Hmmmm

Fear and Loathing still well acted and directed, but lacking much real point. It's an interesting artefact of its time, but without knowing about the historical context it just seems like meaningless discordance.

AllOfMp3.com seems to have lost the various methods I used to use to pay. Which sucks, to put it mildly. On the other hand, I've entirely filled my iPod, so it's not urgent this week.

And finally

On my way to bed, courtesy of recycled_sales, have the PG version of 300:

Public Stardust Announcement

First trailer is over here. (Direct Quicktime link here).

Could go either way - the supporting cast look great, the special effects look great, but the main character seems a tad limp. Mind you, he starts out that way in the book too, so maybe i'll be pleasantly surprised. Not out until October either.

The Stainless Steel Fish

I recently finished re-reading John Varley's Steel Beach, a book I am remarkably fond of. It had never clicked exactly why I felt the strange attachment to the book until the most recent re-read, as I hadn't actually been paying much attention to the themes of the book before, but on a closer look it's clear that it shares one of my favourite topics of thought:
How does one live a life without external meaning or drives?
Which is a theme shared by a one of my other favourite books, Brave New World, and constantly lurking in the background of Iain Banks' Culture novels (most explicitly in Look to Windward), as well as being something that's preoccupied me since 1995-ish.

The book doesn't focus on this explicitly - indeed, when reading various reviews and comments online it's clear that many people have skimmed over this aspect of the book entirely, focussing instead on the skilled world-building and plot. Those readers, however, seem to find the ending lacks a certain something, because while the plot concludes it does so largely off camera, as we zoom in entirely to the personal experiences of the main character (Hildy Johnson - reporter, school-teacher and card-shark), leaving the resolution to be hand-waved away. To me this didn't matter at all. The world-building, though entertaining in and of itself, was there to walk me through a place and time where people's needs are provided, if not free, then cheaply enough that there no challenges that weren't self-made. We pass through sex, violence and religion, all turned into garish entertainments for the masses and marketed back to them in the most compulsive ways. We see what this does to the uneducated (who seem largely happy - natural now that _everything_ is their opiate) and what it does to people who examine their life (eventually, it seems, makes it _not_ worth living, as they run out of things to distract them that they haven't seen a thousand times before).

And the book doesn't have any answers. This is it's most explicit statement - the main character goes through every available option to find an external source of meaning, something to lift them out of their ennui and give them direction, and she finds that she's too smart to be taken in by any of it. In the end she finds her own answer - but it's internal, not external, and she's darned if she can explain to other people why this particular answer works for her, or guarantee that it will for other people.

All of which makes the book sound altogether bleaker than it is, and it does have an undercurrent of wry humour, from the opening line ("In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.) to the naming of characters and the sheer ludicrousness of some aspects of the future society. It's entertaining and funny and does a fantastic pastiche of bits of Heinlein without taking it too seriously (it's clear that Varley is fond of Heinlein's rational anarchism but considers it unlikely to work well for most people). Highly recommended on multiple levels.

Thou shalt not

Some rules to live by in this video:

Cheers to wordofblake for that one.

DnD, Season 1, Episode 2

Many years ago, when I was active on usenet, I encountered an argument over whether Watchmen or Gravity's Rainbow was the better book. I attempted to intervene and soothe the clearly hurt feelings on both sides, but this was to no avail and I seem to recall that a fully blown (albeit brief) flamewar erupted.

The point being that whether a book is any good or not depends fully on whether the reader is in the right frame of mind for it at the time they encounter it. If you share my prediliction for thoughts on absolutes, meaning, life and general philosophising then you'll probably enjoy the works which strike a chord with me on those topics (Signal to Noise, Brave New World, Fight Club, Brazil, and so forth). If, on the other hand, you feel entirely differently then you'll be off enjoying entirely different works. And your choice will be entirely valid _for you_ - because a book is only worthwhile insofar as it reaches into its readers and brings something out of them, and as our insides are altogether variable it seems only reasonable that the books, music, films, and other causes of emotion and thought within us would also be highly varied.

All of which is by way of thoughts incited by jerrykaufman's comment on my recent post here.

All dressed up and somewhere to go.

Off to club noir in 15 minutes. Frilly shirt courtesy of Electric Caberet and their marvellous shop assistant who dresses like captain Jack and called me matey.

Sat 24/03/2007 21:22 24032007261