A play by Tom Stoppard “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead”
We all eventually come to a realization that in the grand scheme of things, we are not the main characters.
So there is a bit of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in every single one of us.
Do you remember who those guys are? I bet even Shakespeare wouldn’t, after enough time passed.
You could have see Tim Roth and Gary Oldman in the movie, which is despite all the love you might have for them, an utter blashpemy.
You might have been one of the lucky few who have seen it recently in the Globe Theatre, the one with the Benedict Cumberbatch (it is incredibly silly, but it’s really hard not to chuckle at this name).
Or in any other theatre, actually. Tom Stoppard is the holy cow among all other plays, for once, doesn’t get stomped over in a moderrn theatre with such horrors of the earth as “avant-garde approach” and “visionary rehaul”.
I did see it in the theatre for the first time, but I found reading it afterwards a profoundly entertaining experience. I will achieve the level of English to even imitate the writing; but my knowledge suffices to revel in the paradoxes and curiousities of theatre linguistics.
If you are considering giving it a go, watch the scene where they throw a coin thousand times heads. Then, you are either in, or you can just leave it be.
Laird Barron “Swift to chase”
My kind is swift to kill, swift to chase.
I don’t know how Laird Barron does it; but he does it to me. Makes me read the same phrases and words twice just to enjoy them one more time. I am usually not so big on fancy words, I prefer the general flow, the undertone. But I can’t help but appreciate Barron’s literary genius.
I do appreciate the format he does, I like the little interconnected novellas that weave his world into a one huge spider web. He does set an almost unachievable standard for a horror writer, though, but it’s definitely not on him, but on us.
Laird Barron was born in Alaska (check him out, seriously, with his patched eye and solemn face he looks something like an arctic hunter, read: amazing). And his Alaska is as freezing, heartless and malicious as you would think when you hear the name of the town “Screaming Elk”, population 333. I don’t know which of these two, the name or the population, freaks me out more. It’s imaginary, thank God, but I don’t have a single doubt it is the very gist of his homeland.
You’ll read a lot about how superb, mind-boggling and imaginative Ardor was, the jewel of this collection. A morbid hunt in Alaska. No need to say more, it’s a masterpiece.
But it’s another story that stole my heart – “worms crawl in”.
“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your snout.
A big black bug with two red eyes,
crawls up through your stomach and out through your eyes.”
It’s a children song, guys, I shit you not. Lovely, right? Need to sing it to my future kids, that’ll teach them to toughen up.
And fits right into the story.
I don’t know why I liked so much. It was unpredictable, but not the so many twists it’s boring type. It’s cruel, but it’s also somewhat… homely.
Try it.
Another one, “Andy Kaufmann creeping through the trees” is your daily serving of good old existential horror but with a theatrical twist. My favorite one from all the Jessica Mace stories, but a very close tie with “Termination dust”. Jessica felt somehow too human for me, unlike, say Julie V or Steely J.
I’ll write more about Laird Barron and I sure as hell will read more of his books.
Someday I’ll grow tired of him and his bug demiurges, but I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon.
Richard Dawkins “The Selfish Gene”
As much as I like to use descriptive and metaphorical language for reviewing fiction book, with non-fiction literature I would prefer to stick to the facts and assess the books based on the criteria important to me.
I come from an economics-finance background with a foreign languages twist (Rus, Eng, De, Fr), so my primary interest is either to learn something I either didn’t know or take a fresh look at something I thought I knew too well.
Selfish Gene by R.Dawkins
Subject: Biology, evolution, gene-centered theory of evolution
Publishing date: 1978
Information relevance: high
Subjectivity: medium
Review:
It’s a fair chance you heard about Professor Dawkins, and so did I, albeit in a different context of atheism. I started to read this book with an established, yet blurry faith in the Darwin Theory – and by blurry I mean “I know how it works, but don’t ask me the details’ (which is a pretty accurate description of my knowledge in many scientific principles). Further interest was fuelled by the fact that as far as argument between creationists and evolutionist go, I could only contribute with mild annoyance that evolution is evident, but very little knowledge to actually argue for it.
And not only did I acquire a better understanding of evolution; I found the scientific foundations of many actual behaviours that I observed. I knew there was a deeper biological reason behind them, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it, e.g. altruism and mating behaviour. Gene-centered evolution theory is like a pretty frame on your picture of the world that just fits and you know it truly works. Like an internal invisible structure that holds everything. This feeling of clarity is the closest I could get to a spiritual experience.
As far as personality of Professor Dawkins is concerned, many say that he blindly defies criticism . Look, I don’t know. But at least its not how the book reads – I did’t have the feeling that I had, say, with works of Noam Chomsky (no disrespect to Prof. Chomsky at all, but still).
Dalton Trumbo “Johnny got his gun”
War. The word too many times said: too many times shouted – it started to feel dull, tongue-numbing, tasteless.
Now, the words that surround it give it the real flavour. The Great War. The Holy War. The World War. The War of the Worlds. The imagery. The horror. The pride. Defeat and victory.
This book will give this word an exquisite taste not know before. A new feeling. Claustrophobia. Being trapped in your own body. Suffocating. With remnants of “the life that could be” buried alive with you, playing in your head a dull tune, over and over again. Over and over again, scorching the little that is left of your sanity.
But this is not what will not be the final blow. For it would never be the meaning that “would have been” to deliver the final blow; it would be the meaning that never even existed. Never existed for a man with no legs, no arms, no mouth and no face; nothing but one wish.
Which is against the regulations. T-H-E regulations, somebody just shoot me.
Both the wish and having one.
P.S. When I closed the book, one line echoed in my head spoken by a Motorised Patriot from Bioshock Infinite: “Too rare is the man who takes a stand, for God and sweetest Fatherland. But here’s the place we revere the heroes of our city dear.“
Cormac McCarthy “The Road”
At this point you might slowly realise I don’t fancy reading about happy endings and sweet nothings.
This one – it’s dark, pitch black.
There is a boy. And a man. On a road. And that’s just about as much as you are going to get and that’s about as much as you are going to need.
It’s an invitation to walk with them.
To wander alone, you and your child, more hungry and miserable with each step you take. And the world around you is even more miserable and a lot more hungrier. What a perfect platform for a philosophy class on the moral dilemma of cannibalism. Think hard, for the time is running out faster than your food does.
And the road goes on. And on& Survival and death are the only options; until they aren’t.
Fear goes along with any hope – and what hope there is?
Because you knew the end even before you took this road; because at the end, there would be only death.
I believe this was the first spoiler we ever got in our lives.
William S. Burroughs “Naked Lunch”
Do you do drugs?
You probably don’t. At least not the scary stuff that lands people in places worse than you could ever imagine.
Do you want to do drugs?
You probably do. Not the whole lifestyle package, but just to try it. Once. Just once to see what the fuss is about. Just once to see the capabilities of your most essential daily tool.
You know who did drugs?
Took the high road, took the wrong turn, to the hell and back? William S. Burroughs did.
And he brought you this lovely souvenir. This junkie ride. And it’s a first class experience.
It is going to be everything you imagined, only worse – disgusting, surreal, depraved and, above all, meaningless. Because as we all know all-too-well, who needs reasons when you got heroine (hello Part 2 I am coming to see you).
Get into the elevator and press the button straight to the station Hell. Ding-dong, we arrived.
Caution: you might just lose it. As a matter of fact, you probably should. Loud and clear: this cannot be, this should not be, should be prohibited, banished from existence, buried ten miles deep. It was.
Close your eyes and say “It’s not there.”
It’s there. Close. Probably one street away from you.
Probably closer.
Thomas Ligotti “Teatro Grottesco”
Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti became what one would call a “cult book”f or me. I stumbled upon it, as I am sure many did, after watching “True Detective” and happened to enjoy it way more than the TV show (which was far from mediocre, but yet somehow fell below the expectations. Dunno why. Just did). Through this book I discovered the whole new genre of “weird fiction” to me; that is how I later discovered Laird Barron and Eugene Thacker.
So why is this book worth it?
Do you remember how you felt when you first saw a Goya, or, say, a Francis Bacon painting? The imagery seems familiar, and yet bizarre, weird – the more you look at it, the stranger it gets. You cannot stop looking at it and you keep searching for what is right amongst everything is terribly wrong until it ultimately dazzles you.
This is the stuff the nightmares are made of, mine at least. Not the scary monsters, not the gore and not the clowns, but just these weird, morbid things. Things you try to catch with your eye but you never do, it’s an illusion, a fleeting image, a bad dream. Illogical things. Things that could not ever exist under the current laws of logic, physics and common sense. Things you, ultimately, don’t want to coexist with you.
Yet Ligotti does a tremendous job at showing that they still do. At putting away the thin veil under which the cosmic, the gut-wrenching, the profoundly existential horror hides.
Teatro Grotesco is a collection of short stories, and if you want to give it a go and see what I just described, read the Red Factory. After I read it, I looked at my arms and they seemed like mass of crudely arranged flesh, yet arranged just right enough to believe it was some sort of entity who did this.
If that’ not horror, I don’t know what horror is.
Using Pandas to get stock data
In this blog post we want to explore how to download financial data from Yahoo finance with Python. The easiest way is to use the data analysis package Pandas for Python. Pandas is a high quality package that offers a Yahoo finance data reader as well as a set of useful data structures to perform analysis on this data. Check out Pandas at http://pandas.pydata.org. Read More…
Stream of Consciousness 