Annals of lame
Thank you all for the birthday wishes, and thanks to kernezelda and simplystars for the virtual gifts! I had a good birthday this year, and in the spirit of continuing to find a better work/life balance by not losing unused vacation time, I even took Monday off. The weather was beautiful, and I loafed around the city and marveled, as always, at how many people in this town don't seem to have regular jobs. (I'm sure they were marveling the same about me.)
Then I attempted to put together my new TV stand. The bag of hardware fixtures contained 147 separate pieces, and there was crying and cursing and possibly a thrown screwdriver, and I stopped after 3 hours with the damn thing half put-together and my patience entirely shredded. I guess I know what I'm doing this holiday weekend, and I'm sure I know how relaxing it will be.
And after looking forward to new episodes of Jericho for several months, I wasn't able to watch last night. CBS foiled me by airing the show at 9pm! Since I had started the day with a 7am conference call, there was no way that was going to work; I'm hoping to get to it tonight. I am finally caught up with The Sarah Connor Chronicles, though. I saw the beginning of this week's episode before that catching-up, though, and let me tell you, the FBI interview with Charley made a lot more sense when I knew that the FBI agent was Cromartie.
I continue to be really fascinated by the way the show holds Cameron and Sarah up to each other as examples. Cameron embodies the maximum ruthlessness, and Sarah knows she needs at least some of that mindset to protect John; she's in the process of figuring out for herself how far she has to go, trying to navigate a series of potential Catch-22s (burning Andy out may have put the Turk in the hands of arms dealers; the judgments she makes may have terrible unintended consequences). Cameron, in the meantime, is trying to figure out how to emulate a human, and as much as she's picking up at school, I think her closest model is Sarah, because Sarah does have that calculating side, and because the younger John Connor has a kind of impetuous need to help others, and to try to throw caution to the wind to do so, that seems alien to her.
On a superficial level, the question of what makes us humans, and separates us from the machines that walk and talk like us, gives the show a theme similar to that of Battlestar Galactica's, but I think the two shows are going very different places. Cameron is written and acted as, unambiguously, a robot, inhuman; you can see the wheels of her mind turning as she processes information, creates decision trees, parses past experiences and tries to build on them in the next iteration. The twin arcs of Jordan's suicide and Andy's murder are fascinating: Cameron's inability to recognize or handle Jordan's distress; her unwillingness to let John risk himself by helping her; her incomprehension of Sarah's desire not to kill Andy; her fascination with grief--John's for Jordan, Sarah's for Andy--and an underlying guilt she can't begin to comprehend. She tries writing a note; it's a concrete act, something outward she can do to counterfeit those emotions. She doesn't want to become human, or replace humanity with something more evolved; she wants to learn to fit in better so that she can fulfill her programming. (The scene with the grief counselor was interesting for several reasons: because she was not faking it particularly well, because the grief counselor was obviously up to something shady and she seemed to be putting some pieces together, and because it was an illustration of the very human impulse to find explanations for the inexplicable, and Sarah played on that weakness like a pro; Cameron also exploits it regularly.)
asta77 made an interesting point in her episode post that the world Cameron came from is run by machines; it's the dominant paradigm, and John and his band of rebels are the outsiders, the minority, forced to act and think like the machines to survive. Now her job is to fit in in a world where human beings, going about their daily business, define the norm. And she's succeeding, more or less, with people who don't look too closely, but it's clearly not as easy a shift as she thinks it should be; the context is too different, and I think it explains in part why she was so much more willing to openly challenge Sarah's judgment at the beginning, and has become much less so as time has worn on. And it strikes me as another way the show uses characters who are marginalized, in some way, in their current surroundings.
Another thing I'm really enjoying is the excellent use of tertiary and episodic characters. Andy Goode was a sympathetic and interesting young man, and a wonderful illustration of the kinds of innocent aspirations that will lead to disasters, and the hard choices Sarah and John face. Agent Ellison isn't a nemesis, he's a good cop who has scented out a true mystery and doesn't want to let it slide. Derek Reese (OMG Brian Austin Green! What an interesting piece of casting.) is a nice reminder of what John will become, of what people in the future are like (as opposed to machines, like Cameron), and a surprising family connection that is already challenging Sarah's decision to go it alone, to travel light and avoid risks.
In other TV news, via asta77, this article indicates that Chuck and Life will definitely be returning for the 2008/2009 television series, though the wording is ambiguous enough that, given that NBC is not planning to air any more episodes this spring, I'm unclear whether that means renewal or just that they're going to air the rest of a full first season.
* * * * *
Some recent books:
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman: As with Neverwhere, I enjoyed Anansi Boys a lot but don't have much to say about it. I actually thought Fat Charlie was fairly indistinguishable from Richard Mayhew in a lot of ways, both men ordinary guys who had gotten caught up in circumstances that far exceeded their initially blinkered little lives, though in Fat Charlie's case, that ended up being a rather clever way of establishing his division from Spider, and their relationship as the connection point between the mythic and the real. More interesting was Gaiman's use of animal totems and trickster mythology, and the intersection of the ordinary world with forms of ancient and unalterable power, and the traditions--in places like the Caribbean and South Florida--where people still invoke those connections, half-forgotten there, entirely forgotten in modern London. Grahaeme Coates was a fun mortal villain, with his ruthless pursuit of a conversational style devoid of anything but cliche and his cheerful, almost accidental sociopathy, and the Bird Woman and the Tiger were interesting supernatural foes, with more complicated motives and much longer-reaching agendas.
Farthing by Jo Walton: From the beginning, I was delighted by the way Jo Walton absolutely nailed the narrative voices in this book in a way that gave both Lucy Cohen and Inspector Carmichael, approaching Farthing House from entirely different external angles, the kinship of cynical awareness, and evoked an air of Agatha Christie-like mystery at the manor house that tips over slowly and gently into the alternate history that forms the novel's backdrop. The mystery and the alternate history, of England as a country that made peace with Hitler and, ultimately, with fascism, in tiny incremental steps, are deeply intertwined, and the larger historical compromises made by the novel's great figures run in parallel to the small compromises and trades for advantage made in private by the more grasping characters, and the terrible choices made by some of the central ones. Walton's language is careful and precise, and her scenes are filled with wonderful little details that give the characters unexpected nooks and crannies, and create a rich sense of the period--the cut of clothing, the food, the exacting nuances of class in the interactions between an aristocratic household and its servants and a police inspector, household rituals and living arrangements. I thought Farthing was a really wonderful exploration of the "what-if," of tilting history's axis by a degree and following the ripples outward, and in a lot of ways I found it more plausible, the creeping progression more carefully laid out, than Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. I wish the publishing landscape were not such that Tor felt it necessary to include backcover blurbs assuring "ordinary" readers that they'd find something to enjoy in Farthing too.
This NY Times piece (registration required) seems to make a stab, in the first half, at defending genre fiction, pointing out that the distinction between genre and literature is a recent development, and citing all the old standards--Austen as chick lit, James's The Turn of the Screw as horror--but I think it goes badly off the rails when it defines genre fiction this way:
What we look for in genre writing, Mr. Updike suggested, is exactly what the critics sometimes complain about; the predictableness of a formula successfully executed. We know exactly what we’re going to get, and that’s a seductive part of the appeal. It’s why we can read genre books so quickly and in such quantity, and happily come back for more of the same by the very same author. Such books are reassuring in a way that some other novels are not. Does that make them lesser, or just different? Probably both on occasion. But it doesn’t necessarily make them easier or less worthwhile to write.
Certainly some, even most, genre fiction is formulaic and easy to read. Some of it isn't. By this definition, there are some books with space ships and monsters out there that aren't genre, and some literary hits that are. (Memoirs of a Geisha, I'm looking at you!). Bleah.
Then I attempted to put together my new TV stand. The bag of hardware fixtures contained 147 separate pieces, and there was crying and cursing and possibly a thrown screwdriver, and I stopped after 3 hours with the damn thing half put-together and my patience entirely shredded. I guess I know what I'm doing this holiday weekend, and I'm sure I know how relaxing it will be.
And after looking forward to new episodes of Jericho for several months, I wasn't able to watch last night. CBS foiled me by airing the show at 9pm! Since I had started the day with a 7am conference call, there was no way that was going to work; I'm hoping to get to it tonight. I am finally caught up with The Sarah Connor Chronicles, though. I saw the beginning of this week's episode before that catching-up, though, and let me tell you, the FBI interview with Charley made a lot more sense when I knew that the FBI agent was Cromartie.
I continue to be really fascinated by the way the show holds Cameron and Sarah up to each other as examples. Cameron embodies the maximum ruthlessness, and Sarah knows she needs at least some of that mindset to protect John; she's in the process of figuring out for herself how far she has to go, trying to navigate a series of potential Catch-22s (burning Andy out may have put the Turk in the hands of arms dealers; the judgments she makes may have terrible unintended consequences). Cameron, in the meantime, is trying to figure out how to emulate a human, and as much as she's picking up at school, I think her closest model is Sarah, because Sarah does have that calculating side, and because the younger John Connor has a kind of impetuous need to help others, and to try to throw caution to the wind to do so, that seems alien to her.
On a superficial level, the question of what makes us humans, and separates us from the machines that walk and talk like us, gives the show a theme similar to that of Battlestar Galactica's, but I think the two shows are going very different places. Cameron is written and acted as, unambiguously, a robot, inhuman; you can see the wheels of her mind turning as she processes information, creates decision trees, parses past experiences and tries to build on them in the next iteration. The twin arcs of Jordan's suicide and Andy's murder are fascinating: Cameron's inability to recognize or handle Jordan's distress; her unwillingness to let John risk himself by helping her; her incomprehension of Sarah's desire not to kill Andy; her fascination with grief--John's for Jordan, Sarah's for Andy--and an underlying guilt she can't begin to comprehend. She tries writing a note; it's a concrete act, something outward she can do to counterfeit those emotions. She doesn't want to become human, or replace humanity with something more evolved; she wants to learn to fit in better so that she can fulfill her programming. (The scene with the grief counselor was interesting for several reasons: because she was not faking it particularly well, because the grief counselor was obviously up to something shady and she seemed to be putting some pieces together, and because it was an illustration of the very human impulse to find explanations for the inexplicable, and Sarah played on that weakness like a pro; Cameron also exploits it regularly.)
asta77 made an interesting point in her episode post that the world Cameron came from is run by machines; it's the dominant paradigm, and John and his band of rebels are the outsiders, the minority, forced to act and think like the machines to survive. Now her job is to fit in in a world where human beings, going about their daily business, define the norm. And she's succeeding, more or less, with people who don't look too closely, but it's clearly not as easy a shift as she thinks it should be; the context is too different, and I think it explains in part why she was so much more willing to openly challenge Sarah's judgment at the beginning, and has become much less so as time has worn on. And it strikes me as another way the show uses characters who are marginalized, in some way, in their current surroundings.
Another thing I'm really enjoying is the excellent use of tertiary and episodic characters. Andy Goode was a sympathetic and interesting young man, and a wonderful illustration of the kinds of innocent aspirations that will lead to disasters, and the hard choices Sarah and John face. Agent Ellison isn't a nemesis, he's a good cop who has scented out a true mystery and doesn't want to let it slide. Derek Reese (OMG Brian Austin Green! What an interesting piece of casting.) is a nice reminder of what John will become, of what people in the future are like (as opposed to machines, like Cameron), and a surprising family connection that is already challenging Sarah's decision to go it alone, to travel light and avoid risks.
In other TV news, via asta77, this article indicates that Chuck and Life will definitely be returning for the 2008/2009 television series, though the wording is ambiguous enough that, given that NBC is not planning to air any more episodes this spring, I'm unclear whether that means renewal or just that they're going to air the rest of a full first season.
* * * * *
Some recent books:
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman: As with Neverwhere, I enjoyed Anansi Boys a lot but don't have much to say about it. I actually thought Fat Charlie was fairly indistinguishable from Richard Mayhew in a lot of ways, both men ordinary guys who had gotten caught up in circumstances that far exceeded their initially blinkered little lives, though in Fat Charlie's case, that ended up being a rather clever way of establishing his division from Spider, and their relationship as the connection point between the mythic and the real. More interesting was Gaiman's use of animal totems and trickster mythology, and the intersection of the ordinary world with forms of ancient and unalterable power, and the traditions--in places like the Caribbean and South Florida--where people still invoke those connections, half-forgotten there, entirely forgotten in modern London. Grahaeme Coates was a fun mortal villain, with his ruthless pursuit of a conversational style devoid of anything but cliche and his cheerful, almost accidental sociopathy, and the Bird Woman and the Tiger were interesting supernatural foes, with more complicated motives and much longer-reaching agendas.
Farthing by Jo Walton: From the beginning, I was delighted by the way Jo Walton absolutely nailed the narrative voices in this book in a way that gave both Lucy Cohen and Inspector Carmichael, approaching Farthing House from entirely different external angles, the kinship of cynical awareness, and evoked an air of Agatha Christie-like mystery at the manor house that tips over slowly and gently into the alternate history that forms the novel's backdrop. The mystery and the alternate history, of England as a country that made peace with Hitler and, ultimately, with fascism, in tiny incremental steps, are deeply intertwined, and the larger historical compromises made by the novel's great figures run in parallel to the small compromises and trades for advantage made in private by the more grasping characters, and the terrible choices made by some of the central ones. Walton's language is careful and precise, and her scenes are filled with wonderful little details that give the characters unexpected nooks and crannies, and create a rich sense of the period--the cut of clothing, the food, the exacting nuances of class in the interactions between an aristocratic household and its servants and a police inspector, household rituals and living arrangements. I thought Farthing was a really wonderful exploration of the "what-if," of tilting history's axis by a degree and following the ripples outward, and in a lot of ways I found it more plausible, the creeping progression more carefully laid out, than Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. I wish the publishing landscape were not such that Tor felt it necessary to include backcover blurbs assuring "ordinary" readers that they'd find something to enjoy in Farthing too.
This NY Times piece (registration required) seems to make a stab, in the first half, at defending genre fiction, pointing out that the distinction between genre and literature is a recent development, and citing all the old standards--Austen as chick lit, James's The Turn of the Screw as horror--but I think it goes badly off the rails when it defines genre fiction this way:
What we look for in genre writing, Mr. Updike suggested, is exactly what the critics sometimes complain about; the predictableness of a formula successfully executed. We know exactly what we’re going to get, and that’s a seductive part of the appeal. It’s why we can read genre books so quickly and in such quantity, and happily come back for more of the same by the very same author. Such books are reassuring in a way that some other novels are not. Does that make them lesser, or just different? Probably both on occasion. But it doesn’t necessarily make them easier or less worthwhile to write.
Certainly some, even most, genre fiction is formulaic and easy to read. Some of it isn't. By this definition, there are some books with space ships and monsters out there that aren't genre, and some literary hits that are. (Memoirs of a Geisha, I'm looking at you!). Bleah.