Pop culture round-up!
Indeed I now think that the Indian and Chinese description of the afterlife, the system of the six lokas or realms of reality - the devas, asuras, humans, beasts, pretas, and inhabitants of hell - is in fact a metaphorical but precise description of this world and the inequalities that exist in it, with the devas sitting in luxury and judgment on the rest, the asuras fighting to keep the devas in their high position, the humans getting by as humans do, the beasts laboring as beasts do, the homeless preta suffering in fear at the edge of hell, and the inhabitants of hell enslaved to pure immiseration.
My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit. History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generations to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist.
To put it in religious terms, we are still indeed in the bardo, waiting to be born.
The Years of Rice and Salt is an 800-page novel broken up into 10 long chapters that follow a group of people that keep getting reincarnated together. One of them is supposed to be the reincarnation of Monkey, the mythical Chinese trickster figure who brings Buddhism from India to China in Journey to the West (India being west of China). It's an alternative history of the world in which nearly everyone in central and western Europe died from the Black Death and the world is consequently shaped largely by China, India, and Islam. The book was a master class in world-building. I get really enthusiastic about things I like, to the point where the last time I was in New Orleans Lori joked that I was a hair away from yelling WATCH THE BEAR IT'S REALLY GOOD!! at people randomly in the street because I kept talking about it.
Anyway, read The Years of Rice and Salt, it's really good!
I decided to re-read Murder on the Orient Express when I finished because I felt like I needed something I didn't need to think about. Also I guess Agatha Christie has just been on my mind because I keep seeing trailers for A Haunting in Venice. I'm totally baffled by that movie, because I've read every Poirot novel multiple times and I don't recognize that at all. I think it's supposed to be based on Hallowe'en Party, but I just re-read that book last year and it does not take place in Venice, doesn't have any supernatural elements, doesn't feature a suicide that may have been a murder, and the victim is a child. So I don't know what's going on there; I also don't know why they keep making more of these movies. The first two had pretty lukewarm reviews and while I don't think they lost money I don't think they did so well as to justify cranking more out.
Oh well, I don't know shit about how the movie industry works. Maybe Branagh has extortion material on some studio exec.
Tonight after work I'm going to watch the last episode of this season of Foundation. I thought it improved this season, like it really settled into the bombastic space opera groove; Lee Pace figured out he's basically playing Nero in The Fall of the Roman Empire: Galaxy Edition. Last week's episode had him strutting around in a mesh top and demanding the destruction of an entire planet. Like I mentioned before, I have a feeling the show has strayed pretty far from the source material but I do not give a shit.
Official trailer for the 2nd season of Our Flag Means Death!
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