Progress, Regress, Egress

I've been preparing for a conference and trying to get some other things done recently, so I've had little time or attention for the CR. However, I will get a few things down here just to keep track of what I'm up to.

I started a post last week about the release of Ghostface Killah's new album Fishscale and the show he performed at the Roxy on the 6th. The album is fantastic, "best since Supreme Clientele," as the chorus of praise has been saying. If this isn't the best album of the year, it'll be a great year. Cop it, if you haven't already.

I'm reading about 50 books right now. I keep starting new ones without finishing the last one, although I haven't resolved to give up on most of them. I started The Da Vinci Code awhile ago, but haven't returned to it after about 100 pages read before going to sleep. So far, it's pretty boring. Dan Brown's recent legal troubles have been more interesting. I'm also in the middle of several other novels and a typically long list of work-related books. I had to write a textbook review the other day, so that meant putting some other things aside for a moment.

I got the latest dispatch from the Shatner DVD Club the other day, Stuart Gordon's overlooked (at least by me) King of the Ants. I'd spotted the movie on the new release wall at the video store, but never picked it up despite Stuart Gordon's name on the box. It's not really horror, and from its description looked to be another of the endless movies about drifters and punks on the margins of the underworld who have some kind of ill-advised brush with organized crime. I'm not often in the mood for those things. To my surprise, KotA wasn't that bad. It has an obvious "based on the novel" feel to it due to the voice-over narrative and other sequences that provide perfect opportunities for interior reflection by the main character, so it should surprise no one that it's based on a novel (also written by the screenwriter.) It's no great prize, but not terrible. Certainly much better than Venom, a Netflix rental I watched earlier this week for some reason. I recall this movie getting some kind of modest theatrical release, which is pretty sad.

I saw early this week that Stanley Fish opened his new blog on the NYT website with a defense of Antonin Scalia's recent comments that I already dismissed in an earlier post. Only someone as sophistic as Fish could possibly come up with a position as knuckleheaded as this one. Today I notice that he doubles back sort of to take issue with Scalia's larger position with regard to constitutional interpretation. This post is no more coherent, but at least it has the virtue of being serious. By that I mean "not frivolous," rather than "worthy of deep consideration." As someone who has taught constitutional law and theory, I find it astonishing that he has somehow acquired a posting as a law prof, since he demonstrates no familiarity with many of the issues of legal exegesis. He also attributes a defnition to originalism that's idiosyncratic, to say the least. The idiosyncracy is an especially curious one since after defining originalism, he treats textualism (correctly) as an approach to interpretation that would also fit his definition of originalism.