(Part 2) Top products from r/TrueDetective

Seconding Gotham Central! Literally anything by Brubaker might be enjoyed by TD fans.

Another TD esque Book I just had the pleasure of finishing is Murder by Remote Control by Paul Kirchner and Janwillem van de Wetering. Kirchner has been a longtime backpages cartoonist for High Times and De Wetering is a Dutch mystery novelist.

The book reads like a lost season of TD in many ways. It’s like a psychedelic noir Buddhist detective story. Can’t recommend it enough. Here’s a few really awesome splash pages:

https://imgur.com/a/9CehXaW/

Great piece of art. I absolutely love everything related to weird fiction.
If you love Lovecraft and Chambers, be sure to check out [Arthur Machen]((www.amazon.com/White-People-Stories-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143105590/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408639500&sr=1-1&keywords=arthur+machen). He's considered to be the 'patriarch' of the genre. While his novels don't really deal with gods, they do tell the stories of hidden civilizations. Check it out

"Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen." -H.P. Lovecraft

>In this show they are selling one thing; that it all makes sense. That there is an underlying rhythm to reality, and by living in the right way and taking the right drugs and being a general desperate bastard you can perceive it. You can never control it and you can never, never understand it, but it is there and it can be seen. Sometimes. Sometimes, when you’re watching True Detective on TV, it seems like it all makes sense.

I couldn't disagree more with this. I think TD is playing with the allure that "it all makes sense," but that in the end that's a bluff – a bluff we tell ourselves, a bluff that makes characters like Rust so attractive in spite of because of the pathos of "seeing it all." What TD is really about, if you ask me, is the incredible fragility of human being in the face of the chaos and destruction that is the world we live in. There are at least three reasons for understanding TD in this way: 1. the manner in which the story is constructed; 2. because on this reading it succeeds; and 3. it's the most compelling reading.

First, the story itself is constructed around narratives: the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are, the narratives we tell others about who we are, the narratives that detectives construct in piecing together crimes and the narratives we construct in making sense of the world. Rust has a very compelling perspective which we might call nihilism unbound, but he pays a terrible price for it and ultimately he recognizes it is unsustainable. Much could be said on this point, but to keep it simple I'll just say that the story ends not with some kind cosmic confirmation or closure, but with pathos – a pathos that is cathartic, perhaps, but without clear resolution.

Second, many people felt the ending was a disappointment. The principle of charity would suggest that we give TD the best possible reading which would entail understanding it as succeeding at what it evidently succeeded at rather than failing at what we thought it ought to have been.

Three, the world doesn't make sense. How wonderful to have that fact reflected on television. Why would you want it any other way?

I'm not sure that it ever really existed (Monarch, that is). Quite frankly, the whole thing sounds pretty loony tunes to me.

MKUltra, on the other hand, was VERY real, and I'm convinced that it continued long past the 70's. Read The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences by John Marks - it's a mind-blower.

You might look up Brian Greene and superstring theory. That film fumbles around for metaphors for how to explain the M-Brane theory, but I think TD is actually a fantastic rumination on interdimensionality and the weird influence one dimension might have on another, using inter and intratextuality as well as the weird influence audiences have on characters and vice versa. Youtube has a million different videos about superstrings, but changing the idea of time into a flat circle is just changing the perspective of one dimension from the perspective of the next one "up."

Try Tomasula's Vas, for more on dimensional perspectives, or the book that influenced it, Flatland: An Opera in Many Dimensions. Try to imagine how a world might look to people who live in two dimensions. It seems linear and normal, and like a world they might experience as we experience ours, but then imagine us, looking down on flat creatures living in their flat space. That's the way fourth dimensional beings would regard us, according to Cohle.

I'm not seeing an argument here. You are correct that the "bad guys wearing yellow" is part of True Detectives Image System. You are also correct that Marty walking into his daughters room and seeing the dolls is a "fucking scene and part of the plot of this television show". I am not disputing either of these claims. The dolls are also part of the Image System and whose symbolism is incredibly simple, and in little way is as complex as this subreddit would make it out to be.

I'd like to point you in the direction of The Elements of Style. I think it would help you form your sentences and your arguements in a much more clear and concise way.

Good summary.

I'd add one more point, related to this quote. I've encountered this in another piece of fiction, and the author actually credited this in part to Metzinger's book called The Ego Tunnel. I'm guessing there's other works that touch on this too. Anyway, the gist is that the conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain—an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is "a virtual self in a virtual reality." But this isn't philosophy not informed by science; Metzinger draws on a whole lot of studies and experiments into human cognition. Worth checking out, although it's a big honking work.

You might check out Jim Thompson. His stuff is usually from the perspective of the bad guys though.

I highly recommend these collection of pulp stories:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Lizard-Book-Pulps/dp/0307280489/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394426391&sr=8-1&keywords=black+lizard

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Lizard-Stories-Vintage-Original/dp/0307455432/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1394426391&sr=8-2&keywords=black+lizard

TONS of bang for your buck. You'll also see the origin of most of the tropes that true detective draws on.

http://www.amazon.com/2666-Novel-Roberto-Bola%C3%B1o/dp/0312429215/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425255936&sr=8-1&keywords=2666

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