John Holbo

Following up Henry’s post, my Dark Knight Rises take is this. The Nolan brothers are determined to make some kind of serious, dark, brooding, non-fascistic moral sense of Batman, and that’s just flat-out impossible. Can’t tell it that way without the basic story logic boxing you into a place you don’t want to be (as Henry says, there’s too much baked in the cake). If what the world needs is masked vigilantes behaving in this crazy way, then fascism needs a serious look-in as a political philosophy. But what we should really conclude is not that the moral sense of the film is fascist – or even aristocratic. Rather, we should conclude that the film makes no moral sense whatsoever. It conveys no moral message. It’s morally illegible. Lots of explosions and fighting. That’s it. [click to continue…]

I’m on holiday, so here’s some. ‘Language’ in the sense of ‘YouTube video of old Beyond The Fringe sketch’, that is. “There’s too much Tuesday in my beetroot salad.” How has this failed to become a classic example, or at least a ‘classic example’? Why do people think it’s appropriate to go on chomping on Chomsky’s colorless greens when you have an alternative like that? Back to the roughage grounds! “I don’t think you’re saying, I don’t think you’re saying – I don’t say you’re thinking.” Now just ‘go on in the same way,’ as they say.

Link.

Is Alan Bennett supposed to be Austin? Whose mannerisms are being spoofed?

Back around Christmas I had a come-to-Jesus moment, ebooks-wise. I posted some iPad optimized ebooks of Dickens and Spenser, trying to make the illustrations look good. I joked that PDF was the future! Then Santa gave me an iPhone for X-Mas and I discovered that I actually like reading books on a phone, which seemed a priori impossible before that.

So, when I volunteered to make our Red Plenty PDF ebook – here it is – I also decided to try to make my first Mobi format ebook (5 megs) (that’s what you need for your Kindle); and an EPUB version (1 meg). No, I don’t know why the Kindle version is so much bigger, thanks for asking. Both versions have some humorous bugs I’ve not yet worked out, and I gotta catch a plane. So I’m just going to post them and let other people kick the tires.

WARNING: We have a reliable report that the EPUB version crashes Nooks. Very sorry about that. I really need to get back on this, and clean out the bugs. Haven’t had time.

Here’s the cover:

Because not every post should be about libertarianism! [click to continue…]

This post is mostly by way of trying to make Bertram, Robins and Gourvitch’s post sticky, as it deserves to stay at the top for a while. If you haven’t read their post yet, do so. If you are already reasonably conversant with their points, proceed under the fold, if you like, for what is really just a Hayek-inflected restatement and reinforcement of some of their main points. (Also, it’s effectively a late, long footnote to the Red Plenty seminar): [click to continue…]

Amazon is having a $2.99 MP3 album sale [SALE’S OVER] that includes a surprisingly large number of really good selections, should your collection lack them (and if you are an old-fashioned fogey, like me, who still pays for music.) Get your Dark Side of the Moon, or Speaking In Tongues, or Heroes, thereby closing that gap in the list. May I recommend: [click to continue…]

Like Kevin Drum, I haven’t really been following this Fast and Furious thingy. (I didn’t like the movies either.) And, like Drum, I’m amazed at the Forbes CNN Fortune piece he links to. If this is right, everything everyone has been saying about the case is wrong. Unlike Drum, I say it’s possible to extract the nub, like so: [click to continue…]

Another follow-up to the last two posts about body images and beauty ideals. [click to continue…]

The Awl has an interesting piece about papercraft in prison. Obviously that’s the sort of thing boingboing would link to. Next week: prisoner-modded ‘steampunk’ shanks, stylized prison-breaks as YouTube responses to OK Go videos, and associated ‘yardsourced’ projects (Clinkstarter), with all the (brass) trimmings: ‘Help me fulfill my dream of building a giant dirigible in solitary confinement!’ ‘Help me turn my cell toilet into a working trebuchet!’ On a more serious note, the article neglects one of the most notorious episodes in prison papercraft history, from Action Comics #267: [click to continue…]

A follow-up post, I suppose. This sequel to the original 40-worst Liefeld drawings post is a wonder and a public service. But here’s the thing: like all good people, I love Jack Kirby and loath Rob Liefeld. But most of the criticisms of Liefeld – namely, it’s so, so anatomically wrong! – could be applied to Kirby. Why do all his characters look like someone poured a pot of ink down their foreheads? What are those things on the women’s cheeks that might be cheekbones but aren’t? But in the one case I feel affection and admiration, in the other, contempt and revulsion. [click to continue…]

Zoe picked Comic Sans for her school report on tigers. I explained to her that many people would take issue with the selection of this font for body text in a long document, particularly one of an academic nature. Even as display type it is suspect. I explained about Microsoft Bob and that whole sad history. That said, it’s the best font in the world for someone like her, so she shouldn’t worry about it. Used in moderation.

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, a couple months back, I found this gallery of classic images of Venus – downsized courtesy of Anna Utopia Giordano and Photoshop. (The gallery was down for a while, so I didn’t post about it at the time. But now I see it’s up again.) Coates also linked to this post by Bob Duggan, responding to the Photoshopped images. I disagree with almost everything Duggan says. The grotesque results do not in any way shape or form show that there is anything grotesque about the thin, modern beauty standards the artist means to critique (I assume this is the intent.) It’s like trying to prove that moustaches are funny by drawing moustaches on famous paintings. You could also perform the exercise in reverse. Take some reasonably iconic superthin female image and give it the Titian treatment – or the full Rubens – and I’m sure the results would be incongruous and funny. It wouldn’t prove hips and stomachs are themselves inherently hilarious.

Which is not to deny that the superthin standard is grotesque, in a technical sense: it’s extreme and unrealistic to the point of caricature. Duh. But it seems to me that what is objectionable here, if anything, is not the extremity but the standardization. It’s also quite puzzling. Why is beauty culture (per the specs of the fashion industry) such a stable, monolithic body-type monoculture? Feel free to pipe up about how you like ’em with more meat on the bone, so you must be a feminist! (So do I!) But that’s not really what I’m asking. People – men and women – in fact find a wide variety of female body-types attractive. Fashion is all about variety and the new. It seems natural enough to me that the fashion world should gravitate to extremes, and that power-law-type distributions should tend to apply. But fashion is way more than 80-20 in favor of a very particular flavor of thinness. (Or am I wrong?) And thin has been in for a long time. Setting aside whether/to what degree this is to be condemned and/or something done about it, why is it this way? In your expert opinion.

Why don’t we get more change and multi-polarity in ‘ideal’ body-types from the fashion world?

Is it just that fashion designers like to draw nine-heads tall stick figures. And it all flows from that?

I’m sympathetic to a number of points made here (via Andrew Sullivan). I have been trying to institute anti-distraction mechanisms in my own life. Forced offline time. I have little doubt pretty much everyone ought to, these days. At the same time, I’m a big believer in effective multitasking. My philosophy is: peripatetic philosophy is healthy. [click to continue…]

Apparently some readers have been confused about Red Plenty, thinking it is non-fiction. I had the opposite problem, or possibly it wasn’t one. I knew it was fiction but I had the wrong idea about what kind. This error persisted, uncorrected. I actively avoided all reviews or summaries. I solicited no assistance, along the way, from “the panther-footed Mr. Google,” as he is described in Spufford’s “Acknowledgement” section. As a result, I didn’t know what the hell was going on – at all – until the end. Because the one thing I thought I knew about the book – no, I don’t know where I mis-acquired this notion – was that it is a fictional alternative history of how Red Plenty, the fairytale dream, came true.

WARNING: Contains plotspoilers. (It turns out the Soviet Union lost the Cold War!) [click to continue…]