the plague

Alright. I'm going to write something about this book. it's about a city in northern africa with a couple hundred thousand people, a very "modern" city called oran, which is to say horrifically industrious and soulless. camus tells us its an ugly place where people work all week until saturday and sunday when they might hang out or do some loving or something like that. it sits on a plateau by the sea, but facing away from it. it's too hot in the winter, too muddy in the spring, too rainy in the fall. it's nice in the winter.

there are about 6 characters in this book, all except one of which are pretty heroic in their way. part of me thinks camus's closing remarks about the story confirming that people are more good than bad are pretty bogus, and that he's made up an idealized nightmare to confirm his belief. i mean, everybody;s pretty great. rieux is is almost sickeningly perfect. rambert was self centered for a little while but then he turns out to be pretty perfect too. also so beautifully human in that scene when he thinks hes got plague and runs to a square with a patch of sky and screams his wife's name. wonderful. grand is at least a little eccentric and pathetic but he's a small hero too. tarrou you think is gonna be some charming miscreant, with his offkilter perspective on the town, but then we learn about his soaring goodness, fleeing from his dad's red robes, but he's the most perfect of all; at least he's thought about it the most. his speech towards the end about how we've all got plague breath and have to take special care to not breathe carelessly is really a pretty good speech. and don't kill anybody, for god's sake! don't kill people! tarrou's marvelous.

i guess one character who's really got it wrong is paneloux, which is unsurprising because he's the most rousing and fun to listen to. camus did a very funnyt hing making paneloux's raging sermon so gorgeous amidst a very gray book; it's a funny argument for why one might be religious. his spectacular metaphors about the plague as god's flail  are oddly comforting next to what camus offers: a punctilious civil servant.

but i liked this book! i mean, i liked parts of it A LOT. i loved the big picture of a stricken town, of what all that death inside those closed gates does to people. it does a lot to people. it flattens them out, takes from them past and future, and exhausts them, above all. it's a super neat idea musing on what a lot of WORK dead people require. DEAD WEIGHT! i mean, it's really striking thinking of how a dead body is more than a single living body can deal with. i'm extracting the most vulgar, base stuff from this book, when it's got all this rhapsodic stuff. i'm doing a rotten job here. but back to the rottenness: it makes one think about how dealing with the dead, burying them, or whatever, really is this baseline of civilization, of human dignity, and how HARD it is to make that happen! it's terrifically difficult to think you're living for something if you know your corpse'll get stepped on in the street. AH! the funerals! and the descriptions of the layers of sizzling quicklime! and the plague cloud above the town! in some ways it really ends up being about all these humans as rotten biomass, as a physical quantity drowning the town! at least, that's the part i liked best.

that;s enough, i think. k should write something like this too.

the hobbit

pretty much the only idea this pompous, fat action movie has in its head that bilbo ought not kill people with his new sword for no good reason. "heroism's knowing when to not use it, not poking everyone you see with it," or something like that. this strikes me as fantastically odd in a movie where life is so cheap. i mean, it's always cheap for the enemy in action movies, but the not-human enemies of middle earth give special license to massacre conscious beings the way i eat chocolate covered raisins and have it be totally chill.

this comes naturally from the whole fantasy of the good guys, that there are like, 10 of them, and that they can each kill about a million evil people, kind of the way conquistadors massacred the locals when they arrived in central america. (i think cortes LITERALLY had like 60 guys with him and managed to subjugate a solid chunk of mexico). this willingness to have creatures with consciousness die in such stupefying quantity is super fucked up, and super central to propagating the myth of perfect evil. the creatures are helpfully hideous and slobbering so their lives literally mean nothing.

anyway, what really made me think of this was the part when bilbo, clearly thinking back to this whole "poke only the nameless numberless hordes" shtick, does not kill golem, but merely kicks him in the head jumping over him and so running away with the only thing that gave its life meaning. now, i think golem is the strongest argument for euthanasia in the history of the world. but this preposterous restraint coming on the end of the most epic, meaningless slaughter of so many people (but goblins, so it's chill) was fucking mind boggling.

alright, that's enough. i'm the guy who watches lord of the rings and gets outraged on behalf of the orcs.

i think i did super, super well on the GREs unless i straight up saw a mirage of desire before i got up from that computer, which is super possible, and the idea of which makes me feel a little sick, but i think it'll be okay. everything's alright. i wish k was here because everything is better with her and pretty hollow and shitty and just not all that important to me without her.