(no subject)
1. 30 Rock was wonderful last night, as usual. I absolutely adore the friendship between Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy, which was the highlight of the episode, but the secondary stories with Jenna and Frank and Kenneth and Tracy were fabulous. I particularly loved Jenna's outrage at Frank's desperate desire to keep their hookup a secret, and Kenneth's lame attempts to convince Tracy to take his diabetes diagnosis seriously. I must say, Dot Com let me down in this episode by not siding with Kenneth on the side of reason! But I totally cracked up when I think Grizz looks at Kenneth and says something like "Really? That was your plan?" after Tracy saw through another transparent Kenneth ploy. I love Kenneth so much.
2. Did anyone watch the PBS series The Story of India? If so, what did you think?
3. I've been very curious to see what kind of reception Slumdog Millionaire receives in India. I'm beginning to get an answer. I have a hard time thinking that Indians will overwhelmingly love this film - I would expect that reactions will be very mixed.
4. I recently read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God, near-future science fiction novels about human first-contact with sentient life on another planet; the first-contact mission is undertaken by a mix of Jesuit priest-scientists and secular scientists. I loved both books, not because they were beautifully written - the author is an anthropologist and technical writer who transitioned to fiction writing, and it shows in her prose style which improves but starts out fairly plodding and clumsy - but because her story and her main character are so compelling. I'm a sucker for angsty, broken men, and in Father Emilio Sandoz, she provides an angsty, badly-damaged man who has lost his faith, lost his friends, lost everything except his life, and is struggling to understand why. Over the course of these two novels, through a combination of flashback and present-time storytelling, Russell demonstrates marvelous, complex world-building, and she shows us how the best intentions can end in utter ruin, and how meaning and purpose can be found even in the darkest of circumstances. Russell also gives us some wonderful observations on life and relationships, faith and philosophy, and although her main character is a priest (and indeed several of the characters are priests), the books are wonderfully balanced in describing its various characters and perspectives: Catholic, Jewish, atheist, agnostic - and, of course, alien. While there are many things in these books for which Russell can be criticized (predictable relationships and events, for example), I choose to see all the things she does right, and there were enough of them that they made these books an intense, page-turning read for me, and when I came to the end of Children of God, the conclusion felt both poignant and right.