HollowCity/KarlMarx/SlantedScreen

Today I read the next fifty pages of Ransom Riggs’ Hollow City. The children finally find Miss Wren and she begins healing Miss Peregrine. In one sense, this is the end of their quest, but another peculiar asks them almost immediately what they plan to do once Miss Peregrine has been healed and the children realize that they have no idea. It seems that there is a kind of peculiar resistance movement (albeit very small) being organized to fight back against the wights and the hollows, but the children seem to want no part of that struggle. Riggs has cleverly led the reader into a situation where one part of the narrative seems to be drawing to a close and at the very same moment many other possibilities open up (not incidentally, this book advertises the next book in the series!).

I also read the next section of Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx. After Marx was expelled from France in January 1845, he moved to Brussels where he was to spend the next three years and this section of the book concentrates on this period. During his time in Belgium, Marx not only got more and more involved in revolutionary politics (culminating in the events of 1848) but also published three major pieces: ‘The Holy Family,’ ‘The German Ideology,’ and ‘The Poverty of Philosophy.’ In his readings of these pieces, Sperber emphasizes not only the positives and negatives of Marx’s vicious polemics, but also what drove this polemical dimension of Marx’s writing; according to Sperber, these works are often indirect forms of self-criticism. In other words, Marx projected onto his opponents (who were often former friends and associates) earlier stages of his own thinking as a way of both repudiating the beliefs he once held and clarifying the evolution of his ideas. The other thing that stands out about Marx’s writing during this period is what an incredibly narrow audience it was intended for. That would all change with the publication of ‘The Communist Manifesto.’

Can a film be both predictable and still valuable? Yes, absolutely. I watched Jeff Adachi’s The Slanted Screen, a documentary about the representation of Asian American men in American visual media and it was exactly what you might expect: an analysis of the stereotypes that have influenced the ways in which Asian American men have (and have not) appeared on American tv and movie screens, combined with an overarching narrative about how things are gradually changing for the better, along with a final note of optimism about how things will look in the future. So far, so predictable, but also valuable both because it tells a story that needs to be told (especially about the early career of Sessue Hayakawa) and enables one to look at other things in a new way. For example, the film I blogged about yesterday on American character actors featured no Asian Americans. The Slanted Screen gives me a much better sense of why this absence exists.