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PaperclipPerfector  18hr ago (text post)   466 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 2, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm trying Donnelly's Atlantis again. I was interested in him from the Shakespeare authorship question, but now I'm wondering if the mythology of Atlantis has any relevance to new world/indigenous issues. If nothing else I have discovered the rather neat new world art of Waldeck, said to be Egyptianized. Backlog is not moving.

Rereading all the Philip Marlowe books. Why does no one say davenport anymore?

As a child I watched the 2002 psychological/supernatural horror The Mothman Prophecies, whose virtues I think I was too young to appreciate at the time. I rediscovered the film about ten years ago and found that it was right up my alley. By the time Covid rolled around, my appreciation of the film had metastasised into a morbid obsession. Between 2020-21 I must have watched it at least ten times in varying states of consciousness and inebriation: it's one of those rare movies where you can nod off halfway through, wake up in a state of utter confusion, and have that enhance the experience of watching it. Great performances from the entire cast, amazing cinematography, original score so good that it's one of my go-tos when I need to concentrate in work: it's one of the spookiest, most atmospheric films I've ever seen, and one of the best films about the impossibility of trying to communicate with a genuinely alien intelligence (John Klein: "I think we can assume that these entities are more advanced than us. Why don't they just come right out and tell us what's on their minds?" Alexander Leek: "You're more advanced than a cockroach. Have you ever tried explaining yourself to one of them?").

I mentioned my obsession with this film in a thread some time ago, and someone (whose username now escapes me) recommended checking out the source material, a book of the same name by John A. Keel, marketed as non-fiction. I dutifully bought it several months ago, but only started reading it this week.

It's a funny read. While the film adheres to a broadly conventional three-act structure, with a suitably impactful climax, it's hardly the most rigorously plotted film: large chunks of the second act simply consist of the protagonist talking to the residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia about the strange things they claim to have witnessed or experienced. This is an accurate reflection of the source material, most of which consists of disconnected vignettes, not all of which are even told by Point Pleasant residents, and which appear to be organised by commonalities in sightings rather than chronology. (Keel has a particularly irritating fondness for ellipses.) Reading the book, I have a greater appreciation for screenwriter Richard Hatem, who had to corral all of this disparate material into something resembling a conventional Hollywood thriller. Most exasperating of all is author Keel's predilection for what RationalWiki (ugh) used to call "crank magnetism". It's one thing to believe in aliens and otherworldly intelligences: it's quite another to also (apparently) believe that the CIA are in cahoots with the aliens and conspiring with them to have them harass people in West Virginia (just like they conspired to have JFK assassinated).

Absorbing enough, for all that. Best approached as a work of fiction.

I think my favorite part of The Mothman Prophecies might be the very beginning, where Keel talks about the ill-omened visitation of the strange, otherworldly devil disguised as a man upon a rural homestead...before explaining that the devilish creature was in fact himself, wearing a (then-unusual) beard and (if memory serves) in need of a phone due to car trouble, or somesuch. Even if he was a bit of a crank magnet, I think he was at least self-aware about it.

(Although I seem to specifically recall that Keel says that the CIA would not, in fact, harass random people simply for seeing a UFO, but that may not have been in the Mothman Prophecies, or I might be thinking of Vallee or one of their fellow-travelers.)

I just finished Piranesi on the train, and even though I pirated the book, I'd like a refund. I have only so much time under the sun.

I genuinely do not understand what people see in that soggy lump of seaweed. Like Jesus Christ, at best, I can call it beautiful prose wrapped around a shaggy dog story - a trite allegory about domestic violence if I squint, or take off my glasses.

I do not care about spoiler tags. I think I'm doing people a favor if I spoil the "book".

A man lives in an infinite House of halls and statues. He catalogs the statues. He catalogs the tides. He journals about cataloguing. Around the halfway mark we confirm what any reader with a pulse suspected by page 40: he's a kidnapped academic named Matthew whose memory got shredded by the House, and the smug prick he calls "the Other" is the guy who trapped him there to use him as a research instrument. A policewoman walks in, tells him this, the villain drowns on schedule, and our boy returns to England, where he is gently sad and visits the House sometimes on weekends. Also, this nigga fruity. He's as sweet as a sugar plum, but the only characters getting an action in the story are the seagulls and albatrosses.

You've got a quadrillion pages about statues, and then the ramifications of an entire parallel world are buried under seagull shit without so much as a "huh". Like, you can just go there. You can take pictures and upload them to Wikipedia. You could dump nuclear waste in the place, if nothing else. The poverty of imagination of the characters is rivaled only by that of the author.

I started out knowing nothing about the book. I wish I could return to that idyllic state, but I suspect that I'd just end up in an endless cycle of re-reading it because there are rave reviews written by raving idiots. What a waste - I genuinely enjoyed Johnathan Strange.

I personally enjoyed Piranesi after having it recommended on The Motte, so you may encounter other defenders.

To your point about why it is so widely liked, Piranesi's reading level, length and content combine to create a book that anyone can pick up and that almost everyone will feel has more there than appears. Some other examples would be The Old Man and the Sea (definitely offers what is promised), a great deal of Hesse, or The Alchemist (I strongly believe does not fulfill its promise). Piranesi is kind of like an "insight porn" genre of novels.

Personally, I thought the setting was extremely aesthetically pleasing and I liked the idea of the statue world as a sort of aesthetic clearinghouse for the world. While the book does not do too much with the latter idea because it is so focused on the main character who is not a type to grapple with the sci-fi genre implications, I found this reasonable and realistic, though I would tend to agree that the fundamental real world plot was excessively mundane.

A reasonable take, but I object strenuously to the conflation of "human being with a frontal lobe tries to be sensible about the situation they're in" with "sci-fi genre implications".

I didn't expect a rat-fic, or the story suddenly morphing into the SCP foundation. But there is a profound lack of curiosity or grounding inherent to the setting. It's wooly, wishy-washy set dressing.

The existence of an enormous navigable alternate reality is arguably the largest discovery in human history. And almost nobody gives a shit!

You don't even need to go straight to: SELLAFIELD II: NOW WITH INFINITE STORAGE CAPACITY

(not that I'd complain)

Think smaller. Archaeologists. Ecologists. Fluid dynamicists trying to understand tides without an obvious ocean. Materials scientists sampling statues. Cosmologists asking where the light and energy come from. Biologists sequencing the birds. Intelligence agencies having a collective seizure. Philosophers becoming even less employable than usual.

There should be forty competing Nature papers and an armed perimeter around the portal within a few months.

Even if this isn't directly covered in the story itself, it's the kind of thing that deserves a passing reference in an epilogue.

And the whole conceit of a random police woman reading a diary (or something, I'm not going back to check) and swooping in to save the day? Bruh. To say the book has a plot takes all the generosity I have left to give. She can teleport into another dimension on a whim and this isn't given like... any investigation at all? And she doesn't just take an iPhone with her to upload hours of footage? Is everyone concussed? Does the author care? I don't know, but I'm evidently aggrieved.

Small world, my fiancée finished reading that the other day and loved it.

I'm not saying that's grounds to call off marriage, but I'll shake my head and sigh on your behalf. Women keep this kind of "literary fiction" propped up, though men seem to have given up on books so we can't complain too hard.

You've got a quadrillion pages about statues, and then the ramifications of an entire parallel world are buried under seagull shit without so much as a "huh".

I genuinely enjoyed Jonathan Strange.

These statements seem contradictory. It's been several years since I read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but I specifically remember having similar criticisms of that book. (If magicians are so powerful, why has magic been forgotten outside Britain, and why is this book set in a retreading of the Napoleonic Wars rather than in a magician-ruled alternate history?)

It's been a good dozen years since I've read the book. I'm sure the worldbuilding had holes big enough to drive a bus through, but at least there was effort put into something more interesting than "spoopy house with statues and birds and fish and tides." I suspect there's Backrooms fanfic that's higher quality than Piranesi, which is damning to hell and back with faint praise.

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