My TiVO runneth over, and my to-read pile runneth only slightly less over
I somehow managed to miss the premiere of Heroes, and then to forget to record the re-airing last night, but since NBC is recycling content on SciFi and USA, I can still see it. Quite a few of y'all seem to have liked it, and I love me some Agent Weiss.
I also completely forgot that I could see the VM premiere online when I got home last night. I was preoccupied with making dinner, and then with D. and Mrs. D. stealing taking back the puppydog. Just because--technically!--he's theirs. Sheesh. The puppydog was very excited to see them, and I was left with an empty house and a bed full of dog hair. Such is life.
* The deterioration of the Lass marriage is so difficult to watch in large part because it's so realistic. It strikes me that this show is, in so many ways, about avoidance. After George's death, Clancey pulled away from Joy and Reggie emotionally and eventually started an affair--avoiding the messy family he has in favor of something new and shiny--while Joy tried relentlessly to pretend that everything was all right and smothered her suspicions and bitterness until she couldn't stand it anymore. Reggie is the one who constantly forces those around her to acknowledge the obvious by picking at scabs and asking questions. And since in the end Clancey checks out completely, Joy and Reggie are left to pick up the pieces and make a new life together, and I like the fine line Joy walks with Reggie, trying to include her in the decisions without relenquishing her role as parent, because they are all they have left.
* Somehow, without ever making him an iota less fucked-up and foolish, the writers have managed to bring out Mason's remarkable qualities--his heart, the mercy that coexists with his fatalism, the way he knows beauty when he sees it.
* I never thought it would be the case when she was first introduced, but I have found Daisy's spiritual journey both interesting and credible. Daisy's own method of avoidance has been her self-absorption, and her religiosity is a way for her to finally see outside of herself, and I suspect that that is the necessary step she needs to take before passing on, rather than the formulaic embrace of a particular religion.
* Roxie is generally just awesome, and I can't quite get over the way she was killed over legwarmers--and don't blame her for the fact that she can't quite get over it either--but I think she also serves as an interesting reflection of George, because Roxie is farther along the continuum of living in the world while letting to of her attachments and regrets, and of looking her situation squarely in the face. I think it's telling that Rube had no problem with Roxie taking a job with the police, but didn't want George accepting a promotion, because Roxie holds herself separate, and George still feels the pull to try to participate in life as if she's still alive. And it further convinces me that Rube is, for all of his hard-headed approach to life and death, avoiding something bigger than the rest of them put together.
* The going away party Dolores organized for George, with the donkey and the tolerance with which the inmates at Happy Time regard each others' quirks and impulses toward hedonism, was so great. I love that Dolores took George quitting personally, and that George has finally started looking outside of herself enough to spend her day off with Dolores and Murray at the vet without even thinking twice about it. Because George's own avoidance, her own self-absorption, takes the form of keeping to herself and not participating, and everything that has happened to her since she has died has been pushing her toward striking a balance between giving up on the lost opportunities of her own life and engaging with the greater idea of Life.
* I just really enjoy the enthusiasm with which the show embraces its absurd premise--the Rube Goldberg-esque construction of events leading up to the deaths and their gruesome freakishness, underlining the essential unknowability of someone's end even to the people who have the time and place laid out on a post-it, and the bureaucracy of death, the scale, the way the reapers have to fill out self-evaluations and do data entry. There was something particularly great about "Vacation," where all of those last words were rendered banal by the sheer repetitiveness, and the end result was the picture shared humanity among so many nameless people.
I am also enjoying Eureka, though not in a particularly fannish or thinky way. For me, I think it's not so much what the show does as what it doesn't do. It takes a lot of fairly classic elements that would be predictable on their own, but it wisely focuses on the characters rather than the events. Who didn't know, the second we saw that house, that it was going to turn on Jack at some point? It was a given. So the drama isn't in what happens when the house turns on them, or how they get out of trouble, so much as the relationships between the characters and how they deal, collectively and separately, with being trapped together, and that's where the writers keep the focus. And I think that's a generalization that applies to most of the episodes so far, which have run the litany of fairly predictable cliches (A substance makes everyone lose their inhibitions! Evil body doubles are on the loose! A mysterious stranger comes to town, and events from the past are dug up!). The exotic phenomenon of the week is never much more than a mirror to hold up to the characters. And the love triangle between Allison and Jack and Nathan Stark, which had the potential at the beginning to be so cringeworthy, has been saved by the fact that Stark is a really interesting character in his own right, not just a romantic rival but someone with history with the other characters and complex motivations.
Taggert's accent is so all over the map that either Matt Frewer does the worst Aussie accent to ever darken the television screen or Taggert is not being truthful about his background. And I actually think both of those things are plausible.
* * * * *
And now, the book report.
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
In this book, Pollan traces the origin of four meals as a device to explore Americans' relationship with food and--as it ripples out from there--with farming, and the environmental consequences of different farming choices.
The first section, which proceeds from a meal at McDonalds back through the avenues of large corporate monoculture, is probably the most interesting, because it is the most unified: corporate agribusiness is nothing if not uniform, and one corn and soybean farm in the midwest, or one feedlot, is operated much like another, so it's possible to make sweeping generalizations that make sense. Much of the information Pollan supplies about industrial farming was not new to me, but he has a talent for narrowing down to the telling details and then widening out to the big picture in his narrative to produce a compelling picture of an entire system. Central to that system is corn, and the book finally explained something I'd always wondered about--how farming can be subsidizes but still not make enough to keep the average farmer. The answer is that the government is no longer subsidizing farming--it's subsidizing the industries that rely on cheap corn, by keeping production high and prices low. And because the system produces such vast quantities of cheap corn, corn has made its way into much of the food supply as everything from animal feed to sweetener to any one of hundreds of other compounds added to processed food. This is the section that best describes the disconnect in America between food and health, the way industrialization of food production has made available such a cheap, plentiful, highly processed, and ultimately unhealthy food supply, and how Americans three or four generations removed from the farm have stopped thinking about what goes into what they're eating.
The second section examines large-scale organic agribusiness and small-scale sustainable polyculture, and in this section, Pollan seems to have much less of a point to make, so it's more meandering and exploratory, but it did help me to articulate to myself some of the problems I've always had with the natural food industry and stores like Whole Foods. A little background: after graduating from college, I worked for several years for a small natural foods distributor while I flailed around and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and during that time I developed a pretty good picture of the industry. It's not that industrially produced natural foods are bad--they're certainly, on balance, marginally better for the environment than foods produced with chemical pesticides and fertilizers. But there are several big areas of environmental impact when it comes to food production, and "natural" foods--which are made, minus the chemicals, using many of the same processes as commercial foods--are still grown in monocultural agricultural setups, still heavily packaged, still often highly processed, and often transported over great distances using fossil fuels. So I am all for buying organic and avoiding using chemicals on the farm, but the ethos promoted by Whole Foods that you're saving the Earth by spending an extra $3 on Barbara's Organic O's instead of Cheerios drives my up the fucking wall. There are good reasons for choosing natural food brands over commercial ones, if you can afford them, but in terms of really thinking about the impact of your food choices, I think the large-scale organic food industry that has developed in America over the past twenty years has been a very mixed thing. And yet, the small-scale, sustainable polyculture farm Pollan visits and describes in loving detail, while impressive, is not a realistic way for a largely urban population to get its food. It's a dilemma, one that Pollan exposes and pokes at but ultimately doesn't try to answer.
The third section describes a meal made from hunted and gathered ingredients--wild boar, wild mushrooms. It's much more a meditation on the pleasures of eating food you've acquired, and the sense of connection it brings, than anything else. And that connection, or lack of it, is the ultimate point of the book. Americans have become utterly disconnected from what they eat, and there is a relationship between that disconnection and the dysfunction of the American diet. Pollan traces where the food comes from, but he doesn't delve too deeply into the whys of what passes for food culture in America today--how as a society of immigrants, mobile and increasingly atomized and disconnected from the established food cultures of ancestors, and prizing industrial efficiency, we have come to eat the way we do.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
I thought this was an extraordinary novel. It is actually six stories, arranged concentrically, so that you read the first half of the first story first and the second half last, and each story is connected to the previous one in a way that emphasizes a sort of duality of narrative, overlaying a complex structure with ties made up of books, pieces of music, films, historical records. Each story is, except for the point of connection, completely different--a travel diary of a sea voyage in the 1850s, a story of artistic discovery and disillusionment in 1930s Belgium, an industrial thriller in the 60s, the misadventures of a self-absorbed vanity publisher in present time, the testimony of a clone who tried to free others of her kind in a corporate-dominated future, a post-apocalyptic look at the dying of the last remnants of civilized tradition even further ahead, each told in distinct and memorable narrative voices, each as fascinating as the last. If there is a unifying narrative thread aside from the connections, it is the centrality of both greed and art to human life, the struggles against darkness that are sometimes successful but often not, the universality of impulses toward creativity and beauty and violence. The novel has a final structural trick where it circles back on itself, beginning with the white sailors who hold Polynesians in such contempt, ending with a Polynesian society extinguishing what is left of that Western-inspired civilization, after it has risen to its most extreme excesses and fallen about as far as it can go and still be recognizable.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro has a way of building a narrative picture that is almost painterly, using small, delicate strokes and precise details to lay out the narrator's surroundings, and to widen the view slowly until the reader sees what the narrator is missing. Never Let Me Go starts out as Kathy's reminiscences about life at boarding school, and the odd details creep up slowly through the stories of adolescent cliques and studies and clashes between friends--the references to donations and possibles, the complete separation of these children from the outside world, the way these children know instinctively that they creep out normal people, people from the outside. In the end, it is less surprising to realize that these children are clones, created and raised for their organs and afforded an unusually idyllic childhood by a failed social movement, than to see the way they meekly accept their fates. I think the clue to their passivity lies in Kathy and Tommy's final bid to go to Madame and get a deferral because they are in love, and of the children's general belief that such a thing was possible, a wish to be granted by a fairy godmother--it's completely naive, as naive as their belief that Madame collected their artwork to have a way of judging the truth of their love, when all Madame was doing was trying to prove their existence as people rather than walking sacks of organs for donation. I'm not sure I totally bought that that degree of naivety could be sustained, because they were all free to travel around after they left Hailsham, and should have had exposure to the wider world, but it was an effective device for showing the very humanity they weren't supposed to possess.
We are in the midst of Banned Books Week. It occurred to me, while I was looking over the lists of challenged books, that my parents never once tried to restrict what I read when I was growing up, and I ended up reading books that had all kinds of sex and violence and dark themes from a fairly young age. I may not have always understood what I was reading when I was younger, and I sometimes found some things upsetting, but none of it warped me as a person. And implicit in my parents' attitude was a trust in me to be able to handle ideas, and to think for myself, although I mostly think it just never occurred to them to worry about it. (After all, when Alien first aired on cable, my father's reaction was not "Is this really appropriate for a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old?" but "Hey, this is a great movie!" We were, in a lot of ways, just littler people to him.) Did your parents let you read whatever you wanted? Or were some things off limits when you were younger.
I also completely forgot that I could see the VM premiere online when I got home last night. I was preoccupied with making dinner, and then with D. and Mrs. D. stealing taking back the puppydog. Just because--technically!--he's theirs. Sheesh. The puppydog was very excited to see them, and I was left with an empty house and a bed full of dog hair. Such is life.
* The deterioration of the Lass marriage is so difficult to watch in large part because it's so realistic. It strikes me that this show is, in so many ways, about avoidance. After George's death, Clancey pulled away from Joy and Reggie emotionally and eventually started an affair--avoiding the messy family he has in favor of something new and shiny--while Joy tried relentlessly to pretend that everything was all right and smothered her suspicions and bitterness until she couldn't stand it anymore. Reggie is the one who constantly forces those around her to acknowledge the obvious by picking at scabs and asking questions. And since in the end Clancey checks out completely, Joy and Reggie are left to pick up the pieces and make a new life together, and I like the fine line Joy walks with Reggie, trying to include her in the decisions without relenquishing her role as parent, because they are all they have left.
* Somehow, without ever making him an iota less fucked-up and foolish, the writers have managed to bring out Mason's remarkable qualities--his heart, the mercy that coexists with his fatalism, the way he knows beauty when he sees it.
* I never thought it would be the case when she was first introduced, but I have found Daisy's spiritual journey both interesting and credible. Daisy's own method of avoidance has been her self-absorption, and her religiosity is a way for her to finally see outside of herself, and I suspect that that is the necessary step she needs to take before passing on, rather than the formulaic embrace of a particular religion.
* Roxie is generally just awesome, and I can't quite get over the way she was killed over legwarmers--and don't blame her for the fact that she can't quite get over it either--but I think she also serves as an interesting reflection of George, because Roxie is farther along the continuum of living in the world while letting to of her attachments and regrets, and of looking her situation squarely in the face. I think it's telling that Rube had no problem with Roxie taking a job with the police, but didn't want George accepting a promotion, because Roxie holds herself separate, and George still feels the pull to try to participate in life as if she's still alive. And it further convinces me that Rube is, for all of his hard-headed approach to life and death, avoiding something bigger than the rest of them put together.
* The going away party Dolores organized for George, with the donkey and the tolerance with which the inmates at Happy Time regard each others' quirks and impulses toward hedonism, was so great. I love that Dolores took George quitting personally, and that George has finally started looking outside of herself enough to spend her day off with Dolores and Murray at the vet without even thinking twice about it. Because George's own avoidance, her own self-absorption, takes the form of keeping to herself and not participating, and everything that has happened to her since she has died has been pushing her toward striking a balance between giving up on the lost opportunities of her own life and engaging with the greater idea of Life.
* I just really enjoy the enthusiasm with which the show embraces its absurd premise--the Rube Goldberg-esque construction of events leading up to the deaths and their gruesome freakishness, underlining the essential unknowability of someone's end even to the people who have the time and place laid out on a post-it, and the bureaucracy of death, the scale, the way the reapers have to fill out self-evaluations and do data entry. There was something particularly great about "Vacation," where all of those last words were rendered banal by the sheer repetitiveness, and the end result was the picture shared humanity among so many nameless people.
I am also enjoying Eureka, though not in a particularly fannish or thinky way. For me, I think it's not so much what the show does as what it doesn't do. It takes a lot of fairly classic elements that would be predictable on their own, but it wisely focuses on the characters rather than the events. Who didn't know, the second we saw that house, that it was going to turn on Jack at some point? It was a given. So the drama isn't in what happens when the house turns on them, or how they get out of trouble, so much as the relationships between the characters and how they deal, collectively and separately, with being trapped together, and that's where the writers keep the focus. And I think that's a generalization that applies to most of the episodes so far, which have run the litany of fairly predictable cliches (A substance makes everyone lose their inhibitions! Evil body doubles are on the loose! A mysterious stranger comes to town, and events from the past are dug up!). The exotic phenomenon of the week is never much more than a mirror to hold up to the characters. And the love triangle between Allison and Jack and Nathan Stark, which had the potential at the beginning to be so cringeworthy, has been saved by the fact that Stark is a really interesting character in his own right, not just a romantic rival but someone with history with the other characters and complex motivations.
Taggert's accent is so all over the map that either Matt Frewer does the worst Aussie accent to ever darken the television screen or Taggert is not being truthful about his background. And I actually think both of those things are plausible.
* * * * *
And now, the book report.
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
In this book, Pollan traces the origin of four meals as a device to explore Americans' relationship with food and--as it ripples out from there--with farming, and the environmental consequences of different farming choices.
The first section, which proceeds from a meal at McDonalds back through the avenues of large corporate monoculture, is probably the most interesting, because it is the most unified: corporate agribusiness is nothing if not uniform, and one corn and soybean farm in the midwest, or one feedlot, is operated much like another, so it's possible to make sweeping generalizations that make sense. Much of the information Pollan supplies about industrial farming was not new to me, but he has a talent for narrowing down to the telling details and then widening out to the big picture in his narrative to produce a compelling picture of an entire system. Central to that system is corn, and the book finally explained something I'd always wondered about--how farming can be subsidizes but still not make enough to keep the average farmer. The answer is that the government is no longer subsidizing farming--it's subsidizing the industries that rely on cheap corn, by keeping production high and prices low. And because the system produces such vast quantities of cheap corn, corn has made its way into much of the food supply as everything from animal feed to sweetener to any one of hundreds of other compounds added to processed food. This is the section that best describes the disconnect in America between food and health, the way industrialization of food production has made available such a cheap, plentiful, highly processed, and ultimately unhealthy food supply, and how Americans three or four generations removed from the farm have stopped thinking about what goes into what they're eating.
The second section examines large-scale organic agribusiness and small-scale sustainable polyculture, and in this section, Pollan seems to have much less of a point to make, so it's more meandering and exploratory, but it did help me to articulate to myself some of the problems I've always had with the natural food industry and stores like Whole Foods. A little background: after graduating from college, I worked for several years for a small natural foods distributor while I flailed around and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and during that time I developed a pretty good picture of the industry. It's not that industrially produced natural foods are bad--they're certainly, on balance, marginally better for the environment than foods produced with chemical pesticides and fertilizers. But there are several big areas of environmental impact when it comes to food production, and "natural" foods--which are made, minus the chemicals, using many of the same processes as commercial foods--are still grown in monocultural agricultural setups, still heavily packaged, still often highly processed, and often transported over great distances using fossil fuels. So I am all for buying organic and avoiding using chemicals on the farm, but the ethos promoted by Whole Foods that you're saving the Earth by spending an extra $3 on Barbara's Organic O's instead of Cheerios drives my up the fucking wall. There are good reasons for choosing natural food brands over commercial ones, if you can afford them, but in terms of really thinking about the impact of your food choices, I think the large-scale organic food industry that has developed in America over the past twenty years has been a very mixed thing. And yet, the small-scale, sustainable polyculture farm Pollan visits and describes in loving detail, while impressive, is not a realistic way for a largely urban population to get its food. It's a dilemma, one that Pollan exposes and pokes at but ultimately doesn't try to answer.
The third section describes a meal made from hunted and gathered ingredients--wild boar, wild mushrooms. It's much more a meditation on the pleasures of eating food you've acquired, and the sense of connection it brings, than anything else. And that connection, or lack of it, is the ultimate point of the book. Americans have become utterly disconnected from what they eat, and there is a relationship between that disconnection and the dysfunction of the American diet. Pollan traces where the food comes from, but he doesn't delve too deeply into the whys of what passes for food culture in America today--how as a society of immigrants, mobile and increasingly atomized and disconnected from the established food cultures of ancestors, and prizing industrial efficiency, we have come to eat the way we do.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
I thought this was an extraordinary novel. It is actually six stories, arranged concentrically, so that you read the first half of the first story first and the second half last, and each story is connected to the previous one in a way that emphasizes a sort of duality of narrative, overlaying a complex structure with ties made up of books, pieces of music, films, historical records. Each story is, except for the point of connection, completely different--a travel diary of a sea voyage in the 1850s, a story of artistic discovery and disillusionment in 1930s Belgium, an industrial thriller in the 60s, the misadventures of a self-absorbed vanity publisher in present time, the testimony of a clone who tried to free others of her kind in a corporate-dominated future, a post-apocalyptic look at the dying of the last remnants of civilized tradition even further ahead, each told in distinct and memorable narrative voices, each as fascinating as the last. If there is a unifying narrative thread aside from the connections, it is the centrality of both greed and art to human life, the struggles against darkness that are sometimes successful but often not, the universality of impulses toward creativity and beauty and violence. The novel has a final structural trick where it circles back on itself, beginning with the white sailors who hold Polynesians in such contempt, ending with a Polynesian society extinguishing what is left of that Western-inspired civilization, after it has risen to its most extreme excesses and fallen about as far as it can go and still be recognizable.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro has a way of building a narrative picture that is almost painterly, using small, delicate strokes and precise details to lay out the narrator's surroundings, and to widen the view slowly until the reader sees what the narrator is missing. Never Let Me Go starts out as Kathy's reminiscences about life at boarding school, and the odd details creep up slowly through the stories of adolescent cliques and studies and clashes between friends--the references to donations and possibles, the complete separation of these children from the outside world, the way these children know instinctively that they creep out normal people, people from the outside. In the end, it is less surprising to realize that these children are clones, created and raised for their organs and afforded an unusually idyllic childhood by a failed social movement, than to see the way they meekly accept their fates. I think the clue to their passivity lies in Kathy and Tommy's final bid to go to Madame and get a deferral because they are in love, and of the children's general belief that such a thing was possible, a wish to be granted by a fairy godmother--it's completely naive, as naive as their belief that Madame collected their artwork to have a way of judging the truth of their love, when all Madame was doing was trying to prove their existence as people rather than walking sacks of organs for donation. I'm not sure I totally bought that that degree of naivety could be sustained, because they were all free to travel around after they left Hailsham, and should have had exposure to the wider world, but it was an effective device for showing the very humanity they weren't supposed to possess.
We are in the midst of Banned Books Week. It occurred to me, while I was looking over the lists of challenged books, that my parents never once tried to restrict what I read when I was growing up, and I ended up reading books that had all kinds of sex and violence and dark themes from a fairly young age. I may not have always understood what I was reading when I was younger, and I sometimes found some things upsetting, but none of it warped me as a person. And implicit in my parents' attitude was a trust in me to be able to handle ideas, and to think for myself, although I mostly think it just never occurred to them to worry about it. (After all, when Alien first aired on cable, my father's reaction was not "Is this really appropriate for a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old?" but "Hey, this is a great movie!" We were, in a lot of ways, just littler people to him.) Did your parents let you read whatever you wanted? Or were some things off limits when you were younger.