Three hours is more than enough time to make up imaginary posts in your head
Wow, that three-hour quarterly all-hands meeting did wonders for my productivity today!
::writes frivolous, long-winded livejournal post::
* * * * *
I have thoughts about Veronica Mars 3.05 - "Charlie Don't Surf" - that have not that much to do with the actual episode itself, which I thought was kind of disjointed and sadly lacking in Wallace. One of the things this episode brought to the fore, but that has been lurking under the surface for the entire season and last season as well, is how utterly rudderless Logan is. Why is he even at Hearst? Probably because college is the expected next step, and Veronica's there. He's got no family left unless you count Trina, and I don't think he does--Aaron Echolls may have been an evil bastard, but Logan defined himself, first as son of Aaron Echolls, then by trying to be everything Aaron Echolls wasn't. Now all he has is his father's money and Veronica, and his father's money might not be as solid as he thinks it is. That's probably why it was so hard to watch him reach out for a family connection to someone else, and have that effort fail because of the same things--his father's notoriety, his own prickly self-protectiveness--that got him where he is now in the first place. I continue to suspect that the weight Veronica carries in his life is too much for one person to bear. And then there's Veronica's relationship to justice, her certainty that if she doesn't locate the rapist, no one will, certainly not the ineffective and corrupt campus authorities or Lamb's sherrif's department. I think one of the things that's started feeling more and more off to me about the season is the way the noir aspects of the show--particularly the layers of unofficial justice systems underlying the official structure run by Lamb, with the guilty largely escaping consequences because they're wealthy and the little people bearing the brunt--seem to be fading away. The stereotypically angry feminists are annoying on a lot of different levels, but I think their antagonism against the frat would play better if it tapped into the powerless-versus-powerful-and-privileged dynamic of the Two Neptunes we saw in the past couple of seasons, and it doesn't manage to do that. It beggars belief that these women are all so focused on punishing the frat that they're not at all concerned with actually catching the rapist, and without that kind of context to their hostility, it's just dumb.
Also, dear Jericho, you are killing me here with the heartwarming Very Special Moments of families and communities pulling together in times of trouble! The mysterious nuclear holocaust, the creepy Hawkins family, the splits along existing faultlines in the community, the hints that they are about one person's armed temper tantrum away from total meltdown, the missiles in the night and the EMP and the possibility of groups of survivalists out for themselves out there in the wilderness? Fabulous. The whole community coming together to selflessly harvest the (surely radioactive, because I don't think it actually stops taking up water until the plant is harvested, though it slows after the kernels have developed) corn and the big, earnest speeches about having to follow the law in order to be able to enforce it? Not so fabulous. But if you keep slathering on the syrup, I may be able to stop watching you, so there is that.
* * * * *
thassalia and rubberneck both wrote posts recently discussing literary versus genre fiction, which is something I have been thinking about since reading a review of Cormac McCarthy's new novel The Road, which is, from what I can tell, a future apocalypse story and is being treated as literary fiction because it is written by Cormac McCarthy, at around the same time I had a very involved conversation with someone about the literary merits of Stephen King's The Shining.
I have long been primarily a reader of what's labeled "literary" fiction. I went through great gasps of fantasy, science fiction, romance, and mystery reading when I was a teenager, but at the same time, I was doing reading for school that I genuinely enjoyed--Faulkner and Dostoevsky and Robert Penn Warren--and at some point, I'm not quite sure when, the writing itself, the language, and the connection between the events on the page and some universal human truth, became a really critical part of my enjoyment of a particular book. Most of my "genre" reading died off at that point, because a lot of the genre books I had access to were written using, at best, competent language, and involved straight-up plotting that didn't make that larger connection--I know that good plotting is in itself a skill, it just wasn't enough for me. I have gotten a lot of things out of my livejournal experience--including the inability to watch an old Perry Mason rerun recently without immediately deciding that Perry and Della were SO doing it, probably in a threesome with Paul Drake, because come on, it's right there!--but one of the best things has been a flist full of discerning readers who have been able to point me toward truly interesting writers that have been stuck with the "genre" label. And it's a label I've also become increasingly frustrated with, because it's so arbitrary.
King is always an interesting writer to hang this kind of discussion on, because his subject matter is so unabashedly drawn from identifiable and long-running horror traditions, because he is marketed as horror, and because he's also a strong writer who has tapped into a particularly rich vein of American fears and anxieties and uses horror to explore them. I'm not going to get into his more recent work--he lost me at Pet Sematary--but the two books of his I always liked best were The Shining and It, because they hit at exactly the things "literary" fiction does best--using situations as devices to explore darker human truths. It was, at its core, about the helplessness of children in a world where the adults made all the rules and determined who was credible; The Shining was about the terrible pressures of modern American ideals of manhood, and how they can turn back on themselves and become something violent and terrible. At his best, King uses supernatural trappings to explore human nature; the real evil doesn't tend to come from outside sources but from the characters themselves. So he has the storytelling, but also the connection to something larger. But the distinction between "literary" and "genre" breaks down even more with writers like Jonathan Lethem, who is treated as a writer of "literary" fiction even though most of his novels have been recognizably science fiction (As She Climbed Across the Table, Girl in Landscape, Amnesia Moon) or noir detective (Motherless Brooklyn), and Fortress of Solitude used the superpower of flying as a device. Many of Cormac McCarthy's novels have been Westerns (Blood Meridian, the Border Trilogy), his last novel was a mystery (No Country for Old Men), and his latest appears to be something science fiction readers will recognize quite comfortably. The difference between King or Neal Stephenson on the one hand and Lethem and McCarthy (or for that matter David Mitchell or Kazuo Ishiguro or Mark Z. Danielewski) seems to be one of degree--the former more willing to engage overtly with readers' expectations from and understanding of genre and its tropes, the latter slightly more focused on the human elements of the story. But at the end of the day, it's a pretty blurry distinction, and I wish reviewers and booksellers weren't so intent on making it. Don't look for Girl in Landscape--a story about a girl whose family is part of a colonial party on another planet and the alien inhabitants of that planet--in the science fiction sections of most bookstores; it will be shelved under literary fiction. On top of the disservice this dichotomy does so-called "genre" writers, it ignores the fact that a fair amount of "literary" fiction includes fantastical elements. It just gets called "magical realism" when Gabriel Garcia Marquez does it.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, other than to notice for myself that the distinction I make--between straight-up stories and books that address fundamental questions about what it means to be human--doesn't fall along those genre/literary lines at all.
* * * * *
Excuse me while I fangirl John Krasinski with a fierceness. And while tonight's episode of The Office is a rerun, it's new to me because it aired before I started watching and TiVOing the show, so yay! New The Office!
* * * * *
I haven't talked enough about sharks lately. I need to remedy that. Via 3 Quarks Daily, which points to a variety of interesting stuff on a daily basis, check out this extremely cool shark!
* * * * *
My mother recently had eye surgery, and to my tremendous disappointment, she declined to talk like a pirate while wearing the eye patch. Sometimes I wonder how we could possibly be related.
::writes frivolous, long-winded livejournal post::
* * * * *
I have thoughts about Veronica Mars 3.05 - "Charlie Don't Surf" - that have not that much to do with the actual episode itself, which I thought was kind of disjointed and sadly lacking in Wallace. One of the things this episode brought to the fore, but that has been lurking under the surface for the entire season and last season as well, is how utterly rudderless Logan is. Why is he even at Hearst? Probably because college is the expected next step, and Veronica's there. He's got no family left unless you count Trina, and I don't think he does--Aaron Echolls may have been an evil bastard, but Logan defined himself, first as son of Aaron Echolls, then by trying to be everything Aaron Echolls wasn't. Now all he has is his father's money and Veronica, and his father's money might not be as solid as he thinks it is. That's probably why it was so hard to watch him reach out for a family connection to someone else, and have that effort fail because of the same things--his father's notoriety, his own prickly self-protectiveness--that got him where he is now in the first place. I continue to suspect that the weight Veronica carries in his life is too much for one person to bear. And then there's Veronica's relationship to justice, her certainty that if she doesn't locate the rapist, no one will, certainly not the ineffective and corrupt campus authorities or Lamb's sherrif's department. I think one of the things that's started feeling more and more off to me about the season is the way the noir aspects of the show--particularly the layers of unofficial justice systems underlying the official structure run by Lamb, with the guilty largely escaping consequences because they're wealthy and the little people bearing the brunt--seem to be fading away. The stereotypically angry feminists are annoying on a lot of different levels, but I think their antagonism against the frat would play better if it tapped into the powerless-versus-powerful-and-privileged dynamic of the Two Neptunes we saw in the past couple of seasons, and it doesn't manage to do that. It beggars belief that these women are all so focused on punishing the frat that they're not at all concerned with actually catching the rapist, and without that kind of context to their hostility, it's just dumb.
Also, dear Jericho, you are killing me here with the heartwarming Very Special Moments of families and communities pulling together in times of trouble! The mysterious nuclear holocaust, the creepy Hawkins family, the splits along existing faultlines in the community, the hints that they are about one person's armed temper tantrum away from total meltdown, the missiles in the night and the EMP and the possibility of groups of survivalists out for themselves out there in the wilderness? Fabulous. The whole community coming together to selflessly harvest the (surely radioactive, because I don't think it actually stops taking up water until the plant is harvested, though it slows after the kernels have developed) corn and the big, earnest speeches about having to follow the law in order to be able to enforce it? Not so fabulous. But if you keep slathering on the syrup, I may be able to stop watching you, so there is that.
* * * * *
thassalia and rubberneck both wrote posts recently discussing literary versus genre fiction, which is something I have been thinking about since reading a review of Cormac McCarthy's new novel The Road, which is, from what I can tell, a future apocalypse story and is being treated as literary fiction because it is written by Cormac McCarthy, at around the same time I had a very involved conversation with someone about the literary merits of Stephen King's The Shining.
I have long been primarily a reader of what's labeled "literary" fiction. I went through great gasps of fantasy, science fiction, romance, and mystery reading when I was a teenager, but at the same time, I was doing reading for school that I genuinely enjoyed--Faulkner and Dostoevsky and Robert Penn Warren--and at some point, I'm not quite sure when, the writing itself, the language, and the connection between the events on the page and some universal human truth, became a really critical part of my enjoyment of a particular book. Most of my "genre" reading died off at that point, because a lot of the genre books I had access to were written using, at best, competent language, and involved straight-up plotting that didn't make that larger connection--I know that good plotting is in itself a skill, it just wasn't enough for me. I have gotten a lot of things out of my livejournal experience--including the inability to watch an old Perry Mason rerun recently without immediately deciding that Perry and Della were SO doing it, probably in a threesome with Paul Drake, because come on, it's right there!--but one of the best things has been a flist full of discerning readers who have been able to point me toward truly interesting writers that have been stuck with the "genre" label. And it's a label I've also become increasingly frustrated with, because it's so arbitrary.
King is always an interesting writer to hang this kind of discussion on, because his subject matter is so unabashedly drawn from identifiable and long-running horror traditions, because he is marketed as horror, and because he's also a strong writer who has tapped into a particularly rich vein of American fears and anxieties and uses horror to explore them. I'm not going to get into his more recent work--he lost me at Pet Sematary--but the two books of his I always liked best were The Shining and It, because they hit at exactly the things "literary" fiction does best--using situations as devices to explore darker human truths. It was, at its core, about the helplessness of children in a world where the adults made all the rules and determined who was credible; The Shining was about the terrible pressures of modern American ideals of manhood, and how they can turn back on themselves and become something violent and terrible. At his best, King uses supernatural trappings to explore human nature; the real evil doesn't tend to come from outside sources but from the characters themselves. So he has the storytelling, but also the connection to something larger. But the distinction between "literary" and "genre" breaks down even more with writers like Jonathan Lethem, who is treated as a writer of "literary" fiction even though most of his novels have been recognizably science fiction (As She Climbed Across the Table, Girl in Landscape, Amnesia Moon) or noir detective (Motherless Brooklyn), and Fortress of Solitude used the superpower of flying as a device. Many of Cormac McCarthy's novels have been Westerns (Blood Meridian, the Border Trilogy), his last novel was a mystery (No Country for Old Men), and his latest appears to be something science fiction readers will recognize quite comfortably. The difference between King or Neal Stephenson on the one hand and Lethem and McCarthy (or for that matter David Mitchell or Kazuo Ishiguro or Mark Z. Danielewski) seems to be one of degree--the former more willing to engage overtly with readers' expectations from and understanding of genre and its tropes, the latter slightly more focused on the human elements of the story. But at the end of the day, it's a pretty blurry distinction, and I wish reviewers and booksellers weren't so intent on making it. Don't look for Girl in Landscape--a story about a girl whose family is part of a colonial party on another planet and the alien inhabitants of that planet--in the science fiction sections of most bookstores; it will be shelved under literary fiction. On top of the disservice this dichotomy does so-called "genre" writers, it ignores the fact that a fair amount of "literary" fiction includes fantastical elements. It just gets called "magical realism" when Gabriel Garcia Marquez does it.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, other than to notice for myself that the distinction I make--between straight-up stories and books that address fundamental questions about what it means to be human--doesn't fall along those genre/literary lines at all.
* * * * *
Excuse me while I fangirl John Krasinski with a fierceness. And while tonight's episode of The Office is a rerun, it's new to me because it aired before I started watching and TiVOing the show, so yay! New The Office!
* * * * *
I haven't talked enough about sharks lately. I need to remedy that. Via 3 Quarks Daily, which points to a variety of interesting stuff on a daily basis, check out this extremely cool shark!
* * * * *
My mother recently had eye surgery, and to my tremendous disappointment, she declined to talk like a pirate while wearing the eye patch. Sometimes I wonder how we could possibly be related.