What I'm Reading/Watching

The Signet Classic paperback on Voltaire:  I had already read Candide, but this collection includes a couple novellas (Zadig and Ingenuous) and thirteen short stories.  Some were very topical, dealing with specific Jesuits and Jansenists and their feuds, while others were more broadly philosophical and always witty and insightful.

The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics by John Pollack:  Pollack, winner of the 1995 world pun championships, has a brief (154 pages, not counting bibliography, acknowledgments, etc.) account of the history, popularity, and neurolinguistics behind puns.  Very accessible, but at times a bit disorganized, it's a fun read on the subject.  Its original research is limited to asking questions of comedians, writers, linguists, and and neuroscientists, so it's really more of a summation of existing research.

Ended up seeing Lucy (2014) on DVD.  Holy crap was that movie stupid.  The whole 10% of the brain thing would be okay if Besson didn't try to make the movie seem profound by having characters ponder the meaning of being human his liberal use of nature footage.  Then there's the problem of having an action movie where the main character can manipulate matter and no one else can.  There's never any sense of real danger for Lucy.  That said, I can see this having a cult following.  It has a couple big names (Scarlett Johannson and Morgan Freeman), the plot is laughably stupid, and it has some pretty cool visual effects.

Heart of Darkness: the Orson Welles Radio Adaptation

Welles bought the film rights to Heart of Darkness, and generated a script that was, sadly, never filmed.  Years later, though, Coppola made his masterpiece adaptation, Apocalypse Now.

Robert Coover's "A Political Fable" or, the Strangest Little Book You'll Ever Read

     

      Novellas don't really seem to get their fair share of attention, often cast out of the limelight by novels and short stories.  In fact, Coover's A Political Fable was originally published in 1968 as a short story with the much more descriptive title The Cat in the Hat for President.  An odd premise, sure, but what you can't understand until you read this is how terrifying that would be in actuality.  The Cat in the Hat is unlimited by the laws of physics or reason.  His antics drive people to insanity.  He can and does anything, seemingly without rhyme or reason (well, not without rhyme), but there always seems to be some deeper, unfathomable purpose to his actions, whether they're flooding a convention hall and having everyone swallowed alive by giant fish or turning hundreds of coon-skin caps into live raccoons.  

      

      The story itself is, as the title suggests, a fable, with a message to be learned about politics and order and society, etc.  Still, the story is very, extremely, and totally weird.  The blend of the mundane (party politics, voter demographics, etc.) and the bizarre (a magic anthropomorphic cat) creates a very unsettling effect which is only magnified by the way the mundane seems to not only accept, but welcome the bizarre.  And that's part of what makes this the strangest little book you'll ever read: the way the ordinary blends with the unbelievable, the way the innocuous blends with the obscene, the way reason meets nonsense until the difference becomes muddled.  It's a short, quick read, but one hell of a trip.