2016 — 3 July: Sunday
The dull grey clouds visible on the northern side of the house suggest yet more rain.1 My books warehouse now seems waterproof. And the dining table down here is once again becoming covered with culled books, of which this 1993 one by Professor Barbara Creed (cinema studies, at the University of Melbourne) was the answer to yesterday's teaser:
Creed's arguments (the book — essentially her doctoral research — is now in its sixth edition) may well "disrupt Freudian and Lacanian theories of sexual difference as well as existing theories of spectatorship and fetishism in relation to the male and female gaze in the cinema". Who am I to say? However, one quick skim over 20 years ago through her mildly amusing survey of horror2 films — viewing each in turn through what I have long regarded as Freud's badly-warped eyes — is an elegant sufficiency, thanks. The book meets Criterion #1. Away!
Now I need to gaze on some breakfast.
Take this opinion...
... on the Iraq war, make one tiny change, and it precisely fits last week's EU referendum:
The thing I found really shocking when I was researching this was the absence of a plan and a complete failure to make any kind of preparation for the postwar aftermath or even consider what the aftermath might be...
Almost too many...
... riches to choose between in "Aeon" magazine essays:
- Fantasy v realism as an aid to fixing language deficits. Yet another psychological "fact" that doesn't withstand experimental scrutiny
- Language and cognition teased apart by Frans de Waal
- War, on drugs suggesting the chemically altered states necessary for warfare
- Mass shootings and toxic masculinity
What a strange species we are.
After watching...
... an amusing 8-minute deconstruction of "14 hidden jokes and cryptic references" (not all of which I wholeheartedly agree with!) regarding The Dude, I then spent some time browsing its creator's website. (Link.)
Enveloped...
... as I have been in a cloud of post-Brexit angst, I took my eye off my little NUC for the past week or more. It's now playing me some soothing MP3s, but not before I'd first plonked a whole slew of security, and other, updates on to it. Swapping news with a neighbour I find she, too, feels the same mild but pervasive uneasiness. It's the naked ambition and unprincipled — far beyond satire — behaviour that is so sickening.
Is it funny to learn that NZ has offered to lend us their team of experienced EU negotiators? See above re "aftermath".
Here's another...
... little rancid dollop of "sunshine" that is now on its way out of Technology Towers. Even though I only bought it out of morbid curiosity ("Know thine enemy", perhaps?) the £2 I forked out to retrieve it from a remaindered pile in February 2006 was money not well spent:
The issues of "Spectator" magazine3 that Iris has been passing along to me are bad enough, but it took only very little of Ms Coulter and her vile bile to prove that trying to be open-minded can be a lost cause. I still have no idea quite how our cousins across the Pond pulled off the trick of taking the "liberal" idea and remaking it into quite such a lazy term of abuse. It reminds me of that wonderful old advice:
A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over.