Weekly reading/watching meme
Books:
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 depending 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.
I have figured out how to add the footer on a crosspost! Go me! /rollsalot (Original post is here: http://petronia.dreamwidth.org/53440.html)
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 depending 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.
I have figured out how to add the footer on a crosspost! Go me! /rollsalot (Original post is here: http://petronia.dreamwidth.org/53440.html)