Weekly reading/watching meme

[petronia]

Should be fairly light (last week was heavy).

What are you reading/watching now?

Started the Mark Atherton. Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish arrived so started that as well. More Greek philosophers, in the opening salvo at least (perhaps it's just that it was the first golden era of leisurely, intelligent people giving dinner parties where they theorized about sex? I was saying to ayalesca that someone ought to try marketing Plato's Symposium as m/m RPF, see where that goes XD;). Then I got bored and bought a few current issues of Iron Man #4-7, in which Tony Stark... tries to sleep with a space princess from a civilization that is roughly the galactic homologue to the ancient Greeks. Whom he picked up at a dinner party.

...Huh.

What did you just finish reading/watching?

Books/comics:

• Jason Wilson, Boozehound: not as fine a writer as Godrich -- I'm not really a fan of the breezy style, and dude's critical approach is the oenological equivalent of "this pop record is perfect because it played on the radio as I made out with my dream girl that summer I was 17" school of music writing. I don't want tasting notes ad nauseam, but I find baffling that he finds Nigella(!)'s "panettone in liquid form" remark baffling, since I own the book in question and found it concisely evocative. (Who was $famous_critic who complained about applying non-sonic descriptors to music? No idea what "angular guitars" is supposed to mean, he griped. It means they sound angular, I thought, and that you're making a virtue of your impoverished non-synaesthetic sensorium.) But Wilson is a journalist where Godrich is a historian. Godrich will tell you that a pisco acholado containing "Italia" grape tastes better in a pre-Prohibition pisco punch, but Wilson will tell you that acholados have aromatic floral notes, and in a tasting are the marked preference of women and Americans. Neither writes whether Americans always preferred acholado over puro and the punch recipe is adapted accordingly, or if the Peruvian palate has itself changed over the years (though that's not to say they don't know, and if I met either dude in a bar I'd have questions XD).
  Incidentally, the drink is amazing. Pisco seems to go with pineapple the way tequila goes with lime.
• Ruth Padel, Darwin: A Life In Poems: will probably post some of this? It's not National Poetry Month in Canada, I don't think, but. XD
• Guardians of the Galaxy #0.1 and #1: see above, also here.
• Young Avengers (2013) #1-3: series emphasis on "young" i.e. supernatural/superheroing/etc. as a metaphor for YOUTH i.e. (per end notes) Heinsberg's idea of What Sixteen Means vs Gillen's idea of What Eighteen Means. Changing role of authority figures, lampshaded. "I'm Tyrion!" #blessyourheart If I were prone to worrying about stupid shiz in the middle of the night I would worry about the as-yet nonexistant 2020 storyline in which Billy decides he wants kids with Teddy and recapitulates Wanda's eff-ups again such as moving to suburban New Jersey.
• Fashion Beast #2: Alan Moore and Malcolm McLaren...... look for this in trades, methinks.

Movies/TV:

• The Eagle: Friday girls' night out -- Erin and I went for pub food, came back to my place, I mixed a batch of Singapore Slings and we watched a Channing Tatum flick. Well. It wasn't quite Magic Mike. XD Meditatively slow, Gaelic dialogue, and dead kids (though Meg always said the book was a YA adventure). Also, I think I'm just discomfited by stories set in Roman Britain. Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, you know? "And this, too, was once..." Say what you like but that framing device changed my worldview, back in the day. Achebe's critique was that Conrad had no right to Other Africans as savages; it doesn't mean a present-day script gets free rein to go back and do it to the Celts and Picts. The Eagle certainly understands this better than, say, Centurion (someone made the decision to have Channing Tatum in his ineffably stolid G.I.Joe-ness play his Roman as an American), but that just means it's intentionally discomfiting instead of unintentionally so -- uncomfortable with itself. The performances and awareness of its own context at odds, I think, with the plot (unless Sutcliffe was particularly on the ball as a 1950s writer... YA, yes? XD;). In the end the only reading that reconciles the whole is that the colonialist situation is so untenable that both sides have to subscribe to a divine sense of warrior honour -- as represented by the eagle emblem in both sets of religious practices, which the script does not harp on nearly as much as one might assume -- that makes abstraction of utilitarian questions, such as WTF Romans are doing in sunny Caledonia in the first place, in order to retain moral dignity. Id est, the alternate ending makes more sense. (Looking up Ebert's old review, melancholically, I note he was right in observing that one is too aware of the power play -- it's not a one-way imbalance -- between Marcus and Esca to perceive them as becoming buddies. Though at the same time, that is one heck of a power play. Like a classier version of that vibe I got from Wanted: "...Maaaaybe this is someone's specific D/s fantasy.")
  In other news, much as with Zero Dark Thirty, Mark Strong's appearance was greeted by me with an exceptional lack of surprise. It's like when I watch Hong Kong movies and Lam Suet is reincarnated into every era of historical China.

What will you read/watch next?

Whatever's on the list? Probably not much reading this upcoming week tbh, want to get some writing done.

BONUS QUESTION: what books/movies did you acquire?

• Jason Wilson, Boozehound
• Deb Perelman, The Smitten Kitchen
• The Eagle (2011)
• Incendies (2010)

Comments

[acchikocchi.livejournal.com]

I was saying to ayalesca that someone ought to try marketing Plato's Symposium as m/m RPF, see where that goes XD;

I'm not admitting anything here, but if one is a 15-year-old who has just read a lot of Mary Renault, one might, hypothetically, proceed to the Symposium by precisely that logic. Hypothetically.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I mean, really the point of this story was that Aristophanes was a hilarious dude and Socrates can get it.

[tochira.livejournal.com]

I read The Eagle of the Ninth after seeing the movie, and then tracked down Sutcliffe's other Roman Britain novels posthaste. XD; The dated YA aspects of her books are about as one would expect in some cases... and in others, refreshingly absent. (I recommend reading the book because as short as it is, a LOT was sacrificed, enough to give you a different sort of story altogether, and her sense of place is excellent.) They were reprinted when the movie came out, or at least around the same time, so they should be easy to track down - but if you ever get the urge, The Folio Society published absolutely gorgeous versions of the trilogy. ;)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the note! I'll probably track this down at some point (or, more likely, stumble upon it while looking for something else XD).