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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3656 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Zurayk's The Meaning of the Disaster, which established the term Nakba (ie. the disaster) related to the Palestinians. I've seen it mentioned several times in articles by pro-Israel writers, typically to point out that the "disaster" was that Arab countries failed in their war against Israel, and not just the unprovoked displacement of the Palestinians. I wondered how the source text itself would read.

It is refreshing to read a foreign opinion on the topic, however dated. One does wonder if his take on international Jewry, which reads a lot like conspiracy theories of the West, was an indigenous one born from dealing with the West from the outside, or an imported one.

Also picking up Herzl's The Jewish State.

I'm reading Camille DeAngelis's Bones and All, having enjoyed Luca Guadagnino's film adaptation far more than I expected to, to the point that it's my favourite film released in 2022 aside from Tár. (The film of Bones and All incidentally represents a massive step-up in quality from Guadagnino's previous collaboration with Timothée Chalamet Call Me by Your Name, about which I still cannot understand the hype.)

I'm about 80 pages in and it is a gut-wrenching read. DeAngelis is doing an incredible job of creating a character who is both completely fantastical and truly monstrous (a sixteen-year-old girl with an uncontrollable urge to kill and eat young boys her age) and making her surprisingly plausible and achingly sympathetic. The descriptions of Maren's murders are nightmarish and nauseating, and yet in spite of that, all I want to do is give her a hug and tell her everything's going to be okay. I thought this might be a case in which a director takes a silly pulp novel and adapts it into something which transcends its roots (e.g. Hitchcock), but so far it seems like the film producers had some very strong source material to work with.

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