The place of dead roads

What Hacker News says

1. mirimirMar 2020
   I'm an old man now, so I'm especially interested in books about getting complete with life. I'm also into amusing and distracting.

   Top on my list are William S. Burroughs' last trilogy (especially Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands) and Matthew Stover's Caine series (especially Caine Black Knife and Caine's Law). Burroughs published that trilogy when he was about my age, and there's some amazing stuff about how memory shows up. The Caine series is basically a contemplation of "What if you could undo the worst thing that you've ever done?".

   I could go on about many other authors whom I've loved, over the years, but there's other stuff that I gotta do now.

   Show morethread
2. hoersJun 2015
   Crazy to Grasp:

   - Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game

   - Hofstädter - Gödel, Escher, Bach

   - Bulgakov - Master and Margherita

   - Melville - Moby Dick

   - Joyce - Ulysses

   - Everything by Baudrillard (esp. 'Agony of Power')

   - Everything by William Burroughs (The ticket that exploded, Place of dead roads, Discipline of DE)

   Not that crazy to grasp, but still amazing:

   - Everything by Egon Friedell (mostly Historical, unbelievably dense and awesome)

   - Chatwin - Songlines

   - Ludwig Marcuse - Philosophy of Happiness / Philosophy of Unhappiness

   Show morethread
3. mirimirMar 2017
   > Faked pictures are more convincing than real pictures because you can set them up to look real. Understand this: All pictures are faked. As soon as you have the concept of a picture there is no limit to falsification.

   The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs (1983)

   https://books.google.de/books?id=VZLqAQAAQBAJ

   thread
4. mirimirDec 2015
   > Another way of looking at this is these executives didn't necessarily agree to the "social contract," they were simply born into it. There is frequently a rather pervasive attitude that life is competition and any rules were made to be broken.

   All criminals think that way.

   > It is related that Cherry Nose Gio, rescued from drowning, spit in the lifeguard's face: "Crumb! Worka fora living.”

   The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs

   Show morethread