Warren, Warren, Warren, Warren

If there is a Six Foot Turkey candidate this election cycle, it will be surprising no one to say it is Elizabeth Warren. Whether I, as mere private individual and cowardly citizen, will actually pull the lever for her in the primaries is another matter. I may well decide at the ultimate moment that I'd rather hide under a rock for the next year, bypass having to argue about the fraught and unanswerable "electability" question one way or the other, and  emerge blinking in November 2020 to cast my vote for whoever is still standing and is not Trump - the only really decisive factor.

But speaking in the voice of this blog, where I am supposed to stand occasionally for positive ideals rather than the mere negative avoidance of fascism (though that latter goal is surely nothing to scoff at), I want to put it down in writing that Warren is my candidate. She is far and away the most interesting person active right now in politics. Most surprising and intriguing of all, she is probably the closest thing to a "distributist" we're ever likely to see this close to the White House.

Woolf Meets Dog

If I had access to artistic talent -- or, at the very least, a studio at my beck and call -- I would lead the way in the creation of the first ever animated film adaptation of Flush: A Biography. This book -- the only one Virginia Woolf ever wrote, to my knowledge, that is concerned chiefly with the adventures of a cocker spaniel - is simply crying out for the Disney treatment.

And I'm talking about the old Disney. The book would just be so fantastic for it! It has exactly the right amount of scary, and for just the right length of time. Flush's kidnapping by a gang of Victorian dog-thieves and extortionists -- known to cut off their prey's paws when their owners do not cough up the ransom -- is so vividly and unforgettably described.

Errata and Marginalia 007: Pater

Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), originally published 1873.

I recently took a foray into John Ruskin, as you know, and while his reflections on subjects moral, religious, and political are mercifully few in the Elements of Drawing (while his reflections on drawing itself are sound and interesting) -- these minor instances were nonetheless stifling enough that I could immediately understand why Pater would come as such a fresh breeze by comparison.

To set even a toe over the gloomy threshold of Victorian orthodoxy makes one rush with inestimable aching gratitude into the arms of the rebels and iconoclasts of the age, Pater among them. One can well understand the impact he made on a young Oscar Wilde and other undergraduates who were exposed to his work.

Hyper-Reality

It started with the Hobbit movies. The new HD technology was not necessarily a success. The general consensus of people coming out of the theaters was that being able to perceive every follicle and belt buckle on the corpse of an orc was not actually a desideratum. One started to hear for the first time a phrase that has since become commonplace: "It looks so real it's fake." Suggesting that the earlier, grainier CGI in the original Lord of the Rings movies actually achieved a greater verisimilitude.

Things have only gotten worse since then. "It looks like a home video," said a coworker of mine, apropos of a more recent HD franchise. She was referring to the fact that the movie had that mysterious "soap opera" visual look that is instantly recognizable, but whose technological explanation eludes the likes of me. The daytime drama look. Like it must have been shot on a glorified camcorder.