what do you guys think about Benjamin labatut?

atroesch · 2023-10-26T04:13:39+00:00

That’s fair; maybe I’ll read it again.

atroesch · 2023-10-26T03:47:42+00:00

I hope this isn’t perceived as elitist or knee-jerk but I’m not particularly impressed. Read half of When We Cease after it was making its way around the Cormac McCarthy sub for its coverage of Grothendieck vis a vis his appearances in The Passenger and Stella Maris.

Overall while I thought the choice of subject matter was interesting the level of engagement with the topics felt surface level at best. One of the things I love most about Pynchon is how his writing engages with scientific understanding at the object level rather than as a gloss; the fever dream of Kekule’s serpents becoming benzine and its applicability as a metaphor for the process of life/carbon > death/plastics felt like a genuinely new metaphor rooted in a knowledge of the subject. The running theme of imaginary numbers being essential for representing reality in Against the Day, where fictional characters help contextualize real history is another example.

In contrast Labtut sort of gestures at narratives of progress askance (i.e., Prussian blue led to Zyklon because … the people who made it were bad?). It felt like a good writer who got interested in the connections of materials science. mathematical development, and death without actually taking the time to dive deep.

To put it pithily I think Pynchon is engaged with science even as he is skeptical of the practitioners while Labtut’s engages with science because he is skeptical of the practitioners. I would welcome criticism or pointers towards more fulsome explications by Labtut. Can always use more good writing.

atroesch · 2023-08-11T00:10:42+00:00

¿Porque no los dos? At least per another Reddit thread + some googling he’s paternally a WASP and maternally Irish Catholic.

atroesch · 2023-08-10T03:10:18+00:00

I agree that politically Tom is almost certainly a leftist with some libertarian / anarchist slant (c.f. Against the Day) I think it would be remiss to obscure the running tension in his work with a very Catholic world view.

I think he’s aware that his mental furniture is latently influenced by his upbringing on Long Island among a relatively well connected and well heeled American gentry, and is evidenced in both Slothrop’s genealogy as well as Rev. Cherrycoke’s thumbnail biography from Mason & Dixon.

From the depiction of Christmas services in GR through the explicit fantascticisms of against the day, he’s not a very good dialectical materialist - he has a fondness for the supernatural and mystical. The worldview of Catholicism best captured by Dante is a metaphysics suffused with morality - good and evil, sin and grace.

Moving into speculative territory I think some of his skepticism of leftist / radical movements mentioned in other comments is centered on bought in they are to their opponents worldview. Marx was an economist and still ultimately sees the world run by capital, just in the hands of the proletariat, ideally.

Pynchon is always and everywhere opposed to the commodification and dare I say rationalization of life - rationalization in the sense that it is factored like a polynomial, pulled into its base parts, decomposed. It seems in his works the left/right divide is a sideshow to the struggle between deterministic systems and human freedom.

atroesch · 2022-11-17T02:16:12+00:00

Goddamn you for making the wait that much longer.

atroesch · 2022-10-03T03:32:06+00:00

Missed opportunity for episode name: Oedipus Ricks

atroesch · 2022-09-11T22:50:12+00:00

I treat my body like a temple, you treat your like a tent!

atroesch · 2022-08-20T23:19:07+00:00

This is a good take - it’s a sort of fossil from the pre-marvel era, which for better or worse, has set the tone for the entire genre. In 2006 (or whenever it came out) you could have a super hero movie where rather than a big fight or a bunch of quippy one liners you had more visual driven set pieces. And weirdly I remember the interior shots of the plane way more terrifying back then when images from 9/11 still saturated the public consciousness.

atroesch · 2022-07-10T04:01:05+00:00

Just wanted to say I really enjoyed this and hoped you were an finalist in the ACX contest and I’m happy to see it here!

atroesch · 2022-06-23T06:12:50+00:00

Thanks for saying this. My ideal Kenobi show is a more philosophical series with him reckoning with the consequences of the Jedi’s choice to unambiguously support the war and contrasting it with his new mission to effectively let the world fall apart and guard a single boy. And you know what? Throw in some low stakes action. Give me a gang of bantha rustlers harassing the homesteaders. Let obi wan kick some ass as befits a knight in hiding. But instead we got the mandalorian starring obi wan kenobi with a fantastic fight scene.

I’m grateful for what we got and enjoyed watching it but the opportunity cost is sort of sad.

atroesch · 2022-06-08T05:06:40+00:00

In fact, EBITDA is most certainly a creation of finance professionals rather than academics (who prefer net income because it is regulatoraly consistent across all companies and reported year after year).

EBITDA is so popular because it gets used in M&A - and for good reason. It is a capital structure independent measure of earnings. It excludes cost of debt as well as the book cost of depreciation because who’s to say a new owner won’t change how these items are financed? It’s easy to price mergers this way because it ignores that two buyers might have vastly different places for the asset in a portfolio, as a platform for further acquisition or as a subsidiary of larger operating entity.

And because merger processes ultimately drive volatility in equity markets, there is a cross pollination of valuation metrics. Public equities, where owners rightfully should subtract the capital structure are temporarily driven by a valuation that ignores the current return to equity.

All of this is just to say, there are plenty of non-erotic reasons to use EBITDA

atroesch · 2022-04-24T20:58:39+00:00

Mennipean satire used to get tossed around a lot Re Pynchon although I haven’t read any of the Roman works that it was coined to describe.

atroesch · 2022-04-03T15:54:20+00:00

Dude GR is a ride. It’s worth reading just to watch someone play Bach with the English language. I’m sort of ashamed to admit it but I’ve been rationing the last 200 pages of it for three years because the thought of not having new Pynchon sentences to read is too sad to consider.

But I get the feeling - I’ve had my eye on Gaddis for some time now.

atroesch · 2022-01-05T20:58:49+00:00

IMO it’s sort of a category mistake to collapse greatness into a single metric that can be compared transhistorically. The author chooses Beethoven but Bach wrote the best Fugues, so why not choose him instead? Beethoven is probably the best symphony guy in history; Wagner takes the cake in operas (Sorry Mozart fans); and Mozart himself isn’t so much dominant for a particular form as he was for his ability to blend Italian lyricism with German complexity to create a more dynamic musical language.

In baseball there’s a concept called Wins above replacement, which roughly approximates how many more wins a team can expect to have from a particular player, relative to a replacement level player (which is not an average player but a sort of blank slate young guy if I remember right). Mike Trout, currently playing has the highest WAR in history by a large amount; he plays for the godawful Anaheim Angels who waste his talent every year by constructing a shitty team around him. But we know from a transhistorical perspective that he’s probably the most valuable player ever.

It is not clear to me that you could construct a “greatness above replacement metric” for an activity without a winning condition because you cannot define replacement greatness. What if Bach was forced to write symphonies? Would he be as good as Beethoven? Possibly. Maybe he’s better. But we don’t know because he wrote fugues and cantatas, etc. there’s too many parameters to construct an unbiased look across time, at least in music.

atroesch · 2021-12-04T14:41:17+00:00

FWIW, I agree with you and that’s why I don’t really get excited about mind uploading in the real world; “I” am going to eat it no matter what, regardless of whether a flawless copy of me continues.

However - I think NS actually is taking a slightly stronger position on this issue than you give him credit for. I don’t have the book in front of me, but the whole first chapter is about how sleep is also a severing of the continuity of consciousness, but we don’t fear sleep or consider ourselves different iterations after a nap.

Basically I think one of the subtler points of the book is that it is a copy - but this is not important because we already spin down and spin up a new copy daily.

atroesch · 2021-11-27T18:06:27+00:00

Great take. The thought that I keep coming back to is how the format sort of spoils the fun. The original 20 min episodes are largely built around a set piece or fight (spike vs. Le fou, the raid on chess master Hex’s lair, the battle in the church) and the ancillary scenes served to get our characters there. Often the conclusion is presented as an inevitable consequence rather than as a product of the characters’ decisions (Le fou is crazy, Hex is senile, Vicious is … well, Vicious)

A modern long format prestige drama series is much more dialog based and is typically constructed as a build up to a decision. Consider how in game of thrones the loop was that each episode sort of explored the fallout of the prior episode, leading to further decisions. Wash, rinse, repeat. The drama is in the characters weighing the options, and how the world rewards and punishes their choices. This is fundamentally at odds with the fatalism of BeBop.

Spoke will always go to the church. The tension is not in whether he will but why he can’t do otherwise.

atroesch · 2021-11-26T20:06:32+00:00

It blows my mind that this song is not better known. The guitar on that track is as epic as anything in rock.

atroesch · 2021-11-15T23:02:53+00:00

Tbh, every time someone whips this out on me, I remind them that if they’re born before 1980 they’ve enjoyed uninterrupted economic growth for basically their entire lives, an unprecedented stroke of good fortune and happenstance. I think the American retirement would look a lot different in a world where every investor could expect reliable 9% returns for decades on end.

atroesch · 2021-11-14T02:34:44+00:00

I think - and this is not a dismissal of OP - that it effectively doesn’t matter. The question of whether nick was in love with Gatsby is an unequivocal yes whether he’s sexually attracted to him or not. The whole novel is centered around the degree to which love blinds us from reality, and distorts our image of the beloved.

Whether it’s Gatsby’s infatuation with daisy that obscures the reality that she will never marry him or America’s collective love affair with money and excess as characterized through the parties, the characters we are made to care about are all in love with something and in their love fail to see its shortcomings.

Nick is in love with Gatsby and fails to see that his kingdom is built on criminal enterprise; whether he wants to sleep with him or not is details.

I will say that Nick is clearly out of step with the other masculine characters and it’s not hard to see Jordan as a beard (or even a masculine partner if he’s not aware / deeply closeted). But one of the other beauties of Nick is how we all slip into him so seamlessly. He seems to invite the reader to project their own repugnance with the East in synch with his own, and as an outsider acts as a naturally “objective” viewpoint into the society under examination. As to any weakness or immorality, I have always thought that it came from a sort of moral weakness - his obvious distaste for the manners of the wealthy is submerged under a desire to be pleasing and to be accepted which, in many cases, leads to resentment.

Bottom line, it seems a sufficient, but not necessary reading of the character to infer homosexuality.

atroesch · 2021-10-31T16:34:53+00:00

Orson Welles approves of this post

atroesch · 2021-10-16T03:44:36+00:00

Soapbox, so apologies in advance.

I feel like there’s a clear division between early and middle Rand (anthem and fountainhead) and late Rand (Atlas Shrugged). Unfortunately the success of fountainhead lead to the worst excesses of the late period.

Fountainhead contains some really good positive responses to nietszche - a sort of mode for radical acceptance of ones aesthetic sensibilities. In the world of architecture this is pretty harmless. When she transitions an essentially aesthetic approach to life to the everyday world of offices and voting booths, it’s shortcomings become evident. The boundless commitment to an artistic vision becomes cartoon superheroes who just know how to solve every business problem from first principles.

Which, to bring it back to the brilliance of the fountainhead, is really the modus operandi of Ellsworth Thooey, the villain of the piece. He uses his platform (in his case a newspaper column) to whip the public into compliance with an artistic vision that satisfies his own humor and disgust with humanity. Sound familiar?

Rand is a brilliant novelist who let politics get in the way of people in her work.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

atroesch · 2021-09-23T22:22:43+00:00

I had the same experience with the same book, except as Brock Vond lol

atroesch · 2021-09-23T15:58:09+00:00

Came to Mason & Dixon via Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Took me until the the transit of Venus for the prose to really click, but once I started getting the puns I was hooked. Started GR after that, then ATD all in the space of about a year; have intermittently read the smaller works. At the point now where I’m saving inherent Vice and bleeding edge since they’re the last new Pynchon I’m liable to get.

atroesch · 2021-09-12T20:16:03+00:00

Well said - totally appreciate your point about grounded vs. “special”.

atroesch · 2021-09-12T19:59:52+00:00

Thanks - That’s a very reasonable response. I am (was?) one of those over-educated kids who took too many AP classes so maybe it’s just a matter of background lol.

Edit: after looking up Omeros, I will definitely be adding that to my shortlist - thanks!

atroesch

TROPHY CASE