Weekly reading/watching meme
Apr. 29th, 2013 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaBooks:
Finished On Writing and went back to the other Borges essays collection, which continues to be better. But in general Borges turns out to be a good critic, in that he is not only insightful but makes you really want to read the books/authors in question, many of which/whom I had zero or even negative previous desire to read. XD (He is also the sort of critic, of whom I've encountered a few in music writing, who persistently relates new work to his own top ten favourite artists regardless of whether the latter are well-known and generally well-regarded or not. This is neither a good nor a bad thing per se, but it's a thing.)
Started Mythologies, which turns out to be a bit 101 for me (Barthes wrote it as a 101; another one of those books which would have started life as a blog, today). That is, dude was making his audience think about daily life, pop culture stuff they would normally not have tried to analyze intellectually, but said culture was that of 1950s France, i.e. I have to reconstitute the past in order to revisit it. I mean, I had no idea there was French pro wrestling in the 50s, did you? XD Also, everyone overanalyzes pop culture for signs nowadays. You've won, Roland.
Comics:
Usual serialization stuff. Read The Thanos Imperative which was the big cosmic arc before the current thing; so big that they probably had to soft-reboot. And the concept is rather clever.
As I keep mentioning I'm fascinated by the thematic underpinnings of all this -- the explanation for 616's accreted baroqueness being a Douglas Adams-esque "The universe is big and weird and effed up, and Earth specifically is really weird and effed up."
Like... Trek-wise, the Prime Directive assumes that the Federation is doing the violating/not violating thereof; even if, in practice, unknowable alien beings mess with the Enterprise's crew all the time, they can't mess with Earth in this sense anymore, because Earth (part of the Federation) exists as a spacefaring political entity. It would be a diplomatic misunderstanding or a declaration of war or what have you, but the Prime Directive doesn't come into it.
The Marvel 616 Earth, on the other hand, is in this weird liminal space where it's not quite officially spacefaring (the going galactic estimate is "within one generationdepending on whether Tony Stark has a gun to his head or not"), but is already a hotspot. The Big Powers That Be have meddled with it so long and so fundamentally that it has no hope of "natural" development in the Prime Directive sense anymore; in a real way, 616 Earth is a construct, an artefact of galactic-context realpolitik and general unthinking fuckery on the part of purportedly developed civilisations. At the same time, it's unpredictably powerful and is perfectly capable of throwing a wrench in the gears of the most unstoppable galactic-sized onslaught.
It's just, I dunno, a really interesting fundamental decentering? Earth isn't a colonialist power, even cryptically/unconsciously. Earth is Palestine, Afghanistan, maybe North Korea.
What's more, because of the superhero imperative, as it were, whereby political entities must be represented by champions (both in the literal political sense and the signifier sense), the galaxy is full of expansionist space empires. I mean, I am looking for democracies and there do not seem to be any. XD;;; So not only is Earth Palestine, it's 19th-century Palestine.
I realize I've argued myself into the position that Peter Quill is basically Lawrence of Arabia. XD; Though, I've only just described what's going on in the comics -- all this is text, occasionally infodump text even, barely extrapolation -- so maybe they intend to go there. "We turned him blond because we felt like it" seemed rather thin, I have to say.
TV:
More JoJo. Up to episode 6. The weirdness is ramping up, but hasn't coalesced into a gestalt (my experience, which seems to be similar to everyone else's, was that this happens around Caesar's introduction). It's like the delicate moment when a mess of eggs turns into a custard.
Finished On Writing and went back to the other Borges essays collection, which continues to be better. But in general Borges turns out to be a good critic, in that he is not only insightful but makes you really want to read the books/authors in question, many of which/whom I had zero or even negative previous desire to read. XD (He is also the sort of critic, of whom I've encountered a few in music writing, who persistently relates new work to his own top ten favourite artists regardless of whether the latter are well-known and generally well-regarded or not. This is neither a good nor a bad thing per se, but it's a thing.)
Started Mythologies, which turns out to be a bit 101 for me (Barthes wrote it as a 101; another one of those books which would have started life as a blog, today). That is, dude was making his audience think about daily life, pop culture stuff they would normally not have tried to analyze intellectually, but said culture was that of 1950s France, i.e. I have to reconstitute the past in order to revisit it. I mean, I had no idea there was French pro wrestling in the 50s, did you? XD Also, everyone overanalyzes pop culture for signs nowadays. You've won, Roland.
Comics:
Usual serialization stuff. Read The Thanos Imperative which was the big cosmic arc before the current thing; so big that they probably had to soft-reboot. And the concept is rather clever.
As I keep mentioning I'm fascinated by the thematic underpinnings of all this -- the explanation for 616's accreted baroqueness being a Douglas Adams-esque "The universe is big and weird and effed up, and Earth specifically is really weird and effed up."
Like... Trek-wise, the Prime Directive assumes that the Federation is doing the violating/not violating thereof; even if, in practice, unknowable alien beings mess with the Enterprise's crew all the time, they can't mess with Earth in this sense anymore, because Earth (part of the Federation) exists as a spacefaring political entity. It would be a diplomatic misunderstanding or a declaration of war or what have you, but the Prime Directive doesn't come into it.
The Marvel 616 Earth, on the other hand, is in this weird liminal space where it's not quite officially spacefaring (the going galactic estimate is "within one generation
It's just, I dunno, a really interesting fundamental decentering? Earth isn't a colonialist power, even cryptically/unconsciously. Earth is Palestine, Afghanistan, maybe North Korea.
What's more, because of the superhero imperative, as it were, whereby political entities must be represented by champions (both in the literal political sense and the signifier sense), the galaxy is full of expansionist space empires. I mean, I am looking for democracies and there do not seem to be any. XD;;; So not only is Earth Palestine, it's 19th-century Palestine.
I realize I've argued myself into the position that Peter Quill is basically Lawrence of Arabia. XD; Though, I've only just described what's going on in the comics -- all this is text, occasionally infodump text even, barely extrapolation -- so maybe they intend to go there. "We turned him blond because we felt like it" seemed rather thin, I have to say.
TV:
More JoJo. Up to episode 6. The weirdness is ramping up, but hasn't coalesced into a gestalt (my experience, which seems to be similar to everyone else's, was that this happens around Caesar's introduction). It's like the delicate moment when a mess of eggs turns into a custard.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-29 07:29 pm (UTC)Calvino made me want to read Inferno, although I did not end up doing so. Not at all surprised that Borges has the same effect XD
no subject
Date: 2013-04-29 09:04 pm (UTC)I went back to the bookstore but of course the Barthes I wanted was gone. So I picked up a Rubén Darío anthology, because Borges. Well, it is in Spanish, but stylistically similar enough to French writers of the period that I can muddle through (I'm too impatient to study Spanish systematically but that does not prevent me from trying to read Hispanophone writers... principally Borges and Paz and Neruda and so on XD;).
no subject
Date: 2013-04-29 09:53 pm (UTC)Some pretty baroque comments, there. XD
*spock hat on*
Date: 2013-04-29 11:47 pm (UTC)Re: *spock hat on*
Date: 2013-04-30 05:33 pm (UTC)Forget it, Jake. It's philosophy.
(... Yes, I totally just finished teaching one of my philosophy units in a religion course, your point? XD)
no subject
Date: 2013-04-30 05:37 pm (UTC)The article you linked from the NYTimes reminded me a bit of some works on The Matrix, which reminded me of the appropriate ages to be deep into certain thoughts (man, if being a late-teenager or adult when you watch the film, and The Matrix was your first exposure to "reality may not be actually real," then I just don't grok you). I found Borges at age 12, and then picked up the collected volumes at age 24 out of affection, but my phase had been run through. I think those are great ages for his work personally, although they may have only been great ages for me. If I were to come at him right now (particularly given my current "meh" towards band writing), I'm not sure I'd develop the same affection.
(Also helped to be pre-Internet, so it was New! And Just For Me! I was the only one I knew who read Borges, and that was kind of thrilling.)
no subject
Date: 2013-04-30 09:32 pm (UTC)I don't ever remember having my mind blown by the contents of Borges' stories, tbh; that was more Cortázar (late teens there, definitely, since there was a lit class involved). Some of them, like Pierre Menard, I thought I understood but didn't -- it's a parable about criticism and auteur theory, and I didn't know enough about those things at the time. I found their forms amazing -- you know, the idea for instance that you could write a description or a proposal of a thing instead of the thing itself -- and the Mandelbox/Escher feeling associated with them: something as matter of fact as a geometrical treatise that nevertheless seemed simultaneously to peel back a corner of the world's surface.
I'm now finding that this feeling exists as well in Borges' late non-fiction, if not more strongly than in his fiction. Which makes it clearer than ever that it's not actually about content! I mean, he's drawing erudite links between things, and he's very good at taste-based insight, but at base he's mostly engaging in thematic contrast-compare, biographical notes, the usual litcrit stuff. There shouldn't be anything hallucinatory there. So it is a stylistic effect, a matter of word choice.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-30 10:52 pm (UTC)Otherwise, agreed XD
no subject
Date: 2013-05-01 07:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-01 04:04 pm (UTC)* Dunno if you've read Embassyville, but I always picture surrealism, especially visual but also textual, as the very watered-down human version of the "high" therein.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-01 07:24 am (UTC)