"This place is like Spanish Fly"
I am still coughing. UGH. But at least it was just a cold; my company's HR just reported the first confirmed case of H1N1 in the office. So glad I'm working from home today.
And that there's new The Office to watch during lunch!
The Office 6.01 - "Gossip"
Oh, I had forgotten over the summer how much this show, beneath its pedestrian settings and weird characters and hilarious misunderstandings, can pack an emotional punch. OH MICHAEL NO.
Gossip is one of those things that require a relatively fine-tuned emotional antenna. So of course Michael was left out, because he's too oblivious; and of course, when he realized he'd been left out, it brought up that entire lonely childhood of outsiderdom, and he had to fix it. And of course, he tried too hard, and thought of it as a game until it was too late, and was oblivious most of all of the real-world consequences of spreading stories, it ended in tears. Michael is Wile E. Coyote. I half expected it to be a wacky misunderstanding, Stanley out with his daughter or something; I should have known that the truth would be both more painful and human, that Stanley was lonely and weak. But it was especially heartbreaking that Jim sacrificed his and Pam's secret to the cause of Stanley's marriage, and Michael still tried to give away his secret; and Jim and Pam told him that he couldn't talk to Teri, because he'd only give it away, and they were right. Poor Stanley; he's never liked Michael, but now he really has a reason to hate him. At least Michael seemed to be relatively philosophical about the damage to his car.
(It was especially hilarious and wrenching, at the same time, that some of the rumors were so bizarre--Oscar as the voice of the Taco Bell chihuahua, another person inside Kevin operating him with controls--but that some of them hit so close to home, like Pam's pregnancy, and Andy's sexual confusion. Oh Andy. You know you're in trouble when you're trying to get Michael Scott to tell you whether or not you're gay. I've got to say that that Brad Pitt scene will do nothing to hinder
asta77's latent Oscar/Andy shipping.)
Also, I'm glad that Jim explained what Andy and Michael and Dwight were doing in the cold open, because I would never have recognized it as martial arts. When those three unleash their inner children, it's obvious that they desperately need a strict nanny.
* * * * *
Book report -> May:
Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) by Kim Stanley Robinson--These books are at their strongest when they talk about Mars, its geology and biology, and the relationships the characters develop with the transforming landscape. They're at their weakest when they delve into politics and human relationships. Robinson's vision of life on Mars is gripping, and fortunately, I don't know enough about the science to spot the holes. I especially liked the way he addressed the ways that terraforming, by its very nature, destroyed what was unique and beautiful about the untouched planet, and that the loss might feel necessary, but that it was nonetheless a loss. It's not surprising, then, that of all of the characters, I found Sax Russell and Ann Claybourn to be the most complicated and well-rounded, since that tension played out in the directions their lives took, and in their relationship with each other. On the other hand, the political sections, while interesting in an abstract way, felt didactic and, in a lot of cases, far too idealistic. The overpopulation of Earth is the motivating factor for much of the political development on Mars, but developments on Earth are mostly told instead of shown, and what's shown often contradicts the premise. When Michel returns to France, it doesn't seem particularly crowded, for example. I think that Nirgal and Jackie were supposed to embody the tension between different schools of thought in the second generation, but Jackie was too much of a caricature, a manipulator who uses sex as a tool and adopts a matrilineal culture that makes no place for fathers in the life of children. I kept feeling like Jackie's story was supposed to go somewhere right up until it ended, suddenly, with the death of her unpleasant and equally selfish daughter in what felt like punishment for both of them. The original rivalry between Frank Chalmers and John Boone, and the gripping, Cain-and-Abel murder that starts the books, also resolved itself in an oddly unsatisfying and anticlimactic way, one that didn't resonate with Robinson's careful attention to consequences--the population explosion and class problems caused by the longevity treatment and the symptoms of its eventual failure, for example. Still, the books are more than anything the story of the planet itself, and the ways it both changes and is changed by the people who live there, and on that level, I found them fascinating.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami--Murakami talks about how running has taught him about discipline and self-motivation, and about himself; and along the way, he bends that same theme toward his writing. He's much better at both than I will ever be.
Lush Life by Richard Price--Like Clockers and Freedomland, Lush Life is a precise and illuminating dissection of a cross-section of neighborhood actors in the run up to and aftermath of a crime: an unnamed shooter with something to prove but no real avenue toward proving it; the detectives who struggle against the boundaries of their institutions, the neighborhood's social structure, and their own assumptions to put the clues together and catch him; the witness who is a dark and failed reflection of the victim, and resented him for it; the father who can't get past his loss; and the neighborhood that grinds on to its own rhythms. Price's prose is always such a treat--his choice of words illuminates the complicated and conflicting set of resentments and sympathies that motivate his characters, who are never wholly evil so much as stunted and warped, and never truly good so much as better than they should be, considering the circumstances.
The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi--One of my degrees is in communications, and at UC Berkeley, that meant media studies. I was already pretty jaded about American news media before 9/11, but the runup to the Iraq war irrevocably broke my trust forever. It was surreal to watch the media in this country selectively present the President's case for war, and elide over all of the evidence that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the war had been planned and decided long ago, that it didn't have anything to do with 9/11. So as part of dropping many of those sources, I missed out on a lot of the media trends that Faludi discusses in this book, but not on the overall ethos of redemption through rescue, which was in the air, available by osmosis. Faludi examines this country's frontier mythos and the way it was strongly tied to the rescue and protection of (helpless) women in the popular mind, and then traces the way that mythos surfaced again in the wake of 9/11, when we needed a familiar narrative to process our new helplessness. I thought her gendered analysis was interesting and plausible, and especially liked the way she tied the reaction in to popular myths of the West. She touched on the other part of that myth--that of white cowboys triumphing over dark-skinned "savages," but it wasn't the primary thrust of her thesis, and I'm not sure it got the weight it deserves.
Small Favor by Jim Butcher--This installment of the Dresden Files was moderately entertaining, though more one-dimensional than some of the other novels. But I was left with the overwhelming urge to take Butcher's editor aside and quietly point out that Butcher wrote the characters "said quietly" for about 80% of the dialogue attributions. Seriously, it was bad.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville--This novel had everything I love about speculative fiction in spades: tight plotting that is both personal and epic, great characters, and densely layered, complicated worldbuilding. Mieville's city of New Crobuzon is a wonderful amalgamation of grimy Victoriana and alien multiculturalism, and is more like another character than the setting. That physical presence ties neatly into Mieville's preoccupation with physicality: with the distinct physiologies and abilities of the Voidyanoi and Khepri; Lin's art a direct product of her physical body, of the spit of her insect head; the Remade who are physically branded for their supposed moral imperfections; the Weaver and the Construct Council as metaphors brought to life; Yagharek with his torn-off wings and his guilt. The inhabitants of New Crobuzon aren't fantastical creatures; they're people with motives and history, and complicated cultural heritages. I adored Lin's look back at her childhood, at her rebellion from the Insect Aspect; and the carefully constructed legal and moral framework of the Garuda; and neighborhoods, the cities-within-cities, where the Khepri and Garuda and Cactus-people and Voidyanoi made places for themselves among the human majority, and the tensions and accommodations. At first I was puzzled by the book's title; Perdido Street Station is New Crobuzon's heart, but we spend very little actual time there. But among other things, Perdido Street Station is about the corrosiveness of corruption--the decaying city, the militant oligarchy that runs it, the gang lords that operate on its fringes. It opens with a description of how its river becomes filthy flowing through it, and closes with Isaac, Derkhan, and what's left of Lin fleeing because there's no safety there. And the antagonists of the novel are all products of that corruption: the military, the slake moths that were brought to the city as weapons research and sold off to produce drugs (and the dreamshit is literally their excrement) and escaped because someone traded a cocoon for graft. I really, really liked Perdido Street Station, and am looking forward to reading more of Mieville's work.
* * * * *
And, in honor of Friday (here, anyway), have the top 10 weirdest moments from The Muppet Show, which are, indeed, deeply weird. I especially like Alan Arkin's bunny massacre.
This entry was originally posted at http://danceswithwords.dreamwidth.org/140636.html (
comments). Comment at either site.
And that there's new The Office to watch during lunch!
The Office 6.01 - "Gossip"
Oh, I had forgotten over the summer how much this show, beneath its pedestrian settings and weird characters and hilarious misunderstandings, can pack an emotional punch. OH MICHAEL NO.
Gossip is one of those things that require a relatively fine-tuned emotional antenna. So of course Michael was left out, because he's too oblivious; and of course, when he realized he'd been left out, it brought up that entire lonely childhood of outsiderdom, and he had to fix it. And of course, he tried too hard, and thought of it as a game until it was too late, and was oblivious most of all of the real-world consequences of spreading stories, it ended in tears. Michael is Wile E. Coyote. I half expected it to be a wacky misunderstanding, Stanley out with his daughter or something; I should have known that the truth would be both more painful and human, that Stanley was lonely and weak. But it was especially heartbreaking that Jim sacrificed his and Pam's secret to the cause of Stanley's marriage, and Michael still tried to give away his secret; and Jim and Pam told him that he couldn't talk to Teri, because he'd only give it away, and they were right. Poor Stanley; he's never liked Michael, but now he really has a reason to hate him. At least Michael seemed to be relatively philosophical about the damage to his car.
(It was especially hilarious and wrenching, at the same time, that some of the rumors were so bizarre--Oscar as the voice of the Taco Bell chihuahua, another person inside Kevin operating him with controls--but that some of them hit so close to home, like Pam's pregnancy, and Andy's sexual confusion. Oh Andy. You know you're in trouble when you're trying to get Michael Scott to tell you whether or not you're gay. I've got to say that that Brad Pitt scene will do nothing to hinder
asta77's latent Oscar/Andy shipping.)
Also, I'm glad that Jim explained what Andy and Michael and Dwight were doing in the cold open, because I would never have recognized it as martial arts. When those three unleash their inner children, it's obvious that they desperately need a strict nanny.
* * * * *
Book report -> May:
Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) by Kim Stanley Robinson--These books are at their strongest when they talk about Mars, its geology and biology, and the relationships the characters develop with the transforming landscape. They're at their weakest when they delve into politics and human relationships. Robinson's vision of life on Mars is gripping, and fortunately, I don't know enough about the science to spot the holes. I especially liked the way he addressed the ways that terraforming, by its very nature, destroyed what was unique and beautiful about the untouched planet, and that the loss might feel necessary, but that it was nonetheless a loss. It's not surprising, then, that of all of the characters, I found Sax Russell and Ann Claybourn to be the most complicated and well-rounded, since that tension played out in the directions their lives took, and in their relationship with each other. On the other hand, the political sections, while interesting in an abstract way, felt didactic and, in a lot of cases, far too idealistic. The overpopulation of Earth is the motivating factor for much of the political development on Mars, but developments on Earth are mostly told instead of shown, and what's shown often contradicts the premise. When Michel returns to France, it doesn't seem particularly crowded, for example. I think that Nirgal and Jackie were supposed to embody the tension between different schools of thought in the second generation, but Jackie was too much of a caricature, a manipulator who uses sex as a tool and adopts a matrilineal culture that makes no place for fathers in the life of children. I kept feeling like Jackie's story was supposed to go somewhere right up until it ended, suddenly, with the death of her unpleasant and equally selfish daughter in what felt like punishment for both of them. The original rivalry between Frank Chalmers and John Boone, and the gripping, Cain-and-Abel murder that starts the books, also resolved itself in an oddly unsatisfying and anticlimactic way, one that didn't resonate with Robinson's careful attention to consequences--the population explosion and class problems caused by the longevity treatment and the symptoms of its eventual failure, for example. Still, the books are more than anything the story of the planet itself, and the ways it both changes and is changed by the people who live there, and on that level, I found them fascinating.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami--Murakami talks about how running has taught him about discipline and self-motivation, and about himself; and along the way, he bends that same theme toward his writing. He's much better at both than I will ever be.
Lush Life by Richard Price--Like Clockers and Freedomland, Lush Life is a precise and illuminating dissection of a cross-section of neighborhood actors in the run up to and aftermath of a crime: an unnamed shooter with something to prove but no real avenue toward proving it; the detectives who struggle against the boundaries of their institutions, the neighborhood's social structure, and their own assumptions to put the clues together and catch him; the witness who is a dark and failed reflection of the victim, and resented him for it; the father who can't get past his loss; and the neighborhood that grinds on to its own rhythms. Price's prose is always such a treat--his choice of words illuminates the complicated and conflicting set of resentments and sympathies that motivate his characters, who are never wholly evil so much as stunted and warped, and never truly good so much as better than they should be, considering the circumstances.
The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi--One of my degrees is in communications, and at UC Berkeley, that meant media studies. I was already pretty jaded about American news media before 9/11, but the runup to the Iraq war irrevocably broke my trust forever. It was surreal to watch the media in this country selectively present the President's case for war, and elide over all of the evidence that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the war had been planned and decided long ago, that it didn't have anything to do with 9/11. So as part of dropping many of those sources, I missed out on a lot of the media trends that Faludi discusses in this book, but not on the overall ethos of redemption through rescue, which was in the air, available by osmosis. Faludi examines this country's frontier mythos and the way it was strongly tied to the rescue and protection of (helpless) women in the popular mind, and then traces the way that mythos surfaced again in the wake of 9/11, when we needed a familiar narrative to process our new helplessness. I thought her gendered analysis was interesting and plausible, and especially liked the way she tied the reaction in to popular myths of the West. She touched on the other part of that myth--that of white cowboys triumphing over dark-skinned "savages," but it wasn't the primary thrust of her thesis, and I'm not sure it got the weight it deserves.
Small Favor by Jim Butcher--This installment of the Dresden Files was moderately entertaining, though more one-dimensional than some of the other novels. But I was left with the overwhelming urge to take Butcher's editor aside and quietly point out that Butcher wrote the characters "said quietly" for about 80% of the dialogue attributions. Seriously, it was bad.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville--This novel had everything I love about speculative fiction in spades: tight plotting that is both personal and epic, great characters, and densely layered, complicated worldbuilding. Mieville's city of New Crobuzon is a wonderful amalgamation of grimy Victoriana and alien multiculturalism, and is more like another character than the setting. That physical presence ties neatly into Mieville's preoccupation with physicality: with the distinct physiologies and abilities of the Voidyanoi and Khepri; Lin's art a direct product of her physical body, of the spit of her insect head; the Remade who are physically branded for their supposed moral imperfections; the Weaver and the Construct Council as metaphors brought to life; Yagharek with his torn-off wings and his guilt. The inhabitants of New Crobuzon aren't fantastical creatures; they're people with motives and history, and complicated cultural heritages. I adored Lin's look back at her childhood, at her rebellion from the Insect Aspect; and the carefully constructed legal and moral framework of the Garuda; and neighborhoods, the cities-within-cities, where the Khepri and Garuda and Cactus-people and Voidyanoi made places for themselves among the human majority, and the tensions and accommodations. At first I was puzzled by the book's title; Perdido Street Station is New Crobuzon's heart, but we spend very little actual time there. But among other things, Perdido Street Station is about the corrosiveness of corruption--the decaying city, the militant oligarchy that runs it, the gang lords that operate on its fringes. It opens with a description of how its river becomes filthy flowing through it, and closes with Isaac, Derkhan, and what's left of Lin fleeing because there's no safety there. And the antagonists of the novel are all products of that corruption: the military, the slake moths that were brought to the city as weapons research and sold off to produce drugs (and the dreamshit is literally their excrement) and escaped because someone traded a cocoon for graft. I really, really liked Perdido Street Station, and am looking forward to reading more of Mieville's work.
* * * * *
And, in honor of Friday (here, anyway), have the top 10 weirdest moments from The Muppet Show, which are, indeed, deeply weird. I especially like Alan Arkin's bunny massacre.
This entry was originally posted at http://danceswithwords.dreamwidth.org/140636.html (
comments). Comment at either site.