Harries, Martin. Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment. Stanford, 2000.
Knox, Ronald A. Essays in Satire. 1928. Kennikat, 1968.
Applies Higher Criticism to British literature–intended to amuse and instruct.
Strange.
But I just learned via this NYT Magazine profile of David Cronenberg that
After “The Dead Zone,” Cronenberg spent most of 1984 writing 12 drafts of a screenplay for “Total Recall,” only to have the producer reject them all; he found himself going broke. Reitman - who says he has “always thought that David should make a comedy” - brought him out to Beverly Hills and pitched him “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” “I almost had him,” Reitman says. “Then like a week later Mel Brooks calls him up and offers him ‘The Fly.”’
Where the equivalent of Critique of Cynical Reason sells 40,000 copies in its first few months. I don’t think Empire compares well, but what were its American sales figures? There were about 60 million people in West Germany when it was published, so that’d roughly 200,000 copies here now.
I’ve heard that the publishing industry hoards its exact sales figures like the sea. Does anyone know of a quick reference for checking this data?
Books read:
Contains many suggestive ideas, particularly about considering the digital/biological synthetico-imaginary of war. Makes somewhat puzzling and undocumented claim that SAS troops take Viagra to increase testosterone and thus aggression.
This was suggested to me by Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages (MIT, 2004), which I finished last week and hope to have something more to say about shortly, and contained several provocative anecdotes. The “L” and “T” diagrams went on for too long. Not surprised to learn that management consulting figured in De Bono’s future.
From William Noyes’ “Paranoia. A Study of the Evolution of Systematized Delusions of Grandeur.” The American Journal of Psychology 2.3 (May, 1889): 349-375.
A quote from his writings:
Water contains just the same subtle qualities today as it did when Christ changed the water into wine at the marriage of Cana. But we should be careful how we use it, for if you mix with it other than good thoughts and thankfulness, it will produce no wine in your jar, but, on the contrary, something very much resembling poison it its action. It is not what we eat and drink that hurts, but what we mix with it from our own internal infernal economy.
[A representative of Simon and Schuster sent me a review-copy of this book.]
Chuck Klosterman can write sentences, sometimes even paragraphs, worth preserving:
Another 30 percent of those 2,233 have been played less than five times, including one (The Best of Peter, Paul and Mary) I’ve never even listened to once–it’s still wrapped in cellophane (I store it next to a used copy of Husker Du’s Zen Arcade in the hope that they will slowly fuse into a Pixies’ B-side collection) (15).
Shane Carruth’s Primer, budgeted at $7,000, is the most intelligent time-travel film I’ve ever seen (including La Jetee.) Though I can’t claim to be a time travel film scholar like Chuck Tryon, I think he’s come to a similar conclusion. It remains vaguely obscene to compare it to The Matrix or Memento, as some of the understandably puzzled reviewers have done. Before getting into just what’s so good about it, consider the following thought-experiment: at what order of magnitude increase in budget could the film not have been made?
Malcolm Gladwell has an angry article in the New Yorker about the American health care system. Like many graduate students I knew, I didn’t have health insurance in graduate school because it wasn’t provided or subvented and thus couldn’t be afforded. After severely spraining my ankle playing football, I laid off the contact sports for the rest of my stay in Florida. If, like someone on my blogroll, I had broken a wrist or arm, I would not have had to ask the doctor to put an Ace bandage on it–as in Gladwell’s account–because I could have borrowed the money from a bank or the government. Anything much more serious than that, however, I’d rather not think about. I do have insurance now for the first time since my freshman year as an undergraduate, and I’m grateful.
From Videodrome and the library, here are some noted items:
Videodrome
Rented both Sin City and Primer. Am interested in renting The Machinist and Sea Lab 2021 Season Three. May write review of Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again for the Valve.
Library
Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. Full of ideas, this one.
Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice. Think about use of hieroglyph in contemporary design.
Neither del.icio.us nor del.irio.us have allowed me to register for their services. I don’t expect I’m missing something. I just never get to where I’m able to add the bookmarklet. None dare call it treason.
Via Grand Text Auto, I found Florian Cramer’s Word Made Flesh, a book that seems to touch upon several of my more obscure research interests at the moment. Perhaps I’ll have a chance to post more about it later.