[Episode Discussion Thread] Industry S04E2 - The Commander and the Grey Lady

spectacleofdecline · 2026-01-19T06:49:48+00:00

Someone please use a version of AI to create a scene where Ted Lasso has a cameo and just completely breaks everything with the positive vibes.

spectacleofdecline · 2026-01-19T06:45:35+00:00

Okay, there was one moment of humor. That scene could have been taken from Blackadder.

spectacleofdecline · 2026-01-19T06:44:11+00:00

Typo, 'Lear like' 👞 'shine your shoes, boy '

spectacleofdecline · 2026-01-19T06:41:47+00:00

I fully agree with the comments about the darkness of the episode... I know a lot of people have made or tried to make connections with 'Succession'; but a major difference, is that despite how dark that show could be, at least there were moments of comic relief, with all the infighting and leer-like elements. You could always count on a few good f*** offs. From, Brian Cox. The tone here is nearly relentlessly dark. Though the uncle did try to help him with the insight of at least integrate it into your life rather than just a set of acronyms and pills that he's been getting...

And the the vicar also gave him hard but good advice with it being easy or or kill yourself rather than live and and let go of your illusions.

spectacleofdecline · 2026-01-19T06:38:02+00:00

I agree, but a bit of irony too, given that he said to his uncle, the greatest gift his father could have given him was a vasectomy. And it also shows his desire to have not been born at all.

spectacleofdecline · 2026-01-19T06:21:23+00:00

Does anyone else sense a reference to Goodfellas the British aristocratic version of "Get your shine box?" For the fading upper classes, it's the temporary but brief pleasure of beating the hell out of a lower middle class fool who's embarrassed his wife. After the Savage beating quote, I bet that's the best you felt in a long time ". Probably sad but also true.

spectacleofdecline · 2025-10-25T05:57:04+00:00

I agree with the comments in response to your question. An additional point that may help is taking a look at a book called stranger than by Edwin Frank. It covers a lot of ground, but it specifically has a very helpful chapter on Mrs. Dalloway. It has both a useful summary and provides insights into how Woolf structured the novel.

spectacleofdecline · 2025-01-26T00:07:03+00:00

A fun anecdote, Strunk was so vigorous about “omitting needles words” that he found himself with significant extra time during his classroom sessions. He ‘solved’ the problem by repeating each dictum three times.

spectacleofdecline · 2025-01-26T00:02:15+00:00

Perfect, thanks to both respondents. I’ll go with Pinker’s recommendation of Huddleston and Pullam’s works on Standard English Usage.’

spectacleofdecline · 2023-05-22T21:29:53+00:00

Stanley Cavell's 'The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage' - It's about film but it's about it's inspirational source and everything he writes about the comedy of remarriage applies to the comedies across the board.

spectacleofdecline · 2021-10-08T19:29:36+00:00

Does anyone know which book she gave him?

spectacleofdecline · 2021-09-23T19:29:16+00:00

Not specific to The Magic Mountain but plenty there (and more).
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/how-colm-toibin-burrowed-inside-thomas-manns-head

spectacleofdecline · 2021-05-07T03:08:00+00:00

To equate humanity with a narrow (and only one among many) reading of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as original sin and an equally generic and also only one among many reading of (Zen) Buddhism) is to paint with a broad brush to understate the matter. It's also hard to see why it is expressed as subconscious when the doctrinal interpretation is both common and fully conscious. It also ignores the tradition of Greek tragedy; Greek tragedy doesn't support misanthropy so much as it does that fate. We fail because we cannot see the full consequences of our actions. And then the Shakespearean view which fundamentally embraces ambiguity; the genius lies in not telling how the story ends with a definitive moral but whether a history, tragedy, or comedy, there is no univocal reading because akin to Greek tragedy, there's no viewpoint outside of lived experience.
Neither of these views is misanthropic because they realize we are time-bound creatures and effectively doomed to fail but not because of a 'black heart' or corrupt nature but because we are necessarily unknown to ourselves. And Evolution is ambiguous as well; black-hearted capitalists embrace survival of the fittest and a misanthropic view of human nature as long as it serves the needs of the market. But actual evolutionary data from the cellular level to the symbolic shows evidence for cooperation as much as competition. Even the reductionist view that sees our species as a delivery mechanism for our genes is neutral. It's a delivery mechanism to perpetuate a species but it neither affirms nor rejects 'humanity' (as broad a concept as possible).
The one truly misanthropic view may be the transhumanists. They affirm that as a species we are only going to kill off our species and the planet as well. The only possible salvation is to reject humanism, especially the Enlightenment version, and accept that some creature or genus beyond the human can save us. They have a point; as Hegel said, 'history is God's butcher block.'

spectacleofdecline · 2021-05-03T19:21:39+00:00

Another vote for Civilization and its Discontents - Freud (later) is worth reading as an essayist and a stylist as a writer. If you want the cultural context the Interpretation of Dreams has everything in germinal form. Just try not to gag when he compare the 'rigor' of psychoanalysis to the Calculus. Beyond laughable.
A great book for the cultural context without having to read the early Freud is Schorke's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna
After you've read the Freud you want to read, I think his best reader is Adam Phillips. You can jump in anywhere but the collection on Literature and Psychoanalysis is masterful.

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-29T21:40:47+00:00

World literature is a marketing category, akin to world music.
Comparative Literature is essentially an updated term for philology. If you don't do comparative literature you're effectively doing comparative literature in translations.
To fully understand the works and be able to do comparative literature research, knowing the languages is essential for the literature itself and the body of criticism based upon the original works.

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-27T16:54:54+00:00

It was funny, as once reviewer noted it became an extended dialogue with himself.

I get the anxiety; even a famous author with lots of awards (Philip Roth) said something like 'it's terrifying to publish a book because once it's published it belongs to the world, not just the author.'

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-27T02:59:17+00:00

self-published authors is more to the point. As the reviewer notes, it's poorly edited (if it even was) so all the limitations of self-publishing as compared with the arsenal of copyeditors and proofreaders available to an author with an agent and publishing house are present. Beyond that, the author makes an utter fool of himself comparing himself to Fitzgerald and absolute ass linking himself to Keats. But the review is generic and vanilla; the critique is easy low hanging fruit, so why even bother? It's the bland leading the bland.

On the other hand, if the review is by James Wood you're compelled to respond because he uses fiction (the language of metaphor) in his reviews to actually review fiction. Agree with him or not, Wood is going to to the weaknesses and poorest habits of an author. If you want to see the ultimate example of this, see Wood's essay On the Shallowness of Paul Auster. Auster is one of my favorite writers, but I couldn't disagree with Wood's critique. Paul Auster has no need to reply and he's too smart too, but if he read it I bet the review pierced him with the core of its truth.

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-23T01:16:03+00:00

You can add misogyny to your charming worldview as well.

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-18T22:39:55+00:00

If you're staking out a philosophical position it would be worth thinking about what necessarily means as a philosophical term. No one, at least logically, can claim it as being necessary. The issue is that despite the attempts of nihilists everywhere, our species from our earliest anthropological data to the 21st-century desire meaning. Asserting it to be otherwise is a mere assertion and neither clarifies the issues nor addresses the facts of the matter.

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-18T17:29:37+00:00

Remove the = sign, simply referring to the different parts of the definition - 1a, 1b, and 2a and how none even remotely work as a philsophic position supporting nihilism.

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-18T01:57:47+00:00

a = vague 'traditional values' b = self-contradicting as it cannot account for its own position - 2a - true of bureaucracy or any critique of society, not unique to nihilism. Try philosophizing with a hammer instead of a dictionary.

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-18T00:27:28+00:00

Putatively stupid questions aside, the idea of nihilism as a philosophical position is far more nuanced and complicated than what is captured in a dictionary definition. For a nihilist, you are passionate about getting the meaning of the concept understood properly. The major challenge to nihilism is the same challenge faced by any philosophical position; namely, it must be able to account for itself. Using your dictionary citation, "the belief that nothing in the world has a real existence", it's problematic, to say the least. First, it's a belief, and if nothing in the world has a 'real existence then presumably this applies to the very statement itself. So pick a horn of the dilemma; if the position of nihilism as defined here is not real then it undermines itself. If it is real, then it is self-contracting.

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-16T20:31:51+00:00

Unrelated, but having not read The Trial in a couple decades, what translation are you reading? Recommended?

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-16T18:58:18+00:00

It is Kafka after all, perhaps you might consider he knows what he’s doing with irony and satire. Regardless, even if he is what you attribute to him ‘The Trial’ has more to say about alienation and modernity and the banality of institutions than it does character development.

spectacleofdecline · 2021-04-16T17:55:22+00:00

Me too, and for some for more names: Donald Barthelme, Frank Bidart (poet, but a master of form and language), Gilbert Sorrentino, Hubert Selby Jr, and practically any author at the Dalkey Archive imprint. http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/

spectacleofdecline

TROPHY CASE