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.

What I'm reading/watching

I didn't get a chance to post last week, as I was in New York and didn't have wifi when I had expected to.

I finished Anton & Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which was absolutely hilarious.  The beginning is pretty rough, but once it picks up steam it's a page turner.  It's also so clearly a product of the mid-70s, and transmits the counter-culture of that time fantastically.

Tom Stoppard's radio play Artist Descending a Staircase (1972) which was later performed as a play.  It has some great passages about modern art and I like the palindromic structure (think Cloud Atlas), although I still prefer the other Stoppard plays I've read (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Arcadia).

I saw Fury Road, which was an excellent action movie.  The stunt work was fantastic, the over-the-top seventies B-flick aesthetics were great, it was quite simply everything an action movie should be.

I also saw Pitch Perfect 2 which was fun but forgettable.  None of the character development or emotional connection that made the original popular were here.  There was a lot of product placement, which was a bit distracting, but there were a lot of very funny cameos, culminating with David Cross as the world's biggest a cappella  fan, throwing a private a cappella battle including one group called the Tone Hangers (including Reggie Watts, Jason Jones, Joe Lo Truglio, and John Hodgman) and the Green Bay Packers (including several actual members of the Green Bay Packers).  The winner gets a $42,000 gift certificate to Dave & Busters (cf. product placement).

I also saw a performance of Hand to God at the Booth Theater.  The play, by Robert Askins, takes place in Texas "where the city meets the country" and centers on a teenager whose hand puppet is the possessed by the devil (or maybe he's just a bit touched in the head).  It's funny and weird, the cast was fantastic, and this is the second broadway show I've seen that features graphic puppet sex (although the first I've seen in it's original broadway run).