Tom
Giving this a 2.5 because it feels like data and I think that would annoy the author. It started so strong. For the first time since college (long ago) I had to remind myself highlighting everything is the same as highlighting nothing. And then Chapter 2 happened. We went from him trashing capitalism’s effects on humans to him complaining after the French Revolution the fashion got boring. Because they started painting pictures of poor people, dude. There is a whole thing about how tattoos nowadays are pornographic, but they were cool in the Nineteenth Century when rich people got them to indicate membership in a group. If you have a tattoo, this guy doesn’t like you on spec.
Chapters 3 and most of 4 brought it back until, well until the train completely derailed and I kept reading just to argue with him in the margins and amuse myself. PORNOGRAPHICALLY. Like highlighting, you can overuse that word when you apply it to everything. I kept telling myself things were getting lost in translation and I assume the author kept describing things as porn for the strength of the word, but when you seem to completely squicked out about other human beings, I’m not sold. This is a gooner explaining seduction and a second level hobbit paladin explaining the experience of combat.
I’m not trying to dunk on anyone (the forty notes in my Kindle copy were me doing that). This is a person who is smarter than me and far more well-read, but there are blind spots you could fit a bus into sideways. I assume his publishing house has some kind of clean room procedure where no woman was allowed within a mile of the production of this book. And it exists in a world where almost no one, at least after Chapter One, actually has to work even though when it’s going good, this is a book that really pushes on the flaws in what we in the US call capitalism and what the author tends to refer to as neoliberalism, but he and we both know he means US cultural more verbally and rightfully so.
But then he hits you with a contrast of a “ritual society” and I cannot tell if he is unaware or does not care about the amazing problems those tend to have. But he never has to defend his thoughts against antithesis. Whole chapters will have a dozen footnotes and they’re all from some Mr. Ibid he decided to quote at length this time, to the point I kept wondering why I didn’t just read the source material instead. I did make myself smile when one of my notes on how sex and seduction all work simply read, “It would be cool if Mrs Ibid were consulted here.”
And yes, I know how citations work, don’t @ me APA or MLA-style. Let me close with the passage where it went from “this is all quite strange” to “For the first time in a long time, a book just made me physically queasy”
Between hunter and quarry there is a kind of reciprocity, a symmetry. The animal must be killed face-to-face. Before the killing it must be ‘addressed’. An animal must never be killed while asleep. It is asked to wake up. It must also only be wounded in particular places. It is prohibited, for instance, to injure the animal’s eyes, and it thus retains its gaze until the end. Even in the case of hunting, then, there is a reciprocal relationship. The other, after all, is the gaze.
P.S. It pisses me off to realize your man is totally right and to some extent I stuck around just to write bile on the Internet about it instead of sitting with myself and figuring out what that was all about.
Giving this a 2.5 because it feels like data and I think that would annoy the author. It started so strong. For the first time since college (long ago) I had to remind myself highlighting everything is the same as highlighting nothing. And then Chapter 2 happened. We went from him trashing capitalism’s effects on humans to him complaining after the French Revolution the fashion got boring. Because they started painting pictures of poor people, dude. There is a whole thing about how tattoos nowadays are pornographic, but they were cool in the Nineteenth Century when rich people got them to indicate membership in a group. If you have a tattoo, this guy doesn’t like you on spec.
Chapters 3 and most of 4 brought it back until, well until the train completely derailed and I kept reading just to argue with him in the margins and amuse myself. PORNOGRAPHICALLY. Like highlighting, you can overuse that word when you apply it to everything. I kept telling myself things were getting lost in translation and I assume the author kept describing things as porn for the strength of the word, but when you seem to completely squicked out about other human beings, I’m not sold. This is a gooner explaining seduction and a second level hobbit paladin explaining the experience of combat.
I’m not trying to dunk on anyone (the forty notes in my Kindle copy were me doing that). This is a person who is smarter than me and far more well-read, but there are blind spots you could fit a bus into sideways. I assume his publishing house has some kind of clean room procedure where no woman was allowed within a mile of the production of this book. And it exists in a world where almost no one, at least after Chapter One, actually has to work even though when it’s going good, this is a book that really pushes on the flaws in what we in the US call capitalism and what the author tends to refer to as neoliberalism, but he and we both know he means US cultural more verbally and rightfully so.
But then he hits you with a contrast of a “ritual society” and I cannot tell if he is unaware or does not care about the amazing problems those tend to have. But he never has to defend his thoughts against antithesis. Whole chapters will have a dozen footnotes and they’re all from some Mr. Ibid he decided to quote at length this time, to the point I kept wondering why I didn’t just read the source material instead. I did make myself smile when one of my notes on how sex and seduction all work simply read, “It would be cool if Mrs Ibid were consulted here.”
And yes, I know how citations work, don’t @ me APA or MLA-style. Let me close with the passage where it went from “this is all quite strange” to “For the first time in a long time, a book just made me physically queasy”
Between hunter and quarry there is a kind of reciprocity, a symmetry. The animal must be killed face-to-face. Before the killing it must be ‘addressed’. An animal must never be killed while asleep. It is asked to wake up. It must also only be wounded in particular places. It is prohibited, for instance, to injure the animal’s eyes, and it thus retains its gaze until the end. Even in the case of hunting, then, there is a reciprocal relationship. The other, after all, is the gaze.
P.S. It pisses me off to realize your man is totally right and to some extent I stuck around just to write bile on the Internet about it instead of sitting with myself and figuring out what that was all about.