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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on the Iliad, Dialectic of Enlightenment and McLuhan's The Classical Trivium. Picking up Nudge: The Final Edition.
Wrapped up the last of Journey to the End of Night, which I ultimately got almost nothing interesting out of, and finally finished Seeing Like a State, which I got a lot out of but I expect everyone here has already either read the book or read better folks than me summarize its findings better than I could.
Started Storm of Steel which is a fascinating contrast to American Sniper. Both authors, at least at the start, enjoy the war. It's the difference between the 2000s Patriots or the 90s Bulls, and a role player on a .500 team. Kyle goes in expecting to win every time, and is shocked and takes it personally when he loses. Junger is immediately just hoping to survive. Kyle experiences enemy soldiers and civilians as "savages," as mooks that are just part of his story. Junger experiences them as formidable dangerous foes.
As an aside, I saw a local performance of Penelope, a one-woman musical of Odysseus' famous wife. It was fantastic. That woman really carried the show for an hour and a half straight, just her and a band, and of course that is the core commentary of the play: Penelope did it all alone, with nothing but a backing band, for twenty years until Odysseus returned. The show definitely plays the situation for light feminist snark at times, but never lapses into wokeness: at core it maintains a belief in Homer, Homer's heroes stay heroes and his villains stay villains, it doesn't try to flip the script like so many recent musicals based on old stories. It's very reminiscent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in that it looks at how great events feel to someone who isn't privileged to speak constantly with the gods; where Athena speaks to Odysseus pretty regularly, Penelope here gets only a single, cryptic and non-actionable message from Athena. My only critique of the play is that, compare to Madeleine Miller's Circe, the play cuts off before the really interesting and difficult stuff to get Penelope's commentary on: the slaughter of the suitors and the hanging of the maids. How does she feel about her Telemachus going all school shooter on the place?
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