Blind Prophecy

Well, St. Paddy’s Day was all about shopping and music for me. Spent the afternoon picking up some new clothes along Haight. I got some totally cute new duds, including an awesome pair of camo pants, a great knit hoodie, a vintage Spiderman t-shirt and a purple-ish corduroy jacket. Also picked up some new music from Amoeba Records. Jennifer and Daniel are starting to rub off on me and I’m starting to enjoy the dub step stuff they love.

In the evening, we went to a dub step party at Jelly’s on Pier 50. It was awesome. I think the reason I’ve been fighting them on this dub step stuff is because until last night I really haven’t been able to hear it in the way it’s supposed to be heard… with window-rattling subwoofers at chest-pounding volumes.

The party had Poi Dancing…

Great DJs…

Bass face…

Confusing boy we named “Vest Wearing Jake Shears Queer” who started making out with “Exceptionally Androgynous Confusing Boy-Looking Girl” (sometime after I “accidentally” felt his ass on the dance floor and struck up conversation in line to the bathroom)…

One of the fancy new machines where you push the button and get bacon, but with an added feature where you can tilt the nozzle and have bacon shot directly at your face…

On Friday, I finished, The Thousandfold Thought, the third book in R. Scott Bakker’s “The Prince of Nothing” trilogy. I rushed through book 2, The Warrior-Prophet, last week. For nail-biting engagement, the last 100 pages were fantastic. It’s not a feel-good kind of fantasy epic where the good guys win and everyone lives happily ever after. In fact, I spent much of the trilogy wondering who, if anyone, I should be rooting for. Certainly world-ending evil apocalypse is bad, but the various factions and players in the story are ambiguous on all levels. Heroes, villains, allies, enemies… these things all become irrelevent. The way he depicts women is troubling (they’re slaves, concubines, objects to be used… or the emperor’s mother, a woman who used sex with her own son to manipulate him into becoming the man he is), although much of that gets sorta redeemed by the character arc of Esmenet. Similarly, the book depicts homosexuality as a sign of (feminine) weakness, but also turns that notion on it’s head in the final moments when something I suspected for a long while was revealed.

I’m not sure if I hope Bakker returns to this world soon to finish telling the story (the trilogy wrapped a major plot line, but in no way finished the “larger” story of this universe), or if I’d be more impressed leaving it the way it is. The trilogy certainly deserves its reputation as an intelligent read. The series gets a thumbs-up from me.

Filed under: books, livejournal by Jere Keys