Fealty to the Wretched

The King’s Speech is lovely. Some of my colleagues have, disparagingly, called it middlebrow, but I guess that depends on where your particular brow happens to be located.

In a world more perfect than the one we live in, my favorite movie of the year, Sofia Coppola’s extraordinary, steel-rod-delicate Somewhere would be on this list. It’s not a movie about a rich, spoiled, “Why should we care about him?” movie star; it’s a story about a human being who’s lost his way. Apparently, that’s just not as interesting as watching Paris fold over on itself. (Stephanie Zacharek, “Stephanie Zacharek’s Oscar Picks: Middlebrow Schmiddlebrow,” Movieline, 25 Feb. 2011)

"King's Speech" makes not only aesthetes but rights-of-man folk nothing but self-indulgent, self-serving parasites. It makes the duty-to-country crowd just plain right, and those who aren't quite prepared to cowtow to what's ordained -- specifically, King George, in planning to marry out of love, and in cutting down ancient trees (being old doesn't make you grand, it just makes you old) just for a better view!, the worse than Fredos of the family. You wanted "Avatar's" Grace to do more chain-smoking; I'd have preferred George -- the one, we remember, who turned down the to-Bertie acceptable idea of having a kept mistress in preference to being allowed the company of a wife he actually loves -- be given more a chance to extrapolate on the flaws of be-be-be-be-Bertie's positively medieval sense of women, commoners, loyalty, and subjugation. I'm not sure what kind of brows I've got, but be sure they're both frowning away.

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Re: "In a world more perfect than the one we live in, my favorite movie of the year, Sofia Coppola’s extraordinary, steel-rod-delicate Somewhere would be on this list. It’s not a movie about a rich, spoiled, “Why should we care about him?” movie star; it’s a story about a human being who’s lost his way."

My particular complaint about Social Network isn't that it would have us care about someone rich and "spoiled" -- I am very interested in knowing about and caring more for Zuckerberg; he most certainly IS worthy -- it's what it suggests for those not either just moved along by genteel lineage or blessed with a genius to seize the zeitgeist of the time: people like Harvard-insufficient Erica Albright, blessed it would have appeared with some innate goodness and keen intuition, but without anything that would surely keep her in the game, whom you have a sense is given some chance to say something real, wounding, and sticking because its her last words before he finds himself a societal fixture and she is dispatched to irrevocable irrelevance. Seemed appropriate that Sorkin betray even this to a class of people he would see dispatched entire, as he further stomped her out (at the Golden Globes, I believe) in establishing Zuckerberg a true benefactor, not the asshole she had prophesized he was doomed to become. Way to go, Aaron! For your fealty, let us anoint thee also.

Link: Stephanie Zacharek’s Oscar Picks: Middlebrow Schmiddlebrow (Movieline)

Watch out, liberal extremities!

Watch out, liberal extremities! websmith says: “White people and an increasing number of minorities are tired of being called racists by the true racists and more appalled that this loony bleeding has spread from the heart to the brain." This is what many progressives are going to have to get used to hearing -- that THEY are the true racists! I've said this before but '60's liberalism goes down when enough people have decided that, in sum, it was never truly about what minorities, impoverished people wanted/needed, but instead what certain AFFLUENT WHITE PEOPLE wanted to believe those they ostensibly spoke for wanted/needed. They (progressives) will be made to seem, not the most caring, but the most negligent, most truly self-serving. Of course, most democrats in power will not be too afflicted by this, because they're ready to turn on the ’60s too. Why? Because, sad to say, they're getting in mood to want to see the weak and needy set-up as punishment-worthy a...

Conversation about Agulis at the Gene Wolfe Facebook Appreciation Club

James Pepe New Member · 20 hrs I’ve been rereading BotNS (this is my second read of it) and I just finished the part where Sev fights Agulis with the avern. I’m interested to hear what people think of the accusations Agilus levels agains Sevarian. Agilus says Sev has wronged him three times. Are we meant to take these accusations seriously? They're very strange. Is this just a last ditch attempt by Agilus to get out of being killed, or is Sev actually guilty of something, either legal, moral, or cultural. Are the powers that Agilus refers to simply that the avern didn’t kill Sev when it wounded him? Here the quote, “First by entrapment. You carried an heirloom worth a villa about the city without knowing what it was you had. As owner it was your duty to know, and your ignorance threatens to cost me my life tomorrow unless you free me tonight. Secondly, by refusing to entertain any offer to buy. In our commercial society, one may set...

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...

The Invisible Counterpoint

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