mali!

oh man shit is so interesting over there. apparently the country's got a north and a south. the north's a big desert about the size of france. recently there was an uprising in which this nomadic group called the tuaregs took over the north and claimed it for themselves. this development had something to do with the revolution in libya; gaddafi messed regularly with neighboring countries, using tuaregs as a proxy military of sorts. like right after, though, these islamic militants took over what the tuaregs took over from the tuaregs, so now they're in charge. they've been stoning fornicating couples and amputating hands, and now france has invaded to help out the official malian government. the official malian government, however, is a military dictatorship that's been abducting journalists and beating down civilian prime ministers and not doing a tremendous job of governing. the french had some initial success beating back the islamists but now they're back again. coverage has said like eight or nine hundred heavily armed fellows overran some semi formal boundary between the north and the south and now things are see-sawing. there are like 16 million people in mali all together. western countries are concerned about northern mali ending up like afghanistan, a training ground for terrorists. one does get the impression it's pretty sparsely populated up there, with "tricky desert terrain." but what about these tuaregs?

i've got some questions about all this. how many people in the north are keen on stoning fornicators, or a little sympathetic to it? how many are muslims, at least? what do they think of these "islamic militants?" are they home grown, charismatic fellows, or foreigners with guns who just swept in? whadda people think of the official malian government? does it have any religious aspect to it, or is it ecumenically oppressive? 27% of the men and 12% of the women are literate. is this a situation where everyone's starving and being an islamic militant is reliable work?  the tuaregs, despite being "routed," are still in the north. what to do they have to do with all this going forward? about 90,000 people have apparently already peaced out of the north. what's happening with them? what're the plans for dealing with people still there who want to leave?

i gotta talk to natalie about this. never am much interested in any place until it's a fat disaster.

thinking about pacifism: the goal's to have most everybody be sufficiently free from ignorance and want  because people like that don't go in for wars and oppression so much, at least not personally.

so imagine this agent of oppression in some police state. there's this guy with a big gun making you less free and life less good. he's got a gun because the state operates based on the assumption that the threat of violence is the only thing keeping the state together. it's LUNACY to attack this guy, ESPECIALLY with a gun or something like it, because it plays precisely into the expectations of the state, it's presumption that the state would violently fall apart without that guy. it legitimates, in the perverse logic of this lousy, hypothetical state, a violent response, because what other response could there possibly be.

And the agent of oppression with the big gun is a person too, with lots of people like him, and probably a significant, privileged minority of the population that's very invested in his monopoly on big guns. Using a gun against that person mobilizes all those people to get bigger guns, because it validates their fear. now they, absurdly, have gotta protect themselves!

also, economic sanctions are warfare. they're like a siege. they make people hungrier and more ignorant and so more liable to want to have a war and so become even hungrier and ignorant.

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.

drugstore cowboy

it's got the most romantic hero there ever was. he smokes and dopes and outsmarts the coppers and ultimately proves he's sensitive and sensible too. all is redeemed and drugstore belly flops into a very generous happy ending. a junkie keeps his promises! good god!

the best parts are when the hero's acting like a maniac, explaining the hexes and signs by which he lives his life, and, basically, being a drugged up lunatic. it's worst when it tries to show us what bob feels like when he's really high. very silly.

i didn't feel much watching it.

the bluest eye

The Bluest Eye is about racism and sexism and poverty, but as little people know it. There's nothing in this book about the grand structures of injustice that continue to define life in the United States. Instead, it's about how a ten year old black girl comes to pray for blue eyes. The Bluest Eye is about big evils trickled down into tender psyches.

Cholly Breedlove hated women when he should have hated white people, but that would have "consumed him," "burned him up." 

Claudia: "I destroyed white baby dolls."

etc etc. 

And so much other stuff too, so much brilliant understanding of people and relationships, of "ministratin,' " of those human whores one can't damn or idealize, who burp when their hearts ought to melt and swoon when they ought to be crass. Of complicatedly ugly people, like that woman with her cat, who're consigned by those grand structures of injustice to dreadful situations, but then staking out that territory and implicating themselves in the dreadfulness.

Notes on Twin Peaks:

I should have started this sooner. Twin Peaks is sometimes funny and sometimes very scary. It's kind of like a soap opera, I guess. The acting is often very "bad" and the plot preposterously elaborate. But the emotions in it aren't overwrought like a soap opera, it doesn't have that hysterical seriousness, if that makes sense. It's difficult to describe the way people are in Twin Peaks. They're caricatures, definitely, but also so creepy somehow, and not just the creepy ones. I guess it's just the plasticity of them, the uncanniness of seeing a kind of robot, a person with a very rigid essence no matter the circumstances. Everybody is so unflappably themselves, or whatever they are in that episode, that nothing really affects them.

I want to remember that bizarre scene when James and Donna and the doppelganger all sing together in Donna's living room and it's so, so absurd, so hilariously sweeeeeet.

I just watched another episode. Cooper and the sheriff saved Audrey. Mr. Smith is menacing Donna and doppelganger with a gardening utensil. Was there anything special in this episode? I think Bobby's haircut is very '90s. It was action packed and slap stick and intense at times. There's a small town judiciary where they recess with a beer. Donna makes an atrociously cheesy speech about a first kiss. It'd be a fairly corny melodrama if it weren't so many disparate things slapped together.

And another! deprive witnesses of schizophrenic medication to release their other personalities so as to interrogate them! I think I like Twin Peaks best as a musical. Leland is marvelous. I don't know, there really isn't much to all this. I don't really have an excuse for watching it, odd as it is. There's nothing much to take from it. Lynch as Coop's boss, with very bad hearing, is wonderful.