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Notes -
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.
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?
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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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