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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   4844 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 11, 2025

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on the Iliad and Dialectic of Enlightenment, which has turned out to be much more interesting than I expected.

Currently reading SM Stirling's To Turn the Tide. Which is exactly the sort of ISOT story I signed up for. Not the deepest characters but still enjoyable enough. Except...

I just wish Stirling didn't crib from his own - much better - genre namer. You read enough of a small circle of althist writers like him and Eric Flint and you start to see the same tropes.

Just finished Misbelief by Dan Ariely. He was brought in to consult the government during lockdowns on how best to encourage mask wearing and how to boost engagement with remote learning, but played no part in the decision to require masks or close schools.

Conspiracy theorists on the internet became convinced he was one of the evil masterminds behind the plandemic. He reached out and engaged with several and wrote a book about it. One interesting insight was that if someone gets deep into a conspiracy theory — to the point it causes them to become ostracized by their family and (former) friends — it is exceedingly hard to pull them out of the conspiracy, as their new social circle consists of other people who have experienced the same, and they don’t want to go through a second social death.

The people sending Ariely death threats, were to his surprise, quite supportive of one another in their Telegram chat groups. One, after lengthy one-on-one communication, conceded he realized Ariely was not an evil power broker, but acknowledged he could not say so lest he lose the only social circle he had left.

Currently reading Moss Hart’s autobiography Act One after it was highly praised in both Graydon Carter’s memoir and a recent New York Magazine article on the history of Broadway. The rags to riches story has been quite good so far, blending an interesting memoir with insights into acting, directing, playwrighting and the theater business, living up to the hype.

Anybody got a good sci fi or fantasy series to recommend?

Have you read The Sun Eater series?

Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s a novella rather than a series but happens to fit both of those labels nicely.

Ahh I just read his Children of Time series which was pretty good.

Try The Human Reach- it’s basically Tom Clancy played completely straight in ultra-hard sci fi.

What are you interested in?

Epic fantasy!!! and scifi. mostly. Uhh idk man I like anything as long as its well written.

Try The Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio.

Murderbot

eh unfinished. rip.

I'm reading A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway) so far so good, trying to read more and limit screen time. Recently finished the Beautiful and the Damned (Fitzgerald) was a slower start but once the bride enters the scene what a trip.

I always find Fitzgerald’s books an unending wonder. Often it feels like not much is happening but afterwards, often years afterwards, you still find yourself bathed in the glow of whatever feeling he manages to convey. Gatsby is amazing but possibly the least “bathesome” - Beautiful and the Damned and Tender is the Night both left me with something inexplicable and permanent in my veins.

Is that by Fitzgerald?

Edited to add authors!

About a hundred pages into Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. I'm enjoying it so far, although not as much as A Scanner Darkly. There's a funny bit where one of the white characters is looking at a Japanese woman and admiring how beautiful she is, thinking to himself that, compared to the Japanese, white people are defective, unfinished, taken out of the kiln too early (a curiously Yakubian sentiment). As a white man who's had more than my fair share of Asian sexual and romantic partners, I found this rather amusing, and read the paragraph out to my Asian girlfriend, who laughed. (Although funnily enough, part of the reason he finds her so beautiful is because she doesn't even need to wear a bra - a description which was not true of any of the Japanese women I've dated.)

Christ in the Americas, a high school history textbook for Catholic students. It's a pro-Catholic telling of North and South Americans history. Columbus is portrayed as a good man with flaws. Cortes is portrayed as a champion of order and goodness, a sort of crusader king. Aztec nobles are portrayed as blood drinking demon worshipers (Aztec deities are referred to as "the devil gods") who oppress the borderline-enslaved peasant masses. St Brendan the Navigator is claimed to have probably visited Newfoundland. The writing is definitely aimed at high school kids, but the narrative is compelling. It's kind of like reading an action novel.

I started Retail Gangster: The Insane Real-life Story of Crazy Eddie by Gary Weiss just a couple of days ago. It's been a highly interesting read thus far, the glimpse into the New York City of the 70s has already made the read worthwhile for me, much less the story of Eddie himself.

I’ve read this. I love non-fiction tales of financial crimes, and this is a favorite. I found how the fraud inverted over time particularly interesting.

I'm finding it gripping as well and in fact I'm right at the point where they're pushing for their IPO!

You get the feeling that, as a public company, if they could have moderated their greed, tempered it a bit, they might have gotten away with everything, albeit at a lesser scale in the second phase. But that tragic flaw brought them to that point and they couldn’t change.

When I gashed open my face a coach commented that it was going to be a cool "300 scar" after it healed up, so I thought I'd finally read the Frank Miller original comic. I'd seen the movie about 30 times when I was a kid, we used to quote it to each other constantly, it's hard to express what a big impact that movie had on little league baseball teams and boy scout troops around that time. I was surprised by the original in many ways:

-- The plot points and lines from the book largely make it to the movie 1:1, with a lot of stuff added in to pad out the movie run time. The movie is largely, I would say, better for it. Having watched the movie, the comic feels like it's missing beats. In the book the soldiers are "boys" and merely "his bodyguard" while in the film Leonidas specifies that he picked men who had sons to carry on their name, which was a good scene from the start. Especially the "back at the ranch" plotline in Sparta. But the plot around the queen wouldn't work anyway because...

-- The art style surprised me. Stelios is ugly, sort of dreadlocked, and vaguely African looking in the art. All the characters are ugly in that same sort of way, while the in the movie everyone is gorgeous. I remember Gym Jones being a major fad at the time, and the 300 WOD that was supposedly used as a benchmark during the training process remains a well known workout benchmark. Not get too navel gazing and homoerotic about it, but at the time the male bodies in 300 were a real cultural touchstone. This was a thunderbolt image of white masculine virility; so shocking I remember liberals like Dan Savage denouncing the movie as racist and homophobic, how it was movie about the fantasy of Republican White Men beating up fags and ragheads, some line like "When the Persians don't look like Iraqi Muslims they look like a gay pride parade!" Watching the movie that critique makes a certain amount of sense, reading the comic it really doesn't: the ethnic and physical gap isn't the same.

-- It's amazing how the comic lead to the movie created such a cultural movement, but I feel like the movie and even more the comic are barely remembered. About a million people a year run a Spartan Race now, and when it was founded in 2010 everyone knew it was coasting on the film, and now I would bet most people don't make the connection. Reminds me of the Desperate Housewives TV fiction drama, which inspired the Real Housewives of... reality TV juggernaut.

I'm still working through Infinite Jest with a friend, and I'm reading a Platonic dialogue every week or so. I picked up Celine's Journey to the Edge of Night which is brilliant and feels like a really important work, but I'm not far into it enough to comment. I'm curious how much it impacted Henry Miller, Sartre, Kerouac, etc.

Celine is excellent, and he had a big impact on the young Sartre, although of course after the war they hated each other. There's a darkly amusing anecdote in Ernst Junger's war diaries where Celine manages to horrify a party full of Nazi officers with his antisemitic bloodthirst. Still, at least Celine was an honest misanthrope, whereas Sartre buries it under layers of bloated theorizing and projected dishonesty.

Funny, Junger is next up on my list!

Happy to give any recs based on what you're looking for, I happen know a thing or two about Junger. Have one book and a half left before I've finished his entire (translated) bibliography (and "Bartender Venator" is chosen after the protagonist of his novel Eumeswil).

I have Storm of Steel on my kindle right now! My understanding is that is the place to start, right?

Storm of Steel is certainly the classic place to start, but worth remembering that Junger published it at 25 and lived to be 102. Most people only know him for WWI, and so they miss the incredibly rich development of his work afterwards. I'd urge you not to be satisfied without reading either On The Marble Cliffs (fiction) or The Forest Passage (philosophy) to get a taste of the later Junger, both of which are very short books. If you had to pick just one Junger, given your intense reading schedule, I would recommend On The Marble Cliffs (in the newish NYRB translation), which will hopefully give you the taste for more.

Some of the prose in On the Marble Cliffs was mind-blowing.

Maybe I’m an illiterate savage or whatever, but I think especially of the lines towards the beginning, describing the snakes in the garden, and it’s just perfect visual imagery.

He really is a wildly underrated writer, almost certainly because he wasn’t the right sort for mid and late 20th century literary circles, and I’m glad he’s seeing a Renaissance.

Stelios is ugly

Clicking this link reminded me that Michael Fassbender was in this movie. And Dominic West. I'd completely forgotten everyone but Gerard Butler.

Never could get onboard with Frank Miller. Everyone says that Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns kicked off the so-called "Dark Age" of American comic books. While my opinion of Watchmen has hardened over time (I now largely agree with the common critique that it insists upon itself, wherein Moore's determination to show off how clever he is with puns, symbols and parallelism actually takes you out of the story and breaks the immersion - From Hell is vastly better in part because he dialled this tendency of his down a few degrees), I still think it's basically a solid story, and its influence is undeniable. But The Dark Knight Returns - I don't know, man. Did nothing for me. Maybe it's a Seinfeld is Unfunny thing where it was so widely imitated that the original has lost its lustre - but Watchmen is also widely imitated, and still manages to be engaging and affecting on its own terms. And I just remembered that I read a few of the Sin City comics when I was a teenager too, but completely forgot about them until just now - shows you how much of an impression they made.

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