Currently Reading #50: "God Does Not Care"

This will maybe be the last Currently Reading because this has surely been the boringest SUPERBLOG!! feature ever. Cry if you must.

Currently Reading #49: Other Mother

Currently Reading #39

Currently Reading #34

Currently Reading #33

Currently Reading #27

Currently Reading #16: Soon

Currently Reading #7-8: Oops

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Zero points for guessing this time since I accidentally posted the covers. How stupid of me.

Currently Reading #5: The Book Behind the Film

Iz Diz Art?

A plentitude of quiz test goodies! To reveal if you are cultured and literate or a philistine.
Can you tell machine translation from Faulkner? (I got 75%.)
Can you tell true art from fake? (I got 92%!)

Batman by Dostoyevsky

Go read "Dostoyevsky Comics" by comics mimic R Sikoryak. It's an adaptation of Crime and Punishment, drawn in the style of '50s Batman artist Dick Sprang.

Hunter S Thompson Goes to Heaven

If there is a heaven, surely Hunter S Thompson is sitting on the right side of God right this minute. Or possibly he has headbutted the Lord and usurped His throne. Because Dr Thompson shot himself in the head yesterday.

The estimable doctor wrote a bunch of classic books (several of which were illustrated by the great Ralph Steadman, from whom I ripped off the portrait above) and was portrayed on the screen by Bill Murray in 1980 and Johnny Depp in 1998.

I haven't really kept up with his recent work, but I vividly remember his 1994 eulogy for Nixon (entitled "He Was a Crook"), written at a time when it seemed like most people were busy sweeping Nixon's true legacy under the rug:

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Superblog 2!! salutes you, Dr Thompson!

Koala Shrugs

När vår vän onkel Sammy öppnade sin can of worms måste han ha insett att en can of whoop-ass inte skulle dröja länge. Och här kommer den nu!

Sammy är kär i Ms Rand och skulle gifta sig med henne om hon inte var ett ruttnande lik. Själv har jag "bara" läst hennes 1100-sidiga roman Atlas Shrugged och en del onlinetjafs. Alltså ska detta inlägg mest ägnas åt att dissa just den boken, snarare än all hennes blajiga filosofi. Om jag snubblar över fler böcker av Rand kanske jag läser dem, eller kanske inte. Hon skriver bitvis ganska bra (kärnfull dialog, inledningsvis intressanta konflikter) men läsningen blir i längden tröttsam. Det är bland annat för att hon berättar en historia som inte går att ta på allvar, men insisterar på att den SKA tas på blodigt allvar. Samtliga karaktärer i boken är stereotyper, men hon verkar själv tro att de är verkliga människor. Som hyfsat intelligent läsare finner man sig ständigt mentalt argumentera emot Rands Hjältars många befängda påståenden. Rands Skurkar är givetvis oförmögna att göra det. Här är en faktisk passage ur boken (s 967, min översättning):

Den attraktive, briljante John Galt närmade sig långsamt den ynkligt veke Dr Looter, som kissade på sig medan han försökte gömma sig bakom sitt skrivbord.
"Min penis är en snöboll. A är A!" sa John Galt. "Du kan inte säga emot, för det är Sanningen!"
"Jag... jag kan inte argumentera emot... för A ÄR ju A... men... det KÄNNS som att din penis inte borde vara en snöboll."
John Galt var obönhörlig. "Känslor är för suckahz! Använd ditt förnuft! Ge inga pengar till sjuka och fattiga och handikappade för de bränner dem bara på knark och horor! A är A!"
"NEEEEEJ!!" skrek den ynklige veklingen medan han kastade sig ut genom ett fönster på ett inkompetent vis. "Du har rätt!!! Och jag orkar inte leva längre i en värld där A är AAAAAAAA!!!!"
"Jag vinner. Pengar är bra. Kyss mig, Dagny!"

Äsch, jag kan inte sitta här hela dan och göra narr av objektivisters älsklingslitteratur. Jag lämnar över ordet till Whittaker Chambers, som sågade boken i National Review redan julen 1957 (även här):

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive story-telling. And, in fact, the somewhat ferro-concrete fairy tale the author pours here is, basically, the old one known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

Men vaffan! Det där har jag ju redan sagt!

Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing.

Just det. Rand är en låtsas-författare. Och hon är en jobbig bitch oxo (lite Maggie Thatcher):

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind, which finds this tone natural to it, shares other characteristics of its type.
1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it.
2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation.
Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked.

Och lite om filosofin bakom:

The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. No doubt, Miss Rand has brooded upon that little rub. Hence, in part, I presume, her insistence on "man as a heroic being" "with productive achievement as his noblest activity." For, if Man's "heroism" (some will prefer to say: "human dignity") no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche's anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity. So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held "heroic" in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author's economics and the politics that must
arise from them.

Så det är därför Randy Sammy går runt och kallar sig hjälte - för att inte verka beastly! Själv kallar jag mig hjälte för att jag använder mina mystiska krafter för att bekämpa brott. Jag lämnar nu mitt visitkort och rider iväg i skymningen. Detta har varit en can of whoop-ass sponsrad av Superblog!!