Missing Hong Kong Booksellers + Book Passage of the Week (1/9/2016) – from The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

HK booksellers have gone missing, if you haven’t heard the news. One of them was a British citizen, so the CCP is now kidnapping citizens of other countries for publishing books they don’t want you to read.

And don’t doubt for a second they’re behind it. You can’t put anything past the mainland regime. When you operate the strictest internet censorship in the world and require companies to turn over customer data as a condition to do business in their country…yeah, it’s not a stretch at all.

The appropriate response would be to disseminate these books as widely as possible. Far as I know, the book is about Xi Jiping’s alleged mistress. If I had more power, I’d do everything I could to not only publish it but make it as widely read as possible: every language, every country. Fuck your hurt feelings.

As it stands, I’m here, blogging about it. If you want to help, spread the word. Sign the petition. Don’t let them get away with this shit. You think this just stays in Hong Kong? Wake up. It sets a horrible precedent all over the globe.


This passage is from The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. He’s the guy who helped get Confederacy of Dunces published, which is how I knew about him and ended up reading The Moviegoer:

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but—” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However—” and I think to myself: this is death.

I felt the same way the other day at work, when people had a length discussion about whether Caitlyn Jenner still has a penis, and does this make him a man or a woman? I can’t even pretend to care about this shit.

 

TMQ is a douche

Some people think that writers who refer to themselves in the third person cannot write anything worth reading.

Gregg Easterbrook, “the Tuesday Morning Quarterback”, has done little to prove them wrong:

“The Dark Knight” — TMQ’s nominee for the worst motion picture ever made — used Chicago for its location shots of Gotham City. The 2012 sequel, “The Dark Knight Rises” — I am guessing Warner Brothers won’t invite me to a preview — uses Pittsburgh and New York to stand in for Gotham. Two American cities couldn’t be more different physically than pancake-flat Manhattan and hilly Pittsburgh. But hey, it’s a movie.

You’re right, it is a movie. What the hell do you think? Stop production — Pittsburgh and Manhattan look different! Now they have to go back, pick one and shoot the entire movie there. Thanks Gregg, you’ve saved Warner Bros. millions of dollars with your brilliance. Not to mention embarrassment when savvy moviegoers like yourself point out that in different shots, THE CITY LOOKS DIFFERENT!

Look dipshit, if they were truly going for realism, they’d build a fucking city and call it Gotham. What a douche.