Books

[zaratustra]

I've been asked to read a book. Namely, to record myself reading a book so someone can use the recording for sleepy ASMR.

I'm as surprised as anybody.

Taking recommendations for books without a lot of action sequences, I guess.

I will recommend Calvino's Invisible Cities and Jorge Luis Borges's everything in most occasions, but i feel they fit here

[Mongrel]

You should do the Hobbit, unless you need something boring enough to put people to sleep and content doesn't matter, then just do Lord of the Rings

If your goal is to bore people to sleep, isn't that the Silmarillion?

You should do the Hobbit, unless you need something boring enough to put people to sleep and content doesn't matter, then just do The Book(s) of Lost Tales

[Mongrel]

A fun, short, anecdote from the annals of anthropology: Shakespeare in the Bush.

[Friday]

Not being overly familiar with Hamlet, a lot of that was lost on me (including the last paragraph) but it was indeed very fun.

And, not for nothing, it's true that humans fancy themselves up in motives of complexity when usually people's motivations are exceedingly simple.

[pacobird]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Years ... ght_Nights

[Thad]

I looked up an old acquaintance, Heather Berg, and found that she's Dr. Heather Berg now and she's recently published a book, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism.

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.

I can't vouch for the book directly -- I only just found out that it exists -- but it looks like a well-researched, pleasingly radical look at a couple of taboo subjects, an exploration of sex work and how, insofar as it's exploitative, it's exploitative because it's work, not because it's sex.

[Büge]

[Thad]

I mean, we're mostly just talking about Dawkins, right? And I guess we can include Cleese and Gilliam, if we stretch it, but the Pythons who Adams was closest to were Graham Chapman, who died in the '80s, and Terry Jones, who seemed like a pretty good guy AFAICT.

Adams had a lot of friends who seem like they're still pretty decent people. Neil Gaiman seems like a good guy. I haven't heard anything bad about David Gilmour, and the most controversial thing I've heard about Stephen Fry is that he's still narrating audiobooks for JK Rowling, which isn't great but doesn't put him on the same footing as Dawkins, either. I was gonna say that the only reason I have to suspect anything wrong with Lalla Ward is that she's married to Dawkins, but I looked it up and they've been separated since 2016.

Douglas's daughter Polly seems pretty cool too.

I dunno, and we'll never know; maybe Sandifer's right and Adams would have gone down the same path as Dawkins. But I don't think it's fair to the man to make assumptions about what he would have said and done if he'd lived. He had some friends who turned out to be pretty awful, but he also had some friends who seem like they're pretty okay. His humor always seemed to me to come from a place of compassion for human foibles, even when he showed disgust and contempt for the horrible, stupid things we do to each other and our world.

[Friday]

No, Thad.

Everything is black and white, good or bad.

That's why leftist twitter never says anything incredibly fucking stupid.

[Thad]

Everybody copes with death in their own way.

Some people are shocked by the sudden, unexpected death of a beloved author, even though they never knew him, and affected enough by it that they commemorate the twentieth anniversary of that death.

And some people respond to the first type of person by saying it was for the best, because if he'd lived, he probably would have turned out to be an asshole.

[Brantly B.]

Douglas devoted the last decade of his life to militant environmentalism. I don't think he was in that much danger of falling far to the right.

If you really need something to differentiate him from Dawkins, though, you can use the timeless test of how much each of them spent praising their own farts.

[Thad]

Douglas devoted the last decade of his life to militant environmentalism. I don't think he was in that much danger of falling far to the right.

And Dawkins advocates for the Great Ape Project. There's nothing in the rulebook that says an animal lover can't be a bigot.

I think Adams would have been offended by transphobes on an aesthetic level, though. They only know one joke, and it isn't very good.

[mharr]

There's a default failure mode for transgressive comedians where after a lifetime deriding conservative society's demands to respect tradition and authority, they reflexively deride liberal society's demands to respect... other people. The reaction to that pushes them into the Fortress of Rational Centrism, and we all know who recruits inside those walls.

Douglas was more absurdist than transgressive, I hope.

[Thad]

George Carlin mocked the idea that there are taboo subjects you shouldn't joke about as much as any comic ever did, but he also understood the importance of picking your targets. Here's what he had to say about Andrew "Dice" Clay:



We weren't using the phrases "punching down" or "toxic masculinity" yet back in those days (this was 1990, shortly after Nora Dunn and Sinead O'Connor boycotted the SNL episode Clay hosted), but Carlin had a good grip on the concepts even if he didn't use the same vocabulary we do today.

There are some very smart, very funny people (and also Jerry Seinfeld) who have fallen into this trap of complaining about how audiences are too sensitive. But even leaving aside the question of social change, on a basic level of craft, "I can't say the same stuff I used to" is just another way of saying "Times have changed and I haven't kept up." Sometimes jokes that were funny 30 years ago are still funny now, and sometimes they aren't. It's a comic's job to figure out which is which. Blaming the audience is the equivalent of, well, speaking of 30-year-old jokes that are still funny:

[Brantly B.]

I think Dawkins's entire problem is that he doesn't understand that he's punching down.

[Thad]

One of the things that was interesting about watching the MST3K streams the last couple weeks, where past and current cast members watched old episodes of the show, is that as much as I think of MST3K as a show that was gentle and rarely edgy or mean, there's just a lot of product-of-its-time stuff in there that may not have raised any eyebrows back in the '90s but is wince-inducing looking back at it. I watched Zombie Nightmare the other day, and there are a couple of host segments with Dr. F and Frank in these horrible racist voodoo costumes, and the new cast members audibly gasped when that shot came up onscreen. I'd seen the episode before but didn't even remember that part; I assume Jonah didn't either when he recommended it as one of his favorites.

Before that, I watched the stream where they watched Untamed Youth, and at one point Josh (present-day) reacted with disgust to a trans joke made by Josh (1990). There's no damn reason a comic can't adapt to current sensibilities and even look back at their past work with chagrin and regret. Hell, Joel renamed GPC because her original name's come to be viewed as an ethnic slur. Comics can adapt to changing times. Just because you're getting older doesn't mean you have to keep doing the same shit you've always done.

I remember when I was in high school, when I'd say something like "as people age, they tend to get set in their ways," I had a friend who'd admonish me that that's an unfair stereotype. I've come to see the wisdom in that perspective. Some people *choose* not to change as they age, but age is just an excuse. And the older I get, the less patience I have for it. Getting older is a valid justification for not being able to walk as far or lift as much or see or hear as well as you used to. It's not an excuse for refusing to change your mind about something. Unless you have actual dementia.

[Friday]

Another argument I see sometimes is that people just don't like "mean" comics.

Untrue. I like a lot of mean comics. Carlin himself was pretty damn mean.

It's who they target. You can be as mean as you want as long as you're punching up. Bill Hicks is another good example of that. Dude didn't pull any punches, but he always aimed them up.

[Mongrel]

And just because we use "punching up" as the term for it now, doesn't mean they didn't have terms for it earlier. For example, Carlin uses "underdogs" in that absolutely dead-on interview to describe punching down. Or "taking the piss out" of someone as an example that's less about class and more about attitudes (making fun of the arrogant and conceited is also fair game!).

(in fact I would argue 'underdog' is the better word... this newfangled punching up/punching down has always sounded a bit clunky to me as an expression. But then underdog's a noun and those are verbs)

[Mongrel]

I think that's in a way something else that that gets in the way, the way the internet has made us all very meme and buzzword attuned. In that Carlin interview he doesn't use the terms you mention, he just describes them plainly. It's very clear what Carlin is saying and anyone can understand it.

It's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing that a phenomenon which is frequent or pervasive receive a simple expression which then becomes a catchall shorthand to refer to that phenomenon - that's just what language does. But in the current culture wars, memes and buzzwords are used as weapons with the reductive way they work.

In a way we're taking a very simple idea and simplifying it SO much so that it actually curves back around to being complicated. Kind of the way "triggered" etc. is really just referring to having some fucking basic courtesy to others who need a little consideration; it's just good manners. Or the way the term 'Incels' was coined by a woman who was originally sympathetic to the issue. "Toxic masculinity" is the same, really just referring to a particular subset of insecurity. It's much harder to weaponize something plain like "have some sympathy and some taste consideration", than it is a unique term which can be twisted around or seized for use.

Not that appropriation can't be positive, or is new, really (for example 'gay'), but the current era seems to be producing more bad outcomes than good from our habit of wanting to label everything.

[Thad]

Neil Gaiman (one of those friends of Douglas Adams who hasn't spent the past decade subsisting on a diet of his own feet) once said we should change "political correctness" to "treating other people with respect".

Course, that's not how it works. The same old assholes who spent the last 30 years ranting about political correctness just went ahead and co-opted "woke" and "canceled" from WOC activists and turned them into insults.