Weekly reading/watching meme
Mar. 22nd, 2013 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaWhat are you reading/watching now?
I'm beginning to think I ought to do this meme on Mondays rather than Fridays; I usually start books on weekends. (The resolution for this weekend is to finish the stuff I've left hanging.) In any case, the actual answer today is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which has been my iPod reading project for a while now. This is the official book-that-gets-left-off-the-list-of-books-I'm-reading: I do a few pages when I can, usually on public transit. The last one was On the Origin of Species. At one point I arbitrarily decided I wasn't going to respect anyone who invoked Darwin or Smith without making it evident that they'd actually read these books -- Darwin and Smith, in particular, being public intellectuals who made stepwise arguments in clear English; no Derridean pretzeling -- so the carrot here consists of my own right to bloviate. Also, I was told by an MBA professor to read The Wealth of Nations, and failing that, to buy it in leather-bound hardcover for office display and lie about having read it. That being said, I'm not going to drag around a leather-bound hardcover in my tote every day for the amount of time it will take me. XD
Anyway, one note to keep in mind: as I understand Adam Smith's argument to date (I am 1/10 of the way through the page count), national economic growth is required for a general rise in its citizens' standard of living when organized labour is outlawed but monopoly and price fixing are not. In fact, the logical argument is that said situation will cause inequality to rise, all else being equal, until the working class ends up at subsistence-level wages, which Smith defines over the long run as the ability for each family to raise two children to adulthood. (I've phrased this kind of awkwardly because nowadays we talk about replacement fertility, but he's talking about child mortality.) Economic growth is necessary to mitigate this tendency.
Don't think the scenario where organized labour is protected and monopoly outlawed occurred to Smith. But hey, Marx is the iPod reading project after this one!
What did you just finish reading/watching?
Books/comics:
A couple of first issues, in the bath -- a Sherlock Holmes one, the prequel to Star Trek Into Darkness...
Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Didion wrote these non-fiction pieces in the mid-60s, when she was around the same age as I am, with a mind that in some (but not all) ways is similar to mine: and thus paints a picture of the Haight-Ashbury scene, for example, that I recognize as approaching the reality I would've perceived had I been me there and then. (I do not get this from most visions of the 1960s that have filtered down to me, is what I'm trying to say.) At times, particularly in the personal reflections, she comes across as naturally conservative. On the other hand, she was trying to profile people who fed their toddlers peyote, and she never pretended to have answers. The major takeaway I get from this book is that Some Things Don't Change: California is still full of techno-futurists who sell transcripts of their roundtable discussions, New York is still full of young media-industry workers who aren't paid enough to buy furniture, and Americans still shoot other Americans for no good reason.
My sister describes the denizens of Didion's fiction as "the parents of Brett Easton Ellis's characters" XD which is probably no more than factual.
Movies/TV:
Stoker. It's Park Chan-wook, all right. I mean like "haha, weird to see an all-white cast in a Korean movie" obvious Park Chan-wook. It is dialled down some, but my personal opinion is that Park improves by dialling down (or "maturity," if you prefer). Thirst was by far my favourite of his movies. I perceive Park's violence to be more egregious and alienating than Miike's or Tarentino's; it's quite a long process of thought as to why, actually, and I don't feel like making the whole argument right now. XD; Suffice it to say that dude has aesthetics to burn and can afford to take different angles. The story is luridly OTT, and Park has learned everything he knows about America from, like, Hitchcock and James Dean movies. On the other hand, Thirst was an Emile Zola vampire!AU, and this is basically Further Tales of the Sakurazukamori in Tennessee or what have you. India had my weird-girl sympathy throughout.
The Incredible Hulk. I'm starting to feel a bit fandom-deprived (the good stuff starts coming out again in May), so I got around to this. It's good-not-great, for reasons that seem to me unusually subtle. That is, superhero movies that are bad tend to be glaringly bad, for reasons such as "the script insults my intelligence as a filmgoer." XD; Hulk just sort of... stops one step short? The Avengers gave the Hulk an upside, is one thing. If you haven't got an upside, it's a monster movie (like King-Kong, which this resembles not a little), not a superhero movie. Hulk is a force of nature; about the only thing you can do is point him in a general direction and pray, but he appeals to six-year-old boys because there's a joy to be found in forces of nature. Strength is ambiguous, not necessarily bad. Anger is ambiguous. Technology is ambiguous. Even destruction is ambiguous... But for the point to stick, the super and his/her alter ego need to be the same person; the latter has to be morally responsible for the former. It's Peter Parker's uncle who dies, not Spider-Man's. The sense, here, that Hulk's Hulk-ness may be the result of Banner's Banner-ness (apart from his civilizing love for Betty), either of his anger or of his scientific hubris, is mostly elided. In a way, I found Blonsky more interesting -- his aggression a displaced defense against fear of death, fear of emasculation, a self under siege translating to... well, not quite a country under siege. If all the blame is to be assigned to the military-industrial complex, to the movie's credit it at least hints at an explanation for said military-industrial complex.
Also, I did indeed go see the Peruvian art exhibition at the MMFA. ARQUEBUSIER ARCHANGELS.
What will you read/watch next?
Maybe some comics? Maybe I'll pick up some more Star Trek comics. XD;
EDIT -- It is still Friday night, so I'll note here that I just watched Star Trek V: The Final Frontier on Netflix. Of the odd numbers, I think The Search for Spock was worse! That one was just disappointingly not-well-written, coming after Wrath of Khan, whereas V is a throwback to the glorious cheap-FX ridiculousness of the original series combined with an interminable Shatner-penned fanfic about camping. No but seriously 30 minutes of this movie were just Bones singing "Row row row your boat" and Spock roasting a marshmallow. I felt cheated because on AO3 this scenario would at least have ended with sex pollen. But between Spock's Iron Man rocket boots and Kirk's wrestling match with a slave catgirl and Uhura's exotic feather-fan dancing, any emotional defenses you brought to the movie are completely stripped away, which is of course when the story gets taken over by BONES'S HIDDEN SOUL-DESTROYING PAIN with no warning whatsoever.
BONUS QUESTION: what books/movies did you acquire?
None, but a whole lotta records!
I'm beginning to think I ought to do this meme on Mondays rather than Fridays; I usually start books on weekends. (The resolution for this weekend is to finish the stuff I've left hanging.) In any case, the actual answer today is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which has been my iPod reading project for a while now. This is the official book-that-gets-left-off-the-list-of-books-I'm-reading: I do a few pages when I can, usually on public transit. The last one was On the Origin of Species. At one point I arbitrarily decided I wasn't going to respect anyone who invoked Darwin or Smith without making it evident that they'd actually read these books -- Darwin and Smith, in particular, being public intellectuals who made stepwise arguments in clear English; no Derridean pretzeling -- so the carrot here consists of my own right to bloviate. Also, I was told by an MBA professor to read The Wealth of Nations, and failing that, to buy it in leather-bound hardcover for office display and lie about having read it. That being said, I'm not going to drag around a leather-bound hardcover in my tote every day for the amount of time it will take me. XD
Anyway, one note to keep in mind: as I understand Adam Smith's argument to date (I am 1/10 of the way through the page count), national economic growth is required for a general rise in its citizens' standard of living when organized labour is outlawed but monopoly and price fixing are not. In fact, the logical argument is that said situation will cause inequality to rise, all else being equal, until the working class ends up at subsistence-level wages, which Smith defines over the long run as the ability for each family to raise two children to adulthood. (I've phrased this kind of awkwardly because nowadays we talk about replacement fertility, but he's talking about child mortality.) Economic growth is necessary to mitigate this tendency.
Don't think the scenario where organized labour is protected and monopoly outlawed occurred to Smith. But hey, Marx is the iPod reading project after this one!
What did you just finish reading/watching?
Books/comics:
A couple of first issues, in the bath -- a Sherlock Holmes one, the prequel to Star Trek Into Darkness...
Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Didion wrote these non-fiction pieces in the mid-60s, when she was around the same age as I am, with a mind that in some (but not all) ways is similar to mine: and thus paints a picture of the Haight-Ashbury scene, for example, that I recognize as approaching the reality I would've perceived had I been me there and then. (I do not get this from most visions of the 1960s that have filtered down to me, is what I'm trying to say.) At times, particularly in the personal reflections, she comes across as naturally conservative. On the other hand, she was trying to profile people who fed their toddlers peyote, and she never pretended to have answers. The major takeaway I get from this book is that Some Things Don't Change: California is still full of techno-futurists who sell transcripts of their roundtable discussions, New York is still full of young media-industry workers who aren't paid enough to buy furniture, and Americans still shoot other Americans for no good reason.
My sister describes the denizens of Didion's fiction as "the parents of Brett Easton Ellis's characters" XD which is probably no more than factual.
Movies/TV:
Stoker. It's Park Chan-wook, all right. I mean like "haha, weird to see an all-white cast in a Korean movie" obvious Park Chan-wook. It is dialled down some, but my personal opinion is that Park improves by dialling down (or "maturity," if you prefer). Thirst was by far my favourite of his movies. I perceive Park's violence to be more egregious and alienating than Miike's or Tarentino's; it's quite a long process of thought as to why, actually, and I don't feel like making the whole argument right now. XD; Suffice it to say that dude has aesthetics to burn and can afford to take different angles. The story is luridly OTT, and Park has learned everything he knows about America from, like, Hitchcock and James Dean movies. On the other hand, Thirst was an Emile Zola vampire!AU, and this is basically Further Tales of the Sakurazukamori in Tennessee or what have you. India had my weird-girl sympathy throughout.
The Incredible Hulk. I'm starting to feel a bit fandom-deprived (the good stuff starts coming out again in May), so I got around to this. It's good-not-great, for reasons that seem to me unusually subtle. That is, superhero movies that are bad tend to be glaringly bad, for reasons such as "the script insults my intelligence as a filmgoer." XD; Hulk just sort of... stops one step short? The Avengers gave the Hulk an upside, is one thing. If you haven't got an upside, it's a monster movie (like King-Kong, which this resembles not a little), not a superhero movie. Hulk is a force of nature; about the only thing you can do is point him in a general direction and pray, but he appeals to six-year-old boys because there's a joy to be found in forces of nature. Strength is ambiguous, not necessarily bad. Anger is ambiguous. Technology is ambiguous. Even destruction is ambiguous... But for the point to stick, the super and his/her alter ego need to be the same person; the latter has to be morally responsible for the former. It's Peter Parker's uncle who dies, not Spider-Man's. The sense, here, that Hulk's Hulk-ness may be the result of Banner's Banner-ness (apart from his civilizing love for Betty), either of his anger or of his scientific hubris, is mostly elided. In a way, I found Blonsky more interesting -- his aggression a displaced defense against fear of death, fear of emasculation, a self under siege translating to... well, not quite a country under siege. If all the blame is to be assigned to the military-industrial complex, to the movie's credit it at least hints at an explanation for said military-industrial complex.
Also, I did indeed go see the Peruvian art exhibition at the MMFA. ARQUEBUSIER ARCHANGELS.
What will you read/watch next?
Maybe some comics? Maybe I'll pick up some more Star Trek comics. XD;
EDIT -- It is still Friday night, so I'll note here that I just watched Star Trek V: The Final Frontier on Netflix. Of the odd numbers, I think The Search for Spock was worse! That one was just disappointingly not-well-written, coming after Wrath of Khan, whereas V is a throwback to the glorious cheap-FX ridiculousness of the original series combined with an interminable Shatner-penned fanfic about camping. No but seriously 30 minutes of this movie were just Bones singing "Row row row your boat" and Spock roasting a marshmallow. I felt cheated because on AO3 this scenario would at least have ended with sex pollen. But between Spock's Iron Man rocket boots and Kirk's wrestling match with a slave catgirl and Uhura's exotic feather-fan dancing, any emotional defenses you brought to the movie are completely stripped away, which is of course when the story gets taken over by BONES'S HIDDEN SOUL-DESTROYING PAIN with no warning whatsoever.
BONUS QUESTION: what books/movies did you acquire?
None, but a whole lotta records!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-03-23 01:10 am (UTC)And this is why one loves the 18th and 19th century thinkers. They do not pretzel.
"the parents of Brett Easton Ellis's characters"
I've never wanted to read Ellis' work-- and anyway he was in kindergarten when I read Didion's-- but I will believe this. Didion's California, fic or non-fic, always felt like one of the nastier hells on earth.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-23 02:39 am (UTC)Great paragraph, and I especially enjoyed this line :D
no subject
Date: 2013-03-23 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-23 04:38 am (UTC)