Summer Reading, Cont.

[atolnon]

I read She and Malcom X, so picked up a book of Foucault's notes and the Kipling that I had to buy for the Victorian class that got cancelled. The Foucault's okay, and I'm working through it an essay at a time, but I ran into the roadblock of generally hating Kipling a lot. I mean, his ethos - yeah, pretty naturally, but also he's not fun for me to read. Victorian lit's been very warm and cold for me, and only very rarely hot. Yo, I know that people have reasons to read Kipling and I'm not going to rain on that really but seeing as I really don't at the moment, I dropped it in favor of re-reading some Gibson that's going to rapidly become relevent as background texts for my eventual thesis.

I got through Neuromancer pretty quickly and it's actually better than I recall it being. Count Zero isn't as good as Neuromancer, but it's also not bad. Both Count Zero and Gibson's much later Pattern Recognition feature a female protagonist who's ensconced in the humanities profession, who are both given almost unlimited amounts of money by a corporate interest embodied by a figure who is simultaniously larger and smaller than life to track down origins of pieces of art. That's a very good thing to recognize for me, since it makes it very easy for me to compare cyberpunk themes and post-cyberpunk themes coming from the same artist.

I've found it difficult to concentrate heavily on any one individual academic project, which might be because I'm really under no pressure to do so. I've synthasized some thoughts on the nature of the concept of video games, which would probably sound obvious to someone who plays them a lot and doesn't read academic works on the subject. If you do, than you probably might have guessed how worked up people get over the terminology. One major roadblock to reading and writing on the subject is that video games are sufficiently different in the way they work as to basically require their own discipline, and that discipline doesn't exist yet, so you've basically got various departments fighting over peices of the whole. I've gotten a very vague whiff of the idea that university departments are still torn over trying to decide whether games matter at all or whether they ought to try to invest the energy and money in trying to lay claim to game studies early on. Even though games clearly matter, many departments are strapped enough that they're basically going with the former - not because they don't matter, but because there's not enough will or resources. The University of Madiscon Wisconsin, where a good friend is working on a doctorate in media studies, has a really excellent department for this sort of thing, but they're also engaged in a really nasty fight with Gov. Walker about the removal of tenure which I don't think they can win, as there's really no public goodwill for universities except in universities. What this means is that this institution, which is highly regarded, is likely to be stripped of its really good professors and staff over the coming decades.

Comments

[drbuzzkill.livejournal.com]

I would absolutely never say that history has been unkind to Kipling. At the same time, I don't find him to be quite as horrible as he's made out to be. He wasn't a bad writer, per se. He was just a product, I think, of the imperialist culture he was born into. There's some good stuff buried in all the nationalist dreck.

That being said, I wouldn't willingly read his works for pleasure, either.

[atolnon.livejournal.com]

I'll tend to hyperbole for effect, but in this care I pretty much mean exactly what I said, which is similar to your sentiments here. It's not that he's the absolute worst, and his earlier work has more nuance than his later stuff from what I can tell, but I just don't find him any fun to read. So, I mean, I've read Kipling before and there are important reasons to do so (and I'll probably have to again before everything's said and done since I'm probably writing a thesis on certain aspects of post-colonial studies), but I don't find him very entertaining.

And since I'm going to be up to my neck in mandatory reading and work soon enough (and I'm reading enough theory in my off time anyhow), I'm moving him off my recreational summer reading list.