HollowCity/KarlMarx/FearAndDesire

Today I read the next fifty pages of Ransom Riggs’ Hollow City. In this section of the novel, the worst fears of the peculiar children are realized when they fall into the hands of the Wights. For a moment it looks like they are in serious trouble before one of their number saves them by means of a miraculous bee invasion! After this dramatic escape, they finally succeed in reaching London, but this is only part one of the novel. Many challenges remain in the next part! One notable difference between this book and its prequel is that Riggs can take a lot more for granted. In other words, he has to spend much of the first book explaining who the peculiars are, where they come from, their history, and so on. In this second book, he can assume the reader’s familiarity with that background and focus more on developing the children as characters, with their own individual histories.

I also began Jonathan Sperber’s monumental biography Karl Marx. Sperber’s basic take on Marx is that we spend too much time thinking of him as a prophet of the future and not enough time situating him in his proper nineteenth-century context. Consequently, rather than stressing the ways in which Marx is relevant to the 21^st century, Sperber focuses on how Marx was very much the product of his times. If we understand this, Sperber argues, we will appreciate how very different Marx was from us and how the presentism that so often dominates discussion of Marx distorts both our understanding of who he was and of the content and meaning of his central ideas. It’s an interesting approach, though it obviously leaves open the question of the value of this recalibrated understanding of Marx. In other words, even if we accept the argument that presentism is a problem, how exactly are we going to address the relation between Marx, Marxism, and our current conjuncture? We’ll see whether or not Sperber addresses this issue.

It’s easy to see why Stanley Kubrick disowned his first feature-length film, Fear And Desire (1953) and tried to suppress all copies. It’s clearly the work of someone just beginning to learn how to make a film and given Kubrick’s notorious perfectionism, its wordy pretentiousness must have been agony to him once he’d developed his craft. With all that said, there’s still value in watching it, both for its exploration of key themes that would stay with him throughout his career (not least the two terms in the film’s title) and, more specifically, for the opportunity it provides to compare his portrayal of men at war in this film with that he developed thirty years later in Full Metal Jacket. And then there are those moments which rise above the tedium, shots that with the benefit of hindsight hint at the abilities to come: plates of stew splattering on the floor as a stand in for the violence of an attack, and a door hitting a dead foot as the attackers leave the room. These images stick in the mind long after the wooden dialog fades from memory.