True Confessions: Instead of Watching the RNC or the DNC ...

Seriously! Instead of watching the GOP's and the Dems' dueling dumpster fires (*insert banjo music here*), I did just about anything else.  Sure, some people will complain that I'm not doing my civic duty or whatever by not watching ... to which I say, DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO WITH MY OWN EYES.

On one night (I forget which), I actually watched the following flick on Syfy instead. The thing is laugh-out-loud horrible, but hey, at least (a) it was entertaining and (b) I know for a fact that neither Sharktopus nor Whalewolf is going to be the next president.

   

Yup, that was the dude from Starship Troopers, another laughably awful flick. (The Robert A. Heinlein book on which it's based is much better. Trust me on this, will ya?)

 

Then I proceeded to binge-watch a bunch of shows on Netflix.  I'm thinking of giving the coveted Mad Minerva endorsement to this candidate or possibly this one.

An Author Considers How to Create Characters

Fascinating read.  Here's a bit of it:

"... your bad guys need to be great. They need to be so interesting that they potentially upstage your good guys. Hans Gruber versus John McClane. I’m rooting for McClane, but Hans steals every scene with his casual, clever villainy (best Christmas movie ever, by the way). "

If you don't think Die Hard is a Christmas movie, then I have nothing to say to you.

Summer Reading? 100 Novels to Consider

How many have you read?  Like all lists of this kind, it's plenty arbitrary and subjective.

I must confess that I thought Joyce's Ulysses was a bloated behemoth and a hot mess that isn't worth your time.  I can be an insufferable masochist, and even I could not force myself to get past the first half of this miserable monstrosity.  If you want Joyce, do yourself a favor and read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Wuthering Heights is a bit of Gothic nonsense with two of the worst characters I've met in literature.  Heathcliff and Catherine are both terrible people, and they pretty much deserve each other.  There, I said it.  If you must read a Bronte, read Jane Eyre.

Read more Jane Austen, please.

LOL: New Book Satirizes Overbearing NYC Parents

Mommie dearest.

Mamma Mia! 30 Best Fictional Parents

Atticus Finch et al!

Around the World in 196 Books

Never mind 80 days!

Summer Reading ... Or Not

The season's most unread books as listed by a math professor.

Tour de France 2014: Suggested Reading

Three books on the iconic sporting event that has this year claimed its first victim on the first day.

Meet Philani Dladla the Pavement Bookworm of Johannesburg

Read on!

Forgetting Tiananmen Square

It's been 25 years, and three new books consider how it has been suppressed.  If you're in a hurry, you can jot down the titles of the books and take a look later:

• The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, by Louisa Lim, OUP USA
• Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, by Rowena Xiaoqing He, Palgrave Macmillan
• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos, Bodley Head

Well, here we're not forgetting!  Please take a look at:

• NatGeo's story of two photographers (twin brothers!) who were there
• (still imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner) Liu Xiaobo's poem from his collection June 4 Elegies
• Another poem inspired by those events
• How a gangster became a savior: the story of the Triad who helped smuggle 100+ dissidents to safety after the massacre
• Footage of Tiananmen survivors telling their stories at the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee; one is Chai Ling, founder of All Girls Allowed, an organization combatting gendercide in China.
• The world's first Tiananmen museum that has opened in Hong Kong
• Demonstrations in Hong Kong and Taiwan

25 years ago I was only a child watching the news on TV, and from that year I remember two overwhelming feelings that were so intense that they probably shaped my adult take on foreign relations more than I realize: 1989 was defined by the joy of the fall of the Berlin Wall with all its jubilant crowds ... and the absolute, stomach-churning horror of Tiananmen Square.  God, what kind of monstrous, despicable, (what the hell, let's use the word and call a spade a spade) evil government sends its tanks and troops to mow down unarmed students?  And you wonder why I practically have an allergic reaction to people saying that Taiwan should be part of China. 

UPDATE: The Onion nails it again.

Friday Fun Videos: Thug Notes

This is some kind of brilliant.  The video series covers a gloriously wide array of famous literary works from Shakespeare to Orwell.  Here's the Thug Notes take on The Hobbit.  Don't be fooled by the fun of it all; the analyses are often very insightful indeed.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Kristen Stewart to Star in a Rom-Com Version of "1984"

I don't want to life on this planet anymore.

Magnificent Maps!

Cartography as lovely art.

Ave atque Vale: Tom Clancy (1947-2013)

He will be missed.  His books are always enjoyable.  The Hunt For Red October was the first I read, and I loved it.  I was just a schoolgirl.  While my peers were reading Sweet Valley High, I was reading military thrillers.  Not much has changed - only now they're reading Fifty Shades of Awful and I'm still reading military thrillers.  Heh.

Hail and farewell to Tom Clancy.  Shall we maybe as a tribute re-watch the 1990 movie of the Red October book?  The cast includes the incomparable Sean Connery, James Earl Jones, Sam Neill, and - surprisingly - Tim Curry in a serious role.  It's one of the last Cold War movies made, and it's a lot of fun.

"Bond Girls" or "Bond Women"?

Someone thinks that the term "Bond Girls" should be changed to "Bond Women."  He then argues that James Bond wants real relationships with women and not just casual disposable sex, an argument that prompts La Parisienne and me to ask incredulously, Have you even seen any James Bond movies?  

And I don't care if the guy is writing Bond books.  He's no Ian Fleming.

007 is practically his own genre, and genres have expectations and rules.  Leave James Bond alone!  Let him drink, smoke, brawl, and flirt as much as he pleases as long as he's also sparring with Moneypenny and Q and M and going after bad guys.

Gee, next we'll see some awful wussified version of Bond who is a pacifist vegan hipster or something!  No, thanks.  I leave you with classic vintage Bond: women want him and men want to be him.  It's movie magic.

Oh, James.

Life Imitates Science Fiction: 10 Examples

10 Sci-Fi Predictions That Became Science Fact by alltime10s

Government Literary Stimulus!

Read up, bookworms!  

Here's an accompanying bon mot: "It should be a point of consensus that any chief executive that sends the public flocking into the loving arms of Orwell and Rand is probably not doing the job correctly." Heh.

Gee, What Do You Think?

Here's the question being undertaken by two recent scholarly books:

Modern anthropological research may be settling the great debate between the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Was the state of nature a “war of every man against every man” in which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as Hobbes wrote? Or did “savages” live in utopian bliss, thanks to “the tranquility of their passions and their ignorance of vice,” as Rousseau believed?

BiblioFiles: Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Dream of the Celt"

It's the Peruvian author's first novel to appear in the US since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.  Here's more about it.  I previously posted about (and praised) the freedom-loving Mario Vargas Llosa here.  Here's his website. In fact, I'm going to pluck the Quote of the Day from an archived interview with him (the lines are from his 2000 novel "The Feast of the Goat"):

 "It must be nice. Your cup of coffee or glass of rum must taste better, the smoke of your cigar, a swim in the ocean on a hot day, the movie you see on Saturday, the merengue on the radio, everything must leave a more pleasurable sensation in your body and spirit when you had what Trujillo had taken away from Dominicans 31 years ago: free will."

Book Review: "The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza" by Eyal Weizman (2012)

The book (or at least its intent) sounds interesting, and this review even more so since it actually uses the delightful and grossly underappreciated word "defenestrated" a few paragraphs in. Anyway, here's a blurb:

For Weizman, instead of regulating or limiting violence, international humanitarian law (that is, the laws of war) actually legitimates certain manifestations of it. This is due to the utilitarian logic that pervades our thinking about violence caused by states and their agents, reasoning that sees “the sphere of morality as a set of calculations aimed to approximate the optimum proportion between common goods and necessary evils.” According to Weizman, deeming certain evils “necessary” provides the conceptual cover for further acts of cruelty. What begins as a “pragmatic compromise” between two terrible choices becomes an acceptable logic in less than exceptional circumstances. The logic of the exception is widened; the infliction of suffering is made civilized and inevitable. Weizman focuses largely on the concept of proportionality.