to save a child who is going to die any second?



Psychologically healthy people would feel obligated to help, to prevent the suffering and death of the child. Singer's comparative example from real life is the equally certain imminent suffering of those threatened with starvation. I would add all the people living in hell in the Congo.

He compares the uncomfortable but morally irrelevant sacrifice of the cleanly state of one’s clothes to the equally morally irrelevant sacrifices of enjoyment of wealth the affluent would have to make to help the starving. The only difference between the two situations, Singer argues, is distance. Thus, if distance carries no intrinsic moral weight, as Singer holds, the affluent are under equal obligation to help alleviate famine as they are to save the drowning child.

Bummer city, right?

The other little story I liked from that class was supposed to illustrate a woman’s right to choose.

Imagine you live in a city where there’s a serious vagrancy problem, and the bums all catch a weird sleeping sickness that causes them to fall down and roll around on the ground. It’s summertime, and no one can afford air conditioning.

It’s a really hot night, and it would feel so much better to open one of the french windows everybody in town has and let the breeze blow through. You can just taste the cool breeze on your skin. But the law states that if through your negligence, one of these bums rolls into your house, you have to feed and care for him for the next 18 years to life.

Proof that NYC is bummer city USA courtesy of Girlnarly aka she of gnarly ideas