[A Pleasurable Headache] the language of destruction
It's a bit of a short one this week. I'm still sitting on a huge amount of links to read in my backlog. This week has been my first real week off at the day job since Christmas. I've been all about that decompression life.
Links
The Parallax View and the Golden Age of Paranoia
https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-parallax-view-and-the-golden-age-of-paranoia
The Parallax View is an all time favourite. This piece over at RogerEbert.com looks at the film, the least praised of Pakula's 'Paranoia' trilogy as well as some of its contemporaries such as Night Moves and Executive Action.
The latter movie here, Executive Action, is such a strange beast. It's essentially a conspiratorial take on the JFK assassination, told from the point of view of the conspirators. It's shot in a no-frills, just the facts ma'am, style similar to its stablemate The Day of the Jackal.
But here there are no heroes, no real conflict as such either, as we know the plot suceeds. For the most part it is a bunch of powerful old white man talking in rooms and plotting the murder of a president.
The only real 'protagonist' as such is Burt Lancaster's character, the fulcrum point around which the operation pivots.
Despite all of this, it's a watchable movie about how, yep, a bunch of powerful old white men talking in rooms probably killed the president.
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Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov
https://askeplaat.wordpress.com/534-2/deep-blue-vs-garry-kasparov/
Continuing this publication's metamorphosis into a Chess newsletter, here's a piece on the infamous game between the titular computer and its human opponent.
Kasparov sacrificed the exchange for a pawn to reach the kind of position where computers are notoriously weak: positional compensation for material.
To all the bots on Chess.com. I am coming for you.
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A Very Victorian Two-Penny Hangover
https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Two-Penny-Hangover/
One to drop into conversation (remember those?) next time someone brings up drinking. Here, for your pleasure, is the etymological origin of the word 'hangover'.
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The Orwellian Language of the Animal Industry
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/03/the-orwellian-language-of-the-animal-industry/
Staying on language, this piece by Matthew Chambers is a fantastic exposure of the meat industries use of language to circumvent its inhuman practices. It includes this fantastic bit about how the language used to describe animals has a class aspect to it:
"Post 1066, the English ruling class became French-speaking Normans, whilst the Saxons generally remained as lowly farmhands and huntsmen. As a result of this class divide the names of living animals like “pig,” “cow,” “sheep,” “deer,” and “calf” retained their Saxon character, as interaction with living animals generally remained in the world of peasant farmsteads. Meanwhile, cooked animals, served up to dukes and barons on the family silver, gained French names: “pork,” “bacon,” “beef,” “mutton,” “venison,” “veal.”
"The Latinized Norman terms for cooked meats may now be a part of established English vocabulary, but some alternative history-writing can get us closer to the truth. If we pretend Godwinson and his housecarls won at Hastings, and excise these intrusions from our dictionary, then we observe plainer, more honest results. So “pork” becomes “pig corpse,” “bacon” is “slices of pig belly,” “beef” is “cow flesh,” “mutton” is “sheep muscle,” “venison” is “deer cadaver,” “veal” is “baby-cow hunks.” If such terminology doesn’t sit easily, then interrogate your feelings—each description is accurate."
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Adam Brody on being Seth Cohen and hating the way Jennifer’s Body was marketed
https://film.avclub.com/adam-brody-on-being-seth-cohen-and-hating-the-way-jenni-1846481449
There is a bit of a Adam Brody renaissance at the moment (a good thing) with roles in a bunch of recent films including Promising Young Woman and Shazam. This interview, part of The AV Club's Random Roles feature, touches on a bunch of those, including the excellent Kid Detective. Dear reader, if you like Ed Brubaker comics, dark humour and detective stories that play against type I implore you to seek this one out. It is a hidden gem.
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Do we have the language to describe climate change?
https://www.footprintmag.net/feeling-our-way-with-language/
Yep, back to language. Language changes to fit the zeitgeist. But do we have the capacity, and more importantly the words, to describe the looming threat of climate change.
"The entries are diverse in the languages, cultures and sources they borrow from and include words such as: ‘Misneach’—an Irish word that describes the particular type of courage needed to continue doing something when you are weary and doubtful; ‘Pa Theuan’—a Thai phrase which translates literally to “wild forest” but denotes a type of wilderness that cannot be controlled by humans; ‘hyperempathy’—a term borrowed from Octavia Butler’s sci-fi series Parable which, the essay’s author suggests, could be embraced so that we feel the pains of the planet are pains of our own"
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I'm off to clear the decks and watch the sun rise on a brand new week. See you in two!