Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby?

This delightful book by Allyson Beatrice puts the lie to the idea that online communities are real communities, that they don’t foster actual human-to-human connections, and that fandom is comprised of pasty-faced auto-erotics who have no life between eps of their favorite shows.

Did I go too far?

Beatice’s introduction to life among the fen was by means of the world of Buffy and Angel, and her anecdotes come from that particular fandom.  I’m not personally into the whole vampire thing, my original addiction was “ALIAS.”  I’m not going to tell you how badly into it I was but it was pretty damned bad.

Here’s the thing.  Common interests are common interests.  Until not very long ago, if you just looooved a television show, you might be able to discuss it briefly with one or two people in your immediate geographic vicinity.  The internet has made it possible to share the squee with viewers all over the world.

How is that isolating?

Exactly.  It isn’t.

Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby; True Adventures in Cult Fandom isn’t filled with profoundly heavy insights – but it does have some inspiring ones into the generosity of strangers, and I’d like to recommend the chapter “The Internet Wants Your Daughters” to nervous parents, and the chapters “The Bronze is Dead, Long Live the Bronze,” and “Save Firefly” to fans who want to get an accurate idea how message boards and the industry work.

Beatrice has a light touch, liberal doses of snark, and great insight.  This is a smooth, enjoyable read and I highly recommend it.

To Baghdad and Beyond; How I Got Born Again in Babylon by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

This book is part memoir, part travelogue, part polemic that splits again between religion and politics, and it serves as an introduction to the concept of the New Monasticism.  It does a lot for such a slender volume.  Enough is being said in various venues about the New Monasticism, and I want to approach that topic in a separate review.  There is a sense in which the book is also and apologia, both for going to Iraq and for the manner of life the Wilson-Hartgroves and some friends of theirs (an ever-widening group) have chosen.

I also should say now that I know Jonathan and Leah Wilson-Hartgrove, and have many times been on the receiving end of the generous hospitality at Rutba House.

To Baghdad and Beyond begins with the concept of needing to be Born Again, and with the assumption that the reader knows what that’s all about and agrees.  Not all Christians subscribe to the concept.  I fall into the group that doesn’t, at least not in the sense meant, so I felt not part of the intended audience.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Every book has to be written toward a particular readership.  Most books never find their way out of their target audience.

All the faith groups who now practice adult or believer’s baptism exclusively can trace their roots (whether they know it or not) to the Anabaptists, derived from the Greek for “re-baptizers.”  Adult baptism typically (but not always) goes hand-in-hand with the concept of being born again.

In its attempt to base indiviudal and corporate life on the positive evidence of the Bibile, the 16th century Anabaptist movement choseto shun infant baptism in favor of adult baptism because all the specifically mentioned baptisms in the Christian Scriptures are baptisms of adults.  (Or they seem to be of adults.  I will argue that the phrase “She was baptized and her household with her,” [Acts 16:15] could logically be construed to include any infants or children who might have been present, especially since parents were considered to have absolute, life-and-death kind of control over their children at the time.)

To say the Bible should be the basis of your life begs the question, “Which Bible?”  (Please, let that stimulate your own research.)  It also ignores the historical fact that the Christian Scriptures were written by, to and for already-existing faith communities.

Part of the historic dispute over infant baptism versus adult baptism has to do with the peculiarly Christian idea called Original Sin.  The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox understanding of the doctrine (which are the same and have historical precedence) is crucially different from the Protestant concept, rooted in certain writings by St. Augustine of Hippo which were declared heretical by the Church authorities of the day.  Does this make St. Augustine wrong?  Good question.  It’s possible to look at the discernment process of the Early Church as less an exploration for Truth and more of a consensus of belief.

In the section describing his earliest faith-life, Jonathan says his youth minister, Andy Oliver, asked him what he thought it meant to give his life to Christ, and that he gave an answer that satisfied Andy.  Since Jonathan was only seven at the time this happened, I’d like to know what he said, what the conversation contained.  That would have been more interesting to me than the anecdote about the water glass.

And I’m spending a lot of time on this being Born Again and Baptism stuff because so much of the modern American Church will tell you, “That is the conversion experience, that’s it, the end.”  All done, once and for all.  Therefore, I was quite pleasantly surprised to read Wilson-Hartgrove speak more than once about conversion as a non-ending process, and that he tells us in the subtitle about a particular rebirth, not the only conversion experience he ever had, or that he doesn’t expect to keep on having them.  Every time I came across this concept in the book, I said a little “Yay” under my breath.

The profound irony that Wilson-Hartgrove served as an intern for one of the most conservative – not to mention hawkish – United States Senators ever to hold office (Strom Thurmond, R-SC), and took the post because he aspired to attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis is sadly left unexplored.  His choice instead to attend Eastern University has affected many lives beyond his own, including mine.  I’ve gone over the little bit that’s there several times, and each time, I ask the book for more, please, only it isn’t there.  I very much wanted to understand this critical shift in ways that weren’t made available to me.  I wanted the same transparency here that can be found in other parts of the book.

As foundation for the choice to go to Baghdad, Wilson-Hartgrove gives some discussion to the history of the concept of the Just War, an idea that became necessary to the Church after it merged with the Roman Empire, which was about nothing if not war.  And road building, which was helpful in the war thing.  There is ambiguity throughout this section, good reflection of the tension between the desire to be good citizens under civil authority and the desire to be first and foremost good citizens of a kingdom not of this world.  The book is not a systematic presentation of any sort of theology, it’s an account of real experience, and real experience is messy.

Wilson-Hartgrove talks about our need to repent as a nation for our complicity in events like Saddam Hussein “gassing his own people,” as part of his own struggle to decide how he felt about the approaching war and how he should respond to it, and to the evident need to free the Iraqi people from a cruel despot.

In the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the Hostage Crisis, during the war between Iran and Iraq, when Saddam Hussein was our Flavor-of-the-Month, when we were funding and supplying arms to Iraq because we didn’t want the Islamic Revolution to move beyond the borders of Iran.  If you weren’t around then, or perhaps not old enough to be paying attention, it’s difficult to appreciate the depth of anger everyone in the US felt toward Iran at the time. It was during this larger war that the Kurdish population of Iraq chose to provide the Iranians with a sort of rear-guard, guerrilla, one might even call it terrorist, action.

Saddam gassed insurgent members of a specific political group who were working actively within the borders of his country in support of a foreign enemy during a time of war.  And we were actively supporting the Iraqi military in the war against Iran at the time.   So, yes, to the extent that one feels this action to have been immoral or sinful, and to the extent that one feels to have been a participant in that action (taxes and whatnot), it’s legitimate to call us as individual citizens to repentance.

But also, while you’re assessing that situation, imagine that we were at war with Canada and the Francophone population of  Maine decided to fight on the side of Canada in hopes of eventually forming a unified, resurrected “Acadia.”  (I made that up.  There never was an actual nation-state called “Acadia.”)

We’d probably do something about it.  Hopefully something less draconian, but still, we would do something.  Any government would do something to quash an uprising within its own borders.

In 1985, our elected representational Government deemed it to be in our interest to help Saddam stop the Kurds (whom he had in fact betrayed and who were therefore slightly pissed) from joining with invading Iranian forces.  Seventeen years later, in 2002, The Powers That Were deemed it to be in our interest to use a revisionist version of the events of 1985 to create supportive public opinion here at home and to fire up Kurdish support for our troops as they invaded.

Wilson-Hartgrove buys into the gassing as an example of Saddam’s despotic rulership, which underlay the concept of needing to remove him from power, and comes close to endorsing the legitimacy of other nation-states taking some form of action to do so.  Most of us did, at the time, accept this statement and there’s no reason in any case to think of Saddam as a nice man.   His objection to the war itself seems at times based primarily on the action not rising to the standards of a Just War than on the more-to-be-expected categorical opposition to war that might be expected from a burgeoning Mennonite.  In doing so, he lets the text transparently reflect his own changing attitudes.  There’s a vulnerability to the telling of this story.

Practically speaking, and this is me now, once you begin to question the authority of the earthly state, you begin to move down a slope that’s more terraced than slippery, but which requires you to decide where that authority should stop.  If you oppose the power of the state to make war and exert the death penalty, do you also say the State has no business saying it’s own grace over marriage, for example?  Legal marriage, after all, is more about property than anything else, in that property passes down in lines that are declared legally legitimate.  If you’re abjuring or perhaps limiting the concept of personal property and private ownership of property (in the sense that led to Proudhon’s pronouncement that “Property is theft”), then you have to go back and ask the question again.

So there is this tension, for the pacifist, that cannot be resolved, between being a good citizen and being in opposition to a fundamental function of the state – any state, under any system – of the use of force to maintain order, and the extent to which the state can or should insert itslef into thelives of the citizenry.  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just acknowleging it, and the intense scrutiny it brings to bear on an individual’s choices and actions.

The other thing the Anabaptists accurately brought forward is the awareness that to be Christian is to be different from being anything else.   Where this awareness shines out in To Baghdad and Beyond is in the willingness of the Wilson-Hartgroves (Jonathan wrote the book, but Leah is not to be over looked – she is a formidable woman), and the others whom they meet along the way, to put themselves in places of danger – to put not their money where their mouth is, but their bodies.

Speaking of which, Wilson-Hartgrove describes visiting the tomb of Oscar Romero, and says “To the people of Ecuador, Oscar Romero was a saint.”  As true as this is, it’s worth noting that Romero’s Cause for canonization is stalled largely because there is the sense on the part of the Vatican that Romero’s death was more political assassination than martyrdom.  For my money, being shot while celebrating Mass because your faith leads you to take positions that are disliked by the powers that be  is fairly close to the modern equivalent of a crucifixion.  If Romero’s death doesn’t count as martyrdom because of the political elements, it seems logical that you must also re-visit your ideas about Jesus’ death at the hands of the Roman Empire.

Does God call us to obey the law of the land?  Good question.  I can point out that it was the ability to call on this Biblical principle that made possible the “banality of evil” so beautifully documented by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem.  (If you haven’t read that most-excellent and important book, it should be the very next thing you do.)  Does God in the Bible call us to question earthly authority?  Which earthly authorities?   Perhaps you should come to own conclusion.

Working with various groups, Jonathan and Leah finally make it to Iraq, along the way meeting people like Marty Jenko, who provides a profound lesson about forgiveness and gratitude.

From this point on, the reasons for going, the reasons for acting, and choosing, are woven into the narrative, we are out of exposition and into the course of events, and this is the best part of the book.  It should have  started there, and brought the other elements in through the course of the narrative, but this is a first book, and Wilson-Hartgrove is most concerned to explain to his target audience how a good boy from King, North Carolina wound up going to Iraq just as we began to bomb the place.

The brief discussion of Ghandi further provides proof that the Church (at least in America) is in deep trouble.  To whom can we look for the most effective example of the implementation of the non-violence preached by Jesus?  Not to any living Christian leader I know of.   Martin Luther King, Jr., was  by his own admission influenced as much by Ghandi as he was by Jesus, but to Ghandi, a man who accepted Jesus’ teachings but rejected the Church that claimed to follow Jesus.

I found interesting Wilson-Hartgrove’s reaction to the same assurance received from two different sources.  One, a trusted friend of like mind, who assures the team that God will take care of them.  Another from a friend who worked at the Pentagon (therefore, not of like mind) who, when Jonathan called to tell him what they were about to do, assures him the same thing, in the same words, “God will take care of you.”

In one of the more dramatic moments in the narrative this assurance gets tested.  It puzzles me that Wilson-Hartgrove does not consider that God takes care of them in the situation precisely through the instrument of the friend at the Pentagon.

I am fascinated by the phrase “abandonment to reality,” which can be found as part of the narrative I’m trying not to describe in detail.   The Western religions tend to assume first of all that there is such a thing as ontological reality, and that God has something to do with that ontological reality such as having thought it up and keeping it running in ways that are according to his will (they also have in common that the creator of reality is to be spoken of in masculine terms).  It follows, in this model, that to abandon oneself to reality is to abandon oneself to the God who runs it.  Anyone who chooses to follow a man who got himself nailed to a cross can’t expect that sort of abandonment to guarantee personal safety.

Most important, though, is Wilson-Hartgrove’s realization, sitting there in the desert, that while he had book-knowledge of God, he had yet to meet God in those “dark places where we must go,” to paraphrase an old Egyptian blessing.

Frankly, it is impossible to meet God, whoever and whatever God is, anywhere else.

There is some awkward struggling with metaphors from the Psalms.  This could have been left out, but it also shows a young mind trying to reconcile some things that ultimately can’t be reconciled.  In terms of the writing as writing, the attempt to entwine allegory and reality doesn’t quite get where it wants to be, at least not for me, and Wilson-Hartgrove does best in this text when he’s simply telling the story.  What does work, and rather beautifully, is Wilson-Hartgrove’s account of a fugue state under stress.

The core events of the narrative took place seven years ago.  In most cases, a narrative of this sort would gain a second life as a conversion story once the political incidents resolved themselves.  But the U. S. military is still in Iraq, nothing is resolved there, and the conversion hasn”t actually ended.

The rest of the book leads toward the early days in the formation of the New Monasticism movement.    I’m leaving that topic alone for now, as Wilson-Hartgrove has another book devoted entirely to the subject, and I need to know more before I go shooting my mouth off in a global venue.

The Rutba House as it is now is not the Rutba House as it is depicted at the end of To Baghdad and Beyond.  When I asked, Wilson-Hartgrove said he would not now use the phrase “Mennonite Worker” (which comes not from his own mouth in the text but is used in the text as a way of defining the nature of the place) to describe Rutba House.  Things evolve, and sometimes it takes a while to know what something is.

If you aren’t a professing Christian, To Baghdad and Beyond is worth your time as a look at what it was like to be on the receiving end of the actions covered so well by the embedded reporters.   By telling the story of entering Iraq, their time in Baghdad, and what happened in Rutba, Wilson-Hartgrove provides a perspective on the invasion we would never have gotten from the six o’clock news.

Ads for online viewing

Nice article over at tv by the numbers about the likely increase of ads shown during online viewing.

I’ve said this before, and almost everyone I know has said something similar.  I stopped watching shows on the television set precisely because the commercial breaks were so long and so jammed with messages and images that were unrelated to each other and the show that I could easily forget what I had been watching.

I can’t support illegal file sharing, but I do understand it and happily predict an upsurge of some measurable proportion if this plan goes through, along with a corresponding loss of viewers through online portals.  Or else folks will just wait however long it takes for the ad levels to drop, and then watch online, and then the nets will extend the number of days the full set of commercials are inserted, and ….

The ads pay for the shows.  Everyone (almost everyone) gets that.  But we also know how much damage extended advertisements do our sense of the narrative, and generally destroy the ability to enjoy the show with any sense of suspended disbelief.  And we know, individually, precisely how much of it we’re willing to put with.

White Collar

If you missed the premiere of “White Collar” Friday night, get on over to hulu and watch the best first episode I’ve ever seen.

The characters are clear-cut and recognizable but not hackneyed, with pitch-perfect casting.  I don’t have to imagine what the characters will be like once they’ve had a chance to gel – they’ve gelled.   The chemistry between Tim DeKay as veteran FBI agent Peter Burke and Matthew Bomer as Neal Caffrey fuels the show.  They play off each other’s lines, movements and energy like butter.

Each has a rapidly established homelife, Burke with wife Elizabeth, played by Tiffany-Amber Thiessen, and Caffrey as the stray taken in by rich widow June, played by Diahann Carroll.  Burke’s frustration with Caffrey’s easy access to material pleasures is counterbalanced by Caffrey’s frustration with the loss of the woman he loves, while Burke has a successful ten-year marriage to loyal and patient Elizabeth.  Caffrey’s loss of the love of his life sets up potential for a long arc underneath the episodic action.  Don’t let the concept scare you off – it’s going to be a very long arc, at least I hope it is, and even though Kate’s departure sets events in motion, her story line is capable of being developed, marginalized, or dropped altogether.  It is important primarily in that it gets Caffrey logically out of where he was and into the situation the writers (and we) want him to be in – partnered with Burke, and it sets up the primary reason for Burke to treat Caffrey with a dose of distrust.

Want a benchmark for “production quality?”  Right here.  You don’t often see this level of creative quality in terms of staging, lighting, cinematography and editing in a television show.  A movie, either, come to that.  It’s not only that the ideas are actually there, it’s that they’re effectively executed.  Look for a particularly smooth effect toward the end of the episode, using a simple camera pan and the way the light reflects from the chrome on a car door to direct the eye and transition the action from what you think is going to happen to what is really going to happen.  The surprises actually do surprise in this script without taking leaps of logic or throwing our sense of the characters out of whack.

Series Creator/Executive Producer Jeff Eastin has taken an established genre (mis-matched partners in police porcedural in major American Urban area) and given it new life, much like Caffrey in June’s late husband’s classic designer suits.

“White Collar” is on USA Network Friday nights at 10 pm Eastern, 9 Central.

What?

NBC, perhaps revealing why it canceled “Medium,” as the move seems to have been prescient, has canceled “Southland” before it even aired it’s first ep of the second season.

Since “Southland” is one of the best shows to come along in a long while and NBC seems bent of self destruction, this probably shouldn’t surprise me, and in a way it doesn’t, but still.

The good news is the show is being shopped.   Let’s hope it lands somewhere quality can get a little respect.

October 25 – Latest news is that there’s a strong possibility this show will be picked up by TNT.

I expected it to be CM vs SVU

Instead, they were both overtaken by  a pair of new comedies on ABC.  Here’s where you can read some actual data.

Why?

Hmmm – I can come up with a few reasons off the top of my head.

One – people generally enjoy laughing.

Two – SVU will repeat on Saturday, so instead of choosing whether to watch it, some viewers may have been choosing when.  Problem is, there’s not much of a way to know that.  Numbers don’t necessarily tell you much about viewing motivation.

Three – having DWTS on in front of you hurts nothing, even though the whole “lead-in” thingy is not what it used to be.

Four – Relative to how badly SVU did overall, it’s possible that there are viewers who didn’t know about the SVU move?  Weak, yeah.

Five – Shows that have a squeaky-clean exterior and massive slash potential will always do well.

Six – I know people who have never even watched SVU because they assume massive amounts of overt sexual content.  So, folks who come home from mid-week church service and sit down to confront their own suppressed dark side by watching CM (which is ghoulish but squeaky-clean in terms of sexual content and the Powers of Good always thwart the Powers of Evil in the end so it’s very reassuring while reinforcing the entire message of the mid-week church service and not requiring much in the way of thought) may not want to risk hearing about or seeing anything to do with sex, or being made to deal with ambiguity in life, and therefore didn’t give it a try.

They would, of course, be alarmed about the whole slash thing.

I don’t know.  It seems to me that, at some point this season, NBC either finds a way to turn itself around numbers-wise or the peacock winds up on somebody’s dinner table.

Flashforward

Strong potential for this “Lost” meets The Happening sci-fi show from Brannon Braga and David S. Goyer.  Joseph Fiennes is a pleasure to watch as he anchors the cast in this short preview, and other characters are engaging as well, though I hope to see John Cho settle down a little into his character as time passes.

Here’s a link to the seventeen minute preview at hulu.  The show premieres at 8 on the 24th, and then at nine you have to choose between “Criminal Minds” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

Community

Excellent new show.  Perfectly cast, sharp timing, very funny with some characters you can both imagine as real and see as larger-than-life.  Watch it.

Television, Politics, Reality –

I met Angela Davis two nights ago.  Hold up – don’t run away, this is a blog about television and books, and it’s going to stay that way.  We all know (those of us who are not in medically-induced comas) that both not only entertain and educate, but also shape the way we see the world around us .

Example – in an episode of “Law & Order” a character who is a black child tells a black police officer that “Everybody in the projects is crazy,” and the police officer takes this comment as if it were sad but true.  I sucked all the air out of the room.   It looks like a throwaway line, or maybe a shot at humor, but it’s actually not.

I attended a fundraiser for an organization called Critical Resistance (about which I know very little – and of that little, I agree with some things, and not with others, but that would be another blog.)   Dr. Davis, one of the founders of Critical Resistance, was the keynote speaker.  I went specifically because I wanted to see Dr. Davis, because I am old enough to remember her as major figure of the 1970’s, and because I hoped to tell her that her bid for national office (as slim a chance of success as it had) popped my young mind open in terms of the sorts of things women could do.  When someone does something nice for you you should thank them, even if it takes thirty years to get the chance.

Since much of the conversation that night had already been about impossible things being born into possibility, I asked Dr. Davis a question (after I said thank you).  I told her about this little blog and I wondered, if she could ask for one thing from those who were developing shows, not for this season just about to get underway, but for the one to follow, what would it be?

Photo by Amiris Brown

Dr. Davis thought for a moment, and said she would like to see shows not only that inspired us to think, but think deeply, shows that “Don’t assume reality is a done deal.”

I emphasize the statement because it has application in many areas of life.

And I thought later about some really amazing shows, “The Wire,”  “Southland,”  “Saving Grace” are examples but there are so many more, well-produced shows that do a fantastic job of showing us how things are.  (Yes – Earl the angel – that’s not the part of “Saving Grace” I’m talking about and you know it.)  Underlying them, though, is the unspoken belief that it isn’t just the way things are, it’s the way they always shall be.  Having said that, I have to stop and point out that “Saving Grace” actually is a show that is predicated on the potential for the radical change of the individual, for lives to take another course than the one that seems to be laid out for them with inevitability.

So, hoping I understand correctly, I’m going to agree with Dr. Davis, and push for more shows that give us some images of kids and adults who make better choices, shatter a few stereotypes, and make us think deeply.

All while keeping us entertained, of course.

A Poem, for Henry Gibson

He made me laugh

I don’t know why

perhaps the flower

or the sigh.

Most likey, though,

his gentleness

with which he saw

through all life’s mess.

The Meaning of Sarkozy by Alain Badiou

“If competition, the ‘free market’, the sum of little pleasures, and the walls that protect you from the desire of the weak, are the alpha and omega of all collective and private existence, then the human animal is not worth a cent.”

Alain Badiou is a leftist philosopher, whose work you should read perhaps especially if you anticipate disagreeing with his conclusions.

The book, The Meaning of Sarkozy, uses the election of the current President of France as a focal point for discussing ideas.  Thereby, Badiou manages to intersect two of my favorite things: politics and philosophy.  And he writes really well, too.

The difficulty faced, of course, in this sort of consideration, is that Badiou is deeply concerned with what he calls “the real,” and in politics, finding the real is like finding the net proceeds from a film.  Ça n’existe pas.

Badiou claims, I think correctly, that the distinctions we are used to, those of right and left, which arose from the political situation following the Second World War, are defunct.  What he suggests has replaced right and left is one kind of fear over/against another kind of fear.  The first kind of fear, the primal and used rather brilliantly by one party in the last US election cycle, is “essential:”

“This fear, conservative and gloomy, creates the desire for a master who will protect you, even if only while  oppressing and impoverishing you all the more.”

The second kind of fear is simply fear of the first and its logical if not inevitable consequences.

I will just tell you that I took a personal comfort in the passage in which Badiou refers to Lacan’s cure for depression: shifting from a sense of impotence to impossibility.

But what does this actually mean?  A number of things.  It means finding a real point to hold on to, whatever the cost.  It means no longer being in the vague net of impotence, historical nostalgia and the depressive component, but rather finding, constructing and holding onto a real point, which we know we are going to hold on to, precisely because it is a point uninscribable in the law of the situation, unanimously declared by the prevailing opinion to be both (and contradictorily) absolutely deplorable and completely impracticable, but which you yourselves declare that you are going to hold onto, whatever the cost; you are then in a position to raise impotence to impossibility.  If you hold onto a point such as this, then you become a subject bound to the consequences of what is unanimously held to be a crazy disaster and happily quite impossible, but to which you grant reality and thereby make yourselves an exception to the depressive syndrome.

Long quote.  Forgive me.  I find this concept of taking oneself out of the context of being the object of a situation over which one has no control and choosing to be the subject of a “sentence” one writes for oneself deeply liberating on a personal level.  If your life has ever gone to pieces rapidly and unpredictably, this sort of idea is actually rather useful, without regard to anything else in the book.

But I digress.

The core of the book can be found in the chapter “Only One World,” with which I must argue that while Badiou is correct in principle, in fact, there is not one world, there are at least two.  I move back and forth between them every day.    I agree, however, that it is this construction of the two (at least) worlds, and the reinforcement of their literal and ideological existence that creates much of the agony in the world today, while promising more tomorrow.   (I was reminded of Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of Guilty Bystander as I read this chapter.  The second world, the world of deprivation, is the direct construction, the denied child, of the first, or at least of the first as it presently exits.)

ETA:  Here is how to tell if you livein the First World or the Second.  If you think of anything smaller than a twenty dollar bill as useless wallet-clutter, You are a First World resident.  If a Twenty (oranything larger) is useless to you, you live in the Second world.

Badiou is a damned smart man, and I hope I’ve done his concpets justice.  As I say – this book is worth reading because it will make you think, never a bad thing.  Re-examining our preconceptions  is a very healthy activity.

A Little Bit of TV Talk

First, apologies for the long absence.

If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.

Okay – set your calendars for September 24th – because that will be the day we know how “Law and Order:SVU” holds up against “Criminal Minds,” both of which have their Fall premieres that night.

This may be the one show that can actually put a dent in CM’s armor.  Personally, I think SVU is the better show.  Hope it does well.

zap2it has a list of ten shows you just gotta, gotta see.  Out of this list, I pick two -

“The Good Wife.”  The names Julianna Margulies, Chris Noth and Christine Baranski are reason enough for me to tune in.  That the show has a solid premise  offering tons of room for decent scripts is just icing.  Wait – did I say just icing?

The other show I’m looking forward to (with caution) is “Community” on NBC, largely because it gives me a chance to watch Chevy Chase again.  My caution comes entirely from the fact that it’s on NBC.

I hate I’ve had to ignore summer.  But much of it has been ignorable – except – “Burn Notice,” “Saving Grace,” “In Plain Sight” – all of them awesome.  Wish I had time to do them justice.

Back soon with a book for you.

The Animal Dialogues; Uncommon Encounters in the Wild by Craig Childs

I’ve been reading this book slowly, as if I were on a desert island and it was my last chocolate bar.

In The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild Childs brings a series of essays about meeting animals in their natural setting, without romanticism or condescension, and there’s no anthropomorphizing, either. The animals he discusses are entirely themselves, and they belong to no one. His writing is vivid, clear, and engaging, filled with metaphor that makes the narrative sing. The stories themselves are in each case interesting, and emotionally engaging. The story Dog left me angry with Childs for a few days. The story Raven will challenge every preconception you have about birds, animals in general, and the questionable uniqueness of humans and a sense of the sacred.

Delving into this book is more than just reading, it’s opening your life to the natural world around us, the one we (supposedly) came from in the first place.

Serenity could fly again (maybe)

Nick C in his blog shares information that there’s some buzz among those with the ability to make it happen over potential future for “Firefly.” No, specifically this would not be a full-fledged resurrection of the series, but it could mean a mini-series or a made-for-tv-movie. These options are within the realm of possibility, even given the current commitments of cast members to other projects. If you are a fan of “Firefly,” this is exciting news.

Never watched “Firefly?” Hulu is making the entire run available now.

Terminator:Afterthoughts

The choice by FOX to cancel “Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles” seems prescient in light of the first weekend’s box office for T4. In the US, Terminator:Salvation grossed under $54 million Friday-Sunday, just over $67 million if you include the early Thursday viewings.

This barely covers Warner Bros.’ investment. It also doesn’t include overseas ticket sales, and it’s just one weekend, albeit the first weekend. Numbers from next weekend could show the impact of positive word-of-mouth. Slow out of the gate isn’t great but, as in horse racing, what matters is how you finish.

In comparison, the weekend leader, Night at the Museum:Battle of the Smithsonian, grossed an estimated $70 million. While T4 was on fewer screens, it took in less per venue, not including the Thursday showings. If you include the Thursday revenue, T4 did better per venue, but still was in second place overall.

It’s worth noting that all these numbers are all preliminary. They came from Variety.com. I did a little math on my own.

It’s BACK!!!!

“So You Think You Can Dance” returned tonight with a two-hour premiere, and just this first night of auditions brought some beauty, art and courage to the screen.

In comparison to previous season, there was little in the way of the outright ridiculous (I use the word in its original sense: worthy of ridicule, but really, light sabres?), and enough amazing work to make me hopeful this will be the best competition so far.

My own promo

“Southland” is a new show on NBC. An ensemble series, it shows us something of the lives, both professional and private, of several LA police officers, some in uniform, some detectives. The cast is excellent across the board, right down to the bit parts, and the stories are interesting and complex. The episode that ran this past Thursday gives a good feel for all of the characters and their individual story lines. It also contains some interesting themes of modern city life. It’s a worthwhile way to spend about 43 minutes of your time.

In this episode, Det. Daniel Salinger (Michael McGrady) is involved in an automobile accident on his way back from dinner with his mistress. When his car hits a telephone pole and the airbag deploys, Det. Salinger is left disoriented. The occupants of the other car, gang bangers as it happens, take the opportunity to steal his wallet and gun. From here we watch the detectives work toward recovering Salinger’s gun, making important discoveries along the way. Alongside this story are the tales of an unfortunate exhibitionist and a frustrating shift for Cooper and Sherman.

I fear a misimpression

I spoke earlier about “Southland” and the confusion between what it seemed it was going to be and what it seems actually to be.

Personally, I like what it is. I have seldom enjoyed anything more than I enjoy watching Regina King develop a brilliantly written, strong, multi-dimensional female character. And, since this isn’t ABC, I feel I can relax with her. The character is not going to suddenly lose 86% of her body mass and start running around in lacy underwear for no apparent reason. Det. Lydia Adams is a recognizable human being with more than one side to her personality, more than one emotion; she’s interesting and I want the show to give me time to get to know her.

The same is true of other characters. There are no characters on “Southland” who let you take a neutral stance toward them. You either like them or you really don’t. That’s the result of good writing and good acting and the magic that happens between the two.

The issue, for me and I suspect others, is that the excellent show that “Southland” is is not the excellent show that was promoted. I for one would have tuned in if they’d told me the truth. But that’s just me. Even so, I like the show well enough to stick around, even though it is not “the story of a young cop from a rich neighborhood in his rookie year.” This is not, “What if Carter was a cop?”

Maybe it’s better. But, just as you can’t deliver six-wheeled widgets when the customer ordered widgets with four wheels, you can’t bait and switch one premise for another, even if the one you actually deliver is better than promised. There are only so many times you can get away with that before the kids just won’t come out and play with you anymore, and NBC is just about there.

What CBS and FOX Do Right That NBC Does Wrong

Both FOX and CBS (especially CBS) follow a very simple process in developing shows:

• Develop a clean premise that communicates itself well and allows for multiple explorations over time. (I said simple, not easy.)
• Build your show on that premise in a coherent way. This means that all elements of the show (characters, set, scripts, direction) serve the premise, and no one takes it upon themselves to reinvent the concept to serve their own agenda.
• Tell your potential audience in a direct and honest manner what the show is going to be about.
• Leave it in one time-slot over the course of its run within the season.
• Let the show succeed or fail as what it is.

NBC has a consistent record of developing good shows. Then expecting them to perform in unrealistic ways, then massaging the components of the premise, then moving the now unrecognizable show all over the schedule, then running promos that have little resemblance to what finally airs.

Sad News

Dom Deluise died today. He was a funny, funny man, and very nice, too, even to people most would consider insignificant.

Laughter is a great way to honor his memory. There’s lots of good video on the internet with his work. Go find some.

Southland Renewed

That’s the good news. This is an excellent show and can be fun to watch.

Therein lies the key to the ratings issue. It can be fun to watch. It can also be thought-provoking, sometimes it’s both at once. But here’s the thing about the thought-provoking aspect: “Southland” is not on cable.

I loved the pilot. It did a good job of introducing the broad cast of characters and keeping a fast pace. But also thought I was buying into a series about a young patrolman that would have lots of pathos and lots of action. Since then, we’ve had the majority of focus on the detectives. These are fascinating characters, deftly written and superbly portrayed. There’s no character on this show I have a neutral reaction to. But I didn’t think I was signing on for another detective-oriented, ploddy-paced procedural.

So, two problems, the first being too many characters with too many ancillary characters, too many backstories, too diffuse a focus. You don’t know what you’re tuning in for from one week to the next.

Second, pace. Shaky camera movements and quick cuts cannot replace actual forward movement conveyed in a way that gets the viewer’s adrenaline flowing, and sadly this kind of movement is not the movement of the plot. It’s action, pure and simple. I felt engaged in this way only in the two episodes so far that focused on the patrol officers. The detective-oriented episodes have been engaging to me because I enjoy watching fine acting, and you can see plenty to that here, but they are very different in tone and feel from the patrol episodes. It’s as if you’re watching two different series.

Another ratings issue may be that the series is consistently promoted with the face of Ben McKenzie, an actor with an established fan base, who has had significant screen time in only two of the four episodes to air so far.

So, clean this stuff up: tighter pace, more honest promos – oh, wait, this is NBC. Well, okay, then, tighter pace. That’s a start.

Masterpiece Mystery begins a new season on May 10th

If you aren’t familiar with the series of detective novels by Henning Mankel focusing on Swedish detective Kurt Wallender, you’re about to have a new favorite detective. If you are, you’ll be parked in front of your tv for each of the three episodes of “Wallender,” starring Kenneth Branagh in the title role.

Also up are new Agatha Christie and the return of Robbie Lewis.

Take a look:

More mumbling

We all say “ratings determine renewal or cancellation,” but only because ratings for live viewing have always been the gold standard of measurement for profitability. It isn’t the ratings that matter so much as the profitability they have always indicated.

It’s the same thing as if they were selling widgets. Profit is the difference between what it cost you to make the widgets and what people pay you for them. If you want more profit than you’re getting, you either find ways to lower the cost or increase sales price. Either one will make the difference between the two numbers bigger. We’ve seen this happen with candy bars: Don’t raise the price, make the bar a little smaller. Can’t get more money per commercial? Film less show and sell more ads at the same price. This is brilliant because it hits both sides of the equation as it reduces all production costs except cast salary, while it also increases gross income.

Until recently, the only income stream for the network from any programming has been ad revenue based on ratings for live viewing. This is not the sole verifiable income stream for anything anymore. Besides the ratings-based ad revenues, there are the other income streams, by themselves insignificant, but collectively, maybe not.

TSCC — as an example – has had, besides ratings for live viewing, ratings for DVR viewings, gross revenues for two seasons of DVD sales, viewings on hulu and other online portals, plus episode purchases. It’s also had at least one subsidy from the production company to the network. All these revenue streams factor into the only thing that matters: Profitability.

What’s most different, though, is FOX seems to actually grasp the concept.

If TSCC isn’t renewed on the basis of the whole picture, it won’t be long before something is.

Oh, wait, NBC renewed “Friday Night Lights” because of a subsidy. My bad.

Congrats to "Mad Men"

On receiving the 2009 BAFTA for Best International Show.

YouTube could become your Tube

Variety is reporting a new deal signed by YouTube (owned by Google, what isn’t?) and several content providers for full-length television episodes and movies, offered for free viewing, on YouTube, totally legit.

Sony, among the content providers signing on with YouTube, wants more traffic for crackle.com. That’s cool, we all want more traffic. But minisodes of “She-Ra” and Johnny Mnemonic won’t going to attract traffic in volume, imo. (Neither is posting a link to the movie Quantum of Solace that actually takes you to the trailer for the movie.) That said, there are some interesting titles at crackle.com, and I’m sure there are people who enjoy “She-Ra” and Johnny Mnemonic, and I hope I haven’t offended them, the cast, or anyone else. Anyway, it’s like Peggy Hill said: “Choose your Pick.” (Or was that “Pick your Choose”?)

What this news is really is another link in the chain forging before our eyes – the gradual shift of viewing content from the small screen to the smaller screen, and the liberty to watch what you want to watch, when it’s convenient for you to watch it.

They just have to figure out a way to (a) make us pay for it, and (b) decide who’s winning.

TSCC as a case in point

Yes, I have a page that’s dedicated to the series “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” Yes, I know there are many who are saying the ratings are soooo terrible. Keep reading, please.

Let’s look at the Neilsen numbers for the last, oh, eight weeks, and see 3.85 million total viewers watching TSCC on average, with an average 1.2 million in the 18-49 demographic. These are averages of publicly available numbers, and my math is my math but also dependent on the accuracy of those publicly available numbers. I haven’t tried to average the audience share in the 18-49 demo, but TSCC was 4th in the timeslot until four weeks ago, when it moved up to third in the demo behind “Ghost Whisperer” and “Wife Swap,” and stayed there.

For comparison, “Ghost Whisperer” averaged 9.94 million viewers over the six weeks it was on air during the last 8 weeks with 2.33 million on average in the 18-49 demo. “Wife Swap” on ABC averaged 4.63 million total viewers over the eight weeks, with 1.475 in the 18-49 demo.

The only thing that will damage GW’s position at the top of the list is if Jennifer Love Hewitt starts wearing clothes. No offense, I have watched and enjoyed the show but wouldn’t choose it over an ep of TSCC, nor would I go out of my way to find the time to see it.

Predictions of cancellation are, in my opinion, premature.

The networks and production companies know how many DVD sets are selling, they know how many times an episode is viewed through legitimate online portals, they know about downloads from Amazon and iTunes. We don’t.

This is where a show like TSCC has a potential unknown capacity to surprise us, especially because the likely audience is going to be open to watching in a non-traditional fashion.

The demo that focuses on viewers aged 18-49 is huge, and the spread is more than just chronological age. The people I know on the younger end of the spectrum watch tv in a very different way than the folks I know on the upper end. (Granted, my social circle does not constitute a staticially significant sample.) The older viewers tend to actually sit down and watch television, the device in the living room, and they watch what’s on. The younger viewers are more focused on the shows themselves, on the content, and they’ll watch those shows on the television, but often not live, or they’ll watch online. I know people who record when they could watch, sometimes to be able to skip the commercials, sometimes because they know they’re going to want to see it more than once. I know one person who subscribed to the Netflix streaming video service that works with her X-Box purely so she could watch “CSI” whenever she felt like it and she feels like it a lot.

At some point, it will become necessary for Neilsen, or whoever replaces Neilsen because they are vulnerable on this very point, to find ways to assess the viewing habits of the non-traditional viewer, because that demo is the one that’s going to grow, without respect to age or income. Group me in with those who say that TSCC is a great case in point for the existence of this demo. “Heroes” goes here as well. So do shows that have content of high enough quality that you’ll watch the episode a second or third time (“CSI,” “Medium,” SVU, “House,” as examples).

Reality shows will always have the edge in terms of keeping viewers in their seats for live viewing, especially when they also broadcast live. If you’ve ever tried to record a sporting event and keep yourself unspoiled until you had time to see the tape, then fought against the sense that it doesn’t matter how loudly you yell at the tv, it’s over already – you know why. This, in combination with the comparative low cost of producing them, keeps reality shows forever in our viewing future. We’d watch people compete against each other to carry an egg in a spoon if there was money on the line.

Scripted shows, though, need to be produced from now on with an awareness of the potential for multiple viewings and viewing through multiple media. Realize, too, that multiple viewings are the stronger indicator of audience loyalty, and that multiple viewings make for a strong case for product placement over/against traditional advertising. There are lots of ways to get at the golden egg.

At least some of the viewers of shows like TSCC and “Heroes” produce a demographic that isn’t confined or defined by age, income, educational level but by viewing method. It’s new.

Get used to it.

Farewell to “Life”

A lovely bow out. Thanks to everyone involved for two seasons of a terrific show. I really liked this cast, and hope to see all of them again soon.

House

Yes, I know I have an actual “House” page.

But when I see an episode like this one, which is entertaining, faithful to the premise yet innovative, superbly done, and provides some actual food for thought, well, I want to invite people to watch it.

Southland

The first episode is available for web viewing, series premieres next week on NBC at ten pm, in the slot held for so long by “ER.” (Moment of silence.)

What did I think? Imagine “The Shield” from the pov of the uniformed cops, only not on cable. You will recognize at least one location. The script was good – very well-paced dialog, the acting also, the photography and all the little things that tell me the director (Christopher Chulack, who worked with John Wells on “ER” and “Third Watch”) is a talented man.

It’s not for kiddies.

The cast is extremely good, very well-suited to the roles, and I saw not just one or two characters I’d like to know more about but several. Michael Cudlitz has in the pilot alone created a character you can’t feel neutral about – some viewers will love him, others will despise him, but I doubt many will feel like shrugging. Ben MacKenzie is also very good, effortlessly moving from – well, nah. Just watch it. (Or the related videos that will show up when the ep is pulled.)

Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson

Gerald Sampers, long-time resident of Tuscany, has had his home fall down the side of the mountain where it was formerly perched, and on his birthday. He and his guests just happened to notice the garage had gone and got themselves out in time. The following day, while surveying the damage from a helicopter, Sampers makes an offhand remark that’s taken much too seriously by the helicopter pilot. The consequences are as bizarre as they are far-reaching, and the end result is an opera you will wish you could actually see and won’t soon forget.

Sampers is the narrator of most of Rancid Pansies. He’s also a writer, a cook, and a delightfully arch critic of the world around him. As a narrator, he’s distinctly unreliable. As a social critic, he’s capable of delivering insightful observations so sharp you could cut yourself on them, without ever becoming base. It’s a neat trick, I’m not sure how he does it. At the same time, I was never sure if he (the character) was being deliberately thick for the sake of humor when he took a sign at a local church for a Pilates class as being a casting call for an upcoming Passion play, or if Samper really does live a life as récherché as that.

As a cook – well. Don’t read the first part while you’re eating, promise?

Hamilton-Paterson’s style is nothing short of brilliant. Anyone who can combine the phrases “Dernier cri” and “Blowing chunks” properly in a single sentence has my admiration.

Rancid Pansies is utterly hilarious, and it makes a point or two. Don’t miss it.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Sarah Jane Gilman

When I was in college, two friends and I decided we wanted to go to Ireland after we graduated. We figured we could save up enough for Ireland. The plan was to bake bread, which we would then sell at the weekly Farmer’s market in the city where we lived. We started while we were Freshmen, so we had time.

One of us baked exclusively with large amounts of honey. She made everything with large amounts of honey. Her vanilla ice cream was like congealed honey and it was almost impossible to make my throat accept it.

Her bread didn’t sell very well.

Then she decided that, as long as we were in Ireland, we might as well see Venice, too.

We pointed out to her that Venice not in Ireland, also not cheap. (Ireland at the time was very cheap, which was part of why we had chosen it.) She found our vision limited. We stopped spending time together socially. The last time I saw her, she had switched to using maple syrup instead of honey.

My other friend and I abandoned the plan. I forget why.

So you can understand why this particular book caught my eye. Here were two young women who actually made it! They stuck to their plan and saved the money, they got on the plane. They landed alone in a foreign country and set out to blaze a trail of self-discovery.

What happens, of course, is not what they planned, and I use the word loosely. In some ways, this is a story of how not to travel overseas unless you, like Blanche DuBois, feel that relying on the kindness of strangers is a life-strategy. For all that, there’s a lot here about personal courage, and self-discovery.

The girls did one very terrible thing, which Gilman has the courage to describe in plain language, without trying to convince you it was somehow okay, nor does she attempt to rationalize her own actions at the time. I respect her for that. You will know what I’m talking about when you get there, and I can only assure you that you will leave the book with some sense of balance having been restored. How you feel about that is a mirror you can use to your own benefit, if you’re so inclined.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven is part bildungsroman, part travelogue, with a healthy balance between the introspective and the descriptive. If you don’t want to get on the next plane to Guilin Province when you read her description of it, you aren’t human.

Gilman avoids caricature in her delineations of the other travelers she met on her trip, while making them as vividly quirky as only humans can be. There’s not a shred of simplification of the people or the cultures she encountered. Gilman made me laugh out loud, and she made me cry. She builds tension at a lovely pace, suspends it and puts you down in an appropriate manner.

Sarah Jane Gilman is a very good writer, and she has something to say that’s worth paying attention to.

I hope you’ll take the opportunity to enjoy this book.

The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano

T. S. Eliot wrote

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This debut novel has three basic things to recommend it: A clear, consistent voice in the person of the protagonist, nice clean prose, and nice clean vocabulary.

I don’t personally have an issue with words we tend to call profanity, when they’re used in appropriate ways and not to the point of boredom, but I also think it’s all too rare to read something that’s both adult and something you could hand to your mother. You can hand this book to your mother and know she’ll enjoy it.

The book jacket says the story is about identity. I found it to be more about Stockholm Syndrome, which is in turn about identity I suppose, to the extent that identity is a function of volition. Melody, the protagonist and narrator, was truncated at age 6, as a result of witnessing a Mafia hit and her parent’s decision to testify for the prosecution. The result is a lifetime of rotating, common names each three syllables long, none of them really hers. It’s her job to be invisible, but all of us have an inborn need to be seen.

It troubled me that the terrible things that are confessed are handled so lightly they don’t feel as terrible as they are, nor are they always reacted to as being terrible, perhaps because other characters have done the same or worse. Or perhaps because Melody’s entire life has been shaped by an act of unimaginable violence.

Melody floats through the narrative, both in terms of the linear progression of the story and the sense of meeting her via the medium of the story. On the one hand, she feels she lost long ago the ability to act as agent in her own life, and yet the major turning points of her life have been the result of her (often inept) exercise of the little choice she had.

There are elements of the modern fairy tale, but these fairy tale elements are grounded in a context that makes them work. She’s used to being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, told to go and then going. It is, fact, the context of her life. Melody’s voice is child-like but powerful, and the effect is to create a story that’s like 21 grams of protein hidden in a slice of angel food cake.

Here’s a link to a short essay David Cristofano wrote about writing in a female voice.

Ratings

You know, over on tvbythenumbers, folks are talking about the various ways we now enjoy the shows we like, live viewing, DVR, DVD, and so on.

Here’s a problem. The way the success of a show is measured is stuck in the 50’s. My personal gripes are as follows:

• The concept of the lead-in is obsolete. We have remote controls, they are practically grown to our hands, and we surf all over the place.
• The sample of homes that participate in the Neilsen system is roughly 1% of the viewing public.
• The present system has no way to take into account the myriad ways people watch, let alone why.

But maybe the main reason it doesn’t work is the disconnect between why people think they watch the shows and why the shows are made available to them for viewing.

People tend to think they watch the shows because they like the program.

Programs are made available to them to watch because advertisers think viewers of this show will go out and buy their product. Or there are enough viewers that even if only 20% of the viewers in the desired demographic go out and buy their product, they’ll do better than the guys sponsoring the shows on the other channels.

So, you have a show like “Firefly” which did better as a DVD release than as an over-the-air show, and the purposes of the viewer, being able to see the same episodes over and over and over (in this case, in part because it’s all they’ve got), are not in keeping with those of the advertisers, which is people sitting in front to the television every week, watching new episodes and then going out and buying their stuff.

I don’t know a way to quantify the reasons people watch one way over another. If you’re like me and your schedule is nutz, you may choose hulu over live broadcast from time to time because hulu will be there for you when you’re damned good and ready for it. Probably the precipitous cancellation of “Firefly” fed the DVD sales. Obviously, if you love a show and have new episodes to watch for free, you’ll probably watch them for free. If you love a show and can only see it on DVD, you’ll buy the DVD. It’s probably an anomaly, and yet FOX gave Whedon the space to create the horror that is “Dollhouse.” Really, that show is drek on so many levels…
But I digress.

There are good shows, mediocre shows, and bad shows. Many excellent shows struggle for viewers. “Homicide: Life on the Street” was one of those. Which leads to the other spectrum – successful to unsuccessful. This is based on ratings, the present system for determining whether a show is going to turn a buck.

And it’s broken, obsolete, terribly misleading in terms of fan base and viewing behavior. There’s acute need to quickly overhaul it to take into account things like on-line viewing and DVD sales.

Beyond this, I hate to break it to you, it isn’t actually numbers of viewers that make or break a show. It’s advertisers. The money that makes the wheels go ’round all comes from advertisers. They do, of course, base their decisions on the ratings that are available to them.

Here’s an idea. It may be worth nothing, but what the heck? If you enjoy a show, want it to stay on the air, maybe you don’t watch it live over the air. Maybe you do. Don’t just write the network. Make a list of the sponsors, and write them.

As always, use nice stationery, be polite, and use spell-check at the very least. These things matter, especially the polite part. Thank them for making it possible for you to enjoy this wonderful show and oh, wasn’t that the best commercial for their product?

This is the system. Television, which I love as much as you do, exists because of them. If we want to keep the part we enjoy, we have to use the system as it is just as effectively as they do.

Advertisers, on the other hand, might do well to consider that the over-stuffing of episodes with so many commercials you can forget what you were watching during the break, could lead to the loss of the goose that lays their golden egg. All the people I know who have abandonned live viewing for downloading from Netflix or Amazon, watching at hulu (or one of the other portals) or buying the DVD sets tell me they were just so damned sick of the commercials it was that or stop watching altogether.

Maybe that’s something you could put in your letter.

Politely, of course.

Life and TSCC

Life

Yes, again. Can’t help it, I love this show.

Gotta say, they’ve done a good job of handling Sahi’s pregnancy, using it to advance the story line. And, as much as I mind this, because I love Dani, I think the combination of Crews and Stark is extremely enjoyable viewing.

I know things do look grim just based on the numbers, and I still hope for at least a resolution of the plot line if I can’t have another season, but as my foolish hope harms no one, I think I’ll keep it.

If you like the show, write the network. Pen and paper, please, they prefer it that way. And be nice.

TSCC

See, here’s the thing. I’m not really worried about this show going away. I mean, I think it will, and that makes me sad because it’s really extraordinarily good. The thing is, I think it was meant to keep the Terminator Franchise on people’s general “radar” until the advance buzz for T4 got started. (Christian Bale has helped that along, hasn’t he?)

The series doesn’t have to reach any particular end-point, it just has to leave us with an image that doesn’t disturb the way things are at the beginning of T3. And we haven’t really been told how many years are passing in their world, either. Could be two, could be five.

So, watch it while you can.

The Alexander Cipher by Will Adams

A legendary king, a vast treasure, a mystery passed down through the millenia, ciphers in ancient languages, adventurous buddies, a damsel in distress, the exotic sands of the desert.

The Alexander Cipher delivers all this. It’s well-written, exciting, engaging. I had a great time reading this book. It’s a good, old-fashioned treasure hunt adventure in the spirit of Indiana Jones, only believable.

Which brings me to one of the things I liked most about it – female characters written by a male author who read like people who might actually exist. None of them are exactly feminist role models blazing a trail through modern literature, but still refreshing.

There’s no sociological sub-text, no axes being ground. It’s not The Book to Change the World, or Read This and Shatter Your View of History As You Know It, it’s just a ripping good yarn that happens to be based in some actual history. The history is presented in very conversational ways, it’s not at all preachy, no three-page expositionary soliloquies. It may even get you curious enough to learn some more.

I was casting the movie in my head.

Three Books of Poetry

I don’t often get around to poetry, odd, since it’s something I love. These came to me from A Midsummer Night’s Press.

Fortune’s Lover, a Book of Tarot Poems, by Rachel Pollack.

Pollack, who has written a number of books on the Tarot, draws on not only the more familiar Ryder-Waite deck but the Merlin deck and on Kabbalistic traditions, mathematics, and Jewish Yemeni folklore as she gives modern lyric expression to the meaning of the Tarot deck. There’s a dash of Tao in there, as well. Appropriately enough, she begins and ends with The Fool, the middle portion of the book being given over to Magician, High Priestess, Empress and Emperor, Lovers, Wheel of Fortune, Hanged Man, World, Devil, and Tarot Pi. Each poem has a style and flavor suitable to the essence of the card/concept treated, and in the case of Lovers, we have a poem within a poem.

One of my personal favorites, though, is “Hanged Man,” which in this treatement begins like this:

A Story of Merlin

It happened in his early days,
before the elder wise man gig, the
young king with his twelve disciples,
and long before he let his secretary
lock him in a cave.
Back then he lived in Wales,
and for a time in the woods,
a Hermit Fool, astray,
like Sweeny, eating twigs
and talking to owls,
Then one day, something
drove him sane….

It seems light, but Pollack’s work is layered with meaning, some of it sneaking up on you, and not all the works are this easy in tone. If you are familiar with the Tarot, you’ll enjoy this book as an exploration of the symbology used to write the cards. If you enjoy good poetry, you’ll enjoy this book.

This Is What Happened in Our Other Life by Achy Obejas

This collection of poems by Cuban-American author Achy Obejas is a very different sort of experience, more like a confidential conversation between friends than a book of poems, and no less serious or effective for that. The art lies in its seeming artlessness. Obejas takes us from the first stages of an affair to the recovery, ending with the haunting “Historia de Amor.”

Obejas is a prolific writer in many genres, from journalism to poetry, working and translating in both English and Spanish.

This is the opening stanza of “Goodbye:”

Every detail is an accident
the horror
of the next moment.
You will peel from me like
plastic surgery;
later a tuck, a fold.
Public appearances matter so.

Evoking so sharply those moments when you know that this, right here, is the very last of that, and so on, trying to maintain a “face to meet the faces that you meet.” I think of this more as women’s poetry than men’s, which may be sexist of me, because anyone who has loved and lost will surely feel the simple power of these lines. Of the three books, this one was the one I first wanted to press into the hands of a friend.

Banalities, by Brane Mozetic

This work was translated by Elizabeta Zargi and Timothy Liu. (I apologize for the lack of diacritical marks. I can’t find a way to include them.) The translation deserves to recognized, as it provides work that retains the flavor of another language while working perfectly well in English.

Banalities, as you might expect, is an exploration of nihilism, a very well-written exploration of nihilism. The sexually-graphic, book-length poem evokes the moment before the existential experience, the agonizing, hanging boredom that comes just before you shrug and say, “So what?” Here’s part of a representative stanza:

They didn’t give me anything to help me
survive. No faith or hope
to repent, beg, be redeemed. No love
to scatter about. So I wouldn’t go on
crashing into things, begging for attention,
tenderness, arms
to embrace me….

They gave me a world
in which I’m staggering and which
I can’t feel. I can only see a crowd of
people who’ve put on t-shirts
that say: I’m nobody. Who are you?

The writing is riveting. I had limited endurance for the content. Once in a while, something like this can actually be bracing, the necessary shock to the system, or expression of one’s own stare into a hollow moment. This is just me, but at this stage in my life, I found sixty-three pages of it a bit much to take in one sitting, and unlike the first two books, I’ve yet to read the whole thing. That said, I can remember a time in my own life when it would have been entirely welcome. What I did find uplifting as I read it now was the sheer quality of the writing, never mind the content. Mozetic is a significant voice.

These are well-bound little chapbooks, reasonably priced. They fit into a pocket or purse. You don’t have to read the tabloids in the checkout line. You could read poetry.

Varous things on the way to catching up

The CW

Everyone seen this over at tvweek.com? There’s nothing I watch over there on the CW anymore, not in any kind of regular way. I used to watch “Smallville,” but then it went and became “Lois and Clark, Redux” and I just think some concepts have a natural shelf life and it should be respected. Not that I’m not all for anything that keeps actors working and off the streets.

NBC

Along these lines, here’s an article at zap2it.com addressing NBC’s situation. The known lineup there includes JayLeno five nights a week at ten, “The Office,” “30 Rock,” and TBL. They’re ordering 10 pilots. Everything else was up in the air at the time that article was written.

Angela Bromstad’s closing comment about not tossing “Cavalierly aside” a quality show with a passionate fan base seems to me an invitation for supporters of “Chuck” and “Life” to get busy. I’ve already written my letter.

This past week’s episode of “Life” was a nice way to change things up a little. I was glad to see that Dani had found her hairbrush (never been a fan of the JBF look), but I missed the crazy. I think the JBF hair was supposed to clue us in that she’s not typical. News flash – we didn’t need that. Shahi is more than capable of letting us know Reese is a little crazy if she were bald or in an really old-fashioned nun’s habit.

I enjoyed seeing Crews teamed with his old partner Bobby Stark, a creative and interesting way to handle Shahi’s pregnancy. It’s too bad the ratings were pretty awful – up against the second hour of AI, as well as the usual competition. This would have been a great episode for newcomers to the show. Hope for better next week. If you enjoy this show, keep annoying your friends until they actually watch it just to make you shut up.

GA

Jessica Capshaw is sticking around on GA. So… a younger version of Brooke Smith is okay? [Insert tirade here.]

Miscellaneous

I see it’s possible to get a cylon detector for your iPhone. This makes me want to get an iPhone.
Yes, I am a total geek.

I’m very eager to see the new Stargate series, “Stargate: Universe,” premiering in October on Sci-Fi. (Seems a long way off, but it’s not.) Promising cast, some strong long-standing personal favorites on the list. Goody!

Two more years of Homer and Marge! I actually think this is a show that could go on until the actors die. Just draw the characters wrinkly.

The Killing Tree by Rachel Keener

The Killing Tree by Rachel Keener is one of the rarest of the rare. It entertains, but it also drips with beauty, wisdom and intelligence. I strongly encourage you to drop whatever you’re doing and read it. Then read it again.

I’m going to.

The blurb on the jacket, if it’s anything like the blurb on the cover of the advance reading copy I read, doesn’t begin to convey what this book is about, and that’s an injustice, because I almost passed it by. I overcame my misgiving because the story is placed in my general slice of the planet, and I thought I probably should give it a go.

Mercy Heron lives in a square white house on the side of Crooktop Mountain with Father Heron and Mama Rutha, her maternal grandparents. She’s grown up with the knowlege that her mother died under that June apple tree the night she was born, locked out of the house by Father Heron. She’s grown up knowing she is the bastard child of a shunned (and murdered by her measure) daughter and Handsome Stranger. It’s not a unique plot, either in life or in literature although, thankfully, few fathers take their displeasure as far as Wallace Heron.

In Keener’s hands, this basic human story is a window into the depths of the soul, both beautiful and ugly. She gives us genuine depictions of humility, devotion and courage, contrasted against venal bigotry, pride, and the cruel pride that comes from moral certainty. We see the human cost of a so-called righteousness that has nothing to do with the Gospel. This is a story of consequences and grace. Mercy’s voice is unguarded, and when she opens her heart, it’s dazzling to the mind.

Keener sticks to the rigors of a first-person narrator. The reader can’t know anything that Mercy doesn’t know within the confines of the narration. This means you leave the book with questions unanswered, threads left loose. Personally, I like this because it gives some room for the reader to participate in the life of the story, which will be a little different for everyone who reads it. Keener stays close to the bone of life, and in real life, it’s rare that all the threads tie off in a neat little bundle. Not every character we meet at the beginning is there at the end, and everyone left is permanently changed. There’s no fakery, no sleight-of-hand. The characters are themselves straight-through, never doing something they wouldn’t just to serve the plot. Keener never puts a foot wrong. How often do I get to say that?

I could not possibly over-state my enthusiasm for this book, and if I try even to state it adequately, it will become annoying. So I’ll stop, with the hope that you’ll get your hands on this book.

If you want to read Keener’s own story of how the book came to be, here’s a link. Prepare to be amazed.

The Truth of Buffy

So, now I’m going to talk about a book over here on the televison page.

I have not gotten halfway through this book, and I’ll come back, probably, when I do finish and update if my opinion changes in a substantive way.

I was not a fan of the Buffy series, but the book caught my attention because it’s a collection of essays using the Buffy series as a way to look at the ability of things like a television show to stimulate thought and discussion about deeper subjects in life, like morality, friendship, love, death, and that sort of thing. And, oh yeah, Conversion. There’s a scary theme for you. I’m into that conversation, without apology.

The book is not at all fanboyish (so far), there’s plenty of sensible pointing out the holes in the show’s philosophy as well as inconsistencies and an acknowlegement that the show existed not to provoke philosophical discussion but to make money. (Show **business**.)

I haven’t found it necessary to have watched BtVS to understand the essays, although it might make them a little more vibrant if I did. Problem is, so far, they address things like a particular theme as developed throughout the series, not episodes in and of themselves, and I have no desire to watch however many episodes of BtVS there are. If I were goin to sit and watch hours and hours of a show about vampires it would be “Dark Shadows.” If, by the end of the book, particular episodes are mentioned repeatedly, I may then go and watch those, but I don’t know. It won’t be on the top of the To Do list.

The book is worth paying attention to, though, if you’re interested in performing arts of whatever kind as a means of looking at life.

Kill for Me by Karen Rose

I will not hear the phrase “I helped” without snickering for a while.

This is the third (last?) in the Vartanian series written by Karen Rose. The first book (Die for Me) was by far the darkest, the second (Scream for Me) a little less so, this one almost light by comparison, but still pretty intense, though the most disturbing content is alluded to rather than described in detail for you, and let me just say thank you. For a woman who writes very graphic sexual encounters (if books had theme songs, for this one I would nominate “Sex Is Not the Enemy”), Rose is very careful about handling the truly disturbing while producing an extremely high body count.

If you haven’t read the first two, you may want to before picking this one up. While Rose does an excellent job of balancing the crime/thriller aspects of the novel with the romance part of the novel, keeping the pace moving and clear in both plots, the exposition necessary to bring a new reader up to date is at points confusing. This is a long tale with a large cast of characters and some twists you might not expect. Do it justice and read from the beginning.

If you read and enjoyed Ashes to Ashes or Dust to Dust by Tami Hoag, you’re likely to enjoy these three books. Rose puts more emphasis on the romance side than does Hoag, and the first installment (Die for Me) drifts at times toward a non-supernatural horror story (the scariest kind, after all), and I’d be hard put to assign any of them to just one genre.

Does that mean they’re literary? No. There are problems. We see the phrase “That I can do,” or “That s/he could do,” too many times. It’s in the voice of the (third-person omniscient) narrator as well as multiple characters. There are a few wobbly adverbs here and there.

I am tired of the ubiquitous pairing of the great huge he-man with hands like bear paws and the itsy-bitsy doll of a woman. It’s in every other book I pick up, and enough already.

Another thing that bothered me was the identification of both the Vartanian and Papadopoulos families as Catholic. They’d be far more likely to be Orthodox, the Papadopouloi being specifically Greek, and Vartanian a name from Armenia where people are either Muslim or Orthodox Christian and not Catholic. This is sooooo easy to get right it annoyed me, especially as there is a large Orthodox polulation in the South that you never hear about. (I’m a geek. I’ve admitted this many times.) “What if they converted?” you may ask, and I’d say when Hell freezes over is how often people leave an Orthodox church for the Catholic. That division is over a thousand years old and the chasm is filled, I’m sorry to say, with resentment, as well as a few legitimate theological differences. That said, I didn’t put the book down, and this is the sort of thing that sometimes does inspire me to put a book down, as in close it and not open it up again, as well as in the sense of speaking negatively about it.

Why not this time?

These books tell an engaging story filled with characters you can care about despite the uncluttered way they’re drawn. Rose uses elements from various genres to tell that story, instead of picking a genre and then sledgehammering the story to fit the rules of the genre. As in a romance, people meet, fall in love, there’s tension, there are false starts, there’s the suspense of wondering whether, when and how they’ll go mattress surfing. As in a fairy tale, there’s evil in the land that must be ferreted out before the prince(s) and princess(es) can go off and live happliy ever after. Like a well-done crime novel, in these books there’s a crime or thirty, there are suspects, there’s a plot that doesn’t yield easily to resolution, there are cops who work to solve the case. Rose does this very well, I think, and I’d like to see her write a straight-up crime novel someday. Her sense of timing is good, her characters are believable and didn’t do anything out of thier established character just to service the plot, which in turn is well-constructed and holds together over not one book but three books. What’s more, there’s nothing outlandish about how these cops go about enforcing the law from within it’s borders, not outside of it. No one is part robot or psychic or going blind or can’t remember who they are or was sent to learn the ways of the outside world before returning to Ulan Bator. Refreshing.

And like your average horror story, blood-curdling things happen in dark, confusing, twisted ways behind the clean curtains of what passes for Normal, USA, and as I said above, it’s more scary (to me) precisely because the story is set in something like real-life. This is garden-variety human evil, set against garden-variety human decency. The bad guys are bad but not for no reason, and the good guys have a quirk or two but we’re not talking Lethal Weapon quirky. You can imagine these people living next door. Even the bad guys. Maybe especially the bad guys.

I told you it was scary.

Galway Bay by Mary Pat Kelly

Which means something to the effect of “Once upon a time,” or, my preference: Pay attention, here’s a story.

And Galway Bay by Mary Pat Kelly is a story. Let me tell you how good this book is: I was so engrossed in the first chapter I didn’t notice my pyjamas had caught fire. Seriously.

In my defense, I wasn’t in them at the time. But, as you will notice from the fact of my writing this now, I did notice it in time, put them out, got rid of the smoke, and went back to reading the book. As I read this book, I laughed out loud, cried actual tears, and talked back to it from time to time. These characters reach out and grab you.

Kelly has a fine ear for the way people talk and subtle shifts in the use of language. The prose of the section of the book that takes place in Ireland is profoundly different from the prose of the American section, and I don’t mean just the dialog. Honora, our protagonist and narrator, has an Irish voice and an Irish-American voice. You can feel that you’re in a different place, no one has to tell you. Within the story that comprises the narrative of the book, there are smaller stories embedded, like jewels in a brooch. She uses enough Irish to provide a feel for time, place and culture, but not so much that you’re lost. (But there is a glossary in the back just in case you want it.)

If the first section, set in and called “The Before Times,” reads at first like a bit of a fairy tale, enjoy that. You’ll need it later. It should read that way, written as it is by an American descendant recalling a way of life that’s forever gone, one that she never lived. It’s memory, passed down, and in this memory, Ireland in the Before Times, while not exactly Tir na nOg, is inevitably idealized. This is fine, actually, because Kelly stays away from treacle, is forthright about actual emotion but shuns sentimentality, and where she uses a convention, does so well. (Connemara Ponies = Nice Farm in the Country, imo.) Besides, who am I to say it didn’t happen just that way?

We go with the family as they face the struggles of the Great Starvation, the shattering of families, communities, the deliberate erasure of a way of life, then come with them to America, where a new life gets built with courage and industry.

The weakest section of the book deals with the ocean voyage from Ireland to America, and for my taste, this bit could have been left out with no damage to the book as a whole. We’ve had ample description of the journey through other characters. Still, it’s better written than most of the stuff that’s floating around, and isn’t all that long.

The description of mid-nineteenth century Chicago is engaging and vivid. Even at this stage of its existence it’s the “city of the big shoulders,” shaping and being shaped by the influx of Irish immigrants. As in the section set in Ireland, Kelly’s abundant research is conspicuous precisely because it seems not to have been there. There is exposition, no denying it, but for the most part it’s not clunky. I do wish she had taken more time with this part, though. In places it feels a bit rushed. The gift of it is that you’ll learn things about the past you never knew. Much of the book isn’t really fiction at all, and it’s very timely indeed.

Should you read this book?

Yes. You should definitely read this book.

Life

If you’ve been here before, you know I’m a keen supporter of the show “Life” on NBC, and it won’t suprise you that I’m quite pleased to have it back.

All that being the case, why did it take me ffrom Wednesday night to Saturday night to get around to praising the episode? Because a while back I shifted from watching the shows I enjoy on television and started watching them online, where I can see them at times that convenience me, and with much less commercial interruption.

The ratings for this episode, while not stupendous, were an improvement over the last first-run episode before the break. The guys over at tvbythenumbers.com (which is where the link will take you) are, as the name of their site suggests, all about the numbers. This is what makes their site so interesting and useful. I’m not just about the numbers, and I will keep my hope for renewal neatly folded here in my back pocket, thank you. NBC has done some very strange things recently, so who knows – they may go completely mad and opt for a quality line-up. If they do, “Life” should be there.

So, on to the episode.

Re-Entry was one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of picking up at a difficult spot and moving the arc forward exponentially in the midst of an interesting case. Kudos all around. This was an excellent episode of television. The characters developed (I especially like the developments with Dani and Ted), the longer arc was managed rather brilliantly and within the confines of an engaging case that works as a stand-alone. All the elements that make this show intersting and unique were there – Zen, humor, insight, with that nice little edge that keeps you not quite sure what’s going to happen next. The episode brings out all of the factors that lead to “Life” being on the AFI list of the ten best shows on television in 2008.

Thank you to everyone who puts this show on the screen.

Now, if you’ve never done it before, watch:

When you’re finished, if you enjoyed it, remember to tune in next Wednesday at 9 pm. If you don’t have digital television, if you don’t DVR and watch the show the same night or, like me, you watch online, please do contact NBC and let them know you are watching, and would like to keep on doing so.

The Virgin of Flames by Chris Abani

Los Angeles is the object of love in this story, a vibrantly living place, almost the central character. In juxtaposition, the book is peopled with human characters who are largely from Somewhere Else. Leaving, arriving, giving up, becoming – this ordinary and mystical process is the heart of this book, a cautionary tale about not doing it successfully. Be what you are or what you are will destroy you.

The protagonist is given to us by the single name Black, though we learn he was called by another name as a small child. Black struggles with many things, his lack of sense of cultural identity, of sexual identity, but never with a sense of ambiguity toward Los Angeles. Black, who once escaped his sense of displacement by pretending to be Navajo – which he is actually not, paints murals. This is what and who he is, a painter of murals. How he ekes out a living is, in fact, never made clear, and it really doesn’t matter. The two things Black and the reader know without question about Black are that he is a painter and he loves Los Angeles – his Los Angeles, which is somewhat more real a place than anything you’ve ever imagined any city could be.

Black lives in a spare room at a tattoo parlor cum coffee house run by psychic, where he’s built a spaceship for himself on a pole. In his spaceship, he keeps things that focus his obsession – a photo gallery of the Virgin and a photo gallery of Sweet Girl, a Mexican transsexual stripper. The obsession, in turn, is less about the Virgin and the stripper than about the vacant space in Black himself.

If you are not able to make the distinction between the graphic portrayal of sexual acts as literary metaphor and the graphic portrayal of sexual acts as pornography, this book is not for you. The core of it will escape you and you’ll be left with a sort of shadowy misconception of what Abani is writing about. What I think he’s writing about, anyway. What I think he’s writing about here is the depth of disjuncture in modern life between Place and Identity, whether the place is geographical or state of being, the slippery fish that enculturation has become. The distinction between perception and reality underlies much of the book, something to be celebrated in itself. (Despite what you may hear, perception and reality are not the same thing. They are different, which is why Perception is called perception and Reality is called reality.) Black, Sweet Girl and a less pleasant character called Bomboy each in their own way exemplify the difficulty of navigating the change from one thing/place to another. Bomboy, who has the external trappings of a successful transition, is no more confortable in his life than Black. Iggy, the psychic tattoo artist who is Black’s landlady, has made a successful shift both in terms of place and in terms of Self. Her voice grounds the novel, just as the totemic Ray-Ray embodies the native Angelino.

Abani’s prose is captivating. His rhythm is unique in my experience, and mildly addictive. I wanted to keep reading it after the last page, just as I wanted to go back to it not so much to find out what happened next as to simply enjoy the way the words slid in front of my eyes.

Abani does something in this book I’ve rarely seen before – surrender everything to the story. I’d tell you what I mean, but you haven’t read the book yet, have you?

How to Live by Henry Alford

It would be impossible to overstate my enthusiasm for this book.

How to Live is not just another compendium of interviews with the well-known and well-heeled (Ram Dass, Phyllis Diller, Sylvia Miles, Edward Albee, among others). These chapters are revelatory not because the subjects are well-known but because Alford refuses to write about them as celebrities, choosing instead to go the more interesting route of writing about them as people. The same sort of respect, curiosity and wonder shine through the portraits of people we might otherwise be tempted to think of as “ordinary.”

One of the quiet messages hidden in Alford’s book are that there are no “ordinary” people, at least not in the sense of being negligible or meriting being ignored. Nor is there a celebrity so special as to be beyond the sort of life events that come to everyone.

This book is about being human. It’s about embracing life in all its potential for good and ill with courage and generosity, wit, stamina and grace. At the risk of sounding silly, reading How to Live makes you feel good, oddly braced to meet whatever comes next with a smile and an aphorism.

The characters you meet in these pages, whether you’ve heard of them before or not, will challenge you to revise your idea of what lies ahead of you in your own life, and of your own obligations to yourself and others. If you think the elderly have nothing to offer you as a young person facing the blank page of a new career, meet Phyllis Diller and Sylvia Miles. If you think the elderly have no power to impact their society in positive ways, meet Granny D. If you think only a young person can lose it all and start over with grace and generous creativity, meet Althea Washington. If you think your family is alone in facing the Shattering Surprise just when you think everything is settled, well, meet the Alfords.

I found Alford’s description of places I know well to be refreshingly clear, vivid, and without the sort of puzzled condescension that often occurs when someone is describing a place not their own. If you aren’t familiar with Durham, let me assure you he has captured well the complex variety of the city that runs from the upmarket haute-shabby of Foster’s Market to the more “spatial” aspects of the area. (Read the book, you’ll get it.)

Behind all the truly useful insights brought to you by the people you encounter in How to Live lies another bit of wisdom that is the more important one. We are, as a society, making a huge mistake when we marginalize, ignore, devalue and (frankly) jettison the elderly. Never mind the sheer practicality of realizing that, given the speed with which social change does not occur, whatever we insist on for them is what will be there for us. There’s another issue here. The elderly have a vast wealth of that which we call wisdom to share, and they want to, for the most part, do that. We who are younger stand to gain from this, if we will just realize we don’t know it all already.

Wisdom isn’t the same thing as being smart, or having accrued tons of experience and information, useful as all of that is. Wisdom often consists of shutting up and listening to those who have been there first.

That’s what’s wise about reading this book.

Info about the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival here.

Drood by Dan Simmons

In an internet interview with Lotesse on the fansite wotmania.com, Simmons declined to “sharecrop in other writers’ universes,” after being asked what he would do with the One Ring were it to fall into his possession. It begs the question how this laudable mind-set worked in the context of creating a fictional narrative of the lives of two very well-known historical personages, no matter how well-researched. I’ll come back to this.

Simmons does a masterful job of creating a sense of place and time, creating a slowly brooding atmosphere embedded in plain-as-day reality, taking the reader with his characters through a wide range of experiences with great authenticity.

Our narrator is a fictional Wilkie Collins, giving homage to Collins’ own use of the first-person narrator. However, the farther you go into the story, the more you question whether the character Collins is a reliable narrator or whether he’s compromised by his years of opiate addiction. Do all his experiences belong in the category of the Woman with Green Skin? (Very odd but believable in context as the character’s objective experience.) Or do they belong in the same category as the Other Wilkie? (Very odd but believable only as the character’s subjective experience – most of the time.) By the way, the historical Wilkie Collins was also haunted by a doppelganger only he could see, whom he called “Ghost Wilkie.”

In 1865, the historical person Charles Dickens was in a tragic rail accident. Most of the passengers were killed or badly injured. Dickens, somehow, survived. This accident is translated into the fictional world of the fictional character Dickens, and used as the springboard for the events that follow, including the introduction of the character Drood. The passages describing the accident and its aftermath (told largely in Dickens’ voice) are among the best I’ve ever read.

It’s important that neither the reader nor the narrator is actually present for the accident. The scene of the accident is where the character Drood first appears, and we experience that appearance third-hand. The character Collins mediates for us the degree to which this should be taken seriously. But then, Collins is man who believes there is another of himself hanging about the house, and then there’s the Woman with Green Skin.

Does Drood, a person not yet met by Collins, perhaps never met by Collins, belong in the same category with Dickens, with the Woman with Green Skin, with the Other Wilkie?

Woven in and out of the narrative that pertains to Drood the character is abundant material about the rather more normal daily lives of Collins and Dickens, replete with romantic foibles, domestic drama, travels and of course the pursuit of laundanum. These passages are where Simmons’ ability to create scene and atmosphere are perhaps best used, not that the descriptions of the other are less well-executed but because these scenes build our ability to believe the outrageous. They also provide a good deal of humor, greatly needed, and the flip side of the ability to see in the ordinary the shadow of the unordinary just waiting to be discovered.

We are drawn into the story, and pushed out of it, and pulled into it again. What is true? How horrified should we be? And by what? What is more horrible: Collins sudden departure from his mother’s (probable) deathbed or his finding on her a scar to match his own? Or is it the incomprehensibly abject destitution of the residents of Undertown, which was quite thoroughly real?

Drood takes you into a world where the normal and the barely imaginable coexist, you slide seamlessly from one realm to the other. As with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, you will have to decide, more than once, whether this narrator is telling you a story that is bizarre but true within the fictional construct of the book, or whether the narrator is relating both perceptions that can be taken as real beyond the confines of his mind and those that are the result of his psychosis.

What do you choose to accept?

This book is not for everyone. If you are squeamish, you probably don’t read this genre anyway. Squeamish or not, you may want to not follow my example of reading this book just before you go to sleep. (I only did this once.) If you believe Charles Dickens was a nice man, and you want to retain that impression of him, you may not want to read this book.

There are extensive discussions of the process of writing and the nature of collaboration between writers. I found these sections interesting, but I’m not able to say with confidence they’ll be as interesting for the majority of readers. The book might have been just fine without them, but they are valuable as a yardstick for Collins’ attachment to what you and I might casually call reality. Mr. Simmons provides a good deal of material that’s useful to other writers on his own site, delving into the creative process itself is clearly something important to him. I’ve enjoyed exploring this part of Simmon’s website, as well as the sections of Drood that are (frankly) lit crit and “behind the scenes.” These are perks to choosing an author as your narrator if you are a writer who enjoys talking about and exploring the process of writing. Add a second author as his closest friend and collaborator and you get even more of a peek behind the curtain.

All my enthusiasm notwithstanding, I have two concerns with this book. One is that there will inevitably be readers who will construe this as some sort of “hidden truth” about Dickens and Collins. There is truth in here. There are historical facts mixed in with the very tightly and plausibly developed imaginative parts, so well developed and so plausible and so brilliantly combined that it would be easy to take the characters created here as biographical depictions of the real Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. And while it’s possible that these two gentlemen would not mind, it takes me back to the question I asked when I read the interview on wotmania.com. How does writing a book like this with two lead characters who were real people square with being unwilling to share crop in another writer’s universe? Does the creative construction of a writer trump that writer’s actual life?

The answer to this question is (I think) in one of the passages about writing. And if the answer is, as I suspect, “Yes,” there is the question of Simmons’ Drood as a derivation of Dickens’ Drood, and is that not sharecropping in another writer’s universe? The story behind this story is the one I want to read now.

The other concern is that there will be readers who don’t choose to read The Moonstone because they know how the mystery of that book is resolved in the end.

Please, I’m begging you, if you have not read The Moonstone by the real Wilkie Collins, do so before you read Drood by Dan Simmons. You won’t be sorry.

Simmons has written an excellent book. It’s profoundly creepy, it’s thought-provoking, it accurately depicts the era in which it’s set (and, yes, I actually can say that), and it is very well-written. I hope you will enjoy it.

Sheer Genius

Check this out: Loads of classics, downloadable, to your cellphone. Never be without something good to read again.

Here’s the link: booksinmyphone.com

Prison Break and the ending of things

Fox has announced this will be the last season of “Prison Break” – this isn’t news, I imagine everyone who cares to know does know by now.

What I came here to say is that I appreciate that FOX made the decision and shared it early enough for the creative team behind the show to give the characters and fans a satisfactory conclusion to the story we’ve been following.

I suggest that all networks do the same with shows they know they aren’t going to renew for another year. I could, for example, live with the loss of “Life” over on NBC, but would be really annoyed if they didn’t allow time for the show to wrap up at least some of the dangling plot points. The same goes for TSCC back on FOX.

Paging Dr. Freud!

I’ve just read Beat the Reaper, first novel by Josh Bazell, which will hit the stores on January 9th.

If Elmore Leonard had written the first three pages of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, it would not have been any more of wild, intense, violent ride through territory that doesn’t exist on Earth.

You can treat this fast-paced, totally enjoyable thrill-ride in a couple of ways. One way is to just rave about what a good writer Bazell is (because he is a very good writer) and get on the bandwagon for what will be a very successful first book in a very successful series of books. Let’s call this the Path of Least Resistance.

The other way, and this will be the bulk of this review, is to look at the book as literature that reflects on our culture at a specific moment in time as much as it reflects the mind of the author, and which will therefore have an impact on the world-view of its readers. Call this the Path of the Weltanschauungen.

Bazell does an excellent job of replicating the detachment from natural time that comes from being in a hospital for more than a couple of hours. The protagonist is already exhausted when he finds it necessary to beat up a would-be mugger on the way to work. From there, we follow our Anti-hero through his medical routine, which is hair-raising enough. Finally, his stack of patient files takes Dr. Peter Brown to the room of Nicholas LoBrutto, a.k.a. Eddie “Consol” Squillante, a man he is alarmed to find. Mr. LoBrutto, meanwhile, is terrified to find himself at the mercy of the man he knows as Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwa, who is called Ishamel by his former WitSec handler. (The more prominent a character is, the more names he has.)

While a classic example of the hard-boiled crime genre with oodles of sarcastic wit spilling out onto your lap, Beat the Reaper is not really a “whodunit” sort of book. The primary questions of the book don’t use the interrogative “Who,” they use the interrogatives “How” and “Why.” Why did Pietro walk away from a lucrative career as a hit man, and How will he get out of his present difficulty?

Bazell’s choice of technique leads to a unique style. He’s chosen a first-person narrator, which works very well in this sort of novel, but put a spin on that by narrating the book’s present tense in the present tense, reserving past tense for flashbacks. Many of the more interesting bits of information come in the form of footnotes, some of which are pure snark and you shouldn’t skip any of them, snark being a major food group. But this use of footnotes in a novel isn’t just a clever little little trick. These asides contain much of what lifts the novel as a whole out of genre and into literature.

Another laudable element is dialog that’s bright, intelligent, and snappy. All the characters who speak have unique voices. I would quote my favorite interchange, but it would spoil a key plot point. Let’s just say Squillante is a funny guy. Stupid and mean, but funny.

Before I go any further into this, I should tell you that I’m jaded when it comes to modern medicine in America. Maybe anywhere, but I know America, so I’ll confine my opinion to my own country. And by “jaded” I mean I step away from doctors at social events.

So I had no difficulty believing in a doctor who used to be a hit man. After all, the two professions require some similar personality characteristics. Both require assimilating a large amount of information about complete strangers in a short amount of time and formulating an effective plan of action based on that information. Both require a good deal of physical stamina. Both require the ability to endure long periods of boredom followed by fifteen minutes of chaos during which you must be able to think on your feet in a clear and calm fashion. Both require an accurate knowledge of human anatomy. Both require the delusion that any one human being has the right to decide when another human being has lived long enough. The difference is in how these traits are put to use. I don’t mean to trivialize that difference by saying that. Many things have multiple applications in life, some constructive, some destructive.

I didn’t have any difficulty with the campy versions of the pharmaceutical rep and the Famous Surgeon. Caricature exists to convey something you just can’t quite say any other way without being ridden out of town on a rail. Behind these caricatures is more than a teaspoon of truth. Because I have known doctors socially, and because I have a friend who used to date ER docs almost exclusively, and because I used to be in insurance, I know that some of the situations described in the book have happened at least once, somewhere. I also noticed lots of the factoids he warns you to jettison at the end are accurate reflections of information I have encountered in other settings. (No, I’m not going to tell you what they are. I don’t want to get sued, either.) Some of this information should annoy you, or scare you, but cumulatively, it should definitely push you out of your comfort zone. This is the power of literature to convey information that can’t be conveyed elsewhere, and to awaken in the reader an awareness of situations screaming out for change. Bazell has put himself in better literary pedigrees than McDonald’s by providing these extra elements that allow his book to put one foot down on the literary side of the fence.

There are, however, some significant issues.

When I read about someone hiding in a bed where someone had just died but the sheets hadn’t been changed, I laughed aloud. If you want me to go there with you, give me a reasonable way to travel the distance between reality as I know it and reality as you want to present it. Like all readers of fiction, I’m asking to be taken somewhere that I know is not real, I want to cooperate with the illusion, but things like this are about as seductive as a bucket of cold water.

The ending is problematic for more than one reason. After 300 pages of first-person narration, much of it present tense, during which we have learned to trust Pietro as the authority about his own life, his own story, his own truth if you will, we have a final chapter in which the essential information is provided third person, past tense, by someone who wasn’t even there when it happened. (But is a physician.) It was cold, disappointing, and undercut Pietro as a reliable narrator for future outings.

But it’s a first novel and by a talented author and you tend to overlook some things under these circumstances. There’s enough insight, witty dialog and action to make the book an enjoyable read, if these are the only things you consider.

But should you read the book? Can I actually say to someone else, “Here. Read this?” That’s the question I started this blog to answer: Which of the thousands of books out there might be worth the time it takes to read them? I try to answer that question for each book I write about here. In this case, I can’t tell you. On the one hand, if you don’t read this book, you will miss out on something that isn’t only entertaining, it may actually be Important. (Watch that be the one sentence anyone actually quotes.) On the other, if you do read this book, you’ll be subsidizing some of the most unforgivably misogynistic material I’ve ever read.

There are few female characters in the book. That’s fine. You generally don’t find ballerinas in a logging camp, characters have to fit the setting. The problem is that, of the female characters in the book, not one is a positive image of women. In this book, you will find a dead grandmother, a Mob wife (who, being a submissive wife and doting mother, is actually the most completely drawn and sympathetic woman in the book), a lying Auschwitz tour guide, a murdering confidence woman, a pair of voluntarily drugged-out teenaged sluts of the kind everyone knew in high school, involuntarily drugged-out whores, involuntarily drugged-out dead whores, a pharmaceutical rep who is essentially a whore with a Pez dispenser in her navel (okay, he gets a bye on that one), and a patient with spookily prescient parents who seem to have named her Osteocarcinoma Girl. Osteocarcinoma Girl keeps coming on to Dr. Brown by flashing him with her tampon string. Classy.

Last but not least, there is a dead plot-device of a girlfriend, who has a first name: Magdalena. Notably, it’s her family that has a last name, which is Neimerover, as fact that comes out only to explain her brother’s nickname. In this book, the female characters are fortunate to get first names, while the male characters not only have names, they have nicknames and aliases, which come with explanations (stories, pedigrees). We are supposed to see Magdalena as a desirable woman, a contrast to the varieties of sluts, dead sluts, objects of abuse and housewives who make up the rest of the contingent of female characters. This is difficult. She’s a plot device, mono-chromatic, with the body of a child that the protagonist (who describes himself as a longshoreman as interpreted by a sculptor from Easter Island) finds irresistible. We should find this juxtaposition of big strapping man and waif-like, tiny woman/child creepy, and yet, it’s everywhere. It would be nice if there had been someone in the course of his life to tell Dr. Bazell that a man’s inability to keep his hands, tongue and penis off and/or out of a woman doesn’t make her a positive female image.

Granted, you don’t expect to find “nice people” in the setting of mob life, or Nazi-occupied Poland, anymore than you’d expect to find ballerinas in that logging camp, so the women in these cultural settings shouldn’t be presented like they’re Mother Teresa. All the more significantly, Magdalena represents a missed opportunity to have explored a note of genuine contrast to all that, to see Pietro reaching out to an utterly different way of life. This is a tragic misstep when looked at from a literary viewpoint. Even if you leave the political/feminist perspective out of it, this book would have been truly extraordinary if Bazell had taken the non-genre option when dealing with Magdalena.

As a comparison, read Silver; My Own Tale As Told by Me with A Goodly Amount of Murder by Edward Chupack. Chupack introduces a character to challenge the moral world-view of the principal characters, as well as the reader, as does it well. Silver is also a first novel.

It’s not giving anything away to tell you that Magdalena is dead. You know the first time Pietro mentions her that she was dead before the novel opens. You know it’s going to be horrible. You know you’re going to feel all the pain and outrage Pietro felt when she died, and deeply understand how he had the courage not only to turn his back on the mob (though he never was “made”), walk away from the only semblance of family he had, and go into the Witness Protection Program.

And then, you don’t. At least, I didn’t. Given what happens in the preceding pages, it was an enormous relief when Magdalena was finally dead. It’s not what the Bad Guys do to Magdalena that’s a problem. It’s what her author does to her. By trashing Magdalena, Bazell makes it okay for her to die. Thinking her loss will be harsh for the reader to bear (but really, it’s hard to miss a cardboard cut-out) he kills her before he kills her. This is the only logic I can imagine for the choices he makes.

Here is the real question: Did Bazell mean to be this self-revealing?

Real, three-dimensional women, in literature as well as life, do actually have sex, feel passion, act loyally, do wicked things, make desperate and/or stupid choices, face terror with courage, stand up for what they believe in, be intelligent, buck tradition and all of that is far more interesting when done by believable, three-dimensional characters than by plot-devices, whether in real life or in fiction of whatever sort.

On the one hand, seeing an attitude toward women that should have left the page decades ago re-invigorated for a new generation made me tired beyond telling. Because of his later status, we forget that in his earlier years, MacDonald’s works were published in smeary little paperbacks that Daddies brought home from the corner store in a brown paper bag along with a six pack and kept in the den on a shelf too high for the children to reach. Which is to say, he was considered about as reputable as your average skin mag. (Skin mags not being “cool” at the time.) While some of this book will be offensive to many women who read it, it threatens the most damage to the male reader, because it serves to reinforce concepts and stereotypes of women that are distorted and harmful, especially when written by a doctor, an image of authority in our culture.

I’ve come back to add this paragraph, to avoid misunderstanding. MacDonald was a brilliant writer. I’ve read and enjoyed his work. His ability to write action, to describe place, to engage the reader in the narrative and keep him there – all unmatched. But he wrote women poorly. It’s possible to emulate the praise-worthy and leave the time-worn behind.

On the other hand, reading something written by a physician that at least implies that the very things that are most frustrating, most discouraging, often even frightening, to patients and their families about medicine as practiced in modern times are also all of those things to doctors – well, that was refreshing and made me feel a teensy bit of hope. It gave me an idea, about the kind of desperately needed improvements that could occur in medicine if the providers and consumers of medical care would ever just sit down and listen to each other in a non-billable setting.

But those tiny crumbs of encouragement were embedded in a weltanschauung that creates problems at least as difficult as those caused by the twin strangleholds of insurance and big pharma, both of which are skewered in the narrative. In the view of the narrator, who like the author is a doctor, women are largely reduced to bodily functions, and not necessarily their own bodily functions. At the same time, the female characters’ relationships with their own bodies is detached. Magdalena evidently doesn’t feed hers very well. This does two things – it tells the reader that she understands the need to keep the female body intensely restrained (Russell would be proud – also aroused by the childlike shape of the ultra-thin, possibly amenorrheic, body) and is therefore a “good girl,” and it gives some credence to Pietro’s ability to swim for hours while she’s sitting on his face. (Yes, you read that.) Osteocarcinoma Girl is unware of her own bodily functions, to the extent that she doesn’t stop to think about the fact that there’s a tampon string she might want to deal with before flashing Dr. Brown, and makes no connection between the recurrence of pain in her knee and the onset of menses. The puzzle of her body has to be solved for her by the doctor who has known for about twenty minutes altogether.

At the end, the protagonist (now a patient and therefore supine and semi-clothed – c’mon, you can get there without me) has to be told his own truth by the doctor who sweeps into the narrative to unravel for Pietro/Bearclaw/Peter/Ishamel the most insanely ridiculous denouement I’ve ever seen on page or screen. It is not believable. I laughed. And it wasn’t supposed to be funny.

Since readers, like addicts, always want the next fix to take them a little further, the ending creates other problems for Bazell. He has no where to go in terms of ramping up the intensity of the narrative unless he wants to make Peter into a different kind of Doctor and involve Daleks in his stories. In terms of third-dimensional reality as we know it, I don’t see how he can top this.

So, I leave it up to you. I will say that this is not a book for youngsters or the squeamish or anyone who is contemplating surgery in the near future. Or maybe you should read it if you’re contemplating surgery in the near future. Other than that – make up your own mind.