The Corpse Brigadier

For my sins, I have been "elected" by my peers to a professional responsibility that will involve a) no power but b) regular committee meetings. (The vibes are somewhat similar to being forcibly put on an advisory board serving a small town's city council.) What fun! I attended my first meeting last night and then sent off my first sarcastic digest to my peers, who responded with delighted cackling.

In other news, I was talking to an expert on China last week (not about their Chinese expertise; our phone call was about something else), and I told them that I was about to read Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence (a hoary old dinosaur of a book about industrialization in Europe and China). There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. "Oh," they said finally. "I guess I liked the stuff about coal in that one."

Having now read Pomeranz: the stuff about coal did not knock my socks off, but it is always fun to read a book that is so deep in the weeds with entrenched scholarly debates that the entire structure is basically a Socratic dialogue. "What's that, Glaucon? You think seventeenth-century Europe had a greater consumer demand for luxury goods than China did? How curious. Let's just really think about the data for a minute here..."

I also read Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton, which is one of those rare books that straddles the genres of "this one commodity explains everything about world history," "popular nonfiction you could give your dad," and "academic work making a lot of bold arguments that will spur fights at specialist conferences for the next 10-20 years." I'm inherently allergic to any work that reifies "capitalism" to the degree that Beckert does, and I don't think Beckert and his fellow Capitalism Bros really want to think too deeply about how the historical archive operates. But even so, I thought Beckert did an admirable job accomplishing his multiple aspirations in one single volume.

Big Walk (2026, PC) -- Successfully synchronized watches with L., and we have now played two one-hour sessions of Big Walk together. We have unlocked the second zone and located one (1) gourd there.

Valheim (2021/2026, PC) -- My brothers have replaced the wooden palisades around our compound with high stone walls. Meanwhile, I successfully raided one (1) tomb in the Black Forest by myself.

Never Fear (aka Young Lovers) (1950) -- Watched for the Ida Lupino factor. This film embraces a mode of acting that is so extremely out-of-fashion that I kept being reminded of after-school specials and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace; lead actress Sally Forrest is particularly campy whenever her head swivels toward the camera so that she can yell something like, "AND I'LL NEVER DANCE AGAIN." Which is a shame, because the occasional glimpses we get of the other polio survivors at the Kabat-Kaiser Institute in 1950, five years before Jonas Salk's vaccine, are often light and charming without being smarmy.

I also ended the movie thinking that the heroine should have stayed broken up with her saintly, self-sacrificing, self-absorbed boyfriend, but possibly Ida Lupino agrees with me and the "happy" ending of this movie is supposed to be pretty dark. (The mid-movie scene where the doctor forces Carol, who cannot walk unassisted, to go on a car-ride to a lonely location with her upset ex-boyfriend is grim stuff.)

The Barefoot Contessa (1954) -- The first half of this movie, as filtered in turns through the viewpoints of a bitchy Hollywood director and a bitchy publicist, felt mean and snappy and fun. Then the second half arrived with high melodrama and dramatic twists and various people acting like aliens experiencing their first day on planet Earth, and I was considerably less charmed. Mankiewicz!