T.H. Ponders

Bong Joon-ho adaptation when???

Without giving too much away, this gave me the same feelings I had when reading The Man Who Was Tuesday by G.K. Chesterton. Its critiques are sharp, its beats are  thrilling, and it has the conviction to keep following the premise to the bitter end. I loved every minute, and genuinely would love to see an adaptation. Initially I thought it might be more in the wheelhouse of Park Chan-wook, but by the end it's Bong-ho or bust.

As self help books go, this one is really solid. The advice is extremely actionable, concrete, and well defended. My main problem with most books in the self help/productivity space is that they are written by people whose whole productive output is writing about productivity. But Forte keeps the book grounded with examples of people doing a breadth of creative and knowledge work, which tethers this one to the ground. Really excited to operationalize the ideas here and apply what I wasn't doing before to my PKM system.

Read this with the explicit purpose of collecting background research for a project that relates to the 2019 movie. And while I really enjoyed reading it in the context of the research I'm doing, I'm not sure I can say as much for the actual reading experience. 

First, the art is great- it's a very unique style and I thought the pen work and frame composition was fantastic. Let's get that out of the way.

But the story itself was pretty thin. The characters would often say things that had the appearance of being deep, but there was never any follow through or exploration of those ideas. The characters were either one-dimensional (Ido, Vector) or inconsistent. (Alita, Yugo) And of course, because it's early 90's Japanese Manga, there's a healthy dose of misogyny, even with the “kick-ass” female lead, and at times because of it. (I found the nothing comments about Makaku's infatuation/love of Alita to be particularly repellent, and the attempt at giving Makaku a sympathetic backstory a miss.)

And I'm adding nothing new to the conversation by bringing up that Alita's love of Yugo is so unfounded as to face plant head first into the “She loves him because she's a girl, and girls are supposed to be in love.” This compounds with the revelation of Yugo's actual doings and intentions and Alita's willingness to forgo all her morals and life choices to stay with him.

I'm going to read the second volume to continue my research, but I'm not really looking forward to it.  

A lot of really interesting ideas here which other have noted, and a really interesting proposal in his idea for WSDE. Still, I think I want to read the book that ends up citing this booklet in it's chapter on WSDE's as one mode of anti-capitalist labor arrangement. 

I also want to add that some have noted that the references to the Occupy movement feel dated, but I feel like they really helped root this document in it's historical place, namely pre-Trump. And to that end, some of his explanations of conservative neo-liberal exploitation seem down right prophetic, but probably inevitable to those who, unlike 16 year old me, were actually paying attention at the time.

It's the rampant fatphobia and misogyny for me. There's a really interesting idea for a book here, but the execution is god awful. I got swept up in the entertaining bits, but even the slightest reflection on this books take on incarceration or justice will find it quite hollow.

It's an ok start.

Really only using Nazism as its main source of historical reflection, and cherry picking a few small stories from other parts of the world, means that he gets to largely ignore the role the US has played in preventing democracy and installing authoritarian dictatorships in the rest of the world. In doing so, he also never has to meaningfully grapple with contemporary attempts at socialism.

This combined with trying to stay slightly closer to center, only ever referring to Trump as “he who must not be named”, and it only being 120 pages leaves his arguments a little hollow. I might find more in a larger work, but I get the sense that a larger version of this would only more clearly reveal the parts where the answer is leftism unspoken.

Lewis, Lewis, my sweet summer child- is not the sanctity of space safe from your allegorical demands and treacherous parablism?

My advice to anyone who wants to read this book is to look up the “Concerning Language” sketch from the show A Bit of Fry and Laurie and every time Barthes gets extremely up his own ass, read it aloud in the rhythm and tone of Fry's performance in that sketch.

There are a lot on really interesting ideas in here, especially as relate to our extremely image saturated culture. But you have to understand that Barthes is going to spend so much time talking about how he “just doesn't get Photography” that you will want to throw your book across the room and exclaim “THEN WHY DID YOU WRITE A BOOK ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY.” That's normal. That's natural. If you can, push on. He'll get somewhere in the end.

An essential read. I've been making an Art History podcast for years now that falls perfectly in line with Berger's Marxist and feminist theories of art and I had never read it! One of those books that will forever change the way you see the world after reading it. I will be recommending this to everyone always sorry not sorry.

Read the 1959 Lysander Kemp translation. Hoping to get a copy of the new Weatherford translation for a reread. 

A beautifully written coming of age story. The beats are pretty familiar, but Jessie's perspective is so carefully considered at every moment. Jessie is more than a collection of the character tropes associated with the new to high school. The way Khalilieh considers her autism diagnosis and her Palestinian-Canadian background make Jessie feel like a real person, which is aided by how well Khalilieh has captured the actual voice of a teenager. Reminds me of the best parts of Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade.  Would highly recommend to anyone entering high school, or wanting to have a deeper empathy with the experience of what it's like to be a high schooler with an autism diagnosis.

(I rate on a 5 star scale and a 4/5 is “I really liked it” so don't take the missing star as any indication of lesser quality.)

This collection has a lot of gems and a lot to offer. I especially loved the poems in parts one and four, insects and the authors life respectively. The structure didn't always work for me, but if you want a reflective take on our relationship to the natural world, theres a lot to be gleaned from Frank's perspective.

Some of this poetry is beautiful. But extremely bummed when it got to the anti-semitic bits.