Robert E. Howard was, I am coming to understand, a master of his craft.
What is the difference between a real savage and a noble savage? Let us look into the iron shadows of the moonlight for an answer.
This story is well suited to the question, for it just so happens to have a lovely, half-clad and large-eyed brunette in distress; a highly civilized oriental aristocrat bent on her dishonor; a rough and semi-civilized pirate chief who hates Conan with hot passion (and wants him hanged on a hook); eldritch monuments from a forgotten civilization, haunted perhaps with the ghosts of an accursed peoples; and an apelike monstrosity equally likely to originate from the darkness of prehistory as the darkness of the netherworld.
In other words, we have one antagonist from each season of the rise and fall of cultures from primitive to civilized to decadent to dark ages and back to prehistory again.
As they say, Read the Whole Thing. And I have further contrasts of Conan with more modern fiction here, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Unnamed Journal has been kicking a long for a few years now, and I’m mighty glad of it. As a creative outlet, as a process of marketing and stamping your corner of the internet, it has been invaluable. Not only did draft chapters of Void and Last Tomorrow first appear on UJ, but it’s given me a platform to create The Meditations of Caius Caligulia, a project I never thought I’d actually get off the ground, and has caused me to slowly build up my own homebrew space opera universe, short story by short story.
And that past tense doesn’t mean it’s going anywhere. Far From it.
If anything, UJ, currently a quarterly literary journal, is going to be expanding into other realms: a podcast, possibly a larger publishing arm. These things are in the future, and the details have yet to be hashed out. But UJ has a acheived a stable output, and we can only build from here.
All of Cal Newport’s books could be titled, “How to Be an Effective Person.” Or, maybe, “How to Be an Effective Person In This Technological Epoch.” Digital Minimalism is, like Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, about why you should quit or drastically limit the digital distractions that have proliferated in […]
via Digital Minimalism — Cal Newport — The Story’s Story
∞I have long been of the opinion that what passes for post-modern “philosophy” is not a philosophy so much as rhetorical exercise, or in my phrase, “word games”. Consider the act of “deconstructing” something: of tacking a thing to the culture that produced it, to the assumptions of that culture, to the history of those assumptions, etc.
What you haven’t done in any of that is make any kind of statement towards the Truth or value of the thing deconstructed. And if you haven’t done that, then what does the deconstruction of it matter?
The act of skepticism assumes the existence of truth, because skepticism is the suspicion of falsehood, and falsehood cannot exist without truth. Philosophy is the rational pursuit of truth, and one cannot pursue what does not exist. To say “This is not truth,” is to say “That is truth.”
But, as this article at Quillette by Galen Watts explains, the po-mos refuse to admit this.
The scholar begins by deconstructing existing discourses, as if from a position of mere skepticism. However, he is simultaneously making the case that these are corrupt or oppressive in some sense, thereby endorsing some (implicit) normative standard. But you can’t have it both ways. Either you endorse a position and critique others from there, or you commit fully to your epistemic skepticism.
This is why the only philosophy available to those who take post-modernism seriously is nihilism, the rejection of all values. But nihilism is not a philosophy, it is the denial of a philosophy. Thus, I state that there is no such thing as post-modern philosophy, only the post-modern critique of philosophy. And it’s not a particularly useful critique. To tell me that I absorb values from the culture around me, and the traditions of that culture, sounds like a damning verdict, but it isn’t. Because what has not been established is why I should not absorb those values, or why I should not absorb them that way. To do that requires the discussion of alternatives.
A person who attacks your values without stating his own is dishonest. If he has alternative values, he should state them, as they undergird his arguments against yours. If he has no values, then he has no basis for attacking any values at all.
Therefore much of what we see being advanced under the banner of “postmodernism” is simply hypocrisy in disguise.
We see this in my discussion of Ivan Karamazov, as referenced by Camus:
Suffering will continue regardless of how sullenly you refuse to countenance it. What child does Ivan save from suffering? If none, then we must conclude the the intellectual solidarity with the suffering is a sham, or at any rate, a means to an end. And the end is power, moral power as a precursor to political power, the power over life and death.
The Quillette article is worth reading in full.
White Knitters Bad. (h/t The Other McCain)
Really, that’s the only summation that fits. Here’s the story:
And why?
Because she’s white. That’s the only thing that matters. Getting innocuously excited about a trip to India is horrid Othering and Erasing and Literally The Worst, if you’re white. The rest is frills and dressing.
Evidence of my assertion?
Instagram notes scorned Templer’s “peak whiteness,” and reminded her that “the world doesn’t owe you a patient explanation and education” and that as a “coloniser” she ought to “stay in [her] lane.
Consider that. “Peak Whiteness”. In this construction, “whiteness” is an insult. The racial identity of those born of European ancestry is an insult. Consider what that means.
Another knitter spoke up in defense of the first, and was Goody-Proctored post-haste, as is tradition.
To one of Heppell’s tweets, Dave Fraser (@discodave75) replied: “I‘d love to say I watched the whole video to make an informed decision about her, but I was blinded by her (literally) gleaming white face.”
There will come a day when this all ends. But I have my doubts that it will end with racial harmony and inclusivity. A perusal of human nature would seem to suggest otherwise.
People really seem to like Queen. I mean, I can dig one or two Queen songs, but…
I don’t get it. That’s okay, though.
Let’s proceed to the actual scorecard. I’m counting it a win if either my Probable or Sleeper Predictions won. Does that give me an unfair double-shot of being right, and smug about it? Yes. It also gives me two chances to be wrong. So I think it’s fair. This is my scorecard. Go do your own predictions.
Best Picture:
What I Predicted: The Favourite, with Black Panter as a Sleeper.
What Won: Green Book. Race stuff still trumps gender stuff.
Best Director:
What I Predicted: Spike Lee collecting Dues, with Yorgos Lanthimos as a Sleeper
Who Won: Alfonso Cuaron, for Roma. Foreign Language films are becoming safer than I realized.
Best Actress:
What I Predicted: Yalitza Aparicio, with Olivia Colman as a Sleeper
Who Won: Olivia Colman
Best Actor:
What I Predicted: Rami Malek, with Christian Bale as a Sleeper
Who Won: Rami Malek.
Best Supporting Actress:
What I Predicted: Rachel Weisz, with Regina King as a Sleeper
Who Won: Regina King
Best Supporting Actor:
What I Predicted: Mahershala Ali, with Richard E. Grant as a Sleeper
Who Won: Mahershala Ali
Best Animated Feature:
What I Predicted: Mirai, with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as a Sleeper
What Won: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. More important than this, however is my prediction, almost a year-old now, that Wes Anderson will not win an Oscar. The Academy does not love you, Wes. It never will. Your stuff is too cute for them.
Best Adapted Screenplay:
What I Predicted: If Beale Street Could Talk, with A Star is Born as a Sleeper
What Won: BlacKKlansman. They gave Spike Lee his Lifetime Achievement/Paid Your Dues award with a Screenplay Oscar? That’s cold. But it did give us our Political Grandstanding of the night, so that’s something.
Best Original Screenplay:
What I Predicted: Vice, with Greek Book as a Sleeper
What Won: Green Book. I really did not expect them to shut Vice out, but they did.
The Technical/Craft/Unimportant Awards did not provoke strong predictions from me, so I’ll just list my shots and whether they were right.
Cinematography: The Favourite Roma
Documentary Feature: RBG Free Solo
Documentary Short: Period. End of Sentence.
Live Action Short: Detainment Skin
Foreign Language Film: Roma
Film Editing: BlacKkKlansman Bohemian Rhapsody
Sound Editing: A Quiet Place Bohemian Rhapsody
Sound Mixing : Bohemian Rhapsody
Production Design: Black Panther
Original Score: Mary Poppins Returns Black Panther
Original Song: “All the Stars” “Shallow”
Makeup and Hair: Vice
Costume Design: The Favourite Black Panther
Visual Effects: First Man
Correct predictions – 12
Incorrect predictions – 12
Conclusion: I am awesome at calling shots of an awards show I care nothing about, celebrating a collection of films I hardly saw any of.
