february and march reads (Patreon)

an eclectic line-up from the past couple months..and super light. which i'll blame on the move

how to defend humane ideals by james flynn

professor defends the ‘great post-enlightenment project’ of social justice and the reduction of inequality

james flynn is known for doing a lot of research on iq..the ‘flynn effect’..globally iq test scores have been increasing since testing began (and not necessarily because we're getting more intelligent..it's interesting..).

uber-simply: he says even without reliable ethical truth-tests we can still move with intelligence and dignity towards the humane. felt sometimes out of my depth...i read this while i was finishing the last vid script as like casual supplementary material when really these are the ideas and arguments...and in hindsight wish i’d spent more time studying and integrating the text into the video

super anti-nietzschean and his contempt for the common man..also anti-postmodernism in their rejection of objectivity altogether..instead relies on logic and evidence as used in moral debate

some quite profound zingers i.e. the universe ‘has no goals – it merely shows trends’

he explores uncomfortable realities with compassion...still feels very prescient esp to do with race / class discussions...

‘If someone can only sustain a humane-egalitarian commitment by falsifying what people are like, turning workers into proletarian heroes or farmers into peasants sitting under and oak tree always deciding wisely, or believing that everybody is “essentially good at heart,” then his or her commitment is built on sand. But if we have faced up to what people are like, warts and all, and still feel a lively sympathy, we need not undertake a concerted campaign to weaken our commitment by wallowing in human awfulness.’

the uncanny by sigmund freud 

freud discusses the unconscious and the creative writer..childhood memories..the titular uncanny..and, uh, leonardo di vinci

i'm ready to admit that i’m a bit of a freudhead

psychoanalysis..i just like it..i don't know..it's a slippery slope to be sure..integrating its ideas into the way you actually treat and regard others is the most slippery slope of all...but as a poetic exercise..its fetish for symbolism..ah!! whatever!!

such whiplash..on the same page i'll be like oh, that makes total sense..followed immediately by the tim allen incredulous grunt

i appreciate his curiosity towards and reverence of the creative writer..he has no idea how we do it

freud girl summer

(i'm finishing this post without my copy on hand...i'll update this later with some specific passages)

under the skin by michael faber

odd woman kidnaps glaswegian hitchhikers for mysterious reasons 

under the skin is one of my favorite movies. it speaks to the search for connection even if it is antithetical to one’s nature…predation as an impulse to conceal one’s own vulnerability…isolation and deformity…sex as a foreign, confusing and violent act. very cool n disturbing visuals. so slow so subtle. i feel a real kinship with scarlett johansen’s character when i watch it..it makes me very sad..and lights me up. i love that film

allegedly this is the book the film was based on   . i will be regarding them as two separate entities which happen to share a title

what

ok. it’s slowly revealed that isserely is an alien who abducts hitchhikers to take to her farm compound. there the hitchhikers are fattened by a further team of aliens and slaughtered for meat which is sent back to the aliens’, uh, home planet, as a delicacy. ok

my first issue was that where at the end of glazer’s under the skin the alien is revealed to be a sort of smooth voidal humanoid…reminiscent of natalie portman’s copy at the end of annihilation…in the book the aliens are like….dog-monkey-wolves….who’ve had extensive cosmetic surgery to look human? they are described as having snouts(!) and luscious pelts. there's nothing like...inherently wrong with that..i just couldn't take it seriously 

story’s central conceit is that isserley’s species call themselves human and see themselves as superior to human-humans who they call vodsels and that is why they think it is ok to farm and eat them

we are of course supposed to find their prejudice absurd..faber includes such passages as ‘In the end, though, vodsels couldn’t do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they’d never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need to chail, or even chailsinn.’ 

ok...inexplicable alien words which are never defined because we have no differences really (and are all the same…..under the skin :)) and the aliens are deluded into committing atrocities by the strength of their own bigotry...ok

a little flaccid eh…without nuance eh…like what if their species was truly ‘better’ somehow..cognition..morals..whatever…that would’ve complicated the message a bit, eh! eh!!!

no

veganism, factory farming / interspecies or racial compassion message i guess…a little about gender..a little about class…and, uh, pro-marijauna discourse, rock on

there was not enough style or focus here to make any of this interesting or even forgivable for me

my love for the movie meant i was doomed to dislike this from the beginning and for this reason this is a bad review. don’t listen to me. i’m genuinely sorry this is so mean-spirited. an otherwise page-turning romp with a couple truly upsetting sequences..there is a moment where isserley mispronounces 'mercy' that is quite bone-chilling

(wait ok last thing. in the book isserley has giant perky plastic surgery titties. they are discussed / noticed / described often. in the film scar jo is styled in a low-cut top. we understand isserley is attractive because she needs lure men to her home under the pretense of sex. but in the book there are just, like, horse tranquilizer needles installed in the car seat? why does she need enormous tits to push the needle button……..

hahahaha 

isserley’s face is uglyish because she’s a botched wolf ape so i guess she needs the tits to be attractive at all….but she’s just tranquilizing people anyway…what do the tits do…what is their purpose…i’m going insane thinking about it i’m tapping out lads)

simulacra and simulation by jean baudrillard

baudrillard's assessment of the culture published in 1981...with god in the rearview we shape ourselves in the image of cultural impulses and pieces..and then find that these cultural pieces to be full of nothing, a layer over reality that we engage with and accept as reality, or experience as more real than reality

he quotes ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." – but this is a false quote! also, it doesn't really matter! baudrillard! you dog

i'm glad to have read this but i'm sure you can experience this same information more succinctly via youtube lecture or something..i struggled a bit..occasional poetry like ‘science never sacrifices itself – it is always murderous’ and 'there is no fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously – it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality – radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy'.

disneyland as the hyperreal, where reality and symbols interact to alchemize something realer..‘a town of fabulous proportions but without space or dimension’..a pristine 'american' 'main street', an artificial cookie smell pumped from a bakery imitating a bakery (notably, to get you to buy...)

thinkin about memes..when people on twitter joke that you need to have seen like. six other memes to get this one

or layers of irony..when you accidentally read an onion headline like it's real..etc

remembered every time i've seen someone invoke these ideas to like. mock women for getting plastic surgery (but like..true. one wants to look like a celebrity who themselves does not look like 'themselves'...etc)

baudrillard offers, as far as i can tell, no means of escape“To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on “consciousness raising,” indeed a “raising of the unconscious” of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.”

a canticle for leibowitz by walter m. miller jr.

among the third millennia's post-ww3 devastation learned men join the clergy and interpret the artefacts left behind while ‘simpletons’ roam the wilderness..epic tale ensues

mid-century sci-fi..monks in the technoapocalypse..what more could you want

spoilers ahead though i honestly wish i knew this before i read

the book is split into three parts with 600 years passing between each of them..charts a developing american landscape as it recovers from, and, eventually, returns to the doorstep of, its total annihilation..and it's so religious the whole damn time..

circuitry diagrams are treated as holy relics..some very funny moments in these anachronisms...i kept imagining leibowitz as zuckerberg. hehe

cyclical stories of humanity appear again...and again...and again..

a passage about 'cats becoming ornithologists' which i found very profound...respect inherent in the predator-prey relationship

the author is an interesting figure..he served in the air corps during world war 2, converted to catholism, wrote smash-hit canticle, spent forty years working on the sequel, then killed himself without finishing it. i don’t know what to make of this exactly..but notable for sure'What nonsense, old man! he chided himself. When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary. Oh there's the devil, all right, but let's not credit him with more than his damnable due. Are you that life-weary, old fossil?' pg. 131'"If he's lonely, why does he insist on living like a hermit?""To escape loneliness – in a young world.'" pg. 131 (that page went crazy, evidently)

and that's all! think i'm going to stick to fiction this month. on deck for me is some clarice lispector which i'm very excited about. lemme know what you've read / are reading and we'll speak soon

sav