politics and prose
I went to two John Kerry events Wednesday night, forcing postponement of SV/Angel watching. Now, the only reason my picture isn't in the dictionary defining "shy" is that I'm too shy to be photographed, so this required serious fortitude in the face of multiple strangers in close quarters. Turns out I could have gone to the sit-down dinner, but by going to the lower-level shindig in the art gallery, featuring Chuck Schumer and Cam Kerry, I ran into an old friend, so that's okay.
Schumer was funny and talked a lot about judicial nominations, in deference to the lawyer-heavy audience at the art gallery. When he introduced Kerry at the dance club (the event for people younger and less generous than the people at the art gallery), he didn't talk about judges. Instead, he talked about the Sopranos, and got Steve Buscemi's first name wrong.
At the dance club, Kerry wasn't particularly inspiring, and he wanted to talk about health care, which didn't much energize the crowd, though they were willing to cheer for it anyway. I understand why Kerry's strategy can't be to say "vote for me because I'm not George W. Bush," but that's really why I was there. I wanted him to talk about Iraq and the economy - he did get around to the deficit, and the best part of his speech was when he got to foreign relations, pointed out that we need to have some support in the other 96% of the world, and then said "America should never go to war because it wants to. It should go to war only because it has to." That was a crowd-pleaser. There were too many jokes about the young folks getting drunk and forgetting what they'd heard, and there was a six-foot tall friendly joint in a sombrero painted on the wall near where we were standing (think Mr. Butts, Doonesbury's talking cigarette, and you'll get the idea), which I didn't think was exactly the right image. Then again, there was a lot of talk about 1968 ... Anyhow, I heard Kerry, even though I didn't quite see him, and that plus finding my old friend was worthwhile.
In the last bit of politics, I thought Tom Shales of the Washington Post had the best line on Bush's news conference: When Bush said "When I say something, I mean it," he said that the reporters were too polite to call out, "Then when are you going to say something?"
Then I watched SV & Angel. Loved them - no spoilers, but if the WB persists in calling new episodes "fresh" episodes, I won't answer for my actions. Not just in the on-screen bug, but every! damn! time! they came back from commercial.
In other news, the best line from last week's viewing of Jeremiah: Rivka: Would you like little marshmallows in your hot chocolate? geekturnedvamp: Is that a trick question?
Good point.
Donald Westlake, Money for Nothing: This is caper Westlake. The protagonist starts receiving a check for a thousand dollars every month, no return address, no contact information. He cashes the checks, because he could use the money. Then, after years of this, a stranger tells him, "You've been activated." Suddenly he's on an odyssey of intrigue and danger, his wife and young son at risk, and he doesn't know whom to trust. If this sounds like a movie concept, then I've conveyed how it reads. I never felt for the protagonist, not really, but I did root for him, like a good spectator. Westlake is of course an experienced purveyor of this sort of thing, and it occupied me for a good hour and a half on the train.
Devin Grayson, Smallville: City: Yep, it's slashy. Even setting aside "Clark Kent was Lex Luthor's hobby," Clark notices Lex's new car; Lex replies, "What can I say? I've got a weakness for things that move fast." Omar G. would have a field day with that, along with Jonathan and Lionel worrying about the relationship between their sons. Way, way too much exposition of things we already know in the early chapters; perhaps I've been spoiled by reading mostly Star Trek tie-ins, which assume you know who these people are, but you don't buy this book unless you know the show, and I wish Grayson had acknowledged/been allowed to acknowledge that familiarity. Also, I didn't much like reimagining Clark as blue-eyed, though I guess it's closer to overall canon. Far more important, as others have said, is that Grayson obviously likes both Clark and Lex, which makes the book balanced (it's written in a bunch of third-person POVs, wavering in a drunkard's walk through various characters, original and canonical) and tender, almost melancholic in its foreshadowing. When Clark ends up in a phone booth, he doesn't rip his shirt open, but it is a moment in his journey to becoming Superman. I liked Lex's failed date; while Clark's failed date with Lana is just another retread - somebody's in danger, Clark goes to help, a pissed-off Lana presses for explanations and gets only evasions and lies, therefore she leaves in a huff, too bad - Lex's date, with an original character, offers a nice glimpse of how Lex always gets too little, too late. Some people would like to help him, but for one reason or another their own lives always take priority, and by the time they're ready, he's already been hurt enough that he can't trust the outstretched hand. The writing is occasionally clunky and tell-y, but there's enough character insight to make it worthwhile for me. I especially liked Grayson's suggestion that, because Lex only sees in shades of gray, he can't imagine either a completely altruistic act or a completely unforgiveable act. Even though I know it's not going to work out well for our boys, I'd like to think she's right.
Ken Macleod, The Cassini Division: Socialism by way of Ayn Rand provides the background for Macleod's intriguing story, which involves humans versus post-humans whose past technological attacks have left things a little screwy, by twenty-first century standards. Biological technology is very advanced, but regular old electronics are extremely untrustworthy. Now, the Cassini Division, a sort of black-ops bureau in a society with no government and no secrets, has come up with a way to deal with the post-human threat once and for all. The protagonist is firmly convinced that this is the right thing to do, but not everyone is, and to make the plan work she's going to have to recruit from a strange rag-tag band of antisocials - capitalists. Things move briskly and the characters are interesting if sketchily drawn. I was glad that not everything worked out neatly, though I wasn't sure if there was too much political theory or too little. All in all, a good introduction to Macleod for me, with plenty of action and plenty of thought about what the next action should be, which I appreciated.
Irresistible Forces, ed. Catherine Asaro: This anthology of sf- and fantasy-based romances proved disappointing. Lois McMaster Bujold's offering was the most familiar to me, featuring Sgt. Taura and Armsman Roic protecting Miles and Ekaterina from a threat to their wedding. It wasn't bad, but for a light offering there was nothing even approaching the inspired wackiness that punctuated A Civil Campaign.
David Callahan, The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong To Get Ahead: People cheat a lot. They pilfer office supplies, falsify earnings reports, lie on their taxes, lie on their billing sheets, cheat on tests, plagiarize, and download music from Kazaa. People who seem to have good lives are at least as prone to cheat as people who don't. Callahan paints a depressing picture; unfortunately, the trends he sees as producing this epidemic are broad and hard to fix: the winner-take-all nature of society that makes getting into a good college even more important than it was twenty years ago; the gap between rich and poor; the way our culture celebrates success without caring how it was achieved; the way the biggest thieves, the Fastows and their ilk seem to get off without a real penalty. His prescriptions are pretty standard Democratic ones. The book's real weakness is that there's no comparative data; he admits that he doesn't know that cheating has increased, because nobody was looking at it systematically in the 1950s etc. The book is easy to read, but a real downer.
Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts: As usual, Garber's conversational style eases her discussion of how the categories "professional" and "amateur" constitute one another, and each can be elevated to the other's detriment, a subject perhaps of special interest to those of us who straddle the academic/fan divide. Garber also addresses discipline envy, what in my field is the "lawyer as astrophysicist" phenomenon where law professors think they can master another field by doing some self-directed reading. And in discussing academics v. journalists, she makes the nice point that, not only is each the other's abject, but journalism is supposed to explain and describe, while academic writing is about thinking a subject through, and inherently considers itself part of a conversation, so that to take any single piece as a stand-alone is "almost inevitably to find the current speaker's contribution unaccountable, dogmatic, or slightly ridiculous."
Richard Dooling, Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech, and Sexual Harassment: I bought this because I liked Dooling's fiction book Bet Your Life, and it was about free speech, which meant I could get my employer to pay for it. That was a mistake. This polemic, long on vitriol and short on argument, denounces "victim feminism" (or "so-called victim feminists," which seems to me a silly redundancy; it's not like they call themselves victim feminists, which means it's you calling them that) that has made it impossible to be a man, and curse, as men do. It's at least ironic that Dooling says, criticizing the p.c. fascism that apparently rules in his America, "It's not enough for us to discover the truth ... we also need to attack everyone who happens to hold a contrary view." Also, apparently women don't often say "fuck," which I hope this particular readership finds as hilarious as I do, and men are now in peril of being lynched for sexual harassment if they use the term. As for "fuck" itself, he first complains about the word being historically so offensive that it's not in dictionaries or linguistic histories and then - you guessed it - traces its history, with reference to a number of dictionaries that do include it. Dooling, a lawyer, makes several suggestions that it's a violation of his free speech rights (and yours and mine) for dictionaries to exclude "fuck," which annoys me, since the last time I looked the government didn't require dictionaries to do squat. He also claims not to be opposing "real" anti-discrimination law, only sexual harassment law - perhaps unsurprisingly, he has little to say about racial harassment - but when he goes into an extended rant about how unfair life is to everybody, and why does the woman who's fired because she's a woman get treated better than the man who gets fired because he's an asshole, it's plain that the agenda goes a teeny bit further. It's not that there aren't stupid applications of harassment law. If you look, you can find stupid applications of any law. An argument is that the stupid applications do more harm than the smart ones do good. But Dooling doesn't convince with complaint that doesn't go beyond the playground logic, "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me." As I recall, you only said that if they already had. Lone good thing: I am glad that Dooling introduced me to a phrase about someone so incompetent "he could fuck up a wet dream."
Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way: I've never read a Bryson book before; apparently he is a popularizer/travel writer. This book is a decent overview of some neat things about English, though he does early on repeat the misleading claim that Eskimos have over thirty words for snow, as if English didn't have plenty. But the rest was a pleasant tour through history, spelling, pronunciation, swearing, and other tricks of the tongue. I didn't know that many other languages have no need for thesauruses, because English has more words than most. (Interestingly, in light of the Dooling book discussed above, Bryson points out that English is unusual in using plain old "fuck you"/"get fucked" as an insult, because one would think the command would be pleasurable, like snarling "Have a nice day!") Based on this, I'm hopeful that the other Bryson books in my pile will be relaxing reads.
Schumer was funny and talked a lot about judicial nominations, in deference to the lawyer-heavy audience at the art gallery. When he introduced Kerry at the dance club (the event for people younger and less generous than the people at the art gallery), he didn't talk about judges. Instead, he talked about the Sopranos, and got Steve Buscemi's first name wrong.
At the dance club, Kerry wasn't particularly inspiring, and he wanted to talk about health care, which didn't much energize the crowd, though they were willing to cheer for it anyway. I understand why Kerry's strategy can't be to say "vote for me because I'm not George W. Bush," but that's really why I was there. I wanted him to talk about Iraq and the economy - he did get around to the deficit, and the best part of his speech was when he got to foreign relations, pointed out that we need to have some support in the other 96% of the world, and then said "America should never go to war because it wants to. It should go to war only because it has to." That was a crowd-pleaser. There were too many jokes about the young folks getting drunk and forgetting what they'd heard, and there was a six-foot tall friendly joint in a sombrero painted on the wall near where we were standing (think Mr. Butts, Doonesbury's talking cigarette, and you'll get the idea), which I didn't think was exactly the right image. Then again, there was a lot of talk about 1968 ... Anyhow, I heard Kerry, even though I didn't quite see him, and that plus finding my old friend was worthwhile.
In the last bit of politics, I thought Tom Shales of the Washington Post had the best line on Bush's news conference: When Bush said "When I say something, I mean it," he said that the reporters were too polite to call out, "Then when are you going to say something?"
Then I watched SV & Angel. Loved them - no spoilers, but if the WB persists in calling new episodes "fresh" episodes, I won't answer for my actions. Not just in the on-screen bug, but every! damn! time! they came back from commercial.
In other news, the best line from last week's viewing of Jeremiah: Rivka: Would you like little marshmallows in your hot chocolate? geekturnedvamp: Is that a trick question?
Good point.
Donald Westlake, Money for Nothing: This is caper Westlake. The protagonist starts receiving a check for a thousand dollars every month, no return address, no contact information. He cashes the checks, because he could use the money. Then, after years of this, a stranger tells him, "You've been activated." Suddenly he's on an odyssey of intrigue and danger, his wife and young son at risk, and he doesn't know whom to trust. If this sounds like a movie concept, then I've conveyed how it reads. I never felt for the protagonist, not really, but I did root for him, like a good spectator. Westlake is of course an experienced purveyor of this sort of thing, and it occupied me for a good hour and a half on the train.
Devin Grayson, Smallville: City: Yep, it's slashy. Even setting aside "Clark Kent was Lex Luthor's hobby," Clark notices Lex's new car; Lex replies, "What can I say? I've got a weakness for things that move fast." Omar G. would have a field day with that, along with Jonathan and Lionel worrying about the relationship between their sons. Way, way too much exposition of things we already know in the early chapters; perhaps I've been spoiled by reading mostly Star Trek tie-ins, which assume you know who these people are, but you don't buy this book unless you know the show, and I wish Grayson had acknowledged/been allowed to acknowledge that familiarity. Also, I didn't much like reimagining Clark as blue-eyed, though I guess it's closer to overall canon. Far more important, as others have said, is that Grayson obviously likes both Clark and Lex, which makes the book balanced (it's written in a bunch of third-person POVs, wavering in a drunkard's walk through various characters, original and canonical) and tender, almost melancholic in its foreshadowing. When Clark ends up in a phone booth, he doesn't rip his shirt open, but it is a moment in his journey to becoming Superman. I liked Lex's failed date; while Clark's failed date with Lana is just another retread - somebody's in danger, Clark goes to help, a pissed-off Lana presses for explanations and gets only evasions and lies, therefore she leaves in a huff, too bad - Lex's date, with an original character, offers a nice glimpse of how Lex always gets too little, too late. Some people would like to help him, but for one reason or another their own lives always take priority, and by the time they're ready, he's already been hurt enough that he can't trust the outstretched hand. The writing is occasionally clunky and tell-y, but there's enough character insight to make it worthwhile for me. I especially liked Grayson's suggestion that, because Lex only sees in shades of gray, he can't imagine either a completely altruistic act or a completely unforgiveable act. Even though I know it's not going to work out well for our boys, I'd like to think she's right.
Ken Macleod, The Cassini Division: Socialism by way of Ayn Rand provides the background for Macleod's intriguing story, which involves humans versus post-humans whose past technological attacks have left things a little screwy, by twenty-first century standards. Biological technology is very advanced, but regular old electronics are extremely untrustworthy. Now, the Cassini Division, a sort of black-ops bureau in a society with no government and no secrets, has come up with a way to deal with the post-human threat once and for all. The protagonist is firmly convinced that this is the right thing to do, but not everyone is, and to make the plan work she's going to have to recruit from a strange rag-tag band of antisocials - capitalists. Things move briskly and the characters are interesting if sketchily drawn. I was glad that not everything worked out neatly, though I wasn't sure if there was too much political theory or too little. All in all, a good introduction to Macleod for me, with plenty of action and plenty of thought about what the next action should be, which I appreciated.
Irresistible Forces, ed. Catherine Asaro: This anthology of sf- and fantasy-based romances proved disappointing. Lois McMaster Bujold's offering was the most familiar to me, featuring Sgt. Taura and Armsman Roic protecting Miles and Ekaterina from a threat to their wedding. It wasn't bad, but for a light offering there was nothing even approaching the inspired wackiness that punctuated A Civil Campaign.
David Callahan, The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong To Get Ahead: People cheat a lot. They pilfer office supplies, falsify earnings reports, lie on their taxes, lie on their billing sheets, cheat on tests, plagiarize, and download music from Kazaa. People who seem to have good lives are at least as prone to cheat as people who don't. Callahan paints a depressing picture; unfortunately, the trends he sees as producing this epidemic are broad and hard to fix: the winner-take-all nature of society that makes getting into a good college even more important than it was twenty years ago; the gap between rich and poor; the way our culture celebrates success without caring how it was achieved; the way the biggest thieves, the Fastows and their ilk seem to get off without a real penalty. His prescriptions are pretty standard Democratic ones. The book's real weakness is that there's no comparative data; he admits that he doesn't know that cheating has increased, because nobody was looking at it systematically in the 1950s etc. The book is easy to read, but a real downer.
Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts: As usual, Garber's conversational style eases her discussion of how the categories "professional" and "amateur" constitute one another, and each can be elevated to the other's detriment, a subject perhaps of special interest to those of us who straddle the academic/fan divide. Garber also addresses discipline envy, what in my field is the "lawyer as astrophysicist" phenomenon where law professors think they can master another field by doing some self-directed reading. And in discussing academics v. journalists, she makes the nice point that, not only is each the other's abject, but journalism is supposed to explain and describe, while academic writing is about thinking a subject through, and inherently considers itself part of a conversation, so that to take any single piece as a stand-alone is "almost inevitably to find the current speaker's contribution unaccountable, dogmatic, or slightly ridiculous."
Richard Dooling, Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech, and Sexual Harassment: I bought this because I liked Dooling's fiction book Bet Your Life, and it was about free speech, which meant I could get my employer to pay for it. That was a mistake. This polemic, long on vitriol and short on argument, denounces "victim feminism" (or "so-called victim feminists," which seems to me a silly redundancy; it's not like they call themselves victim feminists, which means it's you calling them that) that has made it impossible to be a man, and curse, as men do. It's at least ironic that Dooling says, criticizing the p.c. fascism that apparently rules in his America, "It's not enough for us to discover the truth ... we also need to attack everyone who happens to hold a contrary view." Also, apparently women don't often say "fuck," which I hope this particular readership finds as hilarious as I do, and men are now in peril of being lynched for sexual harassment if they use the term. As for "fuck" itself, he first complains about the word being historically so offensive that it's not in dictionaries or linguistic histories and then - you guessed it - traces its history, with reference to a number of dictionaries that do include it. Dooling, a lawyer, makes several suggestions that it's a violation of his free speech rights (and yours and mine) for dictionaries to exclude "fuck," which annoys me, since the last time I looked the government didn't require dictionaries to do squat. He also claims not to be opposing "real" anti-discrimination law, only sexual harassment law - perhaps unsurprisingly, he has little to say about racial harassment - but when he goes into an extended rant about how unfair life is to everybody, and why does the woman who's fired because she's a woman get treated better than the man who gets fired because he's an asshole, it's plain that the agenda goes a teeny bit further. It's not that there aren't stupid applications of harassment law. If you look, you can find stupid applications of any law. An argument is that the stupid applications do more harm than the smart ones do good. But Dooling doesn't convince with complaint that doesn't go beyond the playground logic, "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me." As I recall, you only said that if they already had. Lone good thing: I am glad that Dooling introduced me to a phrase about someone so incompetent "he could fuck up a wet dream."
Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way: I've never read a Bryson book before; apparently he is a popularizer/travel writer. This book is a decent overview of some neat things about English, though he does early on repeat the misleading claim that Eskimos have over thirty words for snow, as if English didn't have plenty. But the rest was a pleasant tour through history, spelling, pronunciation, swearing, and other tricks of the tongue. I didn't know that many other languages have no need for thesauruses, because English has more words than most. (Interestingly, in light of the Dooling book discussed above, Bryson points out that English is unusual in using plain old "fuck you"/"get fucked" as an insult, because one would think the command would be pleasurable, like snarling "Have a nice day!") Based on this, I'm hopeful that the other Bryson books in my pile will be relaxing reads.