Here’s a little oeuvre which deserves airing, despite the appalling grammar: Indiana Jones And The Last Franchise.
Even though I was not familiar with about 60% of his cultural allusions, the writing was enough to engage me. After all, you don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that combat is awful, bloody and destructive. I especially liked this little turn:
And, if you ever haul yourself out of bed and find that you have little to smile about… just look up Disney on Google News. It may not bring you joy, but the schadenfreude will most likely bring a smile to your face. At least a little grin.
That happens early in the piece, and it gets better. Here’s the pre-climax exposition:
My great-grandfather was a mason. A brick-layer, I mean, not the… well, you know the other type. He was a master of his craft. Back in the 20’s, his skill was in such high-demand that he was paid to travel the world and build structures in places like Shanghai and Glasgow that stand to this day. In an age of cheap, third-world labor, it can be a bit difficult to imagine the artistry, skill, and talent of a good mason. There’s more to it than slopping mortar onto a brick and stacking another on top. You just don’t see a lot of work like what he was doing, these days. Men like him labored to build cities not just for themselves, but their descendants. They spent their lives – some of them gave their lives – so that their descendants would live in a world that they themselves could scarcely imagine. They build us sprawling, glittering skylines of glass and steel and lights. Man-made miracles of engineering and architecture that would be, quite literally, incomprehensible to most humans from before a certain time.
Yet, the cities they built for us, that they left us, are no longer ours. My great-grandfather did most of his work in Pennsylvania and the North-East. He lived in Philadelphia, in a neighborhood his descendants can’t walk through, day or night. His house is still there. I don’t know who lives in it now, if anyone does. I don’t really want to know, either.
All I know is the fruits of his labors, his house, his city — it’s not just that they don’t belong to his descendants, and, arguably, the country he built them for. We can’t even enjoy them. They were wrested out of the hands of the people, and, without consent, broken, smashed, and destroyed by wicked people, who now hand us the smoldering ruins of our predecessors’ lifetime of work, and say with a smile, Here! We made it better! And, if you dare say otherwise, you’re an ungrateful asshole who should be grateful that they’re deigning to give you a damn thing.
Excellent stuff, and well worth the long read.
On one of the book pages on Faschist Book, someone made a great explanation of why they preferred to read classic literature over modern pop culture rubbish. They said something to the effect that they preferred to read works by authors who built our civilization rather than authors who are destroying it
JQ
What if all those Indiana Jones movies were just the dreams of Han Solo while he was frozen in Carbonite?
I hold zero-zero-zero interest in any of those ‘entertainments’.
To me, they are on the level of a pachinko palace or an all-night club specializing in Texas Hold ‘Em.
Or a perky Activities Director encouraging name-badges at a shuffleboard marathon.
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Based solely on our host’s mention of certain grammar issues, I read the entire linked column with an editor’s eye for comical joinings of disassociated phrases and particularly abusive punctuation.
My conclusion:
* [besides the utter uselessness of the subject] the ‘Lerna’ author could benefit from writing, going for a walk, allowing it to mature, then reading his-her-their words with a fresh vision hatched from distance and personal evolution.
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An aside:
Frequently during a YouTube video, I pause to offer a hint to potentially help the content provider increase the digestibility of the presentation.
It goes something like this…
“Suggestions:
* work from a script
* rehearse
* edit ruthlessly.”
And, then, I move on to another video with few cares if my shared wisdom made a modicum.
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But that WILLOW business with the three gals boinking… my Very Significant Other asks ‘how revealing is and the duration of the juicy nudity scenes?’.