Fred and Loathing on The Internet

The Church's Kitchen Needs A Counter Reformation

2023-Nov-18

The reporting on updates will no longer be the impetus for blog posts. The update cycle and the database that holds my blog posts are no longer connected. I suppose once I have a very distinct front and back end defined, I can go back to writing blog posts whenever I make front-end only updates. That feels like too complex of a condition to be met for whenever I want to go on about what’s going on in my tech efforts or my opinions on whatever movie I saw the other night. It is the start of a new media era at fredlambuth.com. The uncoupling of the production from the actual product begins now!

Perhaps the topics are going to go broader than just movies, video games, and books. Things just might get very Andy Rooneyesque. I might feel the need to comment on the tactile pleasures of mechanical keyboards, the dying institution of ‘fast-food’, or the implicit sadness seeing very expensive music festivals chock-full of sixty-something year old alt rock stars. Just about anything the development team wants to talk about it now in this site’s editorial domain.

Two book tidbits on the docket for today’s blog. I’m a little over 5 hours in to the 8ish hour audiobook of An Assassin in Utopia by Susan Wels. The writing itself rolls well through the voice actor’s delivery. Nothing to complain about the close up tactical choices the writer makes to tell her stories. The stories altogether don’t really seem much to do about ‘an assassin’ or ‘a utopia’. The two objects in the title really only take up no more than a quarter of the book’s words. Instead the book is a picayune retelling of America between 1820 up to just about the end of the century.

I have been listening to the book almost exclusively in fifteen minute bursts on my car audio system. This manner of listening can hide the fact that the book does not integrate the components it weaves into their story with any solid cohesion or even a broad theme. That’s more or less what the book has given me: a close up look at notable American celebrities that graced newspapers but did not make it to my grade school US history books. People like Horace Greely. Organizations like The Whigs, or the wide swath of blandly named Christian affiliated utopian cults in the mid-1800s, and the liberal of that time that somewhat sponsored these endeavors.

The other book I have less to say about. I’m about one third of the way into The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham. I usually pride myself on my ability to remember wherever I learned of something. FOr the life of me, I cannot fathom how I came to have a long desire to read this particular book. If I had to guess, it comes from hearing how Bill Murray made a Faustian bargain with movie studio types to star in this movie. That alone does not sound like a clinching reason. Somehow I came to discover the book deals with an affluent American experiencing post-traumatic stress from his WWI experience, leading him to an ascetic pursuit of wisdom.

On a sleepless night I watched the 1980s adaptation. The book follows the essential plot of the screenplay. Somerset Maugham puts himself in as the narrator bumping into the characters of the novel, moving a few years or so with each encounter. The star of the film, played by Bill Murray (or Tyrone Power in 1946) is the main topic of conversation among the novel’s characters. Reminds me of how Nick Carroway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, gets forgotten as being the ‘protagonist’ of the novel talking about Jay Gatsby, who is a much larger than life character than one telling the actual story to the readers.