a lay of the land

On teachers and sexual abuse

2012-02-07T14:39:00.000-06:00

Here is a Jezebel article that details the sexual abuse allegedly perpetrated by two teachers, Mark Berndt and Martin Bernard Springer, were spoon-feeding semen to and/or "fondling" their elementary school students over the years 2005 to 2010. From the article:

As bad as these new allegations are, there might still be more to come for Miramonte. Superintendent John Deasy said that he wants to fire Springer as soon as Tuesday, when the Board of Education will discuss the case in a closed session, and that he'll also urge the Board to fire Miramonte music teacher Vance Miller after two former students (now adults) have come forward with allegations that Miller had sexual relationships with them when they attended the school.

and

He added, however, that though he's "appalled" by the allegations of sexual abuse, "We must never lose sight of the fact that the great majority of the teachers in this district are caring, nurturing and understanding toward their students."

This last quote is what I would like to discuss in further detail. Obviously this school has some major problems in regards to hiring teachers, but - and I am about to say something extremely controversial - this is probably a case of pure coincidence. 3 teachers in one school, Miramonte Elementary School in Florence-Firestone California, have attracted and employed three male teachers who have allegedly sexually abused children. If this isn't a simple case of coincidence, the alternative is even more chilling, ie two pedophiles conspiring! But it is most likely that the two teachers figured out that they share sexual proclivities and then went on joint field trips (chilling enough!). No matter how these teachers got together, the problem facing this school and its future is one of media scrutiny. The school will come under intense observation over the next decade or two and when each teacher is hired to replace the next, that teacher and the school will suffer from protective parents, the eagle-eyed local media, and even the state government. There will be no escape from the horror that these two teachers and possibly a third allegedly did.

Now, I am not going to defend the accused teachers, nor am I going to minimize the trauma experienced by the victims and their families, which will unfortunately shape their lives for a long long long time. This is imminently regrettable and I wish it had never happened.

What I am also not going to do is complain about the hiring process of the administration. There is no way that the people who hired these teachers in the 70s and 80s could have possibly known their sexual proclivities. Nor could the hiring agent have predicted the seemingly epidemic of sexual abuse in schools. So I am not going to criticize them.

The day after the article at the top was posted, the elementary school announced that they would replace all the teachers. This might be gratuitous, but again, I am not going to criticize them.

What I am going to do is explore two things: the fact that the "good" teachers will suffer the fallout from this, and the fact that the media is reporting sexual abuse is seemingly on the rise, though I thoroughly suspect it is not. I am going to work on these points in reverse.

David Finkelhor and Lisa Jones of the University of New Hampshire have compiled data from numerous sources and have reported that

Various forms of child maltreatment and child victimization declined as much as 40–70% from 1993 until 2004, including sexual abuse, physical abuse, sexual assault, homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, and larceny.

Of course, regular data collection has not occurred over the past 40 years so our data is only for 15 years, really. This is a corollary to my initial point however.

The media reports these cases, and everybody is in shock. For many people, their reaction is to say that this never happened before. Because when Baby Boomers were growing up, sexual abuse between teachers and students was not as prevalent. My thesis is that it wasn't that abuse was less prevalent, it was simply not reported as widely as today.

We can essentially thank the modern education system for this perceived uptick in statistics and then its obvious and logical decline.

In The epidemic of rape and child sexual abuse in the United States, authors Diana E. H. Russell and Rebecca Morris Bolen report that the rape rate among females was 12 per 100,000 females in 1932 and 70 per 100,000 in 1997, which is of course a 483% increase. The authors admit that part of the increase is due to the change in methodology concerning reporting of rape and even the definition of rape (ie is it rape within a marriage? Short answer: yes). However, they contend that despite numerous sources claiming rape is declining, it is instead rising astronomically. The National Crime Victimization Survey or NCVS is reporting that rape is declining, but the authors claim this isn't true.

However, my point is that rape is being reported more but there is little evidence to support that rape is happening more. And again, circling back, we can thank the education system for making this happen.

When I was a child in elementary, there was a huge focus put on individuation, something I spoke of and will forever mention as it is a fascinating subject (pun related!). That is to say that individual space was prioritized and we were asked to imagine an invisible force-field around our bodies. Anybody who trespassed this space without permission was ethically in the wrong. We were asked to report any violation of the force-field. Watch this video that I was forced to watch over and over again in school:

If you didn't watch it, the song is called "My Body's Nobody's Body But Mine" by Peter Alsop. The best information I can find about this song is that it possibly came out in 1993, but I suspect it was slightly earlier than that. The lyrics, which you can guess, involve a simplified version of what I just said. My body deserves its own space and no one shall touch it without my permission.

Of course, this is Foucauldian in its panopticism, but it is also integral to teaching children about the power dynamic that occurs in the teacher-student discourse (discourse in the Foucauldian sense of the word). My point, if you haven't already figured it out, is that education such as this, in which the student is asked to report any violation of the power-dynamic, has been omnipresent since at least the late Eighties or the early Nineties. The education system has to be an integral factor in the rise of rape reporting thanks to its efforts in promoting reportage.

Again, this is totally anecdotal but after speaking with my parents and a few other people of the same age, I have determined that at least in Western Canada, this type of education did not exist in the 60s or 70s. Again, not totally scientific, but then again, neither is the media's reportage on this type of abuse.

Statistics will show an uptick in sexual abuse accusations once the education of reportage begins. It will also show a leveling out of accusations followed by a slow decline. However, counter-intuitively, I am willing to predict a rise in accusations due to numerous factors. First, population has increased around the world. Secondly, there are more people living in urban situations now than pastoral, which leads to the obvious conclusion that there are more children in public school systems now than before.

The third reason for my predicted rise in sexual abuse accusations? It's the second major point that I'd like to discuss: the media's representation of the education system.

Look, it's a fact that teachers are underpaid for a job in which they are responsible for the health, well-being and education of future generations, of the future ruling class. According to this website, the average salary for K-12 teachers is just above 40K. The "living wage" calculator at a couple different sites is telling me that the absolute minimum salary that one could live on is 25K. I can provide all sorts of numbers, but I think common sense will show us that the 15K "extra" on top of the living wage will go to debt reduction (student loans), car payments, mortgages, vacations, and other things guaranteed in the right to life, liberty and happiness.

Despite the fact that teachers are underpaid, they are totally demonized in the news. Read this polemic on "sorry state of education in the United States" or check out these stats at Wikipedia. Both of these claim that despite the US's 99% literary rate the country is woefully behind "third world countries". One of the articles claims that a high school diploma 50 years ago is equivalent to today's college degree.

That sounds mighty impressive and damning of the education system, doesn't it? But let's unpack that notion and see if we can't tease out the specious logic here. 50 years, the classroom wasn't chock full of technology. 50 years, there were no MRIs, no Internet, no word processors, no MP3 players, no cellphones. Television wasn't as ubiquitous and students walked to school in a blizzard, in their father's pajamas, uphill. Both ways.

Again, we're running into one of my most loathsome elements of human nature: nostalgia. As if the past was some Golden Age, as if there even existed a Golden Age at some point. The claim that high school diploma is equivalent to a college degree completely disregards how much there is to learn nowadays. Students are expected to be math whizzes and technological geniuses plus play every sport and engage in every extracurricular activity and volunteer work in order to get into a college that nobody can afford.

Helicopter parenting, or hyperparenting as I was taught the term, is a definite thing happening in school nowadays. It is indicative of the change in society that children are no longer left unsupervised. Why would they when the media is reporting rapists and abductors on every street corner? Instead of letting children go out and play, parents are attempting to organize and systematize their lives in order to a) guarantee a future and b) protect their lives. There is nothing inherently wrong about hyperparenting. It simply is. What is wrong is the media's focus on how this is wrong, but at the same time, are scaring parents into believing that the world is totally unsafe. Of course it is, but learning that it is unsafe is part of growing up.

The education system is not totally screwed up. The US boasts a 99% literary rate, and a 77% rate of graduating high school. Sure, that might be slightly lower than developing countries, but think of the fact that despite its comparison to other countries, over three quarters of our children are still graduating. Not only that, but most of them aren't being shipped off to meaningless wars in order to die for their country. The unemployment rate among high school graduates is a measly 10.4%. The rate for college graduates? Below 5%! Obviously high school is preparing students for university and thus, college grads are prepared for the real world if the national average is 8 and the college rate is less than 5!

Let us return to the main point of this post. If we agree that teachers are underpaid, but are on the whole providing a successful workforce, and are protecting our most valuable asset (future workers), then we must agree then the media is unfairly demonizing them and will continue to do so in light of the allegations of sexual abuse.

If sexual abuse is declining, thanks to in part the education system, then we cannot possibly blame them for the aberrations in statistics, such as three teachers in one school abusing children.

Can something be done about this in the future? Probably not. There is little way of screening applicants for pedophilia and one is legally barred from simply asking point blank or monitoring the teacher 24/7. Though that is what the media is going to clamor for. Watch! In a week's time, Dateline or 60 Minutes or a similar news magazine show will do a story on the evil lurking behind every classroom door. Expect to see lots of scary stats being trotted out and manipulated in favor of their point. The effect? Further moral panic regarding education systems.

A long term possibility thanks to the media's scare-tactics is the rise of home-schooled students. I don't know enough about home-schooling that I can make any value judgment on the efficacy of such a system, but I instinctively question the abilities of someone not trained to teach. Of course, this begs the logical opposition that the system in which someone is trained to teach can be fallible. Of course it can. That's facetious if only because that system of training teachers is still transitional. The education department in my University is less than 60 years old. It is still growing up and figuring out how to teach teaching. Despite this, I have faith, thanks to stats and my own education, that within twenty years, our graduating teachers will be able to teach math (despite claims of a math professor at U of M, who said that our future teachers do not know how to perform basic algebra).

Look, humans are incredibly smart and incredibly stupid at the same time. We've colonized most of the globe and most of our atmosphere. We've created unbelievable technological gadgets over hundreds of years and yet, we still manage to function as blithering idiots when faced with the same situations the Ancient Greeks did. Human nature is repetitious and paradigmatic. The media only reports the worst things because we respond to the worst things, especially in our overly humanist, overly sensitive era of the twentieth century, when even the robbing of an old lady causes our blood to boil. We respond to the bad news more strongly than the good so the media otherwise known as the market responds in turn. They provide what we want to hear: that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

WHEN IT FACT IT IS NOT.

Just look at the stats.

On being single part two

2012-02-05T15:35:00.000-06:00

So the day after, I stumble across an infographic from Pew Research about the status of marriage in America and the money spent on Valentine's Day. Click here for the giant infographic.

The most pertinent information that we can extract is that the average age for marriage is at an all time high: 26.5 for women and 28.7 for men. 39 percent of Americans surveyed say that marriage is becoming obsolete. In 1960, 72% of Americans were married. In 2010, only 50% were married. Quite a precipitous drop, no?

I met a girl for a drink yesterday evening (despite my desire to go home and catch up on my sleepies) and we got to talking about flexibility and the future. She is a busy independent traveler who has a lot going for her. I am a busy student who has no idea where school will take me (geographically speaking). We spoke about the excitement of the future and how not knowing what will happen is somehow freeing. The ability to simply walk away and not have a mortgage or children is exhilarating. She asked me point blank if I could ever see myself getting married.

My short answer was "I don't know" and then I launched into a sketchy version of the thesis that I laid out in the previous post. I merely mentioned the "hooking up due to economics" thesis and focused more on how marriage is slowly dying on the vine. I said that I am not opposed to getting married, but I just can't see myself doing it.

She is sort of in a similar space as I am in relation to marriage. She also responded "I don't know" and then proceeded to give me reasons for her ambivalence that I had already mapped out. Everything she said correlated to points I had made regarding marriage.

As much as the conversation validated my theories (or at least for one other real person) it was fascinating to get a different viewpoint, one that isn't so cold and rational (of which she accused me a couple times). It seems that the world is changing, and I am not the only person to notice this.

However, despite my gross generalizations with some stats to back up the claim, there is some anecdotal evidence that supports the idea that my generation is still holding onto marriage. If you went onto my Facebook, you'll see numerous couples my age who are getting engaged or entering into marriage. I can say with confidence that the ones getting married are the ones who have already graduated from school and are working full time. They post pictures of the house they just bought and post statuses about how excited they are to fill the house with a new couch they just picked up. I am invited to socials, which if you are not from Manitoba, you won't understand. A social is a fundraiser for one's wedding. One invites everybody they've ever met, charge them for a ticket, sell them cheap booze, and somehow this pays for one's wedding or at least puts a dent into the debt. As mentioned, the average cost of a wedding in Canada is almost 25K.

Sometimes I become depressed when I see everybody I went to high school with has started their lives and are on their way to stability. They go to Mexico seemingly every year, or Vegas. They have dogs and sometimes they post pictures of their ultrasounds.

[Here's an awkward aside. You post your ultrasound picture on Facebook. Later, you lose the baby. Do you take down the picture? Do you leave it up? What if somebody comments on it a year later and opens up the emotional wound again? This is the shit I think of]

While I get somewhat depressed, I also temper my self-criticisms with the knowledge that I am not alone. There are people on Facebook with whom I went to high school who are also still living in apartments, living paycheck to paycheck, not ready to settle down. They are living alone and seemingly happy. I am not alone in my excitement for the freedom that being single has to offer.

What an interesting world we live in. A world in which a whole new set of protocols must be established thanks to technology or the precariousness of our careers. I find this shit endlessly fascinating. Hopefully you do too because I am thinking about this stuff all the time.

On being single

2012-02-04T12:13:00.001-06:00

I have been thinking a lot about being single at 27 in the context of my friends, my acquaintances, and even in the greater society. This article from Time kind of shows that I am not alone in my ambivalence towards marriage and commitment.

The article states that in a large survey of Americans, 40% said that they weren't sure about getting married with another 27% saying "a wedding is not in their future". This means that over 50% of the respondents, Americans 21 years and older, are not intending of going into a marriage.

However, since we are a rational and logical blog, I think we can make some conclusions based on what the article is telling us. Firstly, this survey doesn't necessarily mean that people are "happier" as single and they don't want to enter a relationship at all. Secondly, 5,000 Americans is not a very large study. Thirdly, the survey was done unscientifically by Match.com.

However, in the sister article at US Weekly, one young gentleman has this to say:

Jeremy Klein, 26, of Fort Lauderdale says he's not seeking a relationship but may try online dating. "I am thinking about it now that I'm out of school and working a lot more," he says, because he doesn't have the "time and energy" to meet new people.

This is fascinating to me for a number of reasons. Firstly, Jeremy doesn't have the time and energy to meet people. I think this is very representative of contemporary society right now. Thanks to the sheer onslaught of work that people are subjecting themselves to in order to afford all of the ridiculous debt that we have incurred, relationships are taking a backseat. We are more focused on our careers than we are on our interpersonal relationships. We have replaced many face to face interactions with online or text or what have you. This is due partly because of time and because of ease of communication. There is not enough time in the day to see all of the friends that we want to see, so we compromise by using less effective and less emotionally consuming methods of interaction.

The other reason that this is fascinating to me (the article, not just Jeremy and his online dating) is that this ambivalence towards marriage is merely symptomatic of greater changes in human interaction. I don't think it is crazy to say that we are delaying the onset of adulthood to a greater extent more and more. The bigger trend seems to be that we are waiting longer and longer to vote, have kids, leave our parents' homes, get married, finish school, get a career, buy a house, etc etc etc. I don't quite have the numbers, but the age at which young people are leaving their parents' home is increasing. I think it's somewhere in the mid to late twenties at this point. Here is an article that says one third of UK men in their 20s are still living with their parents. The reasons given are mostly financial.

So we have two things happening in society on a large scale: the delaying of adulthood and the increasing debt load individuals are asked to carry. Is one affecting the other? Of course. We look at marriage with skepticism because of the financial problems that could occur, such as the wedding itself (average cost in Canada: 23,330) or the inevitable divorce, which is sometimes ruinous for one of the participants.

To bring this back to myself for a second, I will show that I am a perfect representative of the current North American male. I am 27 years old and I live with my parents. I am soon to be in graduate school because you cannot get a job with simply a Bachelor's Degree. I have a car loan and a car that is slowly falling apart. I am single and at this point, I see no reason to get into a relationship.

This warrants further examination, I think. Why do I want to stay single? Number one is pragmatics. There's no point falling in love with somebody when I know that I will have to move across the country for school and eventually for a job. I can't afford to date somebody because dating is ultimately costly. Also, it is increasingly hard to meet new people and maintain those friendships when I can't even maintain the ones I have right now thanks to work and school.

Another reason is because of fear. Fear of the inevitable break up, emotionally and financially speaking. I don't want to go through that so I avoid getting emotionally attached.

Alright, so let's extrapolate further. If we agree that I am a good representative of North American males, then I have sketched out the motives for the rise of the "hook up" culture. Fundamentally, the reason why hooking up has become the primary form of relationships is economical. This is a bold statement, I know (get it?) but I think this is true. Young people today are ambivalent about marriage because of economic reasons and emotional reasons. They see hooking up as an easier thing to do.

Hence, the rise of the "friends with benefits" situation. For proof that this is a tension being worked out on a national scale, look no further than two competing Hollywood films exploring this phenomenon. The FWB situation is often seen as mutually beneficial. Both parties engage in sexual intercourse, ultimately for the pleasure, but agree not to partake in the negative aspects of a relationship such as fights, breakups, meeting parents, living together.

There we have another proof for my thesis. People are increasingly living alone. There is a nonfiction book coming out this year that attempts to explore the rise of the single domicile. In this article at the Huffington Post, the author of the book lists the reasons why people are living alone. This will sound familiar: "it's hard to live with roommates" "freedom" "solitude" "rite of passage" and "flexibility" among others. The idea of flexibility is rising in valuation among young people. Not only because of society's increasing individuation, but because of economic reasons. It is more important to stay flexible for our careers than with our relationships.

A friend with benefits is easier to "break up" with than somebody that you are a) living with (an end goal in relationships) and b) emotionally attached to. We are shifting the balance of relying on our hearts to relying on our wallets in order to guide our life decisions. This means that macrocosmically speaking, as a society, we are moving further away from long term monogamy and into some sort of more mammalian "free for all".

This makes sense. Marriage is an artificial institution. Life long monogamy occurs minimally in species other than humans. We have created marriage as some sort of patriarchal safety system in order to keep an eye on our errant spouses. The whole idea was to protect your spouse from procreating with other people. Social Darwinism tells us that we enter monogamous relationships so that we can always be sure of the paternity of our child. Ambiguous paternity in a smaller community can lead to the greatest genetic crime of all, incest. Therefore, we get married to make sure our wives are having our children and not the mailman's.

But this is ridiculous. With the rise of birth control and access to abortion, there is less procreation in North America and more fucking for the pleasure of it. Therefore the need to be stuck with somebody in order to protect the paternity of your child is not useful anymore. We are less likely to have multiple children, or even one kid, than before. If we aren't having kids (the whole point of life) then why are we forcing ourselves to stick with the same person for the rest of our lives?

Now this makes me sound like I am some sort of anti-marriage anti-monogamy nutter. Far from it. I want to be in a loving long term relationship with somebody, but not until I am financially secure. Those are my prerequisites for engaging in anything resembling a marriage and I am not alone in requiring this. There's a logical outcome to this, of course. As we live alone more and more, and we become more and more financially stable, we will like being alone more and more. We will become less enamored of the sacrificing that freedom and flexibility for another person, which is another proof of my thesis and another reason why people are ambivalent about marriage.

Another reason is the secularization of society. It's fair to say that the role of the Church is diminishing in Western society. This is not 1950s Montreal. This is a world where even the largest institutions of religion are regarded as dangerous and even farcical. The Catholic Church is forever tainted thanks to the sex scandals and the increasing irrelevancy in our technologically minded outlook. Previously, the Church (in general, not Catholic) had a vested economic interest in marriages. Plus, they tend to feel that they are the arbiters of morality. If our morals are changing on a macrocosmic scale independent of the Church, then their particular view of morality needs to either adapt or die. We are becoming more and more humanistic as a society. We tend to value the individual above all things (cf above my remarks on individuation) and we look at the Leviathan as a necessary evil. Therefore our viewpoint on morality is increasingly specific to the individual and not to society. We get upset when an old lady is beaten up in our neighborhood but thanks to the prevalence of rational skepticism (due to secularization) we understand that this is a symptom of crime and harsh economic situations, not angry deities. We no longer need the Church to tell us what is right and wrong because we are already doing it among ourselves. Therefore, we are free to enjoy commitment free sexual relationships with whoever we feel without the Church telling us it is wrong.

So where are we going then? I lazily pointed at some sort of utopian fuckfest where nobody is married and everybody is hooking up, but that's merely a piece of the overall puzzle. I am not 100% sure where society is going in terms of marriage. We are already seeing the trends of fewer children, fewer marriages, and fewer divorces. If the divorce rate is over 50%, won't people just eventually stop getting married?

What does this mean for me? Rationally, I understand that the odds of me getting married are getting smaller and smaller with each year. I understand that the odds of me even getting a girlfriend are getting smaller. Again, this is due to economic reasons and greater changes in social interactivity.

What do I think about this ambivalence to marriage as a moral thing? I'm glad you asked. One of my most popular refrains (which I learned from Barbelith.com posters) is that it is neither a good thing or a bad thing - it is simply a thing that is happening. There is no judgment on my part for the rise of the hook up or the rise of the HPV (50% of sexually active adults with have it). It is simply happening and the best we can is investigate and attempt to understand it. If we agree that our sense of morality is becoming more humanistic and secular, then we agree that there is no moral danger in people having sex freely and without commitment. There is physical danger, thanks to STDs and date-rape drugs, but there is no moral danger. People who are engaged in hand-wringing and pearl-clutching regarding this trend are wasting their time. Unless they have an economic solution for the load of debt we all share, then they should put up and shut up. They won't though. There always has to be arbiters of morals, which is why they won't shut up about pornography.

Is there a link between ambivalence to marriage and pornography? Possibly a correlation but certainly not causation. Some studies have attempted to analyze the brain's chemistry when confronted with endless porn and they have found a chemical dependence on it after awhile. Take a look around the Internet and you will find countless people claiming that porn has ruined marriages because one spouse ends up preferring the fantasy of sex to real sex. The pearl-clutchers then conclude that porn leads men to cheat because they will want to act out that fantasy.

Here's an interesting but anecdotal tidbit. On 4chan, there are a lot of informal surveys. List your age, sex, favourite book, whatever and then sometimes it's list your fetish. I participated, I listed my age, my favourite book, and my fetish. I was initially surprised when I began reading other respondents. You could graph it: the younger the respondent, the more "extreme" and highly specific their fetish was. Of course, in this "survey" we can substitute the word "fetish" for "sexual proclivity". 16, 17 and 18 year olds were posting rape fantasies, bestiality, foot fetishes, a desire to be peed on, all sorts of things. I said I was initially surprised but I can sort of work out why this is.

No, it is not due to pornography. It is due to the rise of moral inclusivity. We are more secular and more humanist. We focus on the individual. We then begin to accept the difference in people a lot more. Niche pornography doesn't create the fetishes in people. No, they provide the outlet for those with the fetishes to see it happening. To say that an 18 year old is aroused by feet due to porn is like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It implies that the fetish wasn't already there in the first place. The porn is simply capitalizing on the fact that this fetish already exists within people.

Alright, so what does this mean? We can agree that porn isn't corrupting or fundamentally shaping the sexual identities of individuals (although there must be some sort of effect, but I'm not sure how much of one). Porn becomes an outlet for the individual who doesn't want the burden of a relationship. It is morally the same as the hook up, which is to say that it isn't immoral.

I think it is time to wrap this up. Society is changing and there is nothing the individual can do about it other than attempt to understand it and explain. I think in the future, we are going to notice this tension of ambivalence to marriage get played out in mass culture on a bigger scale. Romantic comedies will no longer end with marriages but some sort of tentative hope that the couple will make it. I think we will also see the return of body-horror as a genre, but specific to STDs. As STDs reach epidemic proportions (this is not hyperbole, look at the CDC's stats page), this anxiety will get played out in films and television as horror. What is pop culture but a terrain to work out tensions within society?

What is this blog but a terrain for me to work out tensions I see within society?

The future of bookstores

2012-02-02T12:21:00.000-06:00

I will start with a disclaimer. Despite the grandiose title of this post, I don't think that I am fully qualified to prognosticate on the future of bookstores in North America. However, this will not stop me from making wild generalizations and speculations about the position of the book within our contemporary society.

There is a fascinating article in Macleans Magazine titled "Heather's Fix" which you can read by clicking here. In the article, the titular Heather Reisman, CEO of Indigo, is shifting the brand of Indigo from "Books and More" to mostly "More". In the near future, in Indigo stores across N. America, books will account for about 50% of available product within the store itself. The other 50% being made up mostly of "lifestyle" products, a nebulous and unhelpful term that we can essentially conclude to be material goods such as pots, pans, throw rugs, candles and other such knick knacks.

The article, well-written and informative, provides context. From the article:

Big booksellers able to evolve are the fortunate few. In February 2011, Borders Group Inc., the second-largest book chain in the U.S., filed for bankruptcy protection, and Australia’s major bookselling network, REDgroup Retail Inc., collapsed; Barnes & Noble Inc, the world’s biggest book retailer, has been searching for a buyer since last summer.

Some credit Indigo's survival to above par management, while some pessimistically point to government interference in the early 2000s. Regardless of Indigo's previous survival, the relevant fact is how the CEO hopes to maintain the long term profitability of the company.

In addition to context and to bare bones sketches of the long term plan, the article provides a bit of philosophy in the form of hand-wringing regarding the corporatization of books, an essential art form that has been around near the dawn of linguistic ability. One anonymous publisher is quoted as saying that books are different than any other material good. They attract a different type of consumer. Books are not ephemeral and are meant to be cherished. The publishing industry is apparently anathema to corporatization. Part of this is due to the fact that books sell better by word-of-mouth than by near-omnipresent advertising such as movies or television. Therefore, books take a bit longer to sell as word disseminates through the media and Internet. On top of this is the pragmatic aspect. Books take longer to consume than a two hour film. Therefore it is more likely that people are more likely to respond positively to something they can ingest in totality in one sitting.

Of course, this article does the job of good journalism by implying rather than over simplifying. The larger questions, merely hinted at, are questions of a society's taste for culture and art, something many many many cultural studies departments are picking up on in an increasing attempt a) to be relevant and b) to self-analyze.

Why are bookstores dying? Is it because of the widespread adoption of e-books as the form in which books come in? The numbers would suggest that this is only part of the answer. Or is it because of our society's decreasing desire for the abstract and increasing need for the visual?

The answer to that question is an entire book that I might write one day, after spending a year researching instead of sitting down after reading one article and busting out a thousand words on the topic. That is to say, the question of where our society is headed, as symbolized by the decay of bookstores is a much larger question.

I propose, in this space, not to make judgements on the prioritization of the visual, but rather, attempt to show that it is neither a good thing or a bad thing. It is simply a thing that is happening.

Books are not dying in any way shape or form. To say such a thing is facetious and ignores the cyclical nature of societies. At some point, books will return in a much larger fashion, but perhaps not in the physical sense. Perhaps they will be beamed into our brains via a WiFi connection installed in the cranium. However, at this time, books are not dying. For absolute proof of this, look no further than the two twin pillars of modern publishing: Oprah's Bookclub and Harry Potter.

Oprah's Bookclub is perfect corporate synergy. The primary market for books includes middle class women. To see proof of this statement, look at how Indigo is marketing the "lifestyle" products: yoga accessories, candles, sweaters, etc (the gender stereotyping that Indigo is guilty of is an entirely different blog post). Oprah's Bookclub merges the tastes of middle class women with the publishing industry. Whether or not Oprah personally chooses the novels is irrelevant. The books she is choosing are being sold to middle class women, who are already more inclined to purchase books in the first place. By having a national bookclub, Oprah creates a sense of community around the books. People are more likely to buy the books if only to stay "in the loop", or to keep up with discussions on the show.

On top of this, there is the increased individuation of modern society. As our lives become overwhelmingly individual (see Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature among other books), we search for tenuous connections. What better connection than an artificial and self-consciously non-online connection in the form of a bookclub? The bookclub affords individuals a way to avoid the time-trap of online anonymous activity. Humans require face to face communication. If we have to discuss something, why not discuss something to make us feel smarter? There's always an element of class aspiration when it comes to Oprah (she's just like us, she was poor and now look at her) and there's a sense of class aspiration when it comes to "higher brow" forms of culture such as novels. Certainly there are fewer "television clubs" than "bookclubs".

If Oprah's Bookclub is perfect corporate synergy, Harry Potter is a monster of synchronicity. The same elements that I spoke of (eg desiring of human connection beyond online interaction, class aspirations, wanting to stay in the loop) are applied directly to Harry Potter except with one special addition that makes Harry Potter a bigger deal: young people. That's the key difference. Young people, tweens, specifically, are the ultimate niche market. Their income is wholly disposable and their appetite for consumption of culture is insatiable. For proof of this, simply pop onto Tumblr for five minutes to get a sense of the recycling and consumption and remixing of mass amounts of culture on an epic scale. Tweens have a ravenous desire for culture and the ability to share that culture amongst themselves. There's another blog post or even book to be written about the compulsion to remix in our society, but this isn't the place.

Harry Potter capitalizes on everything that I have mentioned. I mean really, let's be honest. This isn't a judgement against Harry Potter, but the whole thing is essentially one big mashup of archetypes and class aspirations, isn't it? It's a gigantic Hero's Journey, which for some psychological reason resonates with audiences far more than any other story (according to Campbell and Jung et al). Plus, it's serial fiction, a form that cries out for sustained attention. Serial fiction manages to survive much longer even when it should die if only because of the all-too human compulsion for closure.

So, to sum up, this mini-argument, Harry Potter, in cold analytical terms, is capitalizing and exploiting many elements of human psychology not just in the story that is being told, but how to story is told and to whom.

Of course, to prove that Harry Potter is an essential element of modern day publishing, look no further than the "teen fiction" department in any bookstore. It's massive and it is full to the brim with clones of Harry Potter and Twilight. Most of which, and I mean most, are serial fictions with sustained narratives over multiple entries that are drawn out Hero's Journeys. And they are selling like gangbusters. Simply search "the rise of teen fiction" for a taste of how much this is selling. (I don't have numbers specifically. I don't need to; this is my blog, after all.)

So books are not dying, to conclude this section of the post. Books are selling well, but (and here's the important part) not in every case. Obviously, literary fiction is not selling well. And by literary fiction, I mean authors similar to Eugenides and Franzen and whatnot. Unless you are a huge name on Oprah, such as Franzen, your "Great American Novel" is sure to fail.

There are two (and a half) reasons for this, in my mind. One, if we agree that the primary audience for books are middle class women, then rich white dudes writing about rich white dudes is not speaking the experiences of the audience. Now, this is a total generalization and is anecdotal, but if you read much of the discussion on Goodreads for novels, you'll immediately notice that most of the users are female, and most of the users are critiquing novels in the form of either how well it entertains or how believable the characters are. This tells me that many readers are searching for identification within stories. They seek to make parallels between what they see and what they read. Therefore, a long 500 page novel about the plight of a rich American married couple who are involved in the environment and their rich musician friend is not going to resonate with the primary audience members. Of course, the feminist in me is already pointing out the fallibility of claiming there is such a thing as a homogenous experience that "all" females could possibly connect with. Likewise, white middle class women are buying books about the experiences of the other, such as Memoirs of a Geisha or The Help or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or whatever the hell it's called. So obviously, despite what I just said, there is a desire for a different viewpoint, but it is not the rich white male's viewpoint they want anymore.

The second reason why I think the "Great American Novel" is failing is because of the primacy of genre fiction. Literary fiction is dying within the past twenty years because of the last paragraph and because of times of recession. When people are in a recession, look no further than pop culture in order to escape. Science fiction, horror and fantasy, if I can arbitrarily make three categories to encompass them all, attempt to work through the problems in our society in an allegorical way, along with the attempt to escape from the harshness of realism. The rise of genre fiction can be seen in the domination of dystopian teen fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction (even Cormac McCarthy tried his hand at that), the meteoric rise of the vampire and other such monsters (paradoxically naturalized and humanized, robbing them of their original fear factor, ie working through anxieties through monsters).

A third, but not entirely big reason, is the impossibility of filming the "Great American Novel". The Corrections, despite its National Book Award and omnipresence on "best of" lists remains only a book as of 2012. HBO is casting a TV series, but I remain skeptical that it will eventually appear. Freedom, Franzen's newest novel, is so specifically "Russian" in form and scale that no single two hour film will do it justice. Add to that, there are a cultural relativism at work within "literary fiction" a type of elitism that proposes books are inherently better for you than film. Which is rubbish, but again, another blog post to figure this out.

Therefore, if we can bring the entire argument together, if bookstores are dying and trying to market both e-books and physical books, then they are going about it the wrong way. Instead of bookstores selling copies of Franzen-clones in stores, they should be selling copies of Harry Potter/Twilight clones in stores. The people who are reading "literary fiction" are probably doing so on their Kindle or iPad anyway. Tweens are buying books by the truckloads; stock the shelves with them. Middle class women are buying physical books and movie tie-ins; stock the shelves with them. Oprah needs to bring back the bookclub if only to inject a little life in the publishing world.

Personally? I'm a white middle class male. I enjoy reading both Franzen and about "the other" through genre fiction. I want to see the revitalization of the publishing industry if only because I read so much and because I prefer to read. I would never say one medium is superior to another because that's wholly facetious, but I can say what I prefer. I just think that the book industry is going about things in the wrong way. Instead of implicitly comparing books to consumable lifestyle objects, I think publishers should be focusing on the permanence of the books. Stop selling yoga shit and start selling bookshelves and way to display books, and lavish looking books. Barnes and Noble do this, as when I was in Mall of America, I found an entire section of high end hardcovers collecting public domain stuff. What a brilliant idea. Too bad this section was pushed away in favor of selling chocolates and yoga mats and exercise books. Put more confidence in the taste of the reading public, and you might be able to sell them on the permanence of books in our increasingly ephemeral lifestyle.

This is why I love Gawker media

2012-01-31T12:28:00.002-06:00

Sorry, but Babies Are Ugly

I have nothing to add to that article.

The Interrupters

2012-01-19T13:00:00.000-06:00

According to the media, Chicago (and the US in general) is erupting in violence. Youth violence is at an all time high, with seemingly hundreds of shootings a year. Despite the relative safety of the world (according to Steven Pinker et al.) the world for an individual in a lower-income neighbourhood, a predominantly black community, the world is not safe at all. People catch stray bullets all the time, and I don't mean in their hands. The Interrupters follows an anti-violence initiative in Chicago over the course of a year; specifically looking at three so-called "interrupters" of violence. Their methodology includes respect earned on the street from their past, training in conflict mediation, and buckets of common sense.

There's something to be said about the type of "art" that energizes the consumer. I normally don't get fired up about films such as Drive or Good Old Fashioned Orgy because they are pablum. They are escapist, an easy way to pass the time. There's nothing inherently wrong with escapism - in fact, one could argue that it is indispensable in helping deal with the turmoil of the world. However, films such as those do not fire me up in a way like Richard Price, George Pelecanos, J. M. Coetzee, or David Simon do. Whenever you engage with writers like that, there's an instantaneous feeling of "this is important" and not in the way Ulysses feels important. Important in the sense that I feel like the world needs changing and there's no way I am going to do it by sitting here, typing on a computer for my blog that less than one hundred people read.

The Interrupters is exactly like that. Let me give you an example. After seeing this documentary, the National Security Minister of Bermuda vowed to implement a similar program to CeaseFire, the anti-violence initiative. You can read about this by clicking this link. This speaks to how powerful a film this is. Politicians are even standing up and noticing.

Why is this film so powerful then? What is it about The Interrupters that causes me to want to quit my job and devote my time to improving the lives of individuals in my own hometown? Part of it is that The Interrupters is well-shot, well-edited and quite effective in demonstrating the talents of the interrupters being documented. The three selected for focus are charismatic, empathetic, street-smart, book-smart, well-spoken, and completely realistic about the world. All three of them come from a history of violence, one spending 14 years for murder, and all three of them share a history of gangbanging in their youth. The sole female of the three, one of the few females in CeaseFire, is the daughter of notorious Chicago gangleader Jeff Fort.

There's a scene in which Aveena, the aforementioned female of the trio, visits a "press conference" held in an neighbourhood by the father of a slain child. The father chastises the media for failing to help, simply observing their grief. As the white people disperse, a large group of black male youths come up the street. Their intent is not clear - are they paying respect, or have they come simply to see what the fuss is about? At this point, Aveena, a short black Muslim, marches up to them and gives them the dressing down of their lives. She excoriates them for even contemplating revenge for this crime. She singles out a boy, and demands to know who he belongs to in the group. When none of the teens admit to watching over them, Aveena gives them another dressing down. She tells them that this boy, this shortie, this baby is watching all of them and is learning from them. The teens are responsible for it.

What makes this most impressive is that Aveena is getting in their faces, shouting, chastising, criticizing, and showing a lack of respect for the men. Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, shows that most homicides, especially lower-income individuals, is based on a perceived imbalance of respect. The victim was responsible for a grievance or a disrespect that the murderer eventually punishes. The homicide is justified by the perceived grievance. Pinker shows that most homicides are not arbitrary or financially motivated but simply by the intangible and ephemeral concept of honour. The black youths in this film go on and on about having to fight because of perceived honour. The fact that Aveena, a small female, gets in the faces of dozens of strapped angry youths is testament to the fearlessness and courage of the interrupters.

This isn't the only scene like this. There is a scene in which the head of the CeaseFire initiative visits one of his interrupters in the hospital. The man had been shot attempting to talk some youths out of a fight. The director, Tio Hardiman, gets choked up, apologizing to the man, trying to tell him how much he appreciates the sacrifice made. It's quite powerful. It shows that there is no way to "beat" the system of violence, but simply interrupt for moments.

The whole movie is like this. Cobe, the black male of the trio, is a father and a stepfather who lives in the suburbs with his wife, a nurse. However, he came from streetgangs and violence, and went to prison for a decade for attempted murder. He knows exactly what these boys are going through. Near the end of the film, this kid named Mikey gets out of prison for armed robbery. Cobe takes him to the salon where he committed the robbery and has him apologize to the owners. It's an absolutely devastating scene. Mikey takes the verbal punishment from the owner, and she attempts to explain the impact that this decision had on her life, and how he'll never understand. She realizes how big of a deal this is, somebody apologizing for his crime, this takes a lot from a person, she stands up and forgives him, hugs him.

Not everything goes perfectly, though. Throughout the year, Aveena is working closely with a nineteen year old girl who has been released from a youth remand center. She must follow parole, go to school, and stay out of the game. Aveena takes her to a nail salon for a manicure, the first the girl has ever received. Aveena takes her for a ride on a carousel, the first the girl has ever done. Later, the girl is being harassed by some youths, attempting to rile her up and get her to fight, but she wisely calls Aveena, who interrupts the violence over the phone, simply with words. It's stunning. But, when it seems like Aveena has broken through to the girl, things change. It turns out that the girl hadn't been showing up for class, and when Aveena feels personally betrayed, the girl walks away. Less than 24 hours later, she has broken parole and is back in the youth remand center. Aveena visits her in the epilogue, where she is greeted with open arms, but not a clear understanding of why things have gone the way they have.

The film ends on a realistic note, neither optimistic nor pessimistic. The reality is that with crime, a lack of police involvement, and the sheer ease of being the game, the idea of violence is too firmly rooted within the culture. One teen tells the camera, while working hard on building a pool, that he could make more money out on the streets, in less time, and be able to do what he wants when he wants. Then he says, "but I have a job" almost incredulously. He doesn't even believe that he's such a sucker. It's this mentality that needs to be interrupted.

The interrupters of CeaseFire are doing amazing work, but it's drops in an ocean. A larger and greater change needs to happen across the country. Pinker borrows from another academician and calls it The Civilizing Process. This doesn't say that black male youths are not "civilized" - far from it. It's simply that a large scale, multi-generational process needs to occur, one in which children are inculcated with empathy from an early age, in which teens understand that violence is an unending cycle, in which everybody is taught to think further into the future.

Pinker demonstrates that part of the medieval era's tenacious hold on violence is that peasants and poor people had no concept of decades down the road. It's impossible to imagine a future when it's too hard to make do on this very day. Part of the government's mandate in eliminating youth violence should be inculcating a concept of the future. Children aren't raised to imagine when they'll be forty. Youths in gang culture are famous for articulating a fatalistic or nihilistic worldview, in which they are predetermined to die young and leave behind a family.

Part of the Civilizing Process is figuring out the possibility of the future and removing this fatalism. Understanding that life goes on, with or without you is integral. If you can visualize yourself with a future, then you're more likely to want to be part of that future. If you have something to live for, you're less likely to take stupid risks such as rumbling in the streets or bringing a gun to a knife fight.

I've been thinking a lot about how to affect change in my hometown of Winnipeg. We have a large gang problem in the North End and inner city and part of it is due to economic factors, as with any inner city problem. Reams of articles and papers have been written on why the inner city develops into a war zone, with some of the blame being assigned to the exodus of the middle class to the suburbs. With the loss of the middle class comes the retreat of specific elements of the local economy and the invasion of spurious elements such as payday loan business, essentially legitimized loansharks.

My short term solution? Quite clever. Banking. Yes, banking. In Canada, banks are protected by the government, therefore they can never fall. (In the US, banks are private enterprises that can and often deteriorate.) What I propose is an initiative that helps bring banking back to the youths, in order for them to a) start appreciating the value of money, and b) start conceptualizing a possible future, one that is financially stable. We do this by taking Aboriginal bank employees and employees of other visible minorities, we take them into the inner cities, give the youths 20 or 50 bucks and help them set up a bank account. However, the trick isn't to simply give them money and have them forget about. These same bank employees have to forge a relationship over time, getting the youths to constantly think about the future. The fact that the same employees return to the same youth will create a sense of stability in the youths, which is fundamentally important to the system.

This plan only works in conjunction with other youth-targeted initiatives, such as the return of the community centre and the return of youth activities outside the home and within a structured system. Structure, stability and comfort are paramount to the web of plans that are needed in order to impact crime. Plus, this financial plan has the bonus of positively impacting the local economy. As an area of town increases in prosperity, so do the surrounding businesses. Once that happens, larger businesses will be attracted. This plan, while small, can have large positive outcomes, but it is on a large time scale. This will be hard to convince people of.

Obviously, I've gotten off topic, talking about my proposal for Winnipeg, considering this is a review of a documentary about Chicago. At the beginning of the review, I mentioned that few things get me fired up like this does. This is the other part of why The Interrupters is so successful (the other reason being the interrupters themselves, as outlined above). This film is a masterpiece not just as a narrative, not just because it's an indictment of the dysfunction of the larger social systems, but because it can cause the viewer to want to help. It's a war cry for peace. As Pinker has shown, peace is possible. It's just not something that can happen over night. You'll be thinking to yourself, "he's starting to sound like a hippie". Well, don't. I'm still realistic about the world and the fact that lower-income neighbourhoods will always attract violence and gangs. It's simply that we have a chance to make change, so why don't we?

Les Belles Soeurs

2012-01-14T13:46:00.000-06:00

It's quite difficult to read something to so political and of its location in translation. Les Belles Soeurs by Michel Tremblay is an important work of drama, not only in Canada but apparently in Scotland and other countries. It's been translated in dozens of languages. However, it's extremely narrow in its focus and themes. The play is aggressively focused on a group of friends and family that have gathered to paste stamps into books in order to win prizes. They fight, they bicker and they judge each other.

What makes the play so difficult for translation, and even appreciation, is its position in time and space. This group of women are part of the Quiet Revolution that is happening in Montreal at the time. They are also speaking a basilect called a joual, which caused the government some embarrassment when the theatre company wanted to take it to France.

Full disclosure, I am reading this for my Canadian literature class. I've never read this before (nor have I read 90% of what's on the syllabus) despite its near universal acceptance as being a classic. Plus, my knowledge of the Quiet Revolution is limited to superficial stuff about the FLQ, the October Crisis, and the secularization of Montreal. I know about the Anglo suburb in Montreal, and I know about the ghettoization of the working class within the physical space of Montreal. My father was born there, and I retain a nostalgia for Montreal through this and through my only visit to the city when I was in my teens. It remains my favourite city in Canada, but that might be rose-tinted glasses of the trip. Historical myopia, as it's called.

I have to mention all this in my increasingly personal review because I need to convey how important historical context is to the play. Normally, I argue that historical context isn't necessary to read texts. One should be able to appreciate and interpret the text based on narrative, character, symbolism, etc etc etc. Certainly, one can read Les Belles Soeurs without knowing anything about Montreal. The same can be said about Ulysses. Sure, one can read it without knowing anything about Parnell or the civil strife in Dublin, but the experience is incomplete. This is the situation one finds themselves in with regards to Les Belles Soeurs. Knowing so little about the Quiet Revolution, Duplessis, joual, Montreal's geography and socio-economic boundaries, and in translation on top of everything, makes reading this a difficult experience.

Not the actual reading itself. Far from it. Les Belles Soeurs is a delightful tragicomedy about the perils of sisterhood and greed. The concept of community, of imagined communities to borrow from Benedict Anderson, is clear from the initial surface reading of the play. The women fight with each other, but articulate an antagonistic relationship with anybody outside of their circle. Men are either saints (priests) or devils (sexually available men). The generational gap is wide (this referring to the Quiet Revolution) and is symbolized by the physical abuse heaped on the elders, all shown through slapstick.

One of the major themes of the play is the use of games. Life is a game, the play suggests, showing this through the primum movens of the plot, the pasting of won stamps in a catalogue in order to win more, and through the "ode to Bingo" and the near constant refrain of "Do I look like someone who's ever won anything?" The idea of entitlement is reverberated through the play. The women who are drafted into Germaine's stamp-pasting become resentful that Germaine even won the stamps and that they deserve a piece of the prize.

There's a fairly obvious Marxist interpretation to be made here. Germaine has over a million stamps that need to be pasted. She cannot do it alone, so she "employs" her friends and family to share the labour. Germaine is the bourgeoisie, owning the means of production (stamps + catalogue = products to be owned) but she is dependent on the workers in order to accumulate this wealth. She spends a good portion of the play placating and calming the unruly women. Of course, in a good Marxist way, the women revolt and take by the force the means of production, depriving Germaine of the wealth.

On top of this, the wealth isn't real. It's tangible in the sense that the stamps are currency, but only for a specific catalogue. The stamps do not purchase things outside of the insular catalogue, and the things she wishes to purchase aren't useful at all. She lives in a third story apartment but she wishes to own a lawnmower. Surely, Tremblay is suggesting something about the inanity of the commodity-focused culture. The only way to own things is not through work but through games, such as contests. One of the women mentions that she spends two dollars a week on mailing responses to newspaper and magazine contests. In 1968, two dollars is a not insignificant amount. According to this site, two dollars in 1968 is worth 12.93 in 2011. 12.93 a week times 52 weeks is over 670 dollars. One could argue that I might be making a big deal of something so small, but the Marxist critic in me is rising up uncontrollably. Tremblay is too good of a writer to have superfluous or reductive details in this work.

Notice that the structure of the play is greatly informed by Ancient Greek comedy, specifically plays such as the Lysistrata. The opening of the play features a huge amount of exposition from Germaine, in the form of a prologue. Then, five women arrive at the apartment and provide a narrative of their day to day life. This is analogous to the chorus detailing the current situation in the polis (city-state). This is called the parodos. There's a choral ode in the form of an exaltation of Bingo (again, a refrain of the games theme). Plus, at the end of the play there is an exaltation of a god or an intangible concept. In this play, there is an ironic use of "O Canada!" at the end, which might be a call to the imagined communities (again, borrowing from Benedict Anderson).

In addition to the structural similarities (or mimesis, to borrow from Aristotle's Poetics), there is the employment of "low" humour, such as slapstick and sexual jokes. In the middle of the play, one of the women tells a rather risque joke about a nun being raped. The joke is fairly funny, even reading it (not hearing it), but what makes it most interesting, returning to the Quiet Revolution, is the transgressive aspect of it.

I am about to break the cardinal rule and explain the joke and why it is funny. Here's the joke:

There was a nun who got raped in an alley.... And the next morning they found her lying in the yard, a real mess, her habit pulled over her head, moaning away... so this reporter comes running over and he says to her, "Excuse me, Sister, but could you tell us something about this terrible thing that's happened to you?" Well, she opens her eyes, looks up at him and in a very small voice she says, "Again, please." (Tremblay 43)

Why is this funny in the context of the play? First of all, let's look at why this joke isn't funny in 2011. While I might not be funny on this blog, I often tell jokes at work and to friends. I'm well-known for my transgressive and frankly aggressive humour. There is no taboo that I won't cross. However, the taboos that I am crossing are not religious based. If I told this joke to my friends, they wouldn't laugh. I know it. I know when a joke is going to land with my audience. They won't laugh. It's not funny because the "sign" of the nun isn't sacred anymore. Frankly, even with my English-speaking and Protestant community, we wouldn't have found this funny 50 years ago. This is a joke that's extremely specific in its overturning of a particular signifier.

A lot of French swears, a good majority of theme, are rooted in the interplay between the sacred and the profane (or as Little Carmine says, the sacred and the propane). One of the most famous French swears is "tabernac". Notice that in English, there is nothing offensive about referring to the tabernacle. Okay, so this doesn't quite answer why this particular joke is funny. If the signifier of the nun is sacred, then overturning the sign and making it oppositional becomes humorous. It's not funny that the nun got raped (although as a setup, even one of the character mentions she's interested), but it is funny that the nun, a nonsexual being, enjoyed it.

Okay, so now I've wrung every bit of laughter out of this joke. Why is it funny in the play? This takes us right back to the Quiet Revolution and the secularization of Montreal in the 60s and 70s. It's more interesting that the ladies trade these jokes than it is interested the joke is told. They are scandalized by the joke but find guilty pleasure at it. The more the jokes are told, the less powerful the jokes will be. This borrows from Foucault. It is through the forced repetition of an concept that it accumulates strength until it is omnipresent. Part of the force of the Quiet Revolution is symbolized through the telling of the joke. By repeating the jokes, we are changing the power dynamic of the Church. In the discourse of the joke, the weight of power shifts to the people telling the joke and not the Church.

This should be sufficient enough to understand why I wrote 500 words about a small joke from a play over a hundred pages long. I guess the question that you're wondering is, did I like the play? Yes of course. It's fascinating and more importantly, extremely well written. There's so much to say about this play. For once, I do not have a problem writing an essay about the play. I have a "critical commentary" to write in the next week which is essentially a close-reading of the play. It's only meant to be ~750 words, but as you can see from this review, I wrote over 1500 without breaking a sweat. In 1500 words, I touched on the Marxist interpretation, the Grecian comedy allusions, and the use of a single joke to explore the importance of the Quiet Revolution, and I still didn't really scratch the surface. As with most things, the more I can say about it beyond the superficial, the more I like the text. There's a reason why Ulysses is the most referred text on this blog (beyond Batman, I suppose). Les Belles Soeurs is fantastic. I didn't even talk about the sexual discourse or even the madcap tension and hectic atmosphere. Ah well, maybe another post!

Uncharted 3

2012-01-12T11:59:00.001-06:00

Almost a year has passed since I have played Uncharted 2, and in my mind, the game continues to rise as one of the best I've ever played. I was terribly excited about the second sequel, due in November '11, but I had not the funds to acquire the game. However, thanks to living rent free, money seems to be no object, as my ever-increasing wardrobe can testify.

Uncharted 3, for those not in the know, follows the pulp-style adventures of one Nathan Drake, the character exclusively controlled by the player, as he searches for treasure, gets mixed up with nefarious villains, and then saves the day. The first two games self-consciously use the template used self-consciously by Indiana Jones. There's globe-trotting, fist fights that go on forever, a strong female presence, some MacGuffin that everybody wants to get their hands on, and then a climax that features the total destruction of the exotic locale. More specifically, Uncharted even uses the plot structure of Indiana Jones, featuring puzzles at the end of the first act and at the end of the second act, and a long action sequence on a convoy that signals the inevitable confrontation between the villain and the hero.

This particular game looks at Sir Francis Drake, supposedly one of Nate's antecedents, figuratively and in a familial way. Drake was sent on an errand by the Queen, and there is some missing time in the chronology of that journey. Nate suspects that Drake found something, the Atlantis of the Sands, and hid it, even from the Queen. Two British people are after the treasure and they employ a seemingly endless army of goons to acquire it and eliminate Drake and his friends.

The major problem that Uncharted 3 has is first and foremost, the villains. In the second game, the villains were well drawn and if you asked the player to name some adjectives or attributes of the villains, they would not hesitate. In the third game, the most I can say about either the Helen Mirren-lookalike or the Gavin Rossdale-lookalike is that they speak with Received Pronunciation. We learn nothing of their motives (beyond the overly simplistic refrain of "they seek power") and we learn nothing about the younger man's attachment to the older lady, whether it be a maternal relationship or romantic or simply business, we never know. This makes the climax a bit of a letdown as it's not satisfying to eventually kill either of them.

Actionbutton.net, one of my video game criticism heroes, calls Uncharted 2 (paraphrasing here) a murder-simulator. Despite the rakish and charming Nate's propensity for humour and lightheartedness, the player spends most of the game dealing out copious amounts of death. In my playthrough of Uncharted 3, I murdered over 700 people, with a variety of guns and explosions. These are men with lives and families, and I murdered over 700 of them. Yes, it is in self-defense, but Uncharted 3 makes an extremely poor decision in highlighting futility of Nate's adventure.

One of the major themes of this game is that Nate is trying to prove something, and gets in friends and himself in danger in order not to seek a treasure, but to solve a mystery, to satisfy a curiosity. He essentially murders hundreds of people (dooming even more in the destruction of the city in the sands) so that he can simply scratch an intellectual itch. It doesn't become clear in the third act that the villains are after something other than money so Drake can't possibly claim that he was doing it to stop the villains. If it was just treasure, he could have let them just do it. After all, they're already rich. As Sully, Drake's friend, and Elena, Drake's romantic interest, keep reminding Nate (and us), these people are out for blood and whatever Nate finds, it's not worth the bloodshed.

Let's just repeat that for a second. Whatever it is, it's not worth the bloodshed. The game is at pains to convey this. We're constantly reminded that Nate is doing this out of pride and curiosity and not out of some altruistic motive. The big cathartic moment comes at the end when Drake helpfully tells the villains (and us) that he no longer has anything to prove.

Oh good, I'm glad. I'm glad that it took a huge massacre of Arabs and Englishmen in order for you to learn a lesson. Not to mention the innocent bystanders who no doubt took a bullet here and there, and the innocent band of Arabs who help Drake get across the vast 500 mile-wide desert.

Of course, ethically speaking, the result is positive. The treasure that the villains seek could be used for terrorism and eventually tyranny, so it is imperative that Drake be the one to stop them. However, like I said before, this doesn't come to light until Drake is already in the endgame.

I loved the game, don't get me wrong, and the only reason why I am criticizing the game for this is because the game is not self-aware of this apparent ethical dilemma. In the second game, not a moment is spared thinking of the hundreds of dead people (including a large amount of civilians), but the game never thought to question Drake's motives. In Uncharted 3, the developers make a large misstep in pointing out Drake's hubris, then putting the murder-simulator in the hands of the player. There is a cognitive dissonance here, a disconnect between the fun pulp-style adventure (that contains important themes of humility) and the nonstop bloodshed of the game itself.

In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which I just recently played, but won't review (short version: the game is short but fun, but not as good as the first Modern Warfare), there is no ethical hand-wringing. The Russians are invading; we must stop them. The Russian terrorists are working behind the scene; we must eliminate them. There is a little bit of jingoism and nationalism, but not nearly as much as the second Modern Warfare. All in all, that trilogy of games is morally simple and monochromatic. There are bad guys and there are good guys.

Uncharted 3 makes the mistake of asking if the hero should be doing all this. There's something fundamentally flawed about a video game asking the player if they should play the game.

Or, there's something incredibly ballsy about it. But that's a different review.

Despite my qualms of the storytelling, the gameplay is incredible and the level design is absolutely remarkable. From the the chateau in provincial France to the barfight in England, to the sinking cruise ship, to the immense city under the sands, each scene is exhilarating and in a few cases, fucking breathtaking. The combat is fun, but the aiming is sometimes a little too sensitive. It's hard to use a sniper rifle at a good distance because the analog sticks respond too much. Plus, the game is sometimes annoying when packing on the snipers, the armored shotgun guns, the asshole with the missile launcher, and the countless dudes with rifles - all at the same time. I played on Easy. I can't imagine how difficult Hard or Crushing is.

Another thing. I can't find a good picture of it, but there is a lot of platforming in this game. Not only is it better than the platforming from the second one, but it's also incredibly responsive and intelligent. Drake won't accidentally jump to his doom unless you particularly force it. With the first and second one, sometimes I had to take guesses on what direction I would need to jump, and a lot of the times, Nate would plummet to his doom. This rarely happened in the third game.

Plus, as someone who has recently come into athleticism, I can honestly appreciate that Drake must be fucking ripped. His upperbody strength is unreal. He does all this climbing and hanging from one arm and pulls himself up and over without using his legs. He must have crazy core muscles and the hottest sixpack ever. Yes, I have a bit of a crush on Nate Drake. Who wouldn't? He's smart, funny, good looking and is totally built. He looks like Nathan Fillion but with Ryan Reynolds' body. Drool.

Uncharted 3 isn't the masterpiece that Uncharted 2 is. It's extremely close. The locales are exotic, the melee combat is fantastic, and the setpieces are amazing. What's missing is the dimensionalization of the villains and the bizarre ethical dilemma into which the player is forced.

Steven Pinker would approve

2012-01-11T17:22:00.000-06:00

Gawker media is reporting that homicide is no longer in the top 15 causes of death in the United States anymore. That means it's more likely to die of heart disease or choking on your own vomit. I am currently about one quarter of the way through Steven Pinker's mammoth tome The Better Angels of Our Nature and this is exactly the kind of data that his book predicts. Anyways, I wanted to post this so that I would not forget when it is time to review his book. So far? It's fucking incredible.

ABC - "The Look of Love"

2012-01-10T13:33:00.001-06:00

A Flock of Seagulls - "Space Age Love Song" 12" mix

2012-01-10T13:14:00.002-06:00

Frankie Goes to Hollywood - "Welcome to the Pleasuredome"

2012-01-07T21:02:00.001-06:00

Long title, long band name, long song. Full album version of 80s excess.

The Sign of Four

2012-01-05T12:39:00.000-06:00

Sherlock Holmes and Watson receive the beautiful Miss Marstan who explains that her father or whatever has gone missing for ten years, but she receives a beautiful pearl one a year from a mysterious benefactor. The game is afoot, and Sherlock gets his fill of dirty savages with blowdarts and tiny feet and an ancient Indian treasure. It's an imperialist racism fest!

I'm reading this for my Victorian literature class, and as you can see, I'm certainly reading this in a particular way. In the name of journalistic integrity, I must admit to a particular bias. I'm presenting a seminar on The Sign of Four, and I plan to use Edward Said's book Culture and Imperialism as a way to show that England's dependence on the colonies is what fuels the plot of this novel. Without the economic dependence on India (as symbolized by the treasure) then the beautiful white lady wouldn't be able to be rich! Alas!

Here's my image macro for Sign of Four:

As you can see, I totally expected a classic Sherlock Holmes story with Sherlock going around sniffing out clues and in general, being an autistic jerk who treats Watson poorly. What I received, in addition to the above, was a sweet boat chase and a whole lot of Indian background.

The villain in the story, if there is a villain to be identified, is seeking the Treasure of Agra, which is a bunch of gems and jewels stolen from a rajah just after the sepoy rebellion of 1857 (a subject covered by J G Farrell in The Siege of Krishnapur). Holmes and Watson are fairly unimportant to the plot, to be honest. Holmes does a bit of detecting and deducing at the beginning of the novel, but otherwise, the people just fall into their hands and spill the beans to Holmes.

There are some interesting tidbits to get out of the way before discussing the postcolonial aspect of the novel. First, this is definitely a novel of London. The case takes Holmes and Watson across the city and back, through chases and through detection. Many many many real places are referenced, and the endnotes in the paperback helpfully explain where everything is. I'm sure some insane Sherlock fan has composed a map of their journey in each story, but I'm too lazy to Google such a map. The other thing, connected to the first, is that Holmes appears to know everybody in the city, from the lowest to the middle (the upper class aren't represented in this particular novel, but we can assume he is). Any time they reach an obstacle, Holmes merely identifies himself and gains passage. We find out in this novel that Sherlock was a bare knuckle boxer and was nigh unbeatable (something the atrocious but accurate Guy Ritchie novel picks up). Holmes' connection with the city itself lends him authenticity as a detective. A lot of his deductions are lucky and based on circumstantial evidence, but his true powers lie in networking. The Sign of Four is a masterclass in the usefulness of networking in the modern metropolis. I can totally understand why my professor chose this novel to represent the Victorian era. Not only is there a constant anxiety of dirty foreigners, but there's this arrogance about the superiority of the city, the thriving throbbing city of London, where people do drugs, have boat chases, send superfluous wires and telegrams. Sherlock Holmes without London makes no sense whatsoever. His true formidable prowess comes from the ability to navigate the modern metropolis, something hitherto not as impressive in the pre-Industrial era.

Of course, part of the Industrial Era's power is their dominance of the colonies. In The Sign of Four, the treasure that everybody seeks is the money of the East, symbolized by the gems and emeralds. Notice that even the wealth itself is a form foreign to the Victorians. Instead of inheritances or wills or pages or sterling, the wealth is baubles and shiny stones.

The plot of the novel does not function without the colonies. This grid can be laid onto the dominator/controlled relationship. In a power dynamic, there is always one party that oppresses the other. However it is not a zero sum game. Certainly, the power dynamic swings in a subtle way. England becomes dependent on the wealth gained from India. In return, India develops a power over England. They require the wealth of India just as the plot of Sign of Four requires the wealth of India.

In Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said, he lays out a system of interpretation to understand novels such as Kim and Mansfield Park through the relatively new lens of postcolonialism. Without the colonies, the Bertram Estate would not be able to get up to their silly games and even the plot of the novel. In The Sign of Four, the dependence of wealth from the colonies is manifested in form of the plot device, the MacGuffin. Without imperial dominance, the villains would have never had the opportunity to steal the Agra treasure.

Speaking of imperial dominators, we can turn to Watson, our author substitute. He is a military figure, and the cult of the military personality was prominent during the late Victorian era, paraphrasing Said, is about bashing in the heads of those who need bashing. He shoots Tonga, the villain's non-white accomplice, thus asserting imperial dominance. Tonga is an interesting figure in the novel, and Holmes helpfully sums him up for us.

Before turning to Holmes' conception of Tonga, we turn to Said's conception of Orientalism, in which the West dominates and controls the East by simple fact of defining what the East is. The Occidental idea of the Orient serves to replace the actual Orient (as if it could ever be summed up in a word) and thus has power over it. Orientalism is a discourse, an idea borrowed from Foucault, in which the act of defining something gives the defining actor the power over the defined. It is a power dynamic.

Returning to Tonga, Holmes draws on a vast network of Orientalism, the scholarly act of understanding the East, ie various anthropological and scientific texts in order to deduce from the thorn who Tonga is. Based on unscrupulous and biased research, Holmes provides a definition of Tonga (we know he is not a Hindu because Hindus don't have small feet) and this definition serves to replace the conception of Tonga.

Indeed, even when Watson sees Tonga for the first time, he uses the word "it" to refer to Tonga. He calls him a "distorted creature". This distortion is key. Tonga is considered distorted because he is not white. He is a white figure seen through a glass darkly.

Then Watson shoots him.

The Sign of Four isn't a very interesting book beyond the fact that it establishes key elements of Sherlock's mythos, ie the boxing, the cocaine, all these other things. It's not a well told story, as the boat chase isn't exciting, and Holmes doesn't really do much detective work. The Sign of Four is more fascinating as both a proto-detective novel working out the kinks of a soon-to-be essential genre, and as a document of imperial arrogance. I don't really like this novel because it's boring and stilted and the solution is idiotic, but I like this novel because of what I can do with it. Obviously, numerous people have done work on Edward Said and Arthur Conan Doyle (including Said himself!) so I'm not really saying anything world-shaking. However, this just confirms to me that Edward Said might be my favourite literary critic of all time. Sorry, F R Leavis and Harold Bloom, I have a new hero.

Year in Review - Part Two

2012-01-04T12:00:00.002-06:00

This is my favourite meme of 2011. Every time I look at it, I get a smile. It's a combination of the dog's ridiculous facial expression and the fact that the response is a confirmation that he or she is indeed "dog". Not a dog. Not the dog. Just dog. Extremely funny.

In other year end roundups, I've detailed movies that I saw, or television that I saw, or video games that I played. I'm going to quickly get those out of the way, so here we go.

Film of the year: Tron: Legacy
TV Show of the year: The League
Video game of the year: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Okay, now on to some other things, such as resolutions. New Year's resolutions are often recipes for failure. The new year is an arbitrary date and often leads to failure due to winter, time, and the exhaustion of the holidays. However, I managed to turn my life around on a purely arbritary day, with no lead up. Just one day, in February, I did it.

This year, I am setting a few resolutions, despite what I just said about the possibility of failure. Number one is to continue working out and eating right. I'd like to lose another ten to fifteen pounds to be honest. I can do it. A corollary of this is that I'd like make sure that this becomes my lifestyle permanently. No more candy, no more junk food. I've been fairly recalcitrant in regards to quitting candy these past few months, and part of this is due to living with my parents, but it's mostly my fault.

My second resolution is to work hard at school. I did the bare minimum last semester. I don't think I did any damage, but I could have done better. This term, I want to excel and not leave everything to the last minute. I just want to do well, make connections and use them in the next year, my last undergrad year.

Thirdly, I would like to sort out my personal life. I don't want to be single anymore, but I also abhor the idea of being in a relationship. I can't imagine having to go through what I went through in 2010. It was awful. Even receiving a text from my ex fills me with loathing. But despite the bad memories and emotions, I still long for a new relationship. Falling in love is actually quite fun. I also don't want a quick fuck or a FWB situation. I don't know what I want and in 2012, I resolve to figure out what I want.

Fourth, sell the physical books that I don't plan on keeping forever. I purchased too many books since I moved in with my parents. It's not good. A corollary to this is that I need to stop buying books. That shouldn't be a problem thanks to my Kobo.

That's 2012 in a nutshell. I think that my resolutions aren't difficult to achieve. In fact, they should be things that I simply do, rather than go to the effort of typing them out as a resolution. Hopefully I can sustain the awesomeness of 2011 into 2012. To be perfectly honest, 2012 is off to a great start. I had a wonderful New Year's Eve hanging out with a super cute girl and last night I had a bit of an informal date with her. So fingers crossed.

Year in Review - Part One

2012-01-03T12:13:00.000-06:00

And so, the increasingly difficult task of evaluating quantitatively the novels I read comes around. This year, I am going to do something slightly different. Because I manage to read a few novels published in 2011 itself, I am going to rank them in a separate list, but still allow them to contend in the year's best overall list.

The 2011 List

6 The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
5 The Adults by Alison Espach
4 Palo Alto by James Franco
3 Doctor Who: Touched by an Angel by Jonathan Morris
2 The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
1 The King of the Badgers by Phillip Hensher

However, I did not finish Reamde by Neal Stephenson, even though I'm halfway through, and it would have no doubt replaced Franco's short story collection on this list.

The Best
10 A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein
9 Star Trek: Destiny by David Mack*
8 The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John LeCarre
7 Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn
6 The Vivisector by Patrick White
5 Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
4 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John LeCarre
3 The Death and Life of Bobby Z by Don Winslow
2 The King of the Badgers by Phillip Hensher
1 Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

* ie the entire trilogy

What an amazing year for books. One can track my interests throughout the year just like last year. When I decided to read classics, I did so for a month, and then switched to sci-fi for a couple months. I read a month of novels like Model Home and The Adults, books distinctly in the Franzen subgenre of social realism. Near the end of the year, I slowed down considerably and didn't read as much. Not just due to school but due to exhaustion. I was just tired of reading, I suppose.

This year I definitely took a bigger interests in my stats than last year. I started on Goodreads back in 2009, but it wasn't until the halfway point of 2010 where I started using it obsessively. When 2011 started, I had Goodreads down to a science, learning to quantitatively and qualitatively track everything I read. Goodreads also holds a challenge every year, where you estimate the amount of books you'd like to read, and then you attempt to defeat that number. At the outset of 2011, I set it at 85 books, hoping to tackle some larger books, such as Infinite Jest. I called this, in the blog, the 2011 Challenge, which I will get to in a second.

I hit 85 books back in September. Yes, back in September. Now it's December and I've read over 125 books, some of which were really short and some of which were long, such as Matterhorn.

Here is the distribution of scores in a handy chart.

As one can see, there are a lot of 4 stars books. In fact, they made up 48% of all the novels I read in 2011. That's huge! That means I chose wisely in my reading. Less than 7% of my reading was two stars or less, which I think counts as a huge success. I read more sub-average books in 2010, but in 2011, I handed out five stars like they were candy. I award 5 stars to 20% of the 125 books, whereas in 2010, I only gave 17 out of 94 novels that score. That's a 47% increase in five stars from 2010 to 2011. As you can see, I love stats. According to Goodreads, I read 39,620 pages. Now bear in mind that this site sometimes has incorrect pagination or different editions, even though I try for maximum fidelity. Still, even with a margin of error, we're still talking upwards of 30,000 pages. That's staggering.

Frankly it's amazing that I read so much considering that I was in school or in the gym or out with friends. I had a hugely social year in 2011, and despite that, I manage to obliterate last year's record. There's no way I am going to beat that in 2012.

Okay, so the 2011 Challenge was a bit of a failure. Every time I set out goals, such as "I'm going to read this specific list" I end up failing. It's the same when I set out goals of writing. I have to allow for organic change and whatnot. Here are the books from the 2011 Challenge that I managed to finish:

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane
A Division of the Spoils by Paul Scott

Pretty dismal showing considering that I set out to read 12 books. That's only 25 percent. That's a failure. Despite this small problem, I feel very good about my reading in 2011. For 2012, I don't plan on setting any reading goals, not even a number. I think 125 is anomalous and will never be repeated for the rest of my life, or at least until I retire. 2011 was a perfect storm of circumstance: no cable, no girlfriend, no responsibility and a desire to get back into school. For goals not related to reading, you'll have to wait for part two of my Year in Review.

Dead Sea

2012-01-02T22:47:00.000-06:00

A group of construction workers and sailors are traveling across the Atlantic to South America where they will build an airstrip for a mining company. Unfortunately, their ship ends up in a bizarre fog that chokes, in a murky viscous sea almost red, filled with creatures unimaginable and terrible. When their ship sinks, they must fight for survival amongst themselves and amongst the awful things that feed in the fog.

Okay, a couple things first. This is the first novel I read on my brand new Kobo Vox that I received for Christmas. Yay, Mom! I've already put a couple hundred books on the damn thing and I can't stop searching for books I've always wanted to read, but could never find. 2012 will be a year in which I read a bunch of things I never expected to read. I love my Kobo already - I'm pretty excited about it.

Secondly, inspired by 4chan and my post about The Grapes of Wrath, I'm posting another image macro that details "what I read, what I expected and what I got". Instead of using 4chan's template, I made my own that is vastly bigger. This review is the first to have this new template of review, which is to say I will post the image and then expand on it. I'm not saying every review will be like this, but some will. Sometimes I'm exhausted of thinking about books critically and I just want to read something awesome and not to feel guilty about not critically appraising it for my blog that nobody reads. Here is the image for Dead Sea

Some have appraised a picture at excesses of thousands of words. I somewhat concur, but not totally. If I did, I wouldn't have read so damn much. Look for my Year in Review: 2011 in the next couple days. I have to put finishing touches on it.

Dead Sea by Tim Curran. Not a great novel, but certainly not terrible. He set out to tell a Lovecraftian splatterpunk novel (somewhat mutually exclusive, but whatever) and he meant to include sea monsters. I chose this because of... the sea monsters mostly. I just fucking love giant squids. Did I receive a bunch of giant squids? Well some. A good portion of the book is the sailors in a lifeboat just fucking arguing. For pages upon pages upon ages. It felt like forever. But finally, in the third part, things changed, and the sea monsters came out in droves.

Then Curran had to go and ruin by trying to explain shit. He tries to explain that the sailors are stuck in some abortion of a dimension and he employs actual physics to explain it. Yes, the words "Einstein Rosen Bridge" appear in this novel. They should never appear in a Lovecraftian novel. Ever ever ever. I don't want things explained to me, especially not by some guy who has read Brian Greene's Elegant Universe and now thinks he's an expert on theoretical astrophysics that Stephen Hawking doesn't fully understand. Curran's explanations soured a good chunk of the novel, but luckily, all is not lost. The end is fairly killer.

Spoilers

The primary antagonist, Saks, a homophobic bully of a sailor, gets shot in the stomach, but the weird creature that's been growing inside him (unbeknownst to the cast) saves his life, only for one of the other characters to simply, from out of nowhere, bash his brains in with a wrench. Yes, that's how the climactic showdown occurs. And it's fucking fantastic. It received an audible gasp from me while I was reading. It was shocking, and purposefully unHollywood. There was no catharsis or great relief; it was just cold-blooded murder. And it was chilling.

Then, the big baddie appears and something happens. I can't explain in such a short paragraph, but Curran makes it awesome. He finally brings out the true horror, the kind that drives you mad, the kind that makes you tear out your own eyeballs to avoid looking at it. It's good.

But it's at the very end. I went through hundreds of pages of sailors making gay jokes and having fisticuffs. I'm not sure if it was worth it. I'm not sure if I would recommend this to anybody other than hardcore fans of sea monsters. Oh well.

First Kobo novel down - only a million more to go!

Christmas Special Double Review

2011-12-28T00:23:00.000-06:00

1.
Doctor Who: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

I haven't liked a Doctor Who Christmas special since David Tennant's first episode. All of the other specials have been boring forgettable affairs. Moffat's first Christmas special was interesting if only for its aggressive disregard of principles of time travel set before in the show. This particular Christmas special is noteworthy for the revelation that the Doctor is apparently immune to the cold vacuum of space.

The Doctor is blowing up some shit on a spaceship and gets blasted out of it, landing on Earth just before the War. He survives somehow and makes a friend in some lady. Then, years later, the lady's husband is dead in the war, and she is left with two kids. They go to a house where the Doctor has conveniently set himself up as the caretaker. He has a present for the kids, which is a gateway to the future, to a planet made up of a sentient forest. When the kids get there, Bill Bailey shows up for a scene and explains that the forest is scheduled for an acid-rain scorching. Then the trees talk through a character, a typically Moffat device and then timey-wimey happy ending because it's Christmas.

20 minutes of story stretched out for 59 minutes. That's it. This was the worst Christmas special since the one with the Titanic. Maybe even worse than the one with the runaway bride (which I only remember with fondness because the Doctor goes apeshit in it). The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe was boring. One entire third of the special was the various character wandering in the forest, the same set, I might add, but time displaced. In typical classic Who fashion, one episode out of four was simply pushing the characters from one corridor to the next. The son is chasing a bizarre creature, the daughter and the Doctor are chasing the son, and the mother is chasing them both, only to be thwarted by Bill Bailey, who is criminally underused. His scene, along with his henchmen, is easily the funniest thing Moffat has written in years. Funnier than the Cybermen episode that everybody hated (but I liked).

There's a fairly large plot hole in this special, in regards to the creature that the son is chasing. Upon finishing it, I realized that something didn't make sense, and I'm not talking about Moffat's twisting of the time stream in order to provide a happy ending.

So to recap, this was aggressively boring, illogical, and only memorable for its bravura opening and Bill Bailey's scene-stealing. The worst Doctor Who episode I've seen in a long time. Which is a shame, because I've loved Moffat's direction so far. Matt Smith does a tremendous job in this episode, as well, showing how deft he is as a comic actor, not just a scary Doctor.

And to make matters worse, there's no a single frame of teasing for series seven!

2.
Downton Abbey

Remember when I said I was going to give the Christmas special a try and if it was as stupid as the second series I was going to quit? Well, it was even more stupid than I could possibly imagine. Contrived, manipulative, dumb, superficial and totally contrived.

What cousin Matthew proclaims at the end of the second series is quickly and stupidly overturned in favour for plot twisting. What happens to Bates is quickly overturned because it's Christmas and this is what happens on soap operas. Rosamund's story in the Christmas special is so imminently forgettable that I can hardly remember the name of the other character she's involved with. The plot with the second cook and her dead husband that she didn't love is stretched out further and further and further, with seemingly no end in sight. All sorts of things happen, but none of it has any consequence. It's simply the plot twisted for the sake of a Christmas special.

And it was boring. Why was everything boring this Christmas? You know what was an especially good "special" even though it was a theatrical movie? The Inbetweeners Movie! Not only was the comedy fucking hilarious, but the drama was organic as it came from the characters and not from the plot (although there were a few instances of the plot twisted for convenience's sake). Not like Downton Abbey's stupid soapy special. This was awful. Awful, awful, awful, awful. I hated it more than the Doctor Who special. I can't think of anything positive to say about this episode, and normally I can.

In fact, I can even mention something that I hated more than anything. Lady Sybil, the really hot sister, doesn't make an appearance, despite her story being the most interesting. Fuck this show.

And yet I know I will watch the third series.

By the way, who the fuck is going to watch an ITV miniseries of the Titanic? Even if it's written by Julian Fellowes? The special effects are going to look campy in comparison to a thirteen year old movie that will no doubt produce a significant influence on the plot of Fellowes' script. What motivated ITV to produce this? Why didn't they do one of the Lusitania? Oh well. Sherlock starts on Jan 1 and I will be watching that with a big smile on my face.

White Teeth

2011-12-27T20:13:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T09:20:00.000-06:00

The fact that Christmas' origin lies in both the birth of Jesus Christ and the solstice celebrations makes no difference to me. It is a time to celebrate the brotherhood of man, really. I use Christmas as a way to relax, to visit friends, to get drunk, to be with my family. It's not a holiday of religious observance or Midnight Mass or any other rituals. Today, on December 25th, I plan to sit in bed and read, as I am far behind in my reading these past three months. I hope to catch up by February. So, Merry Christmas to everybody. Also, I hope you enjoy the new design, which is definitely influenced by my love of the 80s.

The To-Read Pile

2011-12-22T14:07:00.000-06:00

It's getting exceedingly big. I need to stop buying books again. I was doing so well and then I moved back into my parents'. Well, here is a small portion of the to-read pile. Caveat emptor, I may not read all of them.

Click on the picture to make it big. Not pictured, because there wasn't enough room: Stephen King's new behemoth, Philip Hensher's behemoth The Northern Clemency, the behemoth Masks of God tetralogy by Joseph Campbell and a host of other things. I really need to conquer this pile!

Wang Chung - "Dance Hall Days" 1984 Extended Remix

2011-12-19T22:14:00.001-06:00

Texas Killing Fields

2011-12-15T23:23:00.000-06:00

It's hard not to like this movie based on that poster. The lightning, the starkness of the fields, the intense glares in each actor's eyes, the "Produced by Michael Mann" text. It's going to be hard to judge this one because I'm walking into it thinking that I'm going to love it, based solely on that poster. Of course, I watch every movie with the hope that it's going to be my new favourite movie, that it will supplant Indiana Jones and The Bourne Ultimatum. This film has a lot of the ingredients to possibly change things up in my film hierarchy. It's directed by Michael Mann's daughter, it stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Sam Worthington, two good actors.

Set in Texas City, Texas, Worthington and Morgan are two homicide officers who are on the trail of a serial killer or killers, who are abducting women and killing them out in the badlands, in the fields. Chloe Grace Moretz plays a little girl from a impoverished family who wanders the streets and Morgan feels protective of her. Jessica Chastain plays Worthington's ex-wife and a cop in another town, where girls are also going missing.

The opening scene of this movie features beautiful stark imagery of the impoverished conditions these people face, the racial issues and the social inequality faced by them. This is a small town, one without sidewalks, where little boys ride bikes down the street at 11 o'clock at night. Mann shoots all this with the same quick shots of establishment, with the grainy digital eye her father used in Collateral. It evokes a sense of desolation and of dead-ends. These men aren't going anywhere in their shitty jobs, just drink and whores. Even an older peace officer, a friend of Worthington's character's dad, is essentially a functioning alcoholic with a badge.

As the plot slowly builds, with each piece being put in place, the audience is given little sketches of the two main characters. Worthington, alone and sitting on the floor, feeding his dog canned food. Morgan, a family man, praying and cuddling in bed with his wife. However it is Morgan that is inexorably drawn into the killing fields, the place so desolate and so empty that even the Native Americans won't go into it, according to Worthington. He keeps trying to tell Morgan to stay out of the fields, figuratively speaking of course, but this is a cop movie. Morgan must go through the Hero's Journey and reach the Underworld.

Here's a handy chart of the Hero's Journey.

The helper is Worthington's character who guides him through Texas City, Morgan's adopted town. It is the fields where Morgan's death and rebirth will occur. He has crossed the metaphorical threshold of law-abiding and enforcing, God-fearing man into a world of blurred distinctions between following the letter of the law and getting shit done. When he finally reaches the fields, the killing fields, the dark abyss of his own soul and even Texas's soul, he returns for his atonement and the return to the status quo.

Yes, Texas Killing Fields takes on mythic qualities. The fields are imbued with a sense of the epic, of the darkness and of the eternal. Mann shoots the fields in blue, a colour of death, and has thunder and lightning crash over them. The fields themselves become more than a place, but a symbol, like Chinatown does in the titular film noir.

However, unlike Chinatown, Texas Killing Fields does not benefit from a stellar Robert Towne script. The dialogue in this film is mildly clunky, with Worthington's character helpfully telling Morgan and the audience that Morgan's gone over the edge. The cops sort of speak like cops are expected to, and the Texan young men and women speak with the same drawl and the same emptiness. Despite the dialogue issues, the script takes an uneven line for the Hero's Journey. Mann uses a bit of misdirection to try and fool the audience, but anybody who has seen a movie in their life will be able to guess the ending.

The screenplay feels artificial, especially since it maps onto the grid of the Hero's Journey fairly well, but even then, Texas Killing Fields seems to have a sense of authenticity. It wasn't even filmed in Texas (Louisiana, to be honest) but it feels like Texas, like the Southern states where everything is hot and everything is slow because it's too hot to move fast. Mann even borrows from Peter Berg, one of Michael Mann's ardent followers, and uses a sort of Explosions in the Sky style soundtrack, similar to Friday Night Lights. Both those two things are from Texas.

Mostly, it's Mann's competent direction that saves Texas Killing Fields. It's well shot, a mixture of documentary feel and inventive camera work. The car chase near the end of the film is extremely well shot, with the audience being able to follow the action and the geography of the location perfectly. There's a couple action scenes that are shot just perfectly, with a sense of cold-blooded quickness and reality, not the nonsense John Woo crap from the late nineties.

This is a good movie. I may seem somewhat dismissive because of its adherence to the Hero's Journey, but it actually kind of makes me like it more. If only the dialogue was a little bit better. Hopefully Mann directs at a quicker pace than her father. I'm more than excited to see her next film.

Film Round-Up

2011-12-14T16:51:00.000-06:00

1.
Fish Tank (2009)

I watched this because of Michael Fassbender. There I said it. I'm glad I ended up watching it though. It's a well shot and well acted film about a young girl living in a council estate who develops feelings for her mother's handsome Irish boyfriend. There's plenty to be said of the film as a text, and you can interpret it in any which way, especially with an eye for social realism. It's a thematically deep film, and it's successful in convincingly portraying the emotional development of this girl. However, it's a little slow. Could've used a trim here and there just to speed things up. Other than that, this is a fantastic film.

2.
A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (2011)

The cast. Oh my god the cast. Jason Sudeikis, Will Forte, Nick Kroll among others. The plot? I couldn't care less about the plot. However, this is a surprisingly heartwarming and hilarious movie about a group of friends who want to celebrate their last holiday in the summer home before its sold with an orgy. At first the film sort of stumbles with its awkward premise and its thinly drawn characters, but as the film goes on, and sketches the background details of these friends, without belaboring the details, the cast fills out, and the humour comes alive. It helps that everybody is fairly charming and quick-witted, and there appears to be a healthy level of improvisation. What sort of diminishes the movie is the romance that develops between the main character and the real estate agent in charge of selling the house. In a surprising move, the climax of the film sweeps it aside and goes straight the emotional catharsis of the orgy. It works! This is a good comedy, not quite to the level of The Hangover or Bridesmaids, but this style of ensemble comedy with a focus on the dialogue is greatly appreciated.

3.
Drive (2011)

Ryan Gosling, amirite? There's a good looking fellow. The opening scene of Drive is fantastic: a car chase that's not quite a car chase, one that's cerebral and intelligent but tense nonetheless. Certainly emblematic of the rest of the film. Then, the credits sequence, hot pink cursive writing set to night time scenes and a killer French synthpop jam. These are all ingredients for a fantastic movie. I liked Drive a lot. Gosling is amazing, even though he's hardly doing anything. The violence is spectacularly shocking, when there is. Albert Brooks is really good, and so is Ron Perlman. So what's the problem? Not enough Gosling driving. There just isn't enough of him doing what he's best at. The car chase is also bizarrely shot, with odd editing choices, giving the viewer a wrong sense of geography. But the rest of the movie is good. I don't really have much to say about this movie. It's good, but it's not great. It's really really good, but not great.

4.
The Guard (2011)

Here's an hilarious movie in the same vein as Bad Santa or any of those foul-mouthed bastard and the people who love them. Except, it's Brendan Gleeson as an Irish cop, one of the Garda, and Don Cheadle, strait-laced cop from America comes to track down some drug smugglers. This is a film to watch for its screenplay and its dialogue rather than its plot. Mark Strong, the UK's leading villain in all films, delivers a strong performance as an Englishman looking for some violence. Everybody's pretty funny, and despite the film being made in Ireland by Irish people, there doesn't seem to be a lot of specifically Irish humour. It's simply people swearing at each other for two hours. Not a bad way to pass the time.

5.
Final Destination 5 (2011)

I have some sort of affection for the series as a whole. The first one is clever, in that it removes the slasher from the slasher movie, and the second one is amazing for just upping the stakes to an incredible degree. However, the next two were of diminishing returns. Hopefully this fifth one would do something interesting? Well, it does and it doesn't. This one adds the dimension of taking a life in order to appease death, so Miles Fisher, one of my favourite people in the world, ends up trying to murder people. The setpieces are cool, I guess, but nothing as spectacular as the second film. It's the end that really fucking does it. Does anybody remember the end of The Mist? How fucking mean it is? Well, Final Destination 5 is even meaner, if that's possible. The requisite twist ending is impossible to see coming, and it's utterly nihilistic. It's fucking mean and I love it because of it.

6.
Contagion (2011)

Soderbergh is a filmmaker who has almost exhausted my patience. Traffic, Erin Brockovitch, the Ocean's Trilogy, Out of Sight and the Limey are all terrific movies. However, Soderbergh punctuates his career with misfires such as Full Frontal and the Che two parter. I only made it through about an hour of Che before I fell asleep. It's painfully boring. So when Soderbergh makes a more commercial picture, I'm interested. Where will it end up? Like Traffic or like Solaris? Contagion is a fast-paced medical thriller, which is an automatic thumbs up from me, really. Plus, it is meant to be hyper realistic, and its attention to detail is amazing. The cast is uniformly excellent, including Gwyneth Paltrow's exceedingly disturbing death scene in the first ten minutes of the movie. The second half of the movie suffers a bit from a lack of direction. Only two or three characters have a goal by the second half and the rest of the cast simply wanders around until the denouement. Still, it's slickly made and goes to show that Soderbergh is one of the greatest cinematographers in the business.

7.
Fright Night (2011)

This was one of my most anticipated films of the year. I have great affection for the original, despite not seeing it in almost ten years. I remember it being witty, frightening, hilarious and altogether charming. I expected something of the same from the remake, especially because of its acting pedigree. Yes, the Tenth Doctor plays a Criss Angel type of arsehole, and he even uses the same accent from his tenure on Doctor Who. Of course, this was not the only engaging part of Fright Night. Rather, it is a clever movie that suffers only from its dismal CGI effects. There are numerous scenes of palpable suspense, like when the main character is attempting to sneak out of the vampire's house while the villain watches reality TV and drinks beer. Instead of the charming debonair Chris Sarandon, this film features a rugged and animalistic Colin Farrell, who just oozes sex and violence. It's a restrained performance, in which the possibility of violence is more threatening than the display of aggression. The film is equal parts funny and scary, including a hilarious turn from James Franco's younger brother in a small role as a stoned bully who gets his throat ripped out. I enjoyed the movie more than I thought I would.

8.
Friends with Kids (2011)

Again, here is another movie that I watched if only because of the cast. Jon Hamm, Kirsten Wiig, Adam Scott, Maya Rudolph, Chris O'Dowd and some other fine actors all star in Friends with Kids, written and directed by Hamm's partner, who stars as one of two platonic friends who have a kid together with the aim of not falling in love and of course, they end up falling in love. The story beats are boring, but the cast is charming. Hamm's partner is a terrifically weak actress in comparison to the rest of the cast, though. Her own dialogue sounds stilted and forced in her mouth. If you had this cast together, wouldn't you let them improv the shit out of everything? Well, they weren't allowed or at least it didn't end up in the final cut. This is a movie that screaming to be let loose from the director's quiet dialogue. It shakes the frame with potential energy but focuses on small scenes of warmth. Luckily the film moves into real emotion by the end, and it concludes with a heartwarming scene. It's the barebones of romantic comedy, but the cast keeps it barely alive.

Religious Hypocrisy

2011-12-13T11:27:00.000-06:00

Here's a photo of a protester from the Westboro Baptist Church - yes the church that protests funerals of soldiers saying that it was America's fault for allowing gay people to marry or whatever. They famously hate gays. Their signs often have things like "Faggots burn in hell" or whatever. Here's an adorable photo of a protester wearing a Glee shirt. This is fucking adorable.

I don't post about religion on my blog because it's not really a topic that's worth talking about. I'm atheist, my whole family is, we're secular and we don't believe in religion. We have special disdain for organized religion that promotes hatred and intolerance. Theism isn't necessarily dangerous; it's the belief in the supremacy of the pontiff that's dangerous. Either way, the Westboro Baptist Church have set up their own pontiff who is dangerously influential among his followers. It is only a matter of time before somebody does something violent to the church in retaliation for their absolutely bonkers beliefs.

But before that day arrives, let's all sit back, with a smug look on our faces and laugh at this fucking photo.

David Bowie - "Someone Up There Likes Me"

2011-12-07T16:07:00.000-06:00

I have gone on a fairly big Bowie kick the past few weeks. I've always liked Bowie, but he's not somebody that I immediately reach for when wanting something to listen to. I decided to give Young Americans and Let's Dance a re-listen, if only because they are aggressively more commercial. However, in my ever-present pop apologia, I've decided that both albums are, in fact, masterpieces. Especially Young Americans. That saxophone! Those backup harmonies! Bowie's "live" singing - sometimes done with one take! Long story short, Bowie is a God.

You Deserve Nothing

2011-12-05T12:10:00.000-06:00

Will Silver is a 30-ish American expatriate working in Paris, at an international high school, home to students from across the world, sons and daughters of diplomats and businessmen. Will is teaching a special seminar on philosophy and literature to Gilad, the son of an American businessman who uses his fists in communicating with Gilad's mother. Also in the seminar is Ariel, best friend of Marie who ends up in a sexual relationship with Will, to devastating effect to all. Set in 2002, as tensions around the world and in France were heating up, this is a novel about the dynamic of power and authority, and of the intersection of philosophy and life, narrated by Will, Marie and Gilad in the first person.

As every reviewer of this novel is going to mention, Alexander Maksik wrote this from personal experience, as he was a teacher in Paris who left his job after an inappropriate relationship with an underage student. Jezebel, of Gawker media, broke the story, and showed that this novel isn't nearly as innocent or as fictional as it might appear. The real "Marie" expresses the uncomfortable feeling that she was exploited and used, whereas in the novel, Marie longs for Will, and her last line is "I still dream of him." As a reviewer and critic, I hope I can separate the work from the artist. But I have to admit, that my own feelings of discomfort will bleed through. It is inescapable that I am not disturbed by Maksik's rewriting of reality. Even without this added dimension of reality, this work stands alone.

You Deserve Nothing, in a nutshell, is a promising debut. However, it is not a great novel. Nor is it even a good novel, but neither is it bad. It's aggressively average, from its themes to its repetitive prose, to its glaring signposts reminding the reader that this is, indeed, a first novel.

Firstly, there are innumerable scenes of teaching in the novel, with Will at the head of the class, diligently and earnestly explaining existentialism and Sartre and Camus to a group of homogenous students, all of whom have discrete names but blending voices. The teaching scenes are interesting at first, if only to get a sense of why and how these students seem to idolize Will. But then the teaching continues. It makes up one third of the novel. This is not a quantitative count, but an estimate. One third of the novel is a teacher teaching. To sound childish, if I wanted to be taught existentialism, I'd read it for myself rather than read a novel, in English, regurgitating and twisting Camus' words. At least, Maksik provides us with the opening line of L'etranger in French, a rather difficult passage to translate. Not only does he provide bits of Camus, but there are numerous pieces of other works, simply block quoted, so that we can read along with the earnest students and learn along with them. By the end of the novel, when some of the students have become disillusioned with Will, the teaching scenes are excruciating. If the teaching scenes are bad, maybe at least the reader can console himself with above average prose? Not so, unfortunately.

The cadence of Maksik's narrators are all the same, despite their different backgrounds and gender. They all narrate in the same style. The narrator uses two or three short sentences. Then to break up the style, the narrator eliminates the conjunctions, strings two clauses together. Just like that. I wrote this paragraph in Maksik's style.

There's an affected style of disaffection, of disillusioned people. This normally works for me; after all I love Bret Easton Ellis. The problem is that there is an overbearing sense of sameness with characters and scenes bleeding together. Structurally, Maksik uses three narrators, but they all sound the same and use the same style. Not only that, but even his multicultural students use the same voice. Colin, a student in Will's seminar, is from Dublin, as the audience is constantly reminded, but his accent and dialect is totally American. He uses specific American slang and misses that particular sentence structure that the Irish use. Maksik totally fails in constructing differing voices for any of his characters. This would not have been a problem if all the characters were American students of the same socio-economic background. No, Maksik uses a specific multicultural and multiethnic cast, from the Irish kid to the Muslim kid who speaks exactly like a boorish isolationist American thinks a Muslim speaks.

My edition of the novel has 320 pages. Every time the narrator switches, there is a blank page. Therefore, there are at least 40 pages of blank pages, lowering our page count to 280. If one third of that are asinine teaching scenes, then only 186 pages are actually important. Of that 186, there are many repeated scenes, from each of the narrator's point of view. The point I am trying to make? This is a short story with ample padding. If this had been a short story, without Gilad and Colin, focusing only on Marie and Will's disastrous relationship, I would have loved it. It would have been a tight and gripping narrative of the delusions of power. Unfortunately, we have a earnest naive novel filled with extras from Dead Poets Society.

Now that I have thoroughly excoriated the novel, and judged it on its own merits, let us turn to the unfortunate reality of the situation Maksik found himself him. Jezebel tells us that almost everything in the novel is taken from actual experience, with only the names changed. We can then position Maksik onto Will. Therefore, Maksik wrote a novel about himself as a charming and charismatic teacher that all female students want to bang, a teacher whom the male students idolize, whom even the faculty thinks is a fantastic and efficient teacher. Maksik re-wrote the ending of this episode, from real life, into one in which it is Maksik who makes the fateful decision to depart, leaving Marie in a longing state, pining away for Maksik.

The cliche of first time novelists is that they tend to write idealized versions of themselves into the novel. Otherwise known as a Mary Sue in fanfiction parlance. Maksik has written a creepy and narcissistic version of events that paints him in a rather flattering light. The effect of which is to turn me off entirely. At the beginning of the novel, I was quite enamored with the French setting, the multicultural student body, and the sexual subtext. By the end of the novel, I was creeped out, but not in the way Maksik intended. Will seems to love Marie. Marie reciprocates this. At no point does Maksik entertain the notion that this is a situation of power and dominance. Maksik used his authority as leverage to sleep with a girl, despite the girl thinking that it was her choice. In the teaching scenes, Maksik implies heavily that there are no choices, that there is no free will. It is a determinist novel. At the end, Will is accused by the headmaster of thinking himself innocent. Will provides a sly smirk and walks away into the sunset. He thinks he is innocent because there is no free will. He is an idiot.

The novel is amateurish and clumsily written. The prose is weak and repetitive. Add into this mix the fact that Maksik thinks he did nothing wrong and re-wrote reality to suit his ego, then you have the recipe for a novel that is not good, but not bad. Maksik has enough talent to make the novel readable, engaging, and at the beginning, quite good. Perhaps with a second novel, not based on his questionable decisions, then he'll succeed. It is laudable that Maksik even wrote a novel about such a controversial and taboo subject, but he did it in the clumsiest way he possibly could.

"Nothing on Earth Comes Close"

2011-12-04T23:36:00.000-06:00

This is a commercial directed by Tony Scott for Saab. Thanks to this commercial, Scott was offered the chance to direct Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise. The rest, they say, is history. This is an interesting advertisement in that it is starkly simplistic. There are two men, and I mean masculine men. Both of them walk towards the camera in slow motion, carrying their paraphernalia. They open garage doors, and an ethereal light illuminates their machines: a jet fighter and a Saab. The pilot lovingly strokes the wing of the plane. They drive their machines out into the rain, and thanks to a series of quick cuts, it appears that they are staring each other down. There is a competition to occur. As the orchestral score lowers in volume, the engine of the plane grows louder. The plane and the car drive towards the camera, but the plane takes off. In the frame, the jet is above the Saab. There is nothing between them. The music returns, swelling, and the logo is revealed again: Saab.

It is simplistic but ever so effective. Ostensibly, the comparison is being made between a jet fighter and an automobile. The viewer is meant to associate the two machines and conclude that if one wants to be an ideal of masculinity, or a fighter pilot, one must purchase a Saab, the next best thing. The comparison is made by using equal screen time and by shooting both machines at the same angles, then cutting between them, creating a sense of continuity between the two.

The fighter jet is also made by Saab, famously so. The idea that the makers of a fighter jet would also make a car seems attractive. If you were a man who appreciated the power and thrust of a jet engine, then why would you not enjoy the power and sleekness of a miniature jet, an automobile version of a jet? While there is an explicit comparison being made between the Saab car and the Saab jet, there is an explicit comparison being made between the men. Only men who drive Saabs are comparable to the men who pilot jets. In the Eighties, with the Cold War simmering, a common masculine ideal is that of the military man. In 1985, both Rocky and Rambo sequels were dominating US box offices. In 1986, Top Gun dominated the box office totally along with Platoon. Military personnel were symbols of American austerity and prosperity. Of course, Saab is a European company, and the commercial aired in Europe mostly, but the point is that the military figure was on the minds of millions of people. They were symbols to look up to. If you wanted to be like a symbol, all you had to do was buy a Saab.

This is why this is one of the best commercials ever made.

The King of the Badgers

2011-12-01T22:40:00.000-06:00

The quiet village of Hanmouth is far from London, but picaresque and beautiful, containing a small university, twelve pubs, a Neighbourhood Watch, a cheese shop owned by two men who host gay orgies every once in awhile, an estate council from which young China has been abducted. Now, all eyes of the nation are fixed on this small community, where everybody watches everybody and CCTV cameras gaze unblinking and silent. The King of the Badgers portrays an England in the 21st century as it copes with the postmodern problem of what to do when everybody is watching but you've nothing to show them.

This was not longlisted for the Booker this year, despite Hensher's prior novel The Northern Clemency being shortlisted and despite Hensher's prodigious talent and critical presence in the UK. The very brief version of this review is that The King of the Badgers should have been shortlisted, and possibly should have even won the prize. It towers over some of the novels published this year, and yes, I would even say it was better than The Stranger's Child, which I recently finished and reviewed.

Part of the novel's success is Hensher's gripping and exuberant prose. On his Wikipedia page, it is said that Hensher is known for his detached prose, his distance from the characters. While this might be true, the sheer linguistic deftness and dexterity that Hensher shows on a sentence-by-sentence rate is impressive. If I were judging a novel this year by prose alone, The King of the Badgers would surely be in the top 3 (with Oblivion and The Stranger's Child all competing). Each sentence is so intricately and brilliantly composed, with clauses and subclauses interpolated like a wonderful trumpet solo in the middle of a gorgeous Miles Davis song. Hensher finds a quick and often evocative way to describe a physical detail, then expands on it with more sentences to place it within the larger scope of the village itself. From the description of the estuary flowing through the center of the town to a central character's thin humble penis, Hensher's prose rivals some of the better stylists I've read before. It is Hensher's utmost fidelity to the grammatical rules that helps each phrase sparkle with complexity but clarity. If there was ever an author to argue for a style of rule adherence....

Of course, The King of the Badgers isn't a novel written for linguistics students. This is a "state of the nation" novel, something that the English excel at, something that, in American, only Franzen seems brave enough to attempt. Hensher's novel is explicitly concerned with the postmodern anxiety of constant surveillance. Perhaps this is reviewer's bias, but I started reading this novel on day 3 of a seven page paper on Michel Foucault's Panopticism, which is surely an influence on Hensher's novel, even in the most superficial of ways. In a nutshell, the panopticon is an architectural design that places each prisoner into a room where they cannot see the other prisoners, but they can see the central tower, where an unseen presence may or may not be observing them. Thus, the prisoners assume they are being watched and modify their behaviour accordingly. The model of the panopticon is echoed in the spatial and philosophical designs of institutions, or disciplines, such as prisons, hospitals and schools. In The King of the Badgers, the panopticon is represented in the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, the unseen Neighbourhood Watch (the presence of which is only felt in politely worded but sinister letters slipped through mail slots) and even in the village dwellers themselves. Their constant gossiping and judging of other people tends to affect each other's behaviour. This is a novel that could only be written right now, as Hensher plunges the reader into a wealth of detail relating to the music they listen to, the books they aren't reading for book clubs, and especially the television shows they watch. The presence of the TV, the forever strobing cyclops, weighs heavily in this novel, and it should, considering the central theme of watching.

The "state of the nation" novel, like Freedom by Franzen, is about trying to capture the national feeling at the moment of writing. It is usually expressed in an anxiety. In this novel, it is the ever present anxiety of the ever present observing eye. The cast of characters in this novel, sharply drawn and exhaustively detailed, are constantly expressing a feeling of discomfiture, not only with their own lives, but with each other's. It's enough for people to go bonkers what with all the watching. Hensher takes this to another logical step by showing us the people who have fallen down in this quickening march to modernity. David, the gay son of two retirees, brings a sexy charming man from London and poses him as his boyfriend, but David could never acquire such a partner, thanks to his crippling lack of confidence and his ever-expanding waistline. After a night of debauchery with the resident posh gay couple, David finds a measure of inner strength and when he does a bit of coke to shore up his mental defenses in celebration, he promptly dies of an overdose. In The King of the Badgers, the neverending fight for relevance and importance is like Zeno's paradoxes. There is a goal that never be achieved, a status that can never be attained.

Despite this slightly defeatist conclusion, Hensher's novel is always entertaining. At no point does Hensher ever let up the pace of swift cutting scenes nor does he ever let the characters wallow in self-pity, unless it is in service of a good joke. Do not let it be said that Hensher maintained a serious or dour tone. Instead, when there is a joke to be made, even at the expense of his characters, he never lets the opportunity pass. This is a funny novel and should not be mistaken for an overly serious novel, despite its lofty aspirations. Here is an instance of a novel both being entertaining, imminently readable, and successful at saying something about the conditions of life.

The King of the Badgers is a tremendous success. I began reading The Northern Clemency but gave it up in favour of this tome when I realized that it's 250 pages shorter. However, now that I have finished this fantastic novel, I plan to return to the book and its daunting length.

A small note on The King Badger's: the dust jacket uses a very specific tone and typeface for its logo and author. The inside of the book uses the typeface and layout as advertised on the UK hardcover. This leads me to believe that this is simply the UK hardcover with a redesigned and incongruous dust jacket being slapped on it for a North American edition. Ultimately, both covers are not very evocative or successful, but at least the UK's dusk jacket, title pages and spine match! The header image for this post is the UK cover, not the bland North American image of a cup of tea (which seems altogether a rather lazy image, meant to represented the sheer Englishness of the novel).

The Stranger's Child

2011-11-29T14:32:00.000-06:00

In 1913, George Sawle brings the young poet Cecil Valance to his home, called Two Acres. There, he meets Daphne Sawle, Beorge's younger sister. After a week, Cecil leaves, but not before writing Daphne a poem about Two Acres. Cecil joins the Army and promptly dies in action, and with his death, his poem takes on mythical proportions. The Stranger's Child tracks the history of this family, the history of the poem, and the social history of English from 1913 to 2008.

It's unfortunate for Julian Barnes that I read The Stranger's Child so quickly after A Sense of an Ending. Not only does Hollinghurst's novel have a larger canvas, with room for nuance and depth, but Hollinghurst benefits from a particularly refined style of prose, one without obvious signposts directing the reader's attention to important themes. Both novels are similar in terms of the macrocosm: both have a revelation in the final pages, both are about the intersection of memory and history, and both follow an aging cast through the years. A Sense of an Ending, however, uses the pretense of an older man looking backwards. The Stranger's Child, with its focus on the shifting perspective of the past, takes a provisional look at history. What is lost in memory is lost in history, Hollinghurst seems to say.

If it seems like a discredit to either to compare one grand social novel to a smaller shorter novel about one man, then it is simply in service of showing how out of step this year's Booker judges were. In purposefully selecting a "readable" novel (in this case, substitute "readable" for "brief"), the judges have left out of the short list a great novel. The Stranger's Child is irrefutably a fantastic novel, filled with gorgeous, nimble and deft prose, sharpyl drawn characters that change and grow with time, and huge lofty ambitions. This is a novel about the temporal aspect of art, the changing social landscape, and what Jacques Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible. Only through the vale of time can something build meaning, which is an overly reductionist reading of his theory. None of these things are explicitly referenced in Hollinghurst's novel. Instead, he allows the story and semiotics to do the work, to allow the reader to understand what is being said about art and time. On top of this intellectual pursuit of art and knowledge, Hollinghurst engages in a social history of gays in England through the 20th century, building on what he did previously in The Line of Beauty.

The Stranger's Child is not merely an exercise in symbolism or social history, but also a deeply affecting portrait of socially unacceptable love throughout time. George and Cecil's dalliances in the woods at Two Acres are heartbreaking in that both of them will be required to marry of the opposite sex, and cannot engage in their affair openly. Hollinghurst returns to this pain in a tacit manner, allowing the heartbreak to filter through the mists of time thanks to the work of subsequent protagonists further into the novel. Hollinghurst employs similar tactics in this novel as in The Line of Beauty to naturalize the love affair as normalized. This is a fancy way of saying that The Stranger's Child remains a love story, despite its interest in grand themes of time and art.

Some famous author once said that there is a tendency to overpraise longer novels because of the sense of accomplishment accompanying the completion of the novel. A corollary of this is that there is an anxiety that "easy" means "less valuable". Using both of these axioms, one could argue that A Sense of An Ending is qualitatively superior to The Stranger's Child because it is succinct and a much more palatable read. I would completely disagree. The Stranger's Child is a monumental work of English fiction in part because of its wide canvas, its incorporation of a history of art and a social history, and because of its tricky structure. The Stranger's Child does more than Barnes' slight work because there is simply more room to work with, and has much more to say about the intersection of memory and history. Ultimately, Hollinghurst's novel says something complicated about the transformation of art through the ages whereas Barnes says something slight about the mysts of memory and the starkness of history. It helps that Hollinghurst's novel can be mapped into Hayden White's The Burden of History and Barnes' ideas can be dismissed as overly reductionist.

I cannot help but compare the two thanks to a similarity of theme and because they fit into the matrix of social novels that English writers seem to excel at. Suffice it to say, that even without Barnes' novel scuttling underneath the looming shadow of The Stranger's Child, I would have still loved Hollinghurst's novel. Of the Booker nominees I have read, this is surely the best and most deserving of the award. However, its exclusion from even the shortlist simply speaks the Booker's inability to remain relevant.

Fludd - "Cousin Mary"

2011-11-28T16:03:00.002-06:00

English 3000 - Ireland and History - Irish Fiction from 1985 onwards

2011-11-25T23:48:00.001-06:00

The culture of Ireland is often seen as being rooted in the past, either nostalgic for a simpler way of life, or a compulsion to revisit traumatic events in political history. This course will look at a small sampling of Irish fiction that is concerned with the past, stretching from the First World War to the Easter Uprising to the 80's. Throughout this course, the spectre of war, the IRA, and the Troubles looms over the works we will be studying. The literature studied in this course will range from drama to detective fiction, all with the works dealing with historical fiction. As with other courses with such factual basis, there will be a heavy reliance on history, resulting in the necessity of select historical articles, on reserve at the library and online.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme by Frank McGuinness
At Swim Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill
Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
The Sea by John Banville
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
Amongst Women by John McGahern
Borderlands by Brian McGilloway

Select films will also be screened. Attendance is mandatory.
Michael Collins. Dir Neil Jordan. 1996.
In The Name of the Father. Dir Jim Sheridan. 1993.

Assignments:
Close Reading 1 (750 words) - 10%
Term Essay 1 (1500-2000 words) - 15%
Close Reading 2 (750 words) - 10%
Term Essay 2 (2000-2500 words) - 25%
Participation and attendance - 10%
Final Exam - 30%

Students will notice that At Swim Two Boys is a rather large novel, and it is strongly recommended that they attempt a head start on the novel as soon as possible. As well, students will notice that the books are organized in a rough chronological order based on subject matter rather than publication date.

[This is the third in a series of hypothetical syllabuses that I have created for when I eventually teach.]

The Slap: E05-E08

2011-11-25T00:16:00.000-06:00

In the previous post, I talked about how excellent the show is, due mostly to the acting and the complicated layers of characters being displayed. I also mentioned how strong the structure of the series is, using each of the novel's eight narrators as a focal character for one episode apiece. In the first four episodes, the series examined Hector, Anouk, Harry and Connie. In the second half, the focal characters are Rosie, Manoulis, Aisha and finally Richie.

While the first half set up the titular slap, and most of the character work, the second half appears to be about the fallout, the repercussions. The fifth episode, Rosie's chance in the spotlight, has the cast reunite for the first time, but in the context of the court case. It's not difficult to imagine the structure of the series being mirrored, made up of two halves, as per my review, although the decision to do so was arbitrary and unrelated. Episodes five through eight, while observing different characters, espouse a darker view of its cast than previously, and this is especially true in the fifth episode.

Opening on Rosie in the bath, Hugo's cries have caused her breasts to lactate, clearly a symbol of her strong maternal instinct. Rosie's breast-feeding of Hugo has been an implicit taboo subject among the cast; none of them want to tell Rosie that it's not healthy, but they cannot. Finally, it takes an outsider, a manipulative barrister, to point out that Rosie is still breast-feeding Hugo, who is four years old, old enough for solid foods. It's this scene in particular, coming at the halfway point of the episode, in fact, that perfectly captures the tone and nuance used by the entire series. With Rosie on the witness stand, Harry's attorney takes the strategy of discrediting the complainant by exposing her husband's alcoholism, Rosie's imbibing despite breast-feeding, and in general, her own incompetency as a mother.

Previously, the series has positioned Rosie as not quite all there, overly emotional and above all else, in the wrong in regards to Hugo's slap. She should have been disciplining her child or Harry was simply defending his own child from Hugo's cricket bat swing. The fifth episode challenges that position by forcing the viewer to sympathize with her. It does so by having the barrister attack her, badger her, and force her to admit that at a barbecue, there was a tacit agreement among the adults to simply supervise the children without getting hung up on specifics, which led to a lack of discipline on the part of particular parents.

The other way that the series generates sympathy in the viewer is using the Muslim family as counterpoint. Unlike Gary, Bilal is a strong family man, a strong father, who doesn't drink, who is intense and in shape, essentially, Gary's opposite. After the court debacle, Gary goes to the pub, and Rosie, drunk and high, shows up at Bilal's house, demanding help in retrieving her husband. He quietly and intensely drives her to the pub, enters and quietly tells Gary that it's time for him to go home. Gary refuses and yells at Rosie, so the would-be saviors of Gary return to the car and sit for a few moments. All of this is done without music, without dramatic flair. It's simply the actors doing their best.

When Bilal brings Rosie and Hugo home, there's this moment where Rosie looks up at the tall handsome Muslim man, and he stops her before anything can happen. He tells her to go the kitchen where he proceeds to tell her that she has bad blood, that she and her family should have nothing to do with his family. She reminds him of a life that he has put behind him, thanks to God and family, and he never wants to see her again. It's a devastating scene if only because what Rosie needs most right now is a strong role model, a person to whom she can look up. It's what she needs, and it's cruelly denied her on the dint of bad behavior. It's particularly hard to watch if only because these characters don't know how to fix what's wrong.

Episodes 6 and 7 are increasingly uncomfortable for the viewer. Each time the particular fcal character transgresses the commonly held social boundaries, the viewer squirms, completely at unease. At the gathering after a funeral, Manolis gets into a pushing match with a former friend, falls and ends up screaming at Koula, wishing she would die but she never will. In the middle of a coffee shop, Aishe reveals to Rosie something that could have helped the case, and Rosie screams at her, belittling her, and reminding her of the middle class perfection she has, despite the fact that Aishe's marriage is falling apart. Each of these scenes are painful, not only for the characters but the viewer. The problem is that there is no catharsis. There is no relief. And it's all internal. These characters, if they could just speak to each other, if they make the other understand what they are going through, then these situations could be avoided, but everybody represses, everybody internalizes and there's no outlet save for transgressive behaviour.

Aishe's episode is devastating. Hector reveals to her that he fooled around with a girl, but refuses to name her while at the same time, Aishe flirts with the idea of flirting with a handsome and worldly vet interested in global solutions. His exotic manner and talk of far away places contrasts with Hector's white, Greek and decidedly middle class position. This new vet, Art, even manages to remind Aishe that she is the only person of colour in the extended family. Later, when Hector reveals the affair, Aishe wants to know if the girl is white. The racial tension that has existed, the immigrant's perspective, then Aishe's episode brings that to light, exposing that even in a community of "others", Aishe herself is an "other".

Near the end of the episode, the true victims of the slap come to light, but in a peripheral way, which appears to be the series' true interest. During a quiet dinner, Aishe and Hector discuss going to Harry's for his son's birthday party, but Aishe doesn't want to talk about it. Her son tells her to chill and she leaves in a huff, with her son wondering what the hell caused this. In the sly manner that the series traffics in, the victim has slipped past the viewer. The literal victim of the slap, Rosie's son Hugo, is not just a victim of Harry's slap, but of Rosie's selfish negligent parenting. Aishe and Hector's son is a victim of his parents' narcissistic parenting. The children aren't innocent; they're products of a family that's too screwed up and too concerned with the pleasures of the self. It seems that the only character who is morally good is Anouk. She's the only one that doesn't choose to procreate, therefore she cannot taint a child with her poisonous life.

The Slap's interest seems to be in the marginalia of this world. While ostensibly starting the show with the lead character, Hector, each episode follows a path down a line of importance. Aishe is peripheral to the slap, Manolis is peripheral to the slap, and Richie, the eighth episode's focal character, is less important than anybody. If The Slap's main concept derives from the marginal people in Australia, then its true target is the people on the margin of the margin. Going further down this road takes us to the symbols on the edges, such as Anouk's novel about the wild past of the three girls, or Connie's necklace, or the car that Harry gives to Hector that breaks down at the most inopportune moment (figuratively and literally). These are more important symbols than the slap itself.

The peripheral elements come to a head with the final episode, on Richie. This is a powerful and disturbing episode. His growing obsession with Connie's assertion that Hector raped her has caused irreparable damage in his friendship with Connie. Plus, Richie has developed a unhealthy complex relating to his attraction to Hector. Is he obsessed with Hector because of Connie or because the inability to ever attain Hector has been concretized through the revelation of the rape? Richie hates himself and does not understand his attraction to Hector. He tells himself he is a pervert, after he has failed to masturbate to the hetero porn laying about his ne'er-do-well father's apartment, but he succeeds in masturbating to the illicitly gained picture of Hector.

It climaxes in an believably tense scene in which Richie finally spills the beans to the worst people to spill the beans to: Gary and Rosie. They march him down to the vet's office, where in front of his mother, Richie is forced to reveal the truth to Aishe. At that moment, Connie comes in the scene, and exposes the allegation as a lie, causing the focus of attention to shift on Richie, with claims of "freak" and "pervert" being thrown about. Richie runs home after being told by his mother that she is ashamed of him. He takes a bottle of pills. His mother comes home and saves his life, all conveyed in the most heartwrenching and effective style. If I thought that episode 5 and 7 were hard to watch, those were nothing.

Luckily, The Slap doesn't hate the viewer, and rewards them for making it through the series. We see Aishe rightfully leave Hector (only to return, but in an ambiguous way), Gary and Rosie leaving for a fresh start, Harry and his wife watching the ultrasound of their new addition, Richie apologizing to Hector, and more importantly, Richie and Connie reconciling. She takes him to a music festival, where Richie ends up enjoying his first kiss with a cute boy that's interested in him. It's a textbook example of catharsis.

It ends in a beautiful way, climaxing with the character least connected to the slap itself, but the main story has ended, multiple times. Rosie and Aishe have separated in a previous episode, Anouk has come to terms with her life, Harry might have realized the error of his ways, Manoulis comes to understand his wife and his life, etc etc etc. Structurally speaking, each episode ends in a climax and a resolution, but there is a larger story to be told. This is a drama about the suburb, about the immigrant experience in Australia, about heteronormative relationships, about secrets and lie, about social situations gone horribly wrong, and mostly, it's about the way we treat our family, the damage we cause, and the fact that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.

The Slap is a masterpiece. This is not going to be the last time I write about this. Each episode grabbed me and I held on. It's an exhausting show, but it feels emotionally real. I never felt manipulated or condescended to. Even the overly emotional sections, such as Richie's suicide attempt or Connie's attempt to seduce Hector, these never felt artificial, they felt organic, growing from the characters themselves. Each character was so fully realized by the actors. A special mention must go to Sophie Okonedo as Aishe, who absolutely fucking kills in her role. Her face is so unbelievably expressive. With just a slight change to her mouth, Okonedo is able to convey so much pain and so much misery. It's stunning. But all of the actors were great, even Connie, playing the lightest of all the characters.

I loved this show. If you haven't already guessed. Enough to contemplate reading the novel, despite my problems with the prose. I think I'm going to give it a try....

Obasan

2011-11-24T13:08:00.000-06:00

Naomi is a sheltered and quiet five year old Japanese Canadian, whose life is irrevocably changed when Canada institutes the War Measures Act in response to the Pearl Harbor attack. Now seen as enemy aliens, her family, among hundreds of other families, is taken to internment camps where they are separated from the rest of Canada in a misguided and frankly racist act. She is protected by the silence of her aunt, her Obasan, even years later, when Naomi revisits the trauma.

On the back of my Penguin edition paperback, Kerri Sakamoto claims that Obasan is "an internationally acclaimed, widely studied novel firmly entrenched in the Canadian literary canon." Notice that this cover blurb, and it is a blurb while unconventional, makes no mention of the novel's literary merits beyond its "entrenchment" in the canon. While this quote is out of context, and in her introduction Sakamoto remarks on the literary qualities, this shows that Obasan is heralded because it is studied. This is a novel that is more prized for being important than for being a good novel.

It is certainly a very important work of social awareness. The internment of Japanese-Canadians was not taught in my high school history classes, and I took quite a few, across a broad spectrum. In my history class that explicitly focused on the World War Two era, there was absolutely no mention of the forced segregation of Japanese-Canadians. I might remind my readers that I live in and went to school in Canada, the nation that cannot let go of its past, as manifested in its literature.

Why then is this ugly aspect of our shared history rarely mentioned? Perhaps it is shame. Perhaps it is something white Canadians would like to sweep under the carpet. This shame is preventing students from learning about this extremely important facet of our national history. To borrow from my professor, awareness of this history shatters our national mythology. To be told the truth is discomforting. Perhaps that is another reason why Obasan was not taught in my high school, in that it raises some serious questions about the cultural identity that we share and experience, questions that are inherently accusative and interrogative of the government. Because of this, Obasan should be taught in high school.

Of course, the danger in teaching a novel is that the reader will resent the text, as it is forced unwillingly on the reader. Everybody has examples from school, examples of texts they despised, if only by dint of mandatory reading. Many people have admitted to hating, say, The Grapes of Wrath, and then later re-reading it for pleasure and discovering a love for the novel. Perhaps, it is more important for readers to appreciate the historical background of Obasan than it is to enjoy it on an aesthetic level.

In four paragraphs, I have yet to mention whether or not I liked reading Obasan. By using history and social significance, I am purposefully delaying, or even, deflecting the reveal of my own opinion. Sometimes, the opinion of the individual is irrelevant. In the case of Obasan, it couldn't matter less. Obasan is an important work of art because it points the reader to a time and place of great shame. Obasan is the hand that pushes the dog's face into the mess it left behind. Obasan's strengths as an aesthetic experience are far less important than its didactic motives.

Literary importance can sometimes be synonymous with "critic-proof". Nobody in their right mind proclaims Hamlet or The Great Gatsby as a failure. Any lack of success in reading "great" or "important" texts is a failure of the reader, and not of the text. There are some texts that be universally accepted as "great" or "the best".

This is utterly false. No text is "critic-proof". Nothing can be universally accepted as "great" or "the best". Any time a text is proclaimed to be one of the best ever, there is often a measure of cultural relativism. This text might be superior in this culture but its portrayal of an experience might be so culturally specific as to be alien to another reader from a different culture. As The Great Gatsby, we move further away from its position as a great text about the Twenties. There will come a moment when the lives of Jay and Daisy seem as alien as the cast of Twelfth Night. (Of course, the counterargument to this is that certain stories or archetypes are indeed universal, and that certain experiences, techniques and modes of communication (non-verbal, musical, etc) can be appreciated by all people.)

My rejection of texts being "critic-proof" leads me to the conclusion that despite Obasan's position as important text, I must, in all good conscious, not abstain from articulating that which I did and did not like about the novel.

Firstly, there is Kogawa's background as a poet. Generally speaking, when poets turn to composing novels, there is an expectation that the prose will be "sumptuous" or "beautiful". Critics expect the poet to produce a higher quality of prose, on a sentence-by-sentence level, than the "regular" novelists. Of course, this translates to a pretension of artful language. Here is an example of Kogawa's use of the poetic language in Obasan:

Silent Mother, you do not speak or write. You do not reach through the night to enter morning, but remain in the voicelessness. From the extremity of much dying, the only sound that reaches me now is the sigh of your remembered breath, a wordless word.

My response to this is, of course, a strenuous rolling of the eyes. What in the world is a sigh of remembered breath? How is a sigh a word? There is another instance earlier in the novel where Kogawa mentions the mountain shrouded in the "weatherless mist". Obviously this is a bizarre contradiction for the sake of a nice turn of phrase. It is irritating and distracting.

Obasan is a novel of two halves that do not coalesce (despite the themes of cohesion within the greater community of Canada). There is the lavish poetic sections of dreams and overly stylized phrasing, and then the stark expository or descriptive prose. The regular prose does the heavy lifting in regards to historical context or whatnot. It is especially jarring when these two modes are close together in a chapter. Many flowery sentences would have been quickly struck through with red marker if this manuscript had been presented anonymously to a modern creative writing course. Perhaps it is unfair to judge Obasan, a thirty year old novel, by the standards of 2011. Or perhaps, as a reader, I am simply impatient with ambitions for poetry. I love a beautiful turn of phrase as much as the next critic, but I prefer, no I demand internal consistency. If there is going to be two modes of communication, they should mesh. If there is going to be poetic language, it should be internally consistent and not partake of contradictions for the sake of a nice phrase.

Despite Kogawa's pretensions to lofty prose, I am utterly enamored of the semiotics of the novel. The themes of the novel, silence and stillness, are represented in a multitude of cooperative elements and symbols. Both water and stones are repeated but all in a context of "repetition with a difference". The very first page and the last page mirror each other in structure and in symbol, but again, with a difference. At the beginning of the novel, Naomi sees a new moon. At the end, she sees a full moon. This represents her newly acquired knowledge of what actually happened to her mother when she disappeared from the internment camp. The moon has been repeated previously in the middle sections, but compared to a white stone; the novel's epigraph makes use of a Biblical passage referring to a stone. The complex tapestry of symbolism is there for the reader to provisionally disentangle, rather than empirically decipher (to borrow heavily from Barthes and Derrida). This can be regarded as Obasan's greatest aesthetic strength.

Obasan is a good novel, in spite of the burden of history being foisted upon it. Obasan, it seems, has been laden with the responsibility of being a didactic text, instead of a text that be artistically appreciated, especially if it is being taught to a group of narcissistic teenagers who no doubt would loathe to admit to enjoying such a text. Of course, this sympathy I express for Obasan is moderated by the fact that Kogawa volunteered to take on this responsibility. This is irrelevant to the dual nature of Obasan: a historiographic metafiction and a work of art to be enjoyed and appreciated.

I might take a moment to say here that "enjoy" is used in the sense of "appreciation" and "evaluation" rather than "pleasure" or "fun". Do not be mistaken, Obasan is a dour novel, full of ugly events that cannot but depress the reader. While this might impact a read "for pleasure" (how can one ever hope to have fun with Obasan?), it cannot be considered a criticism against its importance or its success as a work of art. Obasan is something you should read, rather than something you might want to read.

The Sense of an Ending

2011-11-21T12:19:00.000-06:00

On the back of the hardcover, just above in the ISBN barcode, in the tiniest font, the book helpfully tells you that this is "Literary Fiction". Not just "fiction" but "Literary". This separates The Sense of an Ending from the rest of the unwashed masses of fiction, the novels without ambition to be about things. Certainly, Julian Barnes' Booker Prize-winning novel is about things. The first paragraph announces these great big themes of time and memory, alerting the reader that this is a Great Work of Fiction about Great Themes.

While this sounds facetious or dismissive, The Sense of an Ending is a readable novel. It helps that its length is easily manageable in one or two sittings. The best compliment I can pay this novel is that at 150 pages, it certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. Its brief length should not distract from the novel's lofty ambitions of theme.

Every novel should aspire to be something other than a ripping good yarn. This is particularly a factor in what differentiates a novel from a story: it does something new. The Sense of an Ending has great aspirations for telling a story about memory, ageing, and history wrapped up in a man's self-centered and average life. Tony Webster, the protagonist, pontificates endlessly about his own history, repeating the compulsion to pick over memories ad infinitum. Memories come to light after being forgotten for forty years, and then eventually, new history comes to light, changing how he perceives everything.

One can see that The Sense of an Ending wants to be a big novel packaged into a shorter more accessible work. It is the novel's compulsion to be literary that makes this story seem less. If there was ever a novel that felt like pure artifice, here it is. The reader can feel Barnes hovering over every sentence, filling it to the brim with meaning and symbolism, until the rather short novel topples over from the author's ambitions to be taken seriously. There is just so much material in this novel that pertains to the classical goals of high art that the story positively suffocates.

Anytime the story threatens to get interesting, Tony/Barnes derails it with long paragraphs about the fickleness of memory, or aphoristic language about old age. This is a novel where each sentence is designed to be the epigraph in another novel. This is not a compliment.

It might appear that I disliked, or even hated, the novel. Far from it. I enjoyed it for what it was, which was a rather simple and cleverly structured novel about history and memory and where the two should meet (again, another theme announced constantly with aphorisms). What prevented me from thoroughly appreciating the novel was the author's unsteady and forced hand, a presence wholly unwelcome. The story, characters, and theme should have done all the work, rather than the author or his arsenal of aphorisms.

English 4000 - Britain on India

2011-11-18T14:39:00.001-06:00

In this honours seminar, we will be examining the British perception of India, what they called the jewel of the crown. When India became a colony, Britain had extremely high hopes that they could colonize, govern, civilize and industrialize what they found to be a rather "backwards" country. However, India, just like all nations, is fractious, complex, and has deep history. The colonization of India had an immense effect on the culture of Britain, from fashion to art to literature. In this course, we shall examine works of literature written by the British on the subject of India. The course will be split into two halves: the first term will focus on novels written during colonization, with one written after, but set chronologically first, and the second half will look exclusively at Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, a large and complex work about the end of the British Raj that rewrites Forster's A Passage to India.

First term
Confessions of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor
"The Man Who Would Be King" by Rudyard Kipling
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
A Passage to India by E M Forster
The Siege of Krishnapur by J G Farrell

Second term
The Jewel of the Crown
The Day of the Scorpion
The Towers of Silence
A Division of the Spoils
Staying On (time permitting)

In the first term, select films will be screened. Student attendance is mandatory for screenings.
Gandhi. Dir Richard Attenborough. 1982.
The Deceivers. Dir Nicholas Meyers. 1988.

Certain articles will be on e-reserve and in hard copy at the library. Students are responsible for their own copies of the articles.

Assignments:
Close Reading 1 (750 words) - 10%
Term Essay 1 (1500-2000 words) - 15%
Close Reading 2 (750 words) - 10%
Term Essay 2 (2000-2500 words) - 25%
Participation and attendance - 10%
Final Exam - 30%

[This is the second in a series of hypothetical syllabuses that I have created for when I eventually teach.]

Downton Abbey Series 2

2011-11-18T11:28:00.001-06:00

There's going to be a special place in my heart for Downton Abbey for a long time. On the day that my long time girlfriend broke up with me, I had to work a night shift. Usually, on these particular evenings, I chose to read, play computer chess, and waste time on the Internet. This night, I was in the middle of Alias Grace, but I just couldn't read. I couldn't concentrate. So I started watching Downton Abbey. I watched the entire first series that night. The theme music now makes me think of that night, and how a simple costume drama, a soap opera, could distract me enough for a night, instead of facing a reality of being dumped (only hours before having to go to work - that doesn't seem fair, does it?).

Now a year later, the second series has aired, and in typical fashion, I waited until the series had completely aired, and then watched eight hours of indulgent period drama over the course of two nights, staying up until four a.m. the first night. There's something complimentary to said about Downton Abbey's addictive properties, the viewer's utter compulsion to return to the country estate and home to some of the most distasteful plot contrivances ever put to screen.

While I neurotically watched the entire thing, drooling over Lady Mary's exquisite beauty and Carson's booming voice, after the show had ended in its predictably cliffhanger way, I kept returning to how irritated I was with the path the plot took.

Really, there are only two interesting things that happened in Downton Abbey: Sybil decides to bash off to Dublin with the chauffeur, and the First World War gingerly touches the house. The Great War only takes away one character for good, and when it threatens to put Cousin Matthew in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, the show mercifully and conveniently returns the use of his legs. After all, he's meant to continue a "will they or won't they" relationship with Mary apparently until the end of the stupid show. Any time the plot moved for these two characters, it was simply a bait and switch - they get closer to admitting their feelings - no wait, let's take his legs.

It's this stick and carrot approach that grows increasingly irritating with the other plots running through the show. Specifically Bates and Anna. Did anyone care about their plot line? If the artifice of the show was apparent with Matthew and Mary, Bates and Anna are the ship's foghorn in the viewer's face. Anna tells Bates that she'll stick by him through anything - immediately cue the twist that Bates' wife is going to come between them.

The lesson in Downton Abbey is to keep your mouth shut and to simply do your work. Anytime you deviate from the norm, such as speak aloud your feelings, the plot rewards you with hardship and heartbreak. No character remains unscathed in the show if only because none of them mind their own goddamn business. Constantly, a character will be pining away or looking sad, and another character will demand they inform them of the matter. "What's the matter" is the most repeated phrase of the entire series, followed closely by the house's name, which is repeated incessantly, perhaps reminding the American viewers of the show that doesn't seem to star anybody famous.

If the primary moral is to maintain silence, then the second one is to remember your place. Downton Abbey's politics seems to codify and rationalize a dead way of life. Only in times of great recession would a television network have the audacity to air an opulent series about a grand traditional aristocratic family doted upon by an army of servants who are constantly being reminded of their station. Even Carson, my beloved booming voice, tells the audience that he hoped the die in Downton Abbey. Truly, his greatest ambition is to serve all his days. Downton Abbey is at pains to remind the staff that their proper place is under service of great benevolent and altruistic people such as the Crawleys. No matter how poorly they behave, Lord Grantham sagely pats them on the head and forgives them. No matter what Bates might have done, Grantham treats him as an equal. There could be no more benevolent families out there, and the show is at pains to convey the dying way of life. The characters mention incessantly that the war is changing everything, and Downton Abbey must remain relevant in this new world, thereby giving justification for the continuing nonessential existence of the aristocratic family. Lady Grantham attempts to justify her decadent lifestyle by arguing that her house produces employment, the hoary canard of the bourgeoisie, if I've ever heard it.

The politics are distasteful, but so is the breakneck pace. It's understandable that the series wants to move through time quickly, but there's something to be said for letting the scenes breathe. For every plot twist, the scene changes rapidly, robbing the viewer of the emotional consequences of the scene itself. When Bates' wife turns out to be dead, there's not a single moment where Bates reflects on the death of his wife, save for Lord Grantham making a cold and callous observation - no doubt intended to mirror Bates' own thoughts. But if Downton Abbey has the aristocratic rich people tell the audience of the servants' emotions, then they are robbing those servants of their voice, thereby asserting superiority over them in all fashion. Like I say, distasteful.

I plan to give the Christmas Special a try, but if the quality dips further than the second series, that will be the last time I watch it, save for reruns of the excellent first series. It's a shame the show became a parody of itself so quickly, but that's how TV shows go from now on, it seems.

Dark Gods - Part Two of Two

2011-11-13T00:11:00.001-06:00

"Black Man With Horn"

There comes a time when a pastiche or a parody meets plagiarism, when the new item borrows so heavily from the old that it cannot be said to be original. This story is so obviously Lovecraftian, that it uses quotes from the famed author's journals, and is somewhat directed to Howard himself.

The narrator, an aging author of fantastic tales in the spirit of Lovecraft (which is commented upon, naturally), finds himself drawn into a languorous Lovecraftian story of ancient tribes of foreign people who got up to nasty business and had some sort of privileged position in conversation with matters beyond human reckoning. He meets a former missionary on a plane, who tells him of a long lost tribe, stumbled upon, who made his team disappear, all with ominous tones. The missionary claims to be on the run from the tribe, who wish to silence him lest he announce their existence to the world. Of course, the named tribe is fictitious, and is even cherry-picked from a Lovecraft tale.

Just like in previous stories in this collection, as well as in the Lovecraft tradition, things do not end like one expects. There is no confrontation with the beast. There is no showdown or climax to speak of. Rather, the horror comes from the narrator finally understanding the vast and unfathomable horror at the heart of the story, the horror that the reader is already prepared for.

"Black Man With Horn" fails because of the metafiction. The reader is familiar with Lovecraft; therefore the end cannot be a surprise. All of the "beats" that the story hits are ones previously used by Lovecraft himself. This is where the aforementioned criticism of plagiarism comes into play. There is nothing new in "Black Man With Horn" except for one clever part where the narrator sees a John Coltrane album cover featuring the man and his horn, and the narrator immediately makes the very racist comparison between the eponymous man and the jazz legend.

If the racial politics of the other two stories were superficial and excusable, this story left me uncomfortable. A leering grinning black youth mischievously shadows a nice white family of tourists. A silent black man works as a porter. A couple of "half-naked" youths loiter on the steps near the narrator's apartment. The narrator is told explicitly that due to the increase in black people, his neighbourhood is inherently unsafe. This story makes it increasingly hard to forgive the racism as a knowing and ironic reference to Lovecraft, a notorious bigot.

Other than the structural faults and xenophobic tones, the story is boring. Nothing substantial happens until the very end, at which time the narrator explicitly reminds us that in real life, there are no neat endings or even endings at all. Then the last few paragraphs hit the reader with the horror, hoping to shock them. It only sort of works. I suppose that any success the story might have with me is because of my enthusiasm for Lovecraftian horror and for the goodwill generated by the two previous stories. This is easily the weakest of the three that I've read so far.

"Nadelman's God"

On a whim, Nadelman and his future wife go to the open house party at an S&M club in New York. This is what they encounter when they arrive.

...nearly all the customers were men. Most of them appeared to be out-of-town businessmen in search of pickups or simply someone to talk to, or perhaps just a good story to bring back to St. Paul. In the dim light they looked lost and faintly embarrassed. There were only a half a dozen women in the room, including a homely girl with a flat, pock-marked face who strolled among the drinkers in nothing but black panties, a somewhat dazed smile, and a pair of heavy chains fastened in an X across her sad, sagging little breasts.

This is absolutely gorgeous description, conveying the sadness and the feeling of things being forced.

This story is more of a character piece than simply a horror story. It's also the longest story in the collection, taking its sweet time in explaining the personal history of the main character. With the tone of authors such as Richard Ford, Klein sketches out the meek small life of Nadelman: his advertising job, his too-nice wife, his blank slate of a son, his cliched affair on the other side of the city. He used to have ambition; he published a long poem in his college's newspaper, detailing the existence of a god, rival to Yahweh. This new god is one of mischief and injustice, taking pleasure in torturing humanity.

If the other stories in this collection present a worldview of fatalism, then this story attempts to explicate how this ideology could be born within a normal man. As a child then teen, Nadelman was confronted with the injustice and lack of logic in the world. Why did bad things happen to good people? Using twisted logic, Nadelman justifies the meaningless deaths in the world as the victims deserving their fate for whatever slight he can imagine. Reaching his late teens, early twenties, he re-positions the blame on the inherent lack of God in the world, rather than the insanity of God. The poem he eventually writes, made up of scribblings from his childhood and fragments of dreams, coalesces and refines the idea of a rival god, one who is playing a cosmic joke.

The thrust of the story is that some rock band finds the poem, uses it as lyrics to a turgid adolescent attempt at occultism, and some looney in Long Island thinks it's a recipe for conjuring up a god. The story details all sorts of creepy coincidences and spooky happenings, all with cold detached lyricism. Eventually, the story ends just as the others do: with the implication rather than the reveal.

"Nadelman's God" might be the most obfuscating and obtuse of all four stories. The "god" is kept at arm's length - no, kept in another borough of a gigantic city, and is never ever detailed in any satisfactory way. It's not even clear whether the god is a product of Nadelman or that Nadelman simply had some sort of epiphany at a young age, a moment where he discerned the truth. Both of these options are handled equally. Nadelman is positioned as a skeptic, thinking that people who claim to know the real truth often know less than the supposedly ignorant people, which is ironic if Nadelman did indeed have insight in the vast workings of the cosmos. However, there is a parallel made between Yahweh creating this rival god and Nadelman as an author. The concept of Nadelman as a creator, and "author" as "god" is implied as well. Each possibility for the rival god is touched on with equal weight, making an ultimate theory seemingly impossible. This is, of course, to the story's credit.

While I liked this story, and can probably appreciate its Lovecraftian elements as the superior pastiche out of all of them, I felt it to be a rather cold and sparse story. When so much narrative time is spent on developing the (in)humanity of the main character, then the horror elements are left somewhat unformed or malnourished, to borrow a metaphor from the book. I still rather enjoyed the story, but it's certainly not the most engaging. It's too cerebral and theological to be effective or scary. It does exemplify the author's style perfectly, encapsulating all of the themes and tricks, as if the previous three stories were warm-ups for this grand finale.

All this book has done has stoked the fires of anticipation for Klein's sole novel, The Ceremonies. Although, overall I still really liked this collection. After all, I ended up writing over 2,000 words on a 260 page short story collection.

[This is the second of two posts reviewing T. E. D. Klein's collection of long stories called Dark Gods]

Dark Gods - Part One of Two

2011-11-11T14:02:00.000-06:00

"Children of the Kingdom"

I suppose that it is rather fitting, considering the author's academic background in Lovecraft, that the overall tone of this longer story is of racial paranoia. Set in New York City in 1977, the first person narrator, presumably T. E. D. Klein himself as he is referred to as Mr Klein, details helping his infirm but jovial grandfather into a resting home in Brooklyn, in a neighbourhood that's not quite gentrified and not quite a jungle. "Children of the Kingdom" while superficially a horror story, is more of a social document of a singular place in a singular time. The elderly white occupants of the resting home express fear and distrust of the blacks that seem to have them surrounded. The narrator offers many bits and pieces from newspapers and from senior citizens of the racial violence and creeping atmosphere.

It's inevitable that this simmering violence comes to a boil when the power goes out, during the famous blackout of 1977. People engage in looting, rioting, and fighting all the while the narrator and his wife are separated, which ends in a way not expected.

As a long story, Klein takes the time to develop the cast, the narrator, his grandfather, and his new friend, a Costa Rican priest who harbours some bizarre theories on the origin of man. In scenes delicately written without the onslaught of exposition, the priest explains to the narrator that he believes that man came from Costa Rica and that they eventually migrated due to the violence of another group of people. "Another tribe?" the narrator asks. The priest explains that they are God's mistake, the original children who didn't quite look like God. They attacked the prehistoric men, but were cursed by God, unable to procreate amongst themselves, so the cursed men rape the prehistoric women.

One can already feel Lovecraft's influence on this story: an ancient alternate history, the fear of miscegenation, and the slow building of details. However, Klein is not writing an homage or a pastiche. Using a mixture of character development and a subtle integration of background material, the reader is able to put together the horror at the heart of the story.

It doesn't climax with gore or with an epic showdown. No, it climaxes in a heartbreaking and rather transgressive manner, frustrating no doubt many readers who prefer their endings nice and neat. It's a slow burn of a story, but it works thanks to Klein's synthesis of Lovecraftian horror and a very careful social eye. There's an obvious parallel being made between differing neighbourhoods of New York, being made between white people and black people, and even being made between the old and the young. The structure of the story allows such interpretation. However, the racial politics in this story are quite distasteful for a modern reader. The implication that the blacks of the city are primitive and prehistoric and uncivilized is souring, but not fatally so. Other than this questionable view of race (which might simply be a knowing and ironic reference to Lovecraft), "Children of the Kingdom" is a successful and unnerving horror story, worthy of the master himself.

"Petey"

Some of the most effective stories in horror fiction use implication rather than description. The details in the margins accumulate, allowing the reader to put together an image of horror that scares better in their imagination than if the author had simply announced it and dumped it on the page. "Petey" works only because of the margins.

Using the narrative device of a cocktail party celebrating the homeowners' recent purchase of a stately rural mansion, Klein colours the edges of the house and of the story with odd little scraps that eventually build up in suspense and in terror.

This isn't entirely successful however. Klein has thirty named characters in a story of just over 50 pages. The benefit of this is that there is no shortage of people talking, non-stop talking, but the downside is that at least two thirds of these named character are entirely superfluous. "Petey" is reminiscent of William Gaddis' approach to dialogue; Klein piles on the speech and conversation, using little descriptive language until characters are isolated.

The other part that just doesn't quite work is the story's interest in the Tarot, specifically in the second half of the story. As a device, it works to stall and provide suspense. Details emerge, and the horror begins to take shape, but Klein slows the reveal by having the party people play with Tarot cards, all with heavy symbolic undertones, of course. While the suspense works, the use of the Tarot cards are clumsy and kind of childish. They've become a bit of a cliche, and it doesn't help that the omniscient narrator of the story mentions that Tarot decks are the product of charlatans, no doubt attempting a parallel with Klein himself.

These two missteps do not ruin the story, especially the extremely effective ending. One is reminded of Stephen King's ending to Pet Semetary, in which the most horrific and shocking moment comes in the last paragraph of the novel, leaving the reader desperate to know what happens next, but terrified at the implications of what may have occurred. The same happens here. Using 50 odd pages to build up the threat, Klein simply lets it happen in the final paragraph, leaving so many questions and so many implications that the reader is forced to imagine their own ending, which as aforementioned, is far scarier than anything the author could dump onto the page.

If the success of horror is through the accumulation of marginal details, then surely "Petey" is utterly accomplished. Instead of throwing the kitchen sink at you (Clive Barker), Klein invests in one situation, one horror and lets it creep up on you, rather than forcing it down your throat.

[This is the first of two posts reviewing T. E. D. Klein's collection of longer stories Dark Gods]

Edeisa Global Nutrition Solutions

2011-11-11T12:26:00.001-06:00

Plumpy’nut® is a ready-to-use therapeutic food, endorsed by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and is proven to treat severe acute malnutrition with astounding success rates. It is an energy-dense paste made with peanuts, milk powder, sugar, vegetable oils, and a fortified vitamin and mineral mixture.

Plumpy'nut® is revolutionary because it does not need to be refrigerated or mixed with water – two things not readily available in the developing world. It allows for malnutrition to be treated at home by the caregiver instead of in a costly hospital stay and saves lives as if it were an essential medicine. In 4-6 weeks, a child can be transformed from near death to certain survival. With its 2-year shelf life, this simple solution can reach even the most remote areas. In times of great natural and human disasters, ready-to-use foods can effectively and efficiently fulfill caloric and micronutrient needs to the most vulnerable. In recent times, they have helped fill emergency needs in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, drought-stricken Niger and flood-affected Pakistan.

Edesia helps distribute this food all over third world countries where millions of people have little access to clean water or basic food. Famine is a huge problem in the world. This morning, I donated 20 USD to Edesia. 20 bucks is nothing, really. Instead of going to Subway or buying some candy, I thought I could provide people with some food. Somebody other than myself. In North America, obesity is a huge problem, often combined with malnutrition, in the fact that the food we eat is of low quality. At least we are able to eat. While I weighed 240 pounds in January, a little boy was 7 pounds and became the face of global starvation. Thanks to Edesia, that child now weighs 18 pounds and is relatively healthy. But millions upon millions still starve everyday.

Feel free to donate what you can. Whatever you can.

Edesia Global Nutrition Solutions

English 3000 - British Literature and Class

2011-11-10T18:07:00.002-06:00

In this (hypothetical) course, we are going to explore how and why class is important to British literature. The history of British literature might be summed up as an attempt to negotiate the blurring of class divisions through fictional means. Using some key British texts including film and photographs, we will explore how class divisions were irrevocably changed from the beginning of the twentieth century into the turbulent "Angry Young Men" era of the Sixties and we will attempt to tease out the myriad causes and effects from this change. As William Golding once wrote, "class is the language of the English". Particular attention will paid to social changes in society, so there will be a measure of historical context required for each text.

Texts:
The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
Lady Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Saville by David Storey
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

In addition to the above texts, we will be screening select British films:
Kes. Dir Ken Loach. 1968
The Servant. Dir Joseph Losey. 1963.

Certain articles will be on e-reserve and in hard copy at the library. Students are responsible for their own copies of the articles.

Assignments:
Close Reading 1 (750 words) - 10%
Term Essay 1 (1500-2000 words) - 15%
Close Reading 2 (750 words) - 10%
Term Essay 2 (2000-2500 words) - 25%
Participation and attendance - 10%
Final Exam - 30%

A couple of these novels are rather long, starting with Bennett's massive masterpiece. Students are recommended to stay ahead of the readings, but the course is structure to give some sort of relief with shorter novels coming after Bennett. During the second term, students will be required to read Saville, the other long novel, but in the weeks leading up to it, the films will be screened in order to provide students with ample time.

[This is the first in a series of the courses I plan to teach one day]

Tapping the Source

2011-11-08T23:52:00.000-06:00

As I have previously mentioned on this blog, there is, in my mind, a list of novels to read that are woefully out of print or hard to find. Some of those novels I end up stumbling across in a used bookstore, or they miraculously find their way into major bookstores. A good portion of the time, I become frustrated and I simply purchase the novel from eBay, settling on a copy in only okay condition in order to just simply read the goddamn thing. Because of this process, there's a worry of transference, which is to say that I tend to expect more from the books I spend more time searching for, or that when they disappoint, it's on a grander scale than if I had simply picked up the book at the library. Without using statistics, or rather, misusing them, I can say that it seems 75% of the time it's totally worth the battle. Maybe this says something about my taste in literature. Maybe this says something about confirmation bias. Either way, we now come to a novel that I have been wanting to read for years. Or at least one year. Kem Nunn's 1984 novel, Tapping the Source.

Ike Turner is an eighteen year old who has never left his uncle's desert home in California while his sister was quick to quit town when she had the chance, and she's never looked back. But when some kid shows up and tells Ike that Ellen has gone missing, Ike leaves the desert for the coast, Huntington Beach, in search of his sister and three surfers who might have had something to do with her disappearance. In order to get close to these men, Ike takes up surfing and becomes reborn in the ocean, all the while searching for a sister who might have been involved with biker gangs, drug dealers and murderers.

First, let's do a quick checklist of this novel's elements: surfing, noir, California, the Eighties, and SPOILER WARNING (for a thirty year old novel) ritualistic murders. Okay, so there is a very large chance that I am going to love this novel based on content alone, regardless of style or theme or even the author's competency in handling all of the above. Any longtime readers of this blog will know of my love for California, Don Winslow, James Ellroy, Bret Easton Ellis and other famous writers. I fucking love California. The novel I'm writing is a elegiac coming of age tale about two girls in SoCal. And then I find out there's a novel that is an elegiac coming of age tale about a young man who learns to surf while trying to solve a murder? Three words: Sign me up.

The novel is fantastic. Let's just get that out there. Even if you took out the noir, and all you were left with was a Bildungsroman of surfing, I would have loved it. Actually, the best parts of the novel are Ike's growing awareness of the largeness of the world in relation to the vastness and opacity of the ocean. It helps that Nunn's descriptions of surfing are almost mystical, which is surely intentional considering the title of the novel is Tapping the Source. Nunn portrays surfing as primeval, beyond words, somewhere in Lacan's configuration of the Real. It's terrifying and exhilarating to be in the ocean, trying to ride the waves of actuality. There's a lot of symbolic heavy lifting done by other writers when it comes to the ocean but Nunn doesn't need or want their help. In fact, he sets out with his own semiotics of the ocean as if nobody had ever written of surfing before. This ambition and attention to detail totally immerses the reader as if he were submerged in the ocean along with Ike, if I might use a hoary canard of simile. Where I might choose to trot out a creaky simile to describe this, Nunn refuses to, in the spirit of the newly created aforementioned semiotics.

The novel is filled with gorgeous and engrossing ways of conveying the sparkling beauty and treachery of the sea, of the water, of the beach, of the environment. In fact, the spectacle of nature is absolutely noticeable in the lack of description of anything man-made. Only a mansion at the end of the book is given any particular depth as a structure in this novel. Again, this is clearly intentional and because of this, it works. Just as the noir elements manage to do.

Many critics and reviewers forced Tapping the Source into a subgenre that they unimaginatively dubbed "surf noir", no doubt because of the two primary ingredients of surfing and of obfuscated murder and mystery. To reduce Tapping the Source as simply an amalgamation of surfing and noir, or even to say that this novel is a twist on the noir genre, is doing it a great disservice. Tapping the Source is equally about noir as it is about surfing or even as a Bildungsroman, a tale of the development of a quiet stoic boy into a strong passionate masculine figure. The only love Ike has at the beginning of the novel is for the idealization of his sister. By the end of the novel, Ike has learned to love so many other things, such as the girl across the hall who helps him get mixed up with the drug dealers, or his new biker friend Preston, or even the woman taking care of Preston. Mostly though, the desert rat learns to appreciate the great and terrible power of the Pacific Ocean. In typical California fiction style, his development comes at great personal cost, including the sacrifice of his innocence.

It's something many artists and critics have discussed before, but the concept of California is intimately tangled up with the ideology of the loss of innocence, of the Fall. It seems difficult to tell a story set in Hollywood or on the beaches without touching on the inherent sea change that occurs within the individual. Some fiction even take this a step further and claim that even to be born in Cali is a loss of innocence (cf. Less Than Zero). Tapping the Source represents this perfectly, elevating beyond a marriage of Californian noir (Chandler) and surfing (Gidget, Beach Blanket Bingo) into a meditation on the three elements, a synthesis of corruption versus cleansing.

While this review's tone may seem oddly ethereal or beatific, it's only because Nunn completely succeeds. Ike starts out as a blank slate and becomes a man by the end of the book. The noir elements are complicated enough to propel the plot but stay simple enough as not to overpower Ike as a character. The act of surfing becomes something more than simply a sport to portray, or a backdrop on which to hang Ike or even noir. Tapping the Source is more than a genre exercise. It's a fantastic novel of character and place, a perfect balance of form and style.

Lest liberty perish from the face of the earth - buy bonds

2011-11-01T23:09:00.000-05:00

is the name of this watercolour by Joseph Pennell housed at the Library of Congress. Here is a large jpeg of this stunning drawing. In the words of Professor Mark Sample, "the painting’s stark portrayal of a besieged America was intended to spur demand for WWI war bonds — even though American soil was never threatened during the war." The image is of a beheaded Statue of Liberty, an American icon, used in an allegorical sense here. I'm posting this because of its stunning, breathtaking simplicity, its starkness and vividness, not because of political reasons, although feel free to interpret as you wish. For more information on this piece, click here for the Library of Congress' page.

The Slap: E01-E04

2011-10-28T11:07:00.001-05:00

This is the first of two posts reviewing the Australian TV serial The Slap, based on the award-winning novel by Christos Tsiolkas. This particular post covers the first four episodes of a total eight. First, a bit of background: the novel is terribly written, riddled with cliched prose and poor limp description. I made it about 50 pages before I had to give up. I had no conception of the novel's potential for awards. But the premise is just so compelling that perhaps an adaptation could possibly alleviate some of the weaknesses. I decided to watch this if only because I hoped the execution of the TV serial could match the promise of the central idea of the novel.

At Hector's 40th birthday barbecue, we're introduced to Aisha, Hector's wife, Connie the babysitter they employ, Harry, Hector's cousin, Rosie, Aisha's best friend, Gary, her husband, Anouk, Aisha and Rosie's childhood friend, and all of the children of the various couples. Hugo, Rose and Gary's son, is somewhat hyperactive, and when a cricket game takes a turn for the violent, Harry steps in and slaps Hugo. The series follows the repercussions of this slap, the reverberations throughout the families and the lives changed by such an act.

The novel lends itself to the structure of a serialized story, which is to say that each episode takes one character as its focus and follows the plot linearly. The next episode picks up with another character, but continues the overarching plot. There are no flashbacks or flashforwards. While this might make for conventional storytelling, there's a certain power in the constant onslaught of the plot, that never lets up, that never blinks in the face of awkwardness or uncomfortable turns of the plot.

Ostensibly the series struggles with the moral ramifications of the slap. Did Hugo deserved to be punished? Did Harry act out of line? Is Rosie overreacting when she attempts to take Harry to court? Are there any good people in this story? Does anybody behave in a morally good sense? Of course, at the halfway point, the series doesn't take a stand. Instead, it presents to us vivisections of four characters, analyzing them and making them squirm under the microscope, if you'll allow me to mix my metaphors.

The show works because of the aforementioned exposure of the characters, their desires, their relationships, their histories together. In the first episode, a lot of the relationships are quickly mapped out: Rosie is somewhat hippie-ish and unwilling to see her child as anything but angelic, Connie and Hector dance around each other in a flirting manner, until eventually they kiss, and even Hector's tentative relationship with his wife's best friends is quickly sketched out. A lot of the show's success lies in using these complex links later in subsequent episodes. There's a scene in the fourth episode, the one focused on Connie, in which Hector comes to pick up Aisha at Rosie's house, where Connie is babysitting Hugo. Aisha goes to the door, opens it and sees Hector awkwardly standing at the threshold between exterior (his car, the open air, freedom) and interior (Rosie's claustrophobic and cluttered house, filled with trinkets). The camera looks past Aisha's face, past Rosie's face (both of which are complex reactions to Hector's presence) to Connie's face. She's enamored of Hector, but Aisha literally and figuratively stands in her way, along with Rosie, who symbolizes the traumatic events of the slap. In addition to all this complexity, you have Rosie staring at Hector, wanting him to take sides in the inevitable court case. There's more happening between Aisha and Hector beyond the slap, and more happening between Aisha and Rosie beyond the slap as well. All of this happens in a second, but the show implies all of this so quickly and so efficiently.

While the fourth episode works as a sort of "end of volume one" climax, there are still amazing moments to be savoured from the second and third episodes, Anouk's and Harry's respectively. Anouk is a staff writer on a famous Aussie soap, and she's dating one of the stars, a much younger and energetic actor. Anouk has a complex relationship with Aisha and Rosie, in that Anouk never grew up, as symbolized by her dating Rhys. Anouk is also working on a novel that fictionalizes the shared childhood between the three friends. As a non-parent, she tends to see the slap as being justified, but her loyalty to Rosie prevents her from taking a side, even when Harry invites her to lunch so that he can ask her which side she will take. Anouk's story is a fascinating portrayal of a middle-aged woman who doesn't conform to preconceived notions of womanhood: motherhood, maternal instincts, the caregiver. Anouk's mother is suffering from cancer and has been for a long time, but Rosie is the one who takes care of her, putting a strain on the relationship between Rosie and Anouk. Of course, a lot of this is explicit in the series, but a good portion of it is implicit, especially the symbolism.

Harry's story is one of success. There's a scene early in his episode in which he visits the grave of his parents. Manoulis, Hector's father and Harry's uncle, tells him that his father was angry, died angry, and never achieved happiness. "Don't be like him, Harry" Manoulis tells him. Later in the episode, Harry attempts to apologize to Rosie and Gary for the slap, but their reaction is quite bitter. He storms out of the house, gets into his car and visits his mistress, where he immediately engages in overly rough sex. He imagines himself shooting Rosie, Gary and even Hugo. He yells at his wife and comes close to abusing her. But he prides himself on being an amazing businessman, an amazing husband, and an amazing father. The slap changes his relationship with his son, but not in the way one expects. Instead, the slap, and Manoulis, and his violent reaction to the rejected apology only serve to make Harry see himself in a truthful light. It't a tremendous moment of catharsis when even after his despicable behaviour, his adolescent son holds his hand and expresses unconditional love.

This is a lot of detail about a show in order to review it, but it's necessary to show how absolutely convoluted and intense these connections are between the families. This is why I wanted to read the novel, but the terrible prose pushed me away. When you strip away the author and his bumbling tools, you're left with a fantastic premise that serves a serial story perfectly. At the halfway point, The Slap is one of the best television shows I've ever seen, all thanks to a luminescent cast and subtle writing, despite its showy premise. Each of the four episodes work to serve the greater story and at the same time, serve to tell a contained story about one person trying to live in such a complicated world. The Slap is utterly engrossing and complex.

"300 kids is 300 too many"

2011-10-28T09:46:00.000-05:00

Catch up post : October Edition

2011-10-26T16:09:00.000-05:00

Remember when I said this was going to be a low content mode month? Well, this post is just to catch people up with where I'm at.

I had the flu, or rather, have the flu, as it's been four days and I still feel like shit. The worst part about the flu, for me at least, is that it affects my ability to concentrate; I can't read while suffering from influenza. This is intolerable. How am I supposed to keep up my ludicrous reading speed when my brain won't internalize anything I've read? Alas, since my previous post detailing the novels I have read, I have only managed to finish one book, which is The Anglo-Saxon Age: A Very Short Introduction. This barely counts. It was for school, and it was only 130 pages or so. I'm almost done Lady Audley's Secret and I'm almost done another book, but it won't be for another day or two until my brains manage to unscramble enough to conquer these tomes.

So what did I do the past week? Well, school, video games, and watching movies. My parents got me an early birthday/Christmas gift which was a 32 inch LCD flat screen TV. At 720p, this is the highest definition TV I've ever owned. I immediately went out and purchased the third Transformers film on Blu-Ray so that I could enjoy it in all of its detailed splendor. On second viewing, I liked the movie as much as the first time, maybe slightly more. I also watched Dawn of the Dead, the 2004 remake, which holds up, I might add. In fact, it almost highlights the tragedy of Zack Snyder: once a director with a mighty visual eye, he has become a joke, a repetition of the same tricks over and over again with too much of a reliance on green screen. I don't have to mention how much I actively hated Sucker Punch.

I also watched Mission Impossible 3 in high def, my favourite of the trilogy, soon to be tetralogy. Just as before, the movie holds up. In fact, I noticed that the Shanghai heist scene seems to have influenced the Beijing heist sequence in The Dark Knight. Both of them look very similar and both involve high-flying acrobatics. The MI3 scene might even work better if only because the method of escape isn't a convenient plane, but a pulse-pounding car chase through the city.

Gearing up for the remake of the video game, I watched the film version of Golden Eye or Goldeneye, I don't know which. I don't think I've seen it before, but I must have. Either way, it was all new. Sort of. I remember parts of the movie, but it might just be because I'm remember elements from the video game. Ah! Hyperreality! Baudrillaud you would have loved this. Anyways, the movie isn't very good, except for the bravura opening sequence in which Bond drives a motorcycle off a mountain to fall into a falling plane. It's fucking intense. Otherwise, the movie is a mess of simplified spy stories and 90's PC nonsense. In fact, one of the reasons why this film is lauded is because of the filmmakers' intention to modernize Bond, bring him into the 90's.

However, it's in stark contrast to spy novels of the 90's in which the post-Communist Russia is a confused, broken and poor country with rampant crime and numerous ex-KGB agents running amok with the burgeoning Russian Mafia. Not only that, but Bond's spycraft itself seems oddly reliant on convenience and luck. It seems he's always in the right place at the right time. On top of this, the villains' plan seems to rest solely on a magic helicopter that's resistant to EMPs being invented. What if this copter had never been invented? How would they have pulled off their plan?

Bond seems even more lecherous in this film than previously. By positioning Bond in an 90's, PC, gender aware kind of world, it serves to highlight how predatory and harassing Bond actually is. Moneypenny even mentions that Bond's advances could be considered sexual harassment, a moment where the audience is supposed to go "Oh that Bond is incorrigible!" but really, my reaction was "ugh". There's another scene in which Bond and the requisite hacker (it's the 90's! There's a mandatory inclusion of hackers in every movie from the era) escape a tortuously convoluted death trap and afterwards, even though they just fucking met, Bond leans in for the seduction. It comes off as opportunistic and manipulative, rather than suave or charming.

Despite these problems, which are more indictments of the 90's than of the film, Goldeneye manages to be somewhat thrilling, especially when Bond fights hand to hand. For some reason, the brutal, non-martial arts style of the pre-Matrix era seems to be visceral and painful. The sound of every punch is exaggerated and amplified but it sounds bone-crunching and epic. The climactic fight between (a skinny) Sean Bean and (a skinny) Pierce Brosnan is long and it looks like it fucking hurts. I long for the days of close quarters hand to hand combat. I can think of only two films that have managed this without seeming overly stylized: The Bourne Ultimatum and The Kingdom (directed by Peter Berg). In the latter, Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner try beating up an Arabic terrorist, but it's not how you think it goes down. It's long, it's bitter and it's brutal and it's certainly not romanticized fighting. It's nasty. When Goldeneye has moments like this, it works. When it tries to be suave and charming, it's insufferable.

This doesn't make me want to revisit the other Brosnan Bond movies. I remember quite clearly my disdain for the third and fourth of his era. All they serve to do, in the stark vision of history, is highlight how fucking good Casino Royale is, the antithesis of the Brosnan-era self-indulgence and self-parody. I must stress that this is in no way a slight against Brosnan. In fact, I quite like him as Bond. I think it's simply the movies themselves are terrible, but he's a highlight within them.

In terms of video games, I've been playing Saints Row 2, which makes me laugh all the time. While not as satisfying as GTAIV, it's certainly more fun in the long run: more customization, more mayhem and more levity. GTAIV is fantastic, but too much serious. Plus, I'm stuck on one mission and I can't get past it, so that's why GTAIV gathers dust for the moment.

I also picked up Mafia 2, which was on sale for 20 bucks. It's hard to argue with that. In fact, and I might develop this into a full post, but it seems that with the rise of video games as a storytelling medium, there's more value to be had in a 60 dollar game than in buying a movie or going to the theatre. Especially when a twelve hour campaign is eventually sold for 20 bucks, including the DLC and all the side missions. Mafia 2 starts out fairly weak what with the bizarre inclusion of a WW2 shooter set in Italy, but then gets going once all the tutorial missions are completed. The driving feels fantastic and the city looks gorgeous. This is what I wanted LA Noire to be (I sold that shit because it bored me).

I'm stuck in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but I think I can get past it. I bought Dead Island and I think it's okay. I wish I had been able to demo it before buying it. Also, I finished the single player campaign for Crysis 2, which was long and epic and awesome. That's a game that I got a lot of value out of. I also purchased Payday: The Heist off PSN, and I really like it, but each mission is soooo long and there are no checkpoints. In addition, I purchased Old World Blues and Honest Heart for Fallout: New Vegas. Check back here for an eventual review of all of the DLC.

Really, all I care about is Uncharted 3 and Modern Warfare 3. Those will be day one purchases for me, regardless of school or work. I fucking can't wait.

That's the catch-up post for you. I'll probably post a review or something of the books I've been reading.

The Hangover: Part II

2011-10-20T19:44:00.000-05:00

That's my facial expression for the entire running time. Hated this movie.

Low Content Mode

2011-10-17T12:23:00.001-05:00

I just don't feel like writing right now. So instead of reviewing things, here are two lists: the list of books I've read and not reviewed and the list of books I hope to read in the next month.

1 (in reverse chronological order of when I finished them)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Touched by an Angel by Jonathan Morris
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold
Paying For It by Chester Brown
George Sprott by Seth
Therese Raquin by Emile Zola
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Crime by Irvine Welsh
Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd
Broken Skin by Stuart Macbride
Borderlands by Brian McGilloway
Dying Light by Stuart Macbride
Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin
Cold Granite by Stuart Macbride
The Sisters by Robert Littell
Our Kind of Traitor by John LeCarre

So I'm really far behind in my reviewing. But look at the bizarre mix of it all: spy fiction, mysteries, "literature", classics, "graphic novels" and even science fiction.

2 (with currently reading being the first few items)
Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
Winterland by Alan Glynn
Conundrum by Steve Lyons
The Doctor Trap by Simon Messingham

Caveat emptor for the second list: some of these are books that I won't finish for awhile, especially Pinker and Stephenson's massive tomes. Winterland I might not finish because it's rather light and a library book due soon. Orlando I might not finish because I just don't like it.

Apologies for low content mode. I just don't feel like it.

Festival of Death

2011-10-13T19:32:00.000-05:00

The Doctor, Romana and K9 have arrived at G-Lock, a space station that's also a terminal for a hyperspace tunnel. Immediately, they arrive in the aftermath of great destruction and many people congratulate the Doctor for saving the day. The TARDIS crew conclude that "saving the day" happened in their relative future, and the saved people's relative past. However, the Doctor finds out that in order to save the day, he made the ultimate sacrifice, his own death. In order to figure out what brought about his death, the TARDIS crew must investigate the Beautiful Death, a tourist attraction that promises to kill you and then revive you, giving you a taste of the afterlife.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "boggle" as a verb: "[to] be astonished or overwhelmed when trying to imagine something: 'the mind boggles at the spectacle'." Now, Jonathan Morris, author of Festival of Death, apparently loves this word. He uses his frequently. So much that I was distracted. The Doctor, specifically the fourth incarnation, "boggles" at everything. There's a lot to boggle at in this book, by which I mean there's a complication in the plot every chapter, and some of these developments are positively shocking. There's plot twists, to say the least, and they deserve to be boggled at. However, Morris could have checked with a thesaurus and found a synonym or two. I found ten. This is a very slight criticism, and one would expect this reviewer to be making much ado about nothing, but this constant repetition of "boggle" sort of encapsulates on a smaller scale the problem with Morris' prose.

In the first 80 pages of this novel, the Doctor, Romana and K9 sound exactly like they do on the television show. One would credit Morris with being able to accurately capture their voices and mannerisms. This is an illusion, however. The author merely repeats the same quirk of character, the most caricaturistic of elements. For example, the Doctor consistently "boggles" at things. Another example would be Romana's constant correction of the Doctor's misstating of the laws of time travel. Morris simply drives this point over and over. At first, these quirks and jokes are amusing and invest the reader into the novel. By the end, the repetition is tedious.

Morris' prose and characterization relies on simplicity and duplication. On the opposite end of the spectrum, his plotting relies on complexity and a lot of attention from the reader. This is easily one of the more complicated and satisfying time travel novels this reviewer has ever had the chance to read, notwithstanding its status as a licensed novel based on Doctor Who. It is a tremendously exciting and engrossing narrative that works backwards, but in ways the reader cannot predict.

The conceit of the plot is that the Doctor is dead in the present, the Doctor's future. So therefore, the Doctor must figure out how to a) cheat death and b) save the day. The audience knows that he will do both, it's simply a matter of how and when. The when being extremely important. When the TARDIS crew arrives at G-Lock, they quickly deduce that they must go back in time. What happens after that is not easily summarized. If fact, to do so would spoil some of the surprises.

Suffice it to say that this novel uses time travel in a logical and consistent manner. There's a comparison to be made with the finale of Series 6, that I previously wrote 1800 words on. Many viewers felt that "The Wedding of River Song" was a cheat or a cop out. I've clearly indicated that this isn't fair or true. If they felt that strongly about the Eleventh Doctor's way of cheating death, they would surely cry foul at the end of Festival of Death. Not only does the narrative ask the reader to believe that the Doctor is dead, but there is some definite misdirection on the part of the narrative and of the Doctor himself. Obviously, the Doctor isn't going to die (especially since this happens before "Logopolis" the serial in which Tom Baker regenerates into Peter Davison). But we're also told that there is no way to change history (even if it's future history) by Romana and the Doctor himself. If the Doctor can't change history and in the future, he's dead, how will he do it?

Both Festival of Death and "The Wedding of River Song" come to their conclusions using a Chekhov's gun and not a deux ex machina (of course your mileage of this statement will vary depending on your definition of what constitutes a deus ex machina in a "fantasy" or "sci-fi" narrative). Both stories play as fair as they can without giving the game away. Both stories include, at the end, an explanation that satisfies why the narrative misdirected in the first place. Therefore, they cannot be saddled with accusations of "cheating".

What Festival of Death has over "The Wedding of River Song" is that the time travel aspects of the novel are far more tighter, which is to say that there are zero loose ends in Festival of Death. No single element that seemed jarring or out of place did not ultimately have an explanation that was cleverly planted previously in the narrative. That's the trick to time travel narratives: being able to sow the seeds and harvest them later. Plus, there's some fun to be had if there's a paradox or two (or in Festival of Death's case: three) in which an effect is its own cause.

Needless to say, I loved this book, despite the weakness of Morris' prose. There were few "clunkers" in phrasing and wording, but one would never characterize Morris as a prose stylist. Happily, Morris' strengths as a plotter more that make up for any deficiencies in prose. The story in Festival of Death is one of the tightest time travel stories I've ever read, and requires some serious work from the reader in keeping up. When things happen backwards and sometimes simultaneously, there's a necessity in paying attention and missing no details. Thankfully, during some of the more complicated sections, Morris provides context and reiterates scenes under new light to explain and keep the reader afloat. Sometimes I needed this help, and I'm a veteran time travel reader. That goes to show how good of a novel this is.

This is my first in the Past Doctor Adventures, and I really enjoyed it. There are over 70 books in this series, not to mention the 40 in the Missing Adventures and the further 40 I have left in the New Adventures. Plus, the New Series Adventures! I fucking love Doctor Who.

The Left-Handed Hummingbird

2011-10-11T09:41:00.000-05:00

1487: The Doctor and Ace go to the ancient Aztec empire and investigate a warrior-god who might have some sort of psychic powers.
1912: There's something on the Titanic that the TARDIS crew and Cristan must get to before it sinks.
1968: A commune of hippies, led by an LSD-taking Cristan, are getting together to research ancient Aztec gods.
1980: The Doctor doesn't turn at the sound of the gunshots that kill Lennon while Cristan looks on in horror.
1994: The Doctor, Benny and Ace respond to a message for them at UNIT headquarters to meet a man in a Mexico City hospital. This man, Cristan, met them three previous times, but in the TARDIS crew's future, and in Cristan's past. There's a great enemy out there.

I specifically gave a detailed plot summary in chronology order so that readers of this review will be confused going into this. Certainly, The Left-Handed Hummingbird is the most complex thing in the New Adventures, related to plot, that is. It's also the first NA written by a female, and it's the first NA written by an Australian, that is to say, Kate Orman. Even though this is apparently Orman's first novel, it's fantastic. It doesn't feel like a first novel at all. This is an amazing read that uses the TARDIS crew properly, time travel properly, and even research properly. You'll not read a pre-James Cameron Titanic fiction that recalls so much of Cameron's titular movie.

I said that this book was amazing, but let's discuss what I didn't like about the book first, so that I can end on a high note. The first major issue is that there's a Marc Platt-style obfuscation occurring in certain scenes. When in 1487, the Doctor takes magic mushrooms and prepares to do battle with the unseen enemy on the psychic battlefield. At the same time, Ace gets goaded into fighting some Aztec warriors. Something or other happens and people die. It's not entirely clear what happens. It's only the Doctor's description of the events a posteriori that allow the reader to make sense of the situation. This isn't an isolated occurrence however. There are numerous scenes, mostly important action bits, that are left purposefully unclear. It recalls some of the more esoteric scenes in Time's Crucible or Timewyrm: Revelations.

As much as I like when authors don't hold the readers' hands, I'm equally frustrated with opacity for its own sake. There has to be some sort of a middle ground between the two. The unnecessary confusion seems almost self-indulgent. There were two instances in the novel where I had to consult Wikipedia just to be sure of what I read. That's not a good sign. It's not Joyce's Ulysses, after all.

Also, in a move reminiscent of modernist novels, Orman inexplicably shifts back and forth between tenses in the novel. For the most part, Orman sticks with the standard third person past tense. However, for some arcane reason unknown to me, she will use the present tense. Perhaps, and this is just a guess, it's meant to convey a sense of urgency and immediacy. Whatever the reason, it's jarring when it happens in the same paragraph. This shift happens frequently during the climactic scene on the Titanic, and I cannot tell you how distracting it is. I cannot believe that this wasn't fixed at the editing stage.

One more minor complaint. While I applaud the excellent integration of research into the novel, there's a couple scenes where it's just too much. Especially in Orman's depiction of the development of the villain. It's simply detail and name piled onto detail and name, simply confusing me. It doesn't help that the Aztec names are all very similar and impossible to pronounce. This is almost more of a failing of the reader, than the writer. But sometimes, when it comes to impressive research, less is more.

Okay, now we can get to what I like about the book. Dorian, of postmodernbarney.com, describes this as "more of a romp" than the other novels in the Alternate History arc, so that's what I was expecting. This most assuredly not a romp, but it is in comparison to the other ones. The Left-Handed Hummingbird is purposefully and almost oppressively depressing. The weight of the untold deaths and personal cost feels palpable on the shoulders of the TARDIS crew. Ace has never felt so distanced from the Doctor. Benny has never felt so out of place. The Doctor has never been so inscrutable. The relationship between the three of them is depicted perfectly; this is the first NA that I've read to do this so well. Not only are they characterized well, but their relationships and feelings are taken to a logical place based on the previous events. Which is another way of saying that Orman integrates previous continuity in a logical and beautiful way.

It's not just previous books that are referenced in this NA. No, The Left-Handed Hummingbird recalls dozens of televised stories including the First Doctor's adventure The Aztecs. But it's not simply a case of Orman name-checking something. That's too simple for her. Instead, Orman integrates the story's themes into her own. Which sounds utterly circular and obvious, but it's not something that previous writers have accomplished with the New Adventures. Not only does the Hartnell story feel like it makes sense in context, but it feels like a part of the Doctor's past, compounding the Seventh Doctor's burden and age. It's well done assimilation.

The Left-Handed Hummingbird uses time travel properly, as well. When meeting Cristan out of order, the Doctor mentions that it's weird that this doesn't happen more frequently. This totally makes sense and it's one of the first things that Steven Moffat used when writing the TV show. Writers often forget that time travel doesn't necessarily leap the conclusion of linearity. The better time travel stories do not flow in a chronological sense. This novel understands that, but doesn't go too crazy. The time travel is in service of the plot, rather than the other way around. This is a mistake made by first time writers, and Orman avoids that.

Orman succeeds in keeping the stakes high. This may sound like a minor point, but I think it's extremely relevant in light of the Eleventh Doctor's near godhood in the televised stories. The Seventh Doctor has been previously depicted as Machiavellian and manipulative, to the point of being alien to humanity. He's a master player of games, and nothing is unforeseen. Orman picks up on this theme and turns it around. Not only does the Doctor experience extreme physical danger, but he himself is the vehicle for the enemy's psychic attack. The Doctor is the most dangerous person in the TARDIS crew because of his strong psychic powers. Because he continues to be the attack point for the enemy, Benny concludes incorrectly that this is some sort of ploy on the Doctor's part. Even Ace remarks that his strategy is cunning, but the Doctor repeatedly tells them both that he is not playing games. He even swears on this, but he can sense the distrust. Normally, a reader wouldn't expect to take the Doctor's word at face value, but because of the nonlinearity of the events, we can only conclude the Doctor is finally making it up as he goes along.

So, to sum up, we have time travel, research, characterization and themes all synthesized and working together harmoniously to provide an excellent adventure with small reservations. This might be the first time that a New Adventure has all the elements working in tandem. It's a fantastic read, and this doesn't even mention Orman's above-average prose. Of the twenty-one New Adventures that I have read so far (!), I would rank this in the top ten, easily, maybe even the top five.

Dog Soldiers

2011-10-09T14:38:00.001-05:00

John Converse, journalist in Vietnam, decides to buy some raw heroin and then employ a long-time friend, Ray Hicks, to smuggle it into the US and into the hands of Marge, John's wife. Of course, it goes badly, and some definitely violent and scary men come after Ray and Marge. They book it to a former hippie commune site and wait while those violent men torture Converse and bring him to the inescapable showdown.

It's inevitable that books that I'm desperate to get my hands on will ultimately disappoint me. Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone, is a National Book Award winner, and one of the few that I so desperately wanted to read. Unfortunately, it's scarce and not available in my library. I didn't think that it was worth eBay-ing, so I resigned myself to waiting until I one day stumbled across it (I carry a mental list of books whenever I come across a store or a garage sale - it's just statistics that one day I'll find it). My school library, of all places, turned out to carry a copy - not just any copy, but a third edition of the original hardcover, with its pleasing-to-the-eye typeface and its garishly yellow hardcover (the dust jacket is missing, and presumably discarded, the modus operandi of my school library it seems). So I immediately took it out and set to work reading this. But would the experience of reading the book compare to the experience of hunting the book?

Alas, not really. It's unfortunate, because the premise is just so exhilarating: drug deals, Vietnam, burned out journalists à la Graham Greene, shoot-outs and a fairly pessimistic view of hippie culture. It's also a novel about the disillusionment with the government, with the war, with the counter-culture, with modernity. There's a lot to like in the promise of this novel, and it gets there... mostly. A lot of my favourite themes, wrapped up in a neo-noir plot, and critically acclaimed (also made into a movie). So where did the novel go wrong?

It's certainly not unambitious; Stone takes the reader from Saigon to San Francisco, and some rather shady places in between, introduces a medium-sized cast, and puts in some serious narrative time sketching out his three primary characters. The unfortunate part is that all three remain ciphers, regardless of how much background information and characterization the novel invests in them. The single most vivid character is one of the villain's goons, who gets a chance to tell, in his own words, his story of homicide and subsequent imprisonment. The reason why this character works so well is twofold: his monologue is presented in his own words (which seems circular but still important) and he remains consistent throughout his appearances.

That's the biggest downfall in Dog Soldiers, apart from the oppressively vernacular dialogue. The characters, the three primary owns, do not seem to have consistent motives. The most important part of Converse is when he says that this heroin deal is "the most real thing in his life". Why then does he joke and appear not to care about the fate of his wife or his daughter? Why then does he act incensed in one scene and completely passive in the next? Perhaps this character inconsistency is a comment on the affectations of the characters themselves. Perhaps the novel is trying to say that the cast has no idea what they want beyond the next high. If that's the case, then this point is slightly lost on the reader.

Or perhaps this cast acts weird because they're all so high. This is the first novel that I've read (other than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) where the characters just get high and there are no consequences, social or mentally. Only one character, Marge, shows any signs of withdrawal, but her inclusion in the novel speaks wondrously about the female presence in this novel, and agency in general. When I say, "wondrously" I mean that sarcastically. Marge is only a pawn, kidnapped by Ray, who ultimately ends up sleeping with her, his friend's wife, I might add, and Marge never does anything remotely interesting. She's merely the person holding the bag of heroin.

This lack of agency isn't commented on directly by the narrative, but her promiscuity and lack of drive certainly are comments made by the narrative. Marge seems to encapsulate a lot of the counter-culture: her indifference and blasé attitude to drugs, her unwillingness to be conventionally employed or normal, and her definite blurring of marital boundaries. She sleeps with whoever she wants, tells her husband about it, but the novel hints at the emptiness of this direction. In fact, the novel uses some big neon signs to tell us that the counter-culture's approach to life was inherently a failure. One of the bigger scenes in the novel is near the end when Ray and Marge, on the run, end up at a former commune. Dieter, a self-proclaimed God, worshiped (ironically) by Mexicans, has high hopes that Ray's return will signal a like return to the bacchanalia of before. Ray, possibly the only character with his head on his shoulders (until the last thirty inscrutable pages), tells him that those days are over.

This is what makes this book so hard to like. While I respect what Stone was doing with theme and symbols and meaning, because Dog Soldiers is filled to the brim with theme, I just didn't enjoy the book on a scene to scene level. The characters felt hollow (whether or not that is intentional is divorced from my enjoyment of them) and the plot seemed rather stretched out at 350 pages. This should have been a much shorter book; there isn't enough story to sustain so little.

The novel's pointed look at the counter-culture is so diametrically opposed to the nostalgic way we're used to looking at the end of the Sixties. If I might indulge myself with some political thinking, in regards to the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, now in its third or fourth week (depending on who you ask), there are some definite parallels with the Sixties counter-culture. Certainly, if we asked a whole bunch of these protesters, they would look fondly at the past and say that those hippies were real hippies, fighting for what they believed in. Or, these young protesters of today would say that those hippies of yore were fooling themselves, getting caught up in drugs and orgies for the pleasure of it all, rather than the altruistic and political motives youngsters today have. As if there is any difference. Both answers apply to both parties. The 99%, as they call themselves, are just as clueless and formless as the earlier hippies. They have no set political agenda to be legislated. That's the key problem there.

One of the Stone's characters has a great monologue on the foolishness of the average American college student. Everything they wanted, they could have. A revolutionary in the South Americas? Well they want that too. Who is going to tell them that they can't have revolution at all. Even if it's logically opposed to their parents who gave them everything. The futility of their resistance to "the American way" is echoed by the novel, and in some ways, by the Occupy Wall Street protesters***.

This is why Dog Soldiers is easy to recommend as a rich assembly of thematic elements and hard to recommend as a entertaining narrative. It doesn't quite work as a novel, but there is still much to enjoy in the novel's approach to a very turbulent and complicated time in American history. Many modern day hippies would do well to read this more honest work of the dark side of counter-culture than to re-read their tattered copy of Howard Zinn or Abbie Hoffman.

*** Not that I don't fundamentally agree with them. It's just that I can't agree with their lack of organization. There is no clear political lobby here, nothing that can be ultimately written into law. That paints them all with the same brush, unfortunately, because there are some intelligent protesters looking to engage in political discourse in order to ameliorate the economic situation. It's the most ludicrous wishers of economic parity who are receiving the most media attention.

The Dimension Riders

2011-10-08T09:58:00.000-05:00

While Benny is relaxing in twentieth century Oxford, the Doctor and Ace find themselves on the hunt for a spectral figure that only Ace saw, intruding in the TARDIS. It takes them to a dilapidated space station, surrounded by the dead. However, the Doctor gets thrown a week back in time and Ace gets arrested by an investigating search party. It seems that somebody is playing with time again, and it all something to do with the Doctor's past.

On a few Doctor Who fora, I have been arguing in defense for Steven Moffat's "timey-wimey" approach to the new series. Not only is it clever, but when you do time travel stories, when you become God, you have to think non-linear. Time isn't a river anymore. The Dimension Riders kind of picks up on this theme slightly. The villain of the piece, the Garavond, is a creation of the Doctor's meddling in time, and receives his power from paradoxes. So whenever the plot requires the villain to get scarier, the author inserts a paradox. It also serves, paradoxically, to explain how things happened in the novel.

Which is helpful, because the first half of the novel is fairly boring and seemingly endless. In Oxford, Benny hangs out with some hawt student who coincidentally becomes integral to the villain's plot later, but before that, they're busy running around while a hawt chick in skintight clothes drives a Porsche and seems to know a lot about TARDISes. The audience is left unsure of its connection with the 24th century action on a space station, but we trust that the author has some sort of idea what he's doing.

Meanwhile in the 24th century (cue the Superfriends woosh noise), Ace and her new friend from the search party are beginning to get persecuted by these ghostly soldiers who are able to de-age you into a baby (maybe not the worst and most intimidating threat the author could have picked), but this is where the novel decides to become philosophical. Time itself becomes a weapon. And no, not in the figurative sense. The Time Soldiers, as they're dubbed, wield guns that use Time as their ammunition. When Strakk, Ace's new friend, gets too close to a Time Soldier, his hand is brutally injured by Time itself. I'm not quite sure how this works, but I'm willing to go along with it, if only because the author's prose and cast is fairly strong.

Daniel Blythe, the author, has a very good grasp on his overall cast. Each character is well drawn, including the characters who are destined to be cannon fodder (as per a lot of Who stories). The relationship that grows between Strakk and Ace (while reminiscent of Ace's growing friendship with another doomed fellow in Blood Heat - surely coincidental) is extremely compelling. When faced with ultimate destruction, Strakk reaches out to wrap his arm around her waist, Ace acquiesces and it's beautiful and tender. It's definitely moments like this that resonate with the reader, beyond the usual Who stuff that draws them in.

And that's all here as well. The Seventh Doctor is at his most Seventh-y, if you will. Even on the cover, the darkness and manipulation are hinted at, as he is over-seeing a game of chess. This theme, while used previously, is brought to the forefront. Blythe shows off his knowledge of chess by having Benny recognizing the sacrifice of the TARDIS by the Doctor as a classic chess move in which the player loses their knight but gains the queen, or something like that. Later, in a virtual reality-esque climax, the Doctor sees a chessboard, with a game in progress, but no players, and yet he immediately recognizes the paradigm, and names the famous players who helped usher it in.

If the chess metaphors weren't enough, the tension growing between Ace and the Doctor seems to come to a boil here. In the same aforementioned virtual reality-esque climax, Ace chooses to shoot the Doctor in order to stop the madness, but luckily, it's all part of the Doctor's plan. Ace is becoming disillusioned with the Doctor's games and manipulation and it's starting to take its toll. But you notice I've said this before. This theme, brought up ad nauseum by the New Adventures, is becoming slightly tedious. It's time for a climax, instead of constant simmering tension. This can only go on for so long. It stretches credibility with Ace as a character. Is she just going to lay down and take it for another dozen books?

However, this is an editor-targeted complaint rather than an author-targeted one. The problems we can lay at the author's feet include the aforementioned boring first half, when all the disconnected pieces seem so widely divergent. As well, I don't think the book is as clever as it thinks it is. The Garavond's existence is chalked up to someone messing around with the Doctor's timeline, but its ultimate origin is explained in a weird way. Something to do with the Matrix on Gallifrey and a piece of the Doctor's mind? It's confusing and somewhat irritating. I didn't understand its power, or why, with something so inherently powerful, it would need to humans... and then why go ahead and shoot a bunch of people? If you needed them, why would you kill them? The Garavond's plan is exceedingly complex and stretches across time and space, but only to trap the Doctor? How did it know that the Doctor would be in Oxford at that time? Also, the plant of the android assassin and the renegade Time Lord in Oxford of 1993 is exceedingly convenient enough to stretch credibility again.

I still enjoyed myself, I guess. I never felt compelled to read this. I finished it out of duty and because I still have another 35-40 books to go in the series. This is damning criticism, unfortunately. While the actual reading experience wasn't good or bad, the fact that I had to force myself to sit down and read it like a textbook is a poor reflection on the book. But, like I say, I still had an enjoyable time, especially at the climax of the book, which is a fairly strong example of how to pace things at the end of a story. Other than that, I thought it was a fairly pedestrian and mediocre read. But not terrible.

On "The Wedding of River Song"

2011-10-04T18:58:00.000-05:00

Series 6 of Doctor Who has wrapped up, thus depriving me of Saturday night television until Christmas and then again until August 2012(!). "The Wedding of River Song" was the finale, and breaking with tradition, was not a two-parter. However, in keeping with tradition (of Series 5) it has stirred up no small amounts of confusion and controversy, with some fans claiming it to be a total cheat or a cop-out and thus brings the death knell of Doctor Who while other fans (such as myself) enjoyed it as a great finale to a good season. With this post, I want to address some of the issues I had with a) the series as a whole, b) the finale by itself, and finally c) fandom's divisive reaction to both a) and b).

Firstly, I thought Series 6 was good, but not great. Splitting the series into two halves made everything feel so much longer and that any stand-alone episodes (fairly true to the original DW ethos) were merely stopgaps or filler episodes. The arc, which was set up so admirably in "The Impossible Astronaut", was ambitious, but seemed stretched out. Essentially, a future version of the Doctor brings Amy, Rory and River to Utah where they witness his true death by the hands of an impossible astronaut. By the halfway point of the series, the Doctor has foreknowledge of his death, but struggles with his emotions regarding it. After seeing Amy's faith in him nearly kill her, he bids farewell to his companions and then goes after The Silence who have orchestrated the circumstances surrounding his death, including the kidnapping and brainwashing of Melody Pond/River Song. This is a cracking good arc, ambitious and lofty, but unfortunately, it feels rather thin spread over so many episodes.

This leads me to my first complaint regarding Series 6: the universe seemed so small. Everything was connected to the Doctor and Amy - it felt claustrophobic. When we are introduced to a childhood friend of Amy, she is ultimately revealed to be River Song, thus shrinking the fictional world even more. When we arrived at "Let's Kill Hitler" I was hoping for a fun romp, after the shakeup and (obvious) reveal of Song's identity in the previous episode. However, "Let's Kill Hitler" pushed all the fun to the side in the first ten minutes and opted for more and more foreshadowing and building up of the finale. It seemed we couldn't go one episode without the show teasing us further and further.

Therefore, I was ambivalent going into "The Wedding of River Song". The epilogue of the previous episode left me cold. It was meant to get the viewer excited about the finale, but I didn't think much of it. I was getting sick of River Song. Series 6 had put so much emphasis on River Song that I had begun to long for the days of Russel T Davies who knew how to invest in his characters without providing too much exposure (see Mickey Smith in series 2 and 4 or Wilfred Mott in series 4).

However, "The Wedding of River Song" surprised me. Yes, the solution to the Doctor's death was easily guessed (thanks to the painfully obvious "Previously On..."), but it is not the destination, it is the journey that's most important. The finale provided so much to the viewer, that I could have happily accepted a two-parter instead the rushed and packed single episode. Even if fans disagree on the direction that Moffat is taking, it cannot be denied that Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor has come into his own, and is easily the strongest actor in the current series. There is a moment in which the Doctor calls up a retirement home and is told that the Brigadier had passed away a few months earlier. This brings the Doctor to his eventual acceptance of his death, but it is Matt Smith, not the writing, that makes this scene so effective. Of course, this is but one scene of many in which Smith displays such fantastic acting. He was given a fairly complicated and overstuffed script for the finale, but he performed spectacularly.

I suppose that the major issue people are having with this finale is that the ending is a) easily spotted and b) a "cop-out" or a "cheat" or a "deus ex machina". Now, let's systemically examine the claims of point b) and then work backwards to point a).

Firstly, let us define our terms. "Cop-out" means "an instance of avoiding a commitment or responsibility". It is an idiom, which is to say that its meaning will be volatile and dependent on context, often enough. When fans refers to the solution to the finale as a "cop-out" they are probably trying to say that Moffat took an easy way out of the corner he found himself in. This refers to the Teselecta, a plot device he introduced in "Let's Kill Hitler". This "cop-out" also refers to the repeated statement in the premiere that indeed this was the real Doctor being killed. So therefore, Moffat has not only avoided the responsibility of providing a logical answer to the Doctor's apparent real death but has also provided an obvious elucidation.

Obviously, I take issue with this in part. As far as the Doctor's real death, and that we were told frequently that yes this was the real Doctor, it is simply a matter of the Teselecta being able to so convincingly pretend to be the Doctor, up to and including the light show that masquerades as the aborted regeneration. If the Teselecta can fool both Amy and Rory, why can it not fool the audience?

Next, we have "cheat". This is saying that the mystery was not resolved in unequivocalness, that Moffat wasn't playing fair. I disagree, of course. The mystery can be easily solved, which speaks to its plausibility. If the Teselecta had only been introduced in this episode, viewers would have been rightly justified in crying out their rejection. However, like any skilled writer, Moffat puts the pieces of the game into place before making the final move. This is called Chekhov's gun, named after the famed playwright and author. If a gun is shown in the first act, then by the third is should be fired. It's a literary term that implies a logical consistency and efficiency within a narrative. It's also part and parcel of the time travel narrative. Without it, time travel stories would denigrate into incoherency and cheating. With "The Wedding of River Song" the only claim of cheating could be the misdirection related to the real death of the real Doctor. But again, as Moffat and River Song repeatedly tell us, rule number one is that the Doctor lies. Since Moffat offers the solution to the mystery at the beginning and fills in the gaps in the story, one cannot conclude anything other than Moffat played fair.

Thirdly, the claim of "deus ex machina" a woefully misused term and misunderstood to boot. Deus ex machina is a literary term that refers to the abrupt and unforeseen resolution of the plot by an outside party. Its origin is related to classical drama in which gods would abruptly sort out the tangles of the plot at the end of the play. It's considered to be an example of lazy or subpar writing. Whether or not this is true is outside the purview of this particular blog post. Whatever may occur in the end of "The Wedding of River Song" it is most assuredly not a deus ex machina in the literary sense. Not only does Moffat offer the resolution as early as the midway point of the series, it is set up as an idea offered by the Doctor himself. It is the Doctor's cleverness to use the Teselecta that helps him cheat death, not the Teselecta's suggestion. For further explanation of why Moffat played fair, see the previous paragraph.

Therefore, in regards to "The Wedding of River Song" we can conclude this: Moffat played fair, resolved the mystery in a logical manner and did not resort to "lazy" writing techniques such as deus ex machinas. Whether or not it was entertaining is not a matter accomplished with the use of logic.

The episode entertained me. I was not looking forward to it, as I felt that the series had begun to be too close, but within minutes I was excited. This was the reason why I watch Doctor Who.

Of course, the future of the series slightly worries me. Series 6 was easily the most arc-intensive series since The Trial of a Time Lord. In the future, Moffat has teased a return to more stand-alone episodes, but this fills me with dread. Stand-alones or one-offs tend to bore me. I prefer longer forms of dramatic storytelling. This is why I read novels, enjoy trilogies and watch serial television. This is why I cannot get past the first season of Supernatural, no matter how good the show is in later seasons.

However, the intensity of this arc also posed a problem for me. Therefore, I suggest a happy medium. Perhaps instead of a plot-driven arc, the writers could employ a thematic arc. The Cartmel Masterplan, while ultimately failed, could provide an excellent template in form rather than theme for the next series. This arc worked in the background mostly, while coming to a head with "The Curse of Fenric" and then later with "Lungbarrow".

This isn't to say that I didn't ultimately enjoy "The Wedding of River Song". Far from it. It was a captivating and exciting hour of television - the very reason why I watch Doctor Who. My desire to defend it from the fans who disliked it is based on their misuse and misunderstanding of the episode. If fans didn't like it because it didn't entertain them, this is acceptable, rather than fans dismissing it because they are under the delusion Moffat deployed a deus ex machina (rather than a Chekhov's gun) to tie up his loose ends. If they weren't entertained by the finale because they solved the mystery, then this just goes to show the plausibility of the resolution and a testament to Moffat's ability to play fair.

Whatever the answer, I liked "The Wedding of River Song" and it has made me excited for another series of Doctor Who. But not the Christmas story - the last one was very much a failure. But that's another blog post entirely.

The Four Doctors

2011-10-02T14:09:00.000-05:00

The Fifth Doctor is investigating a science lab in the Vault of Stellar Curios which is leaking chronons (or whatever). This leakage attracts the attention of the Daleks, who want whatever is in the Inner Vault. This leakage also accidentally attracts the Eight Doctor, who sort of remembers this.... When Colonel Ulrik betrays the lab to the Daleks, the Doctor throws him through time, backwards, as there is a larger game at play, across time and space, which involves the Doctor's personal timeline and previous incarnations.

I listened to this Big Finish audio drama because it was a multi-Doctor story, one of few. It also features two of my favourite Doctors, Fifth and Seventh. What I didn't expect was an extremely complicated and coherent nonlinear time travel story. I mention "coherent" because the medium of audio drama can sometimes have a disorienting effect on the listener; if the audience doesn't follow every scrap of information or exposition, they may become lost - especially if it involves the listener trying to wrap their head around convoluted chronology.

The plot is stellar. The Eighth Doctor, with the advantage of seeing this all already, throws the misguided Colonel into a time loop that was caused by Eight suggesting it to Five (who only suggested it because he remembers being the Fifth and receiving the suggestion (paradox!) ). The Colonel and a Dalek get tossed down a time corridor to 1854, where Seven is trying to prevent a paradox with a Prof Michael Farraday. Seven is trying to close a temporal corridor that's allowing things to spill in, such as a destroyed Special Weapons Dalek. He must keep Farraday from realizing the truth. Of course, it doesn't help when Dalek Prime and the Colonel show up. Seven manipulates them into going further down the time corridor, into the historic war fought by the Colonel's grandfather against the Daleks, where they both meet Six.

Of course, if you know time travel stories, you can pick up on all the clues, the Chekhov's guns being put into place. We realize that the history everybody speaks of is actually caused by the people from the future, creating a nice neat time loop, a loop that was already explained. Once Six shows the Colonel the light, he has a change of heart and is sent back to the future just before he left. We find out what is in the Inner Vault - somehow this is surprising even though the piece was put into play earliest in the chronology - and the Colonel makes the ultimate sacrifice by helping the Fifth Doctor create the time loop in which the day is saved.

Hurts your brain, doesn't it? The beginning of the story is the end of the story, but we experience it in the wrong order. This is exactly why I love time travel stories. They challenge notions of linearity and normal storytelling parameters. They are a different paradigm. Although, nowadays, they have so many similar elements that I was able to deduce the overarching idea of the plot basically from the beginning.

This doesn't detract from the experience; it's the journey, not the destination, after all. While I loved the plot, that isn't the only thing to recommend here. Everybody is on top form, especially the Seventh and Sixth Doctors. We all knew that Sylvester McCoy would be an excellent radio personality as his voice is just so muscular and multipurpose, but Colin Baker has really come into his own as the Sixth Doctor. He sounds more wearied, older, stronger and smarter. No longer is he the Doctor with a short temper. He's also far more sly than you'd expect.

Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor puts in a predictably fantastic performance. However, Peter Davison sounds old and gruff, almost unrecognizable. When he began speaking, I wasn't sure which Doctor he was. His characterization is also slightly off it seems. Instead of the vulnerable indecisive but heroic Fifth Doctor, we hear am impatient and grumpy Fifth Doctor (kind of like his appearance in Moffat's Time Crash). It's not insurmountable; the audio drama remains top notch.

Even the supporting cast does a great job. The Colonel, a complicated character who goes through a rather harrowing and life-altering journey (over and over ad infinitum) is played to perfection. It's a tough character to pull off if only because of the nonlinearity. David Bamber plays the Colonel and he just absolutely nails it.

The sound effects and production level are outstanding. I was at the gym listening to this, and for long stretches of time, I had forgotten that I was running on a treadmill and I imagined myself in the Vault with the Colonel and the Doctor, surrounded by menacing Daleks. It is a testament to their immersive quality that this could happen.

I liked this audio drama much more than the previous ones I've listened to, if only because the plot was a notch more complicated than expected and the cast was incredible. A backwards time loop through his own timeline! It's genius! Go out and give this is a listen, I guarantee you that you'll be riveted.

Blood Heat

2011-09-27T10:55:00.000-05:00

The TARDIS malfunctions and deposits Bernice into the time vortex, while crash landing in a tar pit, leaving the Doctor and Ace confused at why England's buildings appear to be covered in a jungle, and dinosaurs roam the land. When they meet up with an older, more focused Brigadier, they are told that this trouble, the Silurians reclaiming the Earth, this trouble started with the death of the Doctor over twenty years before.

So begins the New Adventures' Alternate History arc, which continues loosely for the next four books. As for the beginning of an arc, as for the novel itself, this book is a stunner. This book has everything.

Not only does it feature dinosaurs (look at that cover!) but it features dozens of species: ground herbivores moving in herds of thousands, Silurian-mounted pterodactyls getting into dogfights, Sea-Devils leading giant aquatic monsters. Okay, so the dinosaurs are fucking cool, and there's an alternate timeline plot. It's like the book is tapping into my childhood. What else is there?

For a good portion of the first third of this novel, I had no idea how it was going to be 300 pages long. I didn't think there was enough plot to manage this, and that the author was going to have corridor-running scenes for 150 pages. But Mortimore does an interesting thing. In the first third of the novel, he sets up a rather large cast, moves them across the board, foreshadows some of the stereotypical crazy Seventh Doctor ploys, and then has an epic huge gunfight to close out the first half. And by epic huge gunfight, I mean it's fucking crazy. It's on the scale of the most blistering and visceral levels of Call of Duty or Crysis 2. This battle features airships, divebombing dinosaurs, the Brigadier manning an anti-aircraft gun, people yelling, and all sorts of chaos and violence. It's heart-pounding. It works entirely. And it's only the first half of the novel. This scene would work as a climax to a shorter work, but Mortimore has other plans.

After this battle comes to a conclusion, Mortimore ups the stakes, increases the danger and pushes the pieces into place for an ending that's so outrageous and so grand that it's almost guffaw-worthy. The end of the novel features huge metropolises under siege by thousands of mind-controlled dinosaurs, more aerial battles, and a submarine with nuclear missiles being attacked by Sea-Devils and aquatic dinosaurs. Plus, on top of this, Bernice is on a suicide mission to destroy the submarine. At the same time, Ace is exploring a volcano to find the body of the Third Doctor and recover the husk of this timeline's TARDIS! Okay, if that isn't enough, how about this? How about an epic showdown between the Doctor, the Brigadier and the leader of the Silurians in the top of a citadel overlooking the whole battle?

OH - MY - GOD. This is as epic as Doctor Who stories come. I have yet to read or watch anything on this scale. I think it's the size of the story that impressed me so much, that and the nostalgic factor of dinosaurs. The scale is unprecedented it seems, and this is commendable in of itself. This isn't a book of subtle characterization or careful nuanced development of relationships - although Mortimore handles the friendship of Ace and newly introduced Alan in a rather unexpected and tender way. Rather, Blood Heat is a novel of plot. It's the kind of novel that Tom Clancy or Dan Brown would write, but unlike those authors, Mortimore doesn't get bogged down in technical details or even modernity; this is a novel that tries to excite the reader by any means necessary, and if you end up caring for a few of the characters original to the novel or if you end up caring for the cast as a whole, then it's simply a byproduct of the plot. That's not to say that Mortimore doesn't pull off all of these things. Other than a slow beginning, Mortimore succeeds in writing an effective and gripping thriller. It's heartpounding and pulseraising. It's exciting.

Plus, Mortimore gets to play with all sorts of themes and murky moral dilemmas. The Silurians were the original owners of Earth and it belongs to them, in a way. But doesn't humanity have just as much right to the planet as they do? Of course, the book gets into more than simply elementary moral dilemmas than the one I just presented. There's even some personal morality dealt with: Bernice threatens to kill herself and the submarine in order to prevent more death, but she never thought herself as somebody who would die for an ideal. She and Ace struggle with the Doctor's "mission" if that mission itself is morally good or not. Of course, this comes to a head, and echoes many themes and issues brought up by other New Adventures, namely, can you trust the Seventh Doctor? Does he care about humanity at all, or is it some galaxy-level game of chess?

Yes, the New Adventures begin to darken perceptibly in theme and situation with this novel. If the New Adventures books weren't already dark already, that is. Deceit and Love and War begin to set this up, and Blood Heat is a logical outcome of this. And it's well done. The reader has never been more ambivalent about the Doctor before.

Obviously, I loved this book. But that isn't to say that there aren't problems. The first 100 pages of this book are interminably slow and somewhat opaque in revealing information. While this opacity is normally admirable, a little exposition never hurt anybody, I think. Plus, the pace is languid, introducing a bunch of similar-seeming characters, bringing in alternate versions of Jo, Liz, the Brigadier and even Sargent Benton. There's a lot of setup, and yes, it does have payoff in the end, but it's tedious to get through the first third of the book, unfortunately. This isn't insurmountable, as I persevered through it and reached an ending that exceeded my expectations.

Blood Heat is impressive in scope, scale and imagination. Often, these New Adventures remain steadfastly obedient to the structure of classic televised serials. You can imagine the cheap rubber suits on the villains. Blood Heat, and a few others, are in the minority, books that want to explore whole regions of the universe and story. Just the size of the story alone, contained in a paltry 300 pages, is commendable. I loved this book. This excitement I'm experiencing is the reason why I'm reading these books in the first place.

French Doctor Who parody

2011-09-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

Pretty hilarious Doctor Who parody in French. There are subtitles, for those of you who do not speak French. However, there's a line that isn't well translated, but whatever. The best part of this spoof is how the Doctor deals with Amy.... Very funny.

The problem with J. K. Rowling

2011-09-24T22:15:00.000-05:00

Okay, click on this link and watch the first half of this video in which Rowling tells Oprah that she could easily write a eighth, ninth and tenth book in the Harry Potter series. Now, combined with Pottermore, billed as a "unique Harry Potter experience from" the author, we have almost a safe conclusion that Rowling is, unfortunately, a one-trick pony.

I mentioned in my review for the last film that Rowling doesn't know when to stop telling the story. Every writer who has ever written a novel or a short story has lived and breathed with their characters; they know the cast's lives in complete, from the moment they are born to their inevitable end. But that's not a story. That's simply a biography. Stories are different from a chronicle of a person's life in that stories have arcs. Lives can have arcs, one could say in rebuttal, but that's exactly the point: it's the storyteller's responsibility to focus on an arc and restrain themselves from offering too much detail.

There is no need to know what happens after Leopold Bloom gets home from drinking with Stephen Daedalus. There is no need to know what happens to Nick Caraway after Jay Gatsby drowns. Their stories have come to an end. Anything else is masturbation.

Rowling has proven that she cannot let a story end. She's told us details like Dumbledore being gay, which provides nothing to the reading of the texts. She's also told us that she knows exactly what happens to each character, and she teases her audience, threatening to reveal this information that could never compare with our imagination.

Now, I have to clarify here. I have no problems with the existing Harry Potter story other than the idiotic and amateurish epilogue at the end of the final novel (which is simply proof of my thesis). But to add to this vast story will merely dilute the impact of the original books. Frankly, with some tighter editing, the existing 7 books could probably be cut down to five or even four. They are far too sprawling.

This sprawl however speaks of Rowling's prodigious imagination and talent. She isn't an amateur anymore. She is one of the wealthiest authors in the history of the English language, if not at the top of the heap. Only Dickens, Austen and Stephen King have seemed to reach a similar ubiquity. While all three have some not-so-good books to their name, they didn't walk around threatening to add another five books to Bleak House, Emma or The Dark Tower. Oh wait, King did threaten to "fill in some blanks" between the fourth and fifth book. Ugh.

Rowling is slowly turning herself into the George Lucas of literature. After Star Wars, Lucas produced a handful of films, but not directing a single one until the prequels. After that, Lucas has been content to fiddle with his existing works - to what end? Because he cannot let a story go. Just like Rowling. If Rowling continues to produce Harry Potter fiction, then she is going down a path that many people will follow at first, but will slowly grow tired of rehashing the same scenario, no matter how complex and sprawling that scenario may be.

Maybe this speaks to the power of Star Wars and Harry Potter, how universal and singular they are. Both are examples of the monomyth, and both are example of building a mythology, an internal world so complex that readers could easily lose themselves in it. While this is probably true, I think a better explanation is the lack of self-censorship and self-restraint on the part of the author. It is the author's responsibility to understand how to tell a story - because they are, in fact, the storyteller.

Adding more chapters and more installment dilutes the original product. A good example of this is the American approach to television. In the usual case, American comedies and dramas pump out 22 to 24 episodes in a season. Often, successful seasons will run 5 to 7 seasons. So an average of 23 episode over 6 seasons is equal to 138 installments. I cannot think of a single, singular and organic story that needs to be this long. I love Seinfeld, but it didn't need to be 7 seasons long. I love Lost, but I could easily edit the entire thing down to four seasons. On the other side of the pond, the English seem to take a different approach. Most shows have between 6 and 13 episodes, rarely going beyond that (with the exception of soaps). Not only that, a lot of shows rarely last past five seasons. There's less of the show, therefore each episode requires more from the audience.

This analogy fits with Rowling's paradigm. If she insists of forcing more installments of a story that's already ended, there's going to be a sense of tiredness, of rehashing, of revisiting the same stories and subplots that she tied up. And if the subplot was left a loose end by the seventh book, then it wasn't important enough to tie up. There's a maxim by which all writers should live.

If only Rowling would learn to shut up or at least come up with a new idea.

Doctor Who - the bookshelf

2011-09-24T13:05:00.000-05:00

I've said before that I wanted to sell most of my books and keep it to one bookcase. I did that... mostly. Then I had to buy textbooks and whatnot. Plus, I've been hitting up Value Village for books I cannot borrow from my library. Yes, we're starting to get to the same problem that I had before... the compulsive collecting of books. Except, this time, I've purchased cheap books that I plan to read and then discard, however I may choose to do it (sell, donate, toss, etc). However, books I do not plan on selling or tossing or donating are the Doctor Who New Adventures. Something that I thought was going to prove impossible, but I have started collecting. Here is a massive pictures of one of the highlights of my collection (and yes, I bought it for a third of the cover price, when it sells for >30 on eBay)

Here's a picture of some of the Missing Adventures and some of the later New Adventures.

Here's a complete list of what I have so far:
Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible
Cat's Cradle: Warhead
Cat's Cradle: Witchmark
Love and War
The Highest Science
Deceit
Birthright
Iceberg
Blood Heat
The Dimension Riders
The Left-Handed Hummingbird
No Future
Theatre of War
All-Consuming Fire
Blood Harvest
Strange England
First Frontier
Warlock
Set Piece
Infinite Requiem
Sanctuary
Human Nature
Original Sin
Sky Pirates!
Zamper
Toy Soldiers
Head Games
Just War
Death and Diplomacy
Happy Endings
GodEngine
Christmas on a Rational Planet
Return of the Living Dad
The Death of Art

Isn't this nuts? Aren't I fucking crazy? Well, it's not like I'm going to let them sit on the shelf and gather dust. I love these books, even the ones that aren't so good (except I hated a couple of them). I'm going to try and avoid eBaying the rest of the books and just let them fall into my hands through time and perseverance.

Also, here's a massive picture of the only Eighth Doctor Adventure I have:

Oh boy. Here we go again.

The Things They Carried

2011-09-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

This is a book of stories. Not necessarily short stories, because these stories are connected. Neither is this a book of connected short stories because some have nothing to do with each other while others are intimately linked. Neither is this a novel because it is made up of short stories. But it isn't a short story collection because the stories are connected. Rather, The Things They Carried is a book of stories, stories in the sense that these are stories we are compelled to tell, compelled to hear, compelled to live.

The Things They Carried, published in 1990, is written by Tim O'Brien, a winner of the National Book Award for a novel about Vietnam. This work, and I won't use the term novel to describe it, is also about Vietnam. Or rather, it's about the author's relationship to Vietnam. Or rather, it's about the stories about Vietnam, which seems circular and reductionist, but unfortunately, The Things They Carried is a difficult work to pin down, as aforementioned in the previous paragraph.

Rather than follow a central character, this work follows a small group of soldiers in Vietnam, one of whom is Tim O'Brien. The central story, or at least the section positioned in the middle of the book, is about Tim's difficult and complex feelings regarding the draft and joining up. As a youth, Tim didn't want to join, didn't want to go to war, so he thought about running away to Canada. He drove to a small inn near the border and spent seven days with an old man who didn't ask questions. On the last day, the old man took him fishing, where only twenty yards away on the other shore was Canada. Tim realized he couldn't run away so he sat there crying. Afterwards he went home. Later, he went to Vietnam.

It's a complex little vignette that's beautiful, tender and carries the sting of brutal truth. Unfortunately, not a word of it is true. This is the tricky part of The Things They Carried. While it purports itself to be a work of fiction, it is populated by real people, some of whom died in Vietnam, some of whom provided Tim with the seeds that Tim eventually grew into stories. Indeed, Tim even clarifies and qualifies certain stories by reframing them in the context of their original storyteller, and how Tim shaped it, helped it coalesce. This creates a tension between the story itself and the larger narrative, a tension between author and reader, and even, as Tim himself points out, a tension between the author and his own work.

This is metafiction, beautiful complicated hard to pin down metafiction, and O'Brien succeeds admirably. Not only is this one of the more poignant novels that I have ever read, but it's also surprisingly deep. At only 240ish pages, O'Brien manages to do what Karl Marlantes took 700 pages to do, plus add in a complex literary game.

Instead of being a work about the Vietnam War, this book is about the author's repetition compulsion. O'Brien admits to going back to Vietnam over and over again, in an attempt to work through the traumatic experiences and find forgiveness for himself. Whenever he thinks he has found closure, he finds himself coming back to the land, to the mystery, to the exoticism of Vietnam, and indeed to the horror. It's the classic Thanatos drive; to experience life we get dangerously close to death. O'Brien can't let go of Vietnam, despite writing numerous works about it, but he doesn't want to, not really. It's far too fertile for stories, his bread and butter.

The Things They Carried is a masterpiece. I've said before that I can often judge how much I like a book by how excited I would be to teach it to other people. In the future, when I'm assembling materials for a course on American literature, I'm going to include this work. It's thematically rich and technically complex. I could easily see myself writing scholarly papers on the wealth of symbols in this book, the complicated semiotics of Vietnam, the photographs, the fields, the paddies, the rivers, and the soldiers. And it's all delivered in small packets of dense information and heated emotion, these packets being stories but not short stories.

This book speaks to the storyteller in the reader because the book identifies that problem we all have: the razor thin line between fact and fiction. When I teach this book, the first thing I'm going to tell my students after they have read this is that it doesn't matter whether or not the stories are true. It doesn't matter. It has no bearing on the stories themselves. O'Brien cleverly deals with this by editing, adapting and reshaping stories for his own means, some of which absolve him and some of which implicate him. He is complicit in the things that happen, and by drawing the reader in, questioning the validity of the stories, he has made the reader complicit as well, but complicit in the fabrication, in the falsity of stories.

I loved this work. I haven't even discussed O'Brien's economic use of symbols, how he sketches complicated imagery with the barest of descriptors. I haven't discussed his expertise with dialogue or setting. I've mostly discussed O'Brien's use of what he calls verisimilitude - the meeting and mixing of reality and makebelieve. Regardless of what I didn't consider in my review, I thought this was a fantastic and mercurial work of... something. It's hard to pin down, just like the war itself. Oh the facts are all identifiable. Or are they?

Additional Thoughts on Fall on Your Knees

2011-09-20T14:03:00.000-05:00

1.
The more I think about it, the more I dislike this book. There's a scene in which Frances and Lily go to a movie theatre and Leo Taylor, the man whom Frances eventually "rapes" follows them. He recognizes Lily as similar to Kathleen, but the similarity is actually innerving. This is, of course, a reference to Freud's theory of the uncanny. MacDonald painfully points this out by having the narrative declare that resemblance is uncanny. She uses those very words. It's painful.

2.
The movie they went to see is a real movie called "The Diary of a Lost Girl" - get it? Yes, MacDonald, I fucking get it. I understand that you are clever and you assembled a work of clever associations and connotations based off the graduate courses you took about the Gothic novel and critical theory.

3.
One of the major elements of the Gothic novel features doubles, or the Other. We spent forty minutes in class discussing all the doubles-possibilities in the novel and this just reaffirmed in my mind that there are way too many characters in Fall on Your Knees. If everybody can be linked to everybody, does it still have meaning?

4.
The professor said that the middle section, which I derided as painfully tedious, is an example of the psychoanalytic therapy and the concept of the repetition compulsion. The characters go over the same ground over and over, but they don't remember perfectly, or they tell themselves half-truths, which makes the final act of catharsis so meaningful because they worked so hard to get at it. Now, this is all very find and good, but I think the professor is rationalizing an extra 150 pages of repetition. Unfortunately, a novel is not an account of therapy. Even if it were, it would be fictionalized and streamlined and turned into a proper story. Therapy is not a story. The professor is essentially apologizing for the author's self-indulgence.

5.
The basement and the attic are important symbols in the novel. The house itself is important. Oh ho! I wonder what they mean! Of course, in the semiotics of Fall on Your Knees, the basements means exactly what you think it means, which is to say that the semiotics of this novel is simple and drawn from every a ton of books that MacDonald clearly read in graduate school.

6.
A clever bit is the death of Trixie, the cat. The cat finds its way into the baptismal gown (an important symbol!) and then gets stuck in the cedar chest (an important symbol!) and is considered missing for weeks, that is until somebody finds the rotting corpse and buries it (an important symbol!). The cleverness here is that Trixie is implicitly compared to the other characters who have died or who have worn the baptismal gown. What's clever about it is that despite the obviousness of the setting (the gown! the chest! the fucking attic!) the symbol of the dead cat is left alone by MacDonald's constant authorial prodding. She doesn't explain the symbol; she lets it lie there on the page and waits for the reader to figure it out. Which is nice. For once.

Fall on Your Knees

2011-09-19T01:43:00.000-05:00

[Note: I read this novel for school, and any and all novels read for school will be tagged school. I mention this because being told to read something will colour one's perspective of that novel. If I seem unduly harsh or even apathetic, this might be because of school's influence]

[Note 2: This is a novel about secrets. I'm going to spoil everything. Do not read if you wish to avoid spoilers for this novel, which I encourage you to do]

Fall on Your Knees charts three generations of the Piper family, living in Cape Breton from the beginning of the twentieth century through both Wars and the times between. There's James, patriarch and a man who considers himself morally good, above his fellow men, there's Kathleen, the beautiful eldest daughter who dreams of being an opera singer. There's Mercedes, pious and devout, believing only in the power of God. There's Frances, a girl searching for meaning and goodness when all that is taken away. And then there's Lily, salvation and mystery or just a normal girl?

Let me say right from the outset that while I wanted to hate this novel, eventually I developed a grudging respect for its construction. That being said, this respect never evolved into admiration or fondness for this over-long mess of a novel. Fall on Your Knees suffers from numerous problems, the first of which being that it's just too damn long.

Perhaps we should start with why I ended up respecting the novel. Firstly, it's beautifully written. Ann-Marie MacDonald's background is in poetry and the composition of plays, so her prose is tempered by both delicate beauty and efficiency. However, and this is a strong however, this works only in the short term. When given the large canvas of a novel, MacDonald becomes too bogged down in the fecundity of her language. Scenes repeat and overstay their welcome, despite their prettiness.

Secondly, MacDonald's structure, which I disliked and will attend to in a moment, creates bookends, both of which are incredibly moving, fascinating and beautiful. The opening section, in which MacDonald sketches both the town of New Waterford and the two parents, is fast, bravura and extremely deft. The final section is a perfect novella on its own. Yes, perfect.

The final third of the novel is epistolary, taking the form of Kathleen's diary. Rewinding the narrative's clock to 1918, we follow Kathleen to New York, before she became pregnant out of wedlock, before she was brought back to Cape Breton to give birth and eventually die from the trauma. In 1918, she is taking singing lessons from a world famous teacher, who is accompanied by Rose, a mixed-race woman who may or may not be a musical savant. MacDonald skillfully plays with our expectations: we know Kathleen becomes pregnant, but we do not know by whom. Kathleen thinks that she falls in love with David, a soldier, and she ends up having sex with him. However, David goes off to war, and Kathleen's period makes its monthly return.

So it is not David. Instead, Kathleen slowly falls in love with Rose, told in the most beautiful and tender and gorgeous prose, not prose obsessed with similes and metaphors or metonymy. Instead, the power of this budding love affair comes from its simplicity and its honesty. We believe in the love because it comes from a place of truthfulness, which makes it a minority in a novel of dark secrets, many of which were revealed at the climax of the previous section. So Rose and Kathleen fall in love, become lovers. Of course, it ends badly.

James catches wind of this through an anonymous letter writer, and he comes to New York, rapes his daughters and impregnates her. We find out that Lily is not only James' granddaughter but his own daughter as well. This theme of incest was laid down in the first section of the novel, so it's not too much of a surprise. This section works not only because of the emotional suckerpunch of James' rape, but because of the beauty the rape destroys.

The third section could stand alone as a novella and I would have called it perfect. Unfortunately, it comes at the end of an incredibly long and painfully tedious middle section that runs around the same few points over and over and over and over again. MacDonald has Frances and Lily repeat the themes of the novel ad nauseum, all with the same repeated scenes and same repeated close careful prose. It's tedious because for 200 pages the novel goes nowhere. We learn nothing new of the characters. Instead, it's groundwork for more themes and secrets.

Fall on Your Knees is a thematically rich novel: music, incest, the nature of storytelling, the myriad ways love shows itself, race, power, war, economics. If I had to write a paper about this novel (which I will end up doing), I can honestly say I won't have trouble finding anything to talk about. And MacDonald gives us so many easy quotes because the characters just keep telling us.

In the middle section, which seems interminable, Frances becomes a child prostitute, giving handjobs and stripping in a speakeasy while James brews liquor for that same club, not knowing what his daughter is up to. Meanwhile Mercedes thinks that Lily is destined for sainthood so she starts saving up for a trip to Lourdes to possibly cure Lily of her limp (brought on by infant-era polio). Mercedes goes a bit squirrelly. Lily on the other hand is precocious and irritating in that way that child characters often are in novels. There's a ton of references to Jane Eyre and more references to jazz and music than you can possibly handle. What does it mean, this middle section? It's meant to highlight perspectives and conceptions of morality within the characters. They cogitate on the idea of good while things go bad in the world and in their lives. Or whatever. It means a lot, and it's all weighty themes because MacDonald's novel has no sense of humour whatsoever. This is a relentlessly dark novel, dark enough to be oppressive. There is not a single moment of levity. When there is a moment of possible humour, it's always in the context of sexual abuse or violence, so one cannot possibly laugh.

This novel desperately needs two things: the aforementioned missing sense of humour, and secondly, a fucking editor. We could easily cut one hundred pages out of the middle section, which creep dangerously close to magical realism: Lily's twin brother, who did not survive birth, becomes an almost spectral character. Lily never fucking shuts up about Ambrose. Never. It's exceedingly annoying. Yes, I fucking get it, MacDonald, stop grinding my nose into your lofty and pretentious themes.

Fall on Your Knees is clearly a first novel. It's an attempt to be everything to every reader. But it also feels like a checklist. As if MacDonald thought to herself, "hey I'm going to write The Great Canadian Novel, what are the stock elements I'm going to need?" And then she decided to set it in Cape Breton. For the reader, this translates to a reference to a church within the first five pages. MacDonald delivers, bringing a reference to a mine and a church in the third paragraph of the prologue, which is irritatingly titled Silent Pictures (get it?????? Yes, thank you, I get it). MacDonald then proceeds to tick off all the elements of the Canadian novel: isolation, the weather, incest, religion, and the barrenness of family, which is all reflected in the fucking weather.

It's not that I hated this novel. It's just that I hated reading it. I could go on writing about this, but I'm going to have to write 1,000 words on a minor character for an assignment due in two weeks, and I'm going to have to write about this book for the final exam. So I'm going to stop here and simply say that this novel needs an editor and a sense of humour. If the novel didn't try so hard at being important, I might have liked it a little bit more.

Iceberg

2011-09-17T10:57:00.000-05:00

It's 2006 and Earth is dying: overpopulation, pollution and the magnetic poles threaten to reverse at any moment. The UN has an Antarctic base, researching into reversing the reversal of the poles. Ruby Duvall, journalist, is sent to record the ultimate moment of triumph. Unfortunately, everybody runs into a) the Doctor and his broken TARDIS and b) the Cybermen, who are picking people out of the ice base and depositing them into Cybermen suits.

What a weird novel. I don't mean weird in the sense that the going-ons in the book are weird; I mean that the novel's construction is worth noting. David Banks isn't really an author. He's the actor who played the Cyber Leader in the 80's. With this background, it's almost like Banks has a possessiveness about the Cybermen. He translates this into a pretty decent chronology about the Cybermen up to this point; he explains the failed invasions and history of the Cybermen from their perspective, which would be different than the Doctor's perspective which is nonlinear to say the least. It's all very fascinating, and Banks manages to integrate this massive amount of exposition without tiring the reader.

But that's not the weird part, the fanwank continuity, I mean. What's weird is this bizarre sexual subtext running through the entire book. It's so very subtle that I'm almost convinced that it was subconscious on the part of the author. I'm going to give a bunch of examples, some with page numbers, some without. [Note, I'm copying and pasting from my own posts at the Gallifrey Base forum]

We watch Ruby, the protagonist work out, and observe her muscles rippling under dark skin (a paraphrase). We also see her scantily clad while her friend Leslie barges into her room, kisses her and "pats her thigh" while she tugs her T-shirt down to "cover her bum". There's also a terrifically exploitative scene in which Ruby, after a workout, gets naked and then gets stuck in the shower stall. We barely get into Ruby's head as a character; we simply watch her.

Not only is the reader being invited to be a voyeur. The general at the base listens to a couple have sex. She watches them touch each other in that intimate way that couples do. Of course, in the general's case, it's more that it's in disregard of rules and regulations, rather than in the context of sexual voyeurism. However, this extends further when sex scenes between these two (who just signal cannon fodder to me) are detailed.

On page 184: "Lord Straker was peeping between a gap in the curtains" and then further on page 185: "There was an eighteenth-century courtesan sporting such extensive décolleté that her entire bosom was exposed to devastating effect." There's another reference to Ruby being half in half out of her suit. When they arrive back on the ship, someone sees her and thinks the words "skimpily dressed" or something to that effect.

Now, obviously, I'm taking these things directly out of context. Regardless, the reader is often positioned as the watcher, observing these people, specifically Ruby, but instead of focusing on details of character, Banks focuses on details of her body, her skin, her muscles, her lack of clothing. This doesn't change the overall experience of the novel, to be fair, but it did pull me out of the narrative often.

In terms of the actual plot, the novel suffers and benefits from the desire not to reveal too much too soon. Yes, the Cybermen feel all the more powerful and scary when they're used sparingly in the first half of the novel, but Banks uses the same hands-off approach to the Doctor, who doesn't make a full appearance until the halfway point. Banks is surprisingly effective at creating tension within the narrative by holding back the Cybermen. He slows everything down conversely by holding back the Doctor.

When Banks does use the Doctor, he uses him in a more Mister Miyagi kind of way. That is to say that during Ruby's physical journey, she also undergoes a figurative journey of self-discovery. She reads the Tao and studies an Eastern fighting/meditating thing which is modeled on Tai Chi (which in classic Chekhov-style, she uses to beat up a Cyberman later). This journey of self-discovery is amplified when the Doctor shows up and speaks mostly in aphorisms. The pragmatic reason for this is so the Cybermen won't understand what he's saying but Ruby will. Which is fine, but as a reader, it's somewhat groan-inducing. Eastern philosophy is being implicitly compared against Western philosophy in this novel, as Banks brings in a lot of themes about humanity and cybernetic possibilities. While Banks obviously loves his Cybermen, he ends up concluding that a life of logic and survival at all costs is no life at all.

Now, you might think that I'm reading too much into Banks' novel and motives, that Iceberg is simply an adventure romp featuring classic villains. Unfortunately, I am not. Banks has an amateurish habit of having character announce the themes. When Ruby finally comes to her epiphany (in the literary sense, not religious), she declares that she thought she was an iceberg, holding all those emotions below the surface and revealing nothing. I guess the reader is supposed to be impressed that Banks connected the title, the setting, the plot and the characters in one word. It'd be impressive if Banks hadn't bent over backwards pointing it out to us.

I'm complaining a lot about this book, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. It's still a rather fun little Who adventure that features some pretty high stakes elements and a neat little chronology that takes into account the Doctor's nonlinearity. It's also nice to get a Doctor that isn't too powerful. He gets cold just like the rest of us.

Iceberg is a decent, but far from perfect New Adventure. In the history of the Who novels, apparently this is the last in a short string of terrible books, which changes direction with the next novel, one that features an alternate history arc. Yay.

Day of the Daleks

2011-09-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

When a mysterious soldier tries to kill an important diplomat, UNIT sends the Doctor and Jo to investigate. They find remnants of future technology, as if the soldier was from the future. The diplomat is attempting to broker peace between the UK and China, and if he fails, it could mean war. Or will it? The Doctor gets sent into the 22nd century where it seems the Daleks have conquered all of Earth and it's all because of this one diplomat. Will the Doctor be able to save the present and the future?

This is the first Third Doctor serial that I have watched in its entirety. I've given up on a couple other serials from his era if only because they're... not very good, I guess. Lots of camp, lots of karate(?) and lots of frilly frocks and velvet dinner jackets. But this one, I chose this one specifically because of a couple reasons.

Firstly, it's one of the few Classic serials to truly use time travel. Although the TARDIS makes only a limited appearance, there is ample time travel, with both Jo and the Doctor going to the future and back, and even crossing over into their own time stream - which is a subplot that's tragically forgotten by the third and fourth episode. Day of the Daleks is also notable for its first appearance of the Daleks in over five years and the first mention of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, a very nerdy storytelling function that explains why a time traveler wouldn't be able to mess with his own timeline.

On top of these very important elements is the temporal paradox that exists at the heart of this serial. The guerrilla forces from the 22nd century have come to kill the diplomat because history tells them that the diplomat sets off a bomb killing his fellow diplomats during an important conference, including himself. History remembers this diplomat as attempting to seize power for himself, but miscalculating the bomb's timing. The guerrilla soldiers therefore go back in time to kill the diplomat before he has a chance to set off this bomb. Of course, the Doctor realizes that the guerrilla soldiers were always a part of the timelime: they set off the bomb and destroy the conference, leading to the conditions in which the Daleks take over Earth. It's their own fault.

This is an intriguing and fascinating paradox. When thinking about time travel, it's always good to remember that things will always happen and simply going back won't change the fact that it has already happened. Just because your perspective of the events might change, from history's perspective, it remains that way. It's complicated, and this is what excites me about time travel.

It's hard to judge this episode for not fully developing on this idea. First of all, the budget was ludicrously low. The producers only had access to three Daleks, which does not make for an impressive ruling military presence. Plus, their sets of the 22nd century were pretty much just parking garages and the studio set done up with tinfoil. Everything looks cheap. And the ultimate showdown between UNIT and the Daleks isn't very impressive.

But this is the 2011 critic judging a forty year old television show that had no access to computer effects nor the giant budget that the BBC hurls at modern Doctor Who, with the word giant being extremely relative. Therefore, we must judge Day of the Daleks on the criteria of its story and acting rather than its pedestrian special effects.

Largely, it succeeds. It's a rather tight story except for the dangling plot thread of two Doctors. At the beginning of the serial, the Doctor and Jo are mucking about with the TARDIS when suddenly, a second Doctor and second Jo show up. As a learned reader and watcher of time travel fiction, I assumed this was proper setup for a payoff later in the serial. Unfortunately, this never happens. We have to assume that it's one timeline having a brief intersection with another alternate timeline. It's never explicitly laid out.

Strangely enough, when the Doctor manages to save the present and change the future, there's very little mention of how he is able to change the future so easily. There's no consequences it seems. Instead of simply saving the world from the Daleks, he has, for all intents and purposes, wiped out from existence a whole planet, billions of people, and replaced with a world where Rose Tyler will eventually grow too small for her epic teeth.

Other than the philosophical ramifications, this is a pretty ripping good Who yarn: there's a few sweet laser battles between dog-men who look like Klingons and the soldiers, a pretty badass showdown between the Daleks and UNIT (most of whom are cannon-fodder), and the Doctor has a rare moment where he uses a gun and blasts the Klingons into nothingness. Yes, that's right, the badass Dandy Doctor uses a gun to up and murder some bitches.

One of the other reasons why I chose to watch this serial is that the special effects have been given an upgrade thanks to the BBC. For the DVD release, they hired an FX team to add some Daleks, improve the time travel effects, improve the laser battles and, to top it all off, had the iconic voice of the Daleks record new audio, replacing the original one with a more consistent voice. The absolute best compliment I can give to the team that did this, and I'm sure they will appreciate this, is that the special effects are seamless. It works tremendously. It improved and enhanced my experience and I'm sure that's the point. I wish they would do this with some more budget-constrained serials. It would make things a lot more interesting.

Day of the Daleks is a pretty hardcore Who serial that's fun, mind-bending and features a Doctor who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty. Highly recommended.

Birthright

2011-09-15T08:00:00.001-05:00

Look at that cover and tell me it doesn't make you want to read it. This might be the best cover painting yet - although there are many more books to come. Not only is this a fantastic cover painting, but it's also a pretty fun romp.

Benny has found herself in London, in 1909, with a dead TARDIS sitting on the banks of the Thames. All that she has is a key to the TARDIS and a key to a safe deposit box in a bank, set up by a Doctor John Smith. She must figure out where the Doctor is, where Ace is, and why women are being brutally murdered in the alleys, with the witnesses claiming large insectoid features.

Meanwhile, on a barren world in the far future, Ace finds herself sitting next to a dead TARDIS and no other clues. She gets whisked up in a guerilla resistance movement against a race of sinister-looking insects who are harvesting humans for protein. However, she encounters a mysterious man who knows more than he should about the TARDIS, a man who is helping the insects with some vast time-spanning quest.

This is said to be the first "Doctor-lite" novel in the New Adventures line, something that the New Series picks up on, like for example Turn Left or Love and Monsters or even Blink. I was not really looking forward to this book as I thought that a) Doctor-lite episodes are weak and b) the book could never live up to the promise of that cover-painting.

Luckily, the book does. Sure, there are a couple missteps - Nigel Robinson isn't the world's greatest prose writer - but the use of time travel is cleverly done, and he picks all the pieces separate as long as the plot needs them to be. Birthright has a plot that reaches thousands of years, with elements of Kublai Khan and Elizabeth I and even a young farmboy in twelfth century Scotland and it could get out of hand very quickly, but you feel the presence of the dark manipulative Seventh Doctor that I'm such a fan of. This is the Doctor at his most scary because he seemingly put the pawns in place so long ago.... Of course, this could all be tedious if it wasn't for Robinson shooing the reader along, asking them to ignore the heavy narrative straining at the seams of plausibility.

The worst part of this novel is that the climax features another dream sequence in which all the symbols are irritatingly laid out for the reader. We saw this before in Timewyrm: Revelations and in Transit (although this was virtual reality, but it's really the same thing), but this time it's Benny versus a crazed cult leader who is attempting to control the TARDIS. There's all sorts of symbols and even a serpent which echoes so many meanings. I say that this is the worst part because it lasts so much longer than it should. There's no danger either, because each time Benny is killed within the dream, the TARDIS seems to resurrect her. Plus, on top of this, the method by which the villain is defeated has nothing to do with the dream sequence. It merely happens and the plot moves on.

It's unfortunate, because the coolest scene in the book, in which the insects inevitably begin to invade Edwardian London and attempt to slaughter everybody, is glazed over in a matter of pages. Some police show up, gunfire is brought forth, and insects rip people apart. This scene, which sounds fucking brilliant, is only about three pages. The dream sequence? Twenty. Ugh. There's no justice in the world.

Other than these two problems, which aren't insurmountable, Birthright is a very enjoyable book. In "far-future" novels such as this one, usually it's fairly tedious watching an amateur build a world from scratch (see Robinson's previous Timewyrm: Apocalypse) but Robinson wisely keeps it low key and fast - extremely fast. Birthright flies by in a short 216 pages, but I think it could have been just a titch longer - just a titch. Any more and it would have stretched my patience.

This book is as good as Shadowmind was tedious. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Also, and this might have contributed to my bias (and my patience), but Birthright has the honour of being the first Doctor Who novel that I have read in actual physical form. Previously, they were ebooks, but I recently got my hot little hands on 19 paperbacks, all in decent condition. This might have helped me enjoy the book a little bit more. Maybe not. Who can say?

Shadowmind

2011-09-13T21:59:00.000-05:00

     Ace grinned ironically. 'We do seem to find any trouble that's going spare, don't we? Or perhaps trouble finds us.'
     'Like cosmic lightning rods,' Bernice suggested, then frowned. 'Have you ever wondered, Doctor, if it is just chance? I mean the number of these experiences you keep getting into. . . '
     'Don't be coy, call them adventures,' Ace cut in.
     '. . . these adventures, then. The number does seem to stretch the rules of probability somewhat. Have you ever wondered if it isn't always chance?'

Shadowmind is a short but tedious book, and there are only a few moments of intelligence in the novel. This is one of them. The Doctor's explanation isn't nearly as delightful as the question posed by Bernice. This short of sums up my feelings about this novel.

Ace realizes that it is her birthday by her own personal clock, so she asks the Doctor to take them on vacation. The TARDIS lands on an idyllic planet in the future, but it appears that certain people have been replaced by duplicates, all scheming to steal equipment for nefarious reasons and take them to Arden, a forest planet being colonized. When these duplicates end up stealing the TARDIS, the Doctor is forced to get involved, vacation or no.

I'm not going to lie and say that I have any idea what to say about this novel. It confounds me. The plot is very simplistic, so it's not because of complexity that I find myself at a lost. Nor is it the themes or character development, which there is very little of. No, I'm finding it hard to think of something to say about this book because it's so stubbornly mediocre. If we took all of the Virgin New Adventures, gave them average scores based on hundreds of readers, we would no doubt see a Bell Curve of scores, with the majority of novels being somewhere in the middle. At the very center, right in the middle (I took Statistics, but I forget what this is called) would be Christopher Bulis' Shadowmind.

The plot seems more interested in the military than in the Doctor being clever or Ace being badass or even Bernice being clever. It also takes the plot more than half of the novel getting the cast to the planet being colonized for the action. All the little pieces that Bulis introduces in the overly long prologue-ish first few chapters come back for a payoff, but since I have no idea what is going on, and I don't really care about this characters, all of whom are thinner than parchment, so this payoff lands with a soft dull thud.

However, and this is what confounds me, the plot comes to a shrill climax in which some sort of bog stolen from the film Fern Gully makes its appearance. Everybody's screaming, things are happening, and then the cast piles onto a spaceship and travels to an asteroid. It's here, at this moment, that Bulis finds a moment of brilliance. Through intense and preposterous telepathy, the big bad manages to mind control the cast, with the exception of Ace, who then has to shoot them in order to save the world. This moment for Ace takes its cue from the previous novels, in which the badass Ace shows either no emotion or too much. It's an emotional payoff to a longer arc. It works.

I'm not sure if I should be ascribing success to Bulis, who manages the moment of excellence, or to the previous writers who have put all the pieces in place in order to create this moment later down the line. Or if it should go to the editors. Either way, this is the only part of the novel that works.

The list of problems continues with Bulis' novel, however. There's far too much exposition, and in addition, it's done so clumsily. One imagines that in his original draft, Bulis couldn't help himself and wrote "and then" between every paragraph. It's all very amateurish.

There's not too much to say about this novel. The asking of the question of the Doctor's capacity for trouble is far more interesting than Bulis' pedestrian answer, which isn't even really the point of Shadowmind. I just wanted to demonstrate that Bulis could never fulfill the expectations of such a loaded question.

Limitless

2011-09-12T22:57:00.000-05:00

Bradley Cooper is a writer with writer's block, but one day, he runs into an old friend who hands him a pill that unlocks the other 80% of the brain we supposedly don't use. Bradley Cooper finds himself smarter, more confident and without... limits. After finding a large supply, Bradley Cooper makes a lot of money and a few enemies, including somebody who may know more about the drug than he does.

Limitless is an American movie, in the sense that Bradley Cooper actualizes the American Dream. Let's start off by defining the American Dream. It is, for the sake of this review, to make something from nothing. This is different than alchemy: the American Dream is to pull one's self up by one's own bootstraps and make one's way in the world whereby the end result is the twin pillars of America, money and power. In Limitless, Bradley Cooper actualizes the dream of both money and power, but never reaches an end point. That is to say that his potential is... limitless.

Limitless is an American movie in the sense that it is about class. To quote Karl Marx, "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle" but put into the perspective of Limitless, an American film released in 2011, the history of Bradley Cooper is the history of his struggle with class.

In the beginning of the film, Bradley Cooper is dirty, appears to have a broken finger (that the film does not comment on or provide any explanation for its appearance and subsequent disappearance), and is a writer. Of course, "writer" is another way of saying "unemployed" in American film language, and of course, "unemployed" is another way of saying "poor" or in Marx's terminology, the proletariat*. Bradley Cooper is poor and dirty and without prospects. That is until the mechanism for the plot and for Bradley Cooper's meteoric rise through the classes is introduced: a drug dealer with something called NZT.

This drug, synthetic and chemical in nature rather than organic or naturally occurring, is able to unlock the potential of the human brain. According to this drug dealer, humans only use about 20% percent of our brain** and this drug is able to break this limit. Bradley Cooper takes this drug, because there is really no option, and he is able to use memories that are stored within his brain but were previously inaccessible due to inactivity. He uses this power to deflect and then impress his landlord's caustic wife. This translates into Bradley Cooper bedding this woman and then the film subsequently drops her without any explanation or followup.

After taking more of NZT, Bradley Cooper cleans himself up, cleans his apartment, and purchases new suits; the motive being to portray himself as upper class as to ingratiate himself within their ranks. His subterfuge is impeccable thanks to NZT's confidence boosting and intelligence increasing, but he finds the spectacle of the bourgeoisie to be empty. Therefore, he concludes, he must become them, and in archetypal American fashion, his next move is to understand then conquer the stock market.

The impenetrability of the stock market is a cliché that permeates American fiction. It is confusing and mercurial and only those with highly specialized education can possibly make any progress in the market, unless of course you are either a risk taker of epic proportions (see films such as Wall Street) or you are a savant. In Limitless, Bradley Cooper is positioned as savant via NZT. Within days, he has exponentially increased the seed money which he borrowed from a stock Eastern European gangster***.

Bradley Cooper attracts the attention of Robert De Niro who hires him to help facilitate a macro-merger between two corporations that deal in energy and power. De Niro, the self-made owner of one of the two companies, positions Bradley Cooper as consultant with De Niro as the father figure, the mentor of the younger more brash protagonist.

From here, Limitless examines concepts such as addiction and power, both addiction to power and the power of addiction and it looks at these themes through the lens of the techno-thriller. However, what makes Limitless so archetypal and perfectly "American" is that its story is so simple and so demonstrably American: Limitless is the story of the self-made man. However, what makes Limitless so interesting is that the film positions a pharmaceutical drug as the mechanism for the self-making.

Limitless tells a story that has been told many times before; one such story being Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray or even Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant. In both of these novels, the protagonist (not necessarily the hero) is motivated by upward mobility on the social ladder and this is usually done by either marriage or in Bel-Ami's case, wiliness. Both books were written in the age of the Industrial Revolution, a time of great social upheaval. While the face of the ruling class changed from nobility to industrialist, the ruling class remained that: ruling. The difference between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was clear and often easily identifiable****.

Bel-Ami and Vanity Fair (to a lesser extent) have the same story as Limitless, except Limitless uses a quintessential and very culturally relevant mechanism: the drug called NZT. Only in the 21st century would the story of class mobility, the primum movens of the story, be NZT.

In a lot of American fiction of the 20th century, the illusion of the American Dream is offered to the protagonist and by proxy the audience. There is a chance, however small and fleeting, that the reader could one day rise above their class and become one of the ruling class. The fantasy of the American Dream comes from obscuring the rigidity of the class strata. Limitless is the perfect example of this. The agency of veiling the class distinctions is pharmaceuticals. There is no more quintessentially American device.

In the 19th century, the illusion of blurring classes came through inheritance or secret family wills or more often than not, through the sheer persistence and determination of the protagonist, often a ragamuffin orphan or ne'er-do-well. Now we have come to the 21st century, a time of great economic hopelessness*****, where Limitless asks us, the audience, to believe that
one of the few ways to increase our lot is to self-medicate.

There is no doctor or pharmacist or even chemist who tells the audience that this self-medicating with NZT is inherently dangerous. The film shows us scenes of addiction and withdrawal, but then the film asks us to forget these not-so harrowing scenes because, in quintessentially American fashion, the end justifies the means. There isn't any question of what this drug is doing to Bradley Cooper's brain. There isn't any repercussion or consequence outside of material wealth and increased social standing.

What kind of film is this? What kind of message does this send to the audience? This is surely an escapist fantasy designed to bait the audience with the illusion that through science fiction, the audience can also better themselves and rise up through the ranks of society. Fantasy being the important word here. While Vanity Fair and Bel-Ami and countless other famous stories are heralded for their measured and even examination of the "self-made" man or woman, Limitless doesn't belong in their ranks. This film has nothing to say of the consequence of Bradley Cooper's actions or decisions to self-medicate and become, essentially, a long term addict to an illegal drug.

There's an interesting moment around the halfway point of the film that bears looking at. After suffering intense withdrawal, Bradley Cooper endangers his girlfriend by involving her with the drug. Bradley Cooper urges the girlfriend to take the drug in order to escape a pursuer. The next morning, once Bradley Cooper has had his fix, he tells her that he is going to handle it, that she is out of danger, (even though she just ingested an illegal substance) that he's "back". She asks, "Who's back? Because it's not the man I knew." The idea being here that NZT has ultimately changed Bradley Cooper the person, fundamentally changed who that person is.

At first, the film sort of positions this moment as a question of addiction and identity. Is the person as an addict merely a consequence of the drug, or is the drug simply exposing the addict as they truly are. After the theme of addiction is put down and set aside, the film never explicitly revisits the concept of identity again. Instead, the film asks the viewer to forgive this suppression of the true Bradley Cooper because at the end of the film, he is far more rich and powerful than expected, and that there is no limit to his potential, an idea explicitly referred to by a couple characters.

In the end, the film asks of the audience, it is completely worth it to change who we are in order achieve the American Dream. What the film is sort of hinting at, implicitly concluding, is that in order to achieve the American Dream we must fundamentally change who we are. These two things are not quite the same thing; one is much darker than the other. Limitless is the story of the self-made man who changes himself irrevocably into an ideal, of a paragon of progress and success. What the film doesn't do is ask us if a lifetime of addiction, fear and protean identity can justify the end result.

NOTES
* I fully admit to reductionist practices and oversimplifications, but this film is guilty of the same crimes which I feel justifies my tactics

** Of course you know that this is a myth. I shouldn't have to link to any confirmation of its mythic status and I won't. I refuse to. Anybody who looks at an MRI or CAT scan will see the brain lit up like fireworks, constantly exploding and neverending (until brain function ceases due to injury or death)

*** This plot point will inevitably come back, of course, but in a way that is both frustratingly predictable and somewhat surprising.

**** eg. top hats versus cloth caps.

***** Many Americans live beyond their means thanks to the debt culture that has become naturalized and internalized by the constant media exposure of the rich and famous.

Animal Man #1

2011-09-08T09:00:00.000-05:00

I love love love Animal Man the character. Not just Morrison's take on him, which is iconic and trendsetting, but Delano's horror take and Tom Veitch's spiritual take. Love Animal Man. There's something so irresistible about Buddy Baker, maybe his trippy powers, maybe his everyman status, or maybe even the fact that he's married with two normal kids. I was pretty interested in Jeff Lemire's take on him, not only because I found Essex County to be fascinating, but also because that cover! That cover is amazing! It's like somebody finally understood why Bolland was so good as his job.

But alas, all is not meant to be. In terms of first issues, Lemire manages to succeed on every superficial: he introduces an established character, gives enough background for us to understand him, and then gives us enough action to understand his powers and to keep us entertained. Then, there's a trippy dream sequence, which strongly reminds me of previous Animal Man-style stories, and then setup for the rest of the arc, including a pretty frightening cliffhanger.

Why then my disappointment? Oh god the art is awful. Just fucking awful. Look at this page layout and tell me that this guy isn't working with a full set of tools, specifically the fucking panel at the bottom. It's three separate images put together and not even in an artful way. Also what is Buddy Baker wearing?

Okay so that's a bad page. Does this artist have any grip on human anatomy? Nope. Did he design a costume that looks eerily like electric Superman? Yup. Here's proof of both statements with this full page splash panel:

Oh god my eyes. What's with his neck? What's with the bizarre perspective that skews the bottom half of his body? AAAGGGHHH

It's a shame because that cover is miraculous. Plus, the dream sequence is pretty well drawn. I think this artist does better with photo-reference than with drawing from imagination. There's nothing wrong with this. I think he should stick to his strengths.

As for the writing? Yeah, it's good, but it's not great. It didn't blow my mind, but sometimes it takes a bit for the writer to get a feel for the character and put their own stamp on it. I feel like Lemire expects that readers expects these kind of stories: trippy philosophical and weird. I think it fits Animal Man better than standard superhero fare. I just fear that we're going to have retreads of Veitch's or Delano's runs.

This wasn't nearly as harrowing as the first issue of Justice League. I have little to add to this review other than "can this artist please get better?" I think he can improve and I don't want to see him off the title; I want him to grow and mature as an artist. Let's hope this title continues!

A Friend of the Family

2011-09-07T06:20:00.000-05:00

Pete Dizinoff has a pretty perfect life: he's an internist, married to a beautiful woman with a PhD, he's best friends with Joe, a high-risk obstetrician, and he lives comfortably. When his aimless artist son Alec drops out of college, Pete tries to be cool about it. When Alec becomes involved with Joe's daughter, older than Alec by ten years, and harboring a dark secret, Pete tries to stay cool. Unfortunately, Pete wants what's best for his son, even if that means coming between Alec and Joe's daughter. Even if that means sacrificing everything.

This was an unexpected masterpiece. Yes, a masterpiece. While my synopsis makes the book sound like it's a thriller, it's really not. It's a careful vivisection of suburbia, of paternal love, of the modern Jewish man, of the professional, and of the lies we tell ourselves.

The novel opens with a complicated and virtuoso first chapter that has Pete, our first person narrator, yelled at by some angry former patient, for reasons unknown to us, and then a flashback to a multifamily vacation in 1991 when the Soviet union was about to fall. Pete remembers feeling disconcerted that the black/white morality of the Cold War was about to change into something far more murky. There's also some clever foreshadowing, some of which is extremely subtle (I didn't even realize the novel was a circle until I re-read the opening chapter) and some of which is tantalizing enough that I read this book over the course of one day.

The first chapter is emblematic of the rest of the novel: the nonlinear chronology, the foreshadowing, and the clever use of the first person narration. A Friend of the Family reminded me, at first, a lot of Updike and Cheever, both authors who scraped beyond the surfaces of the modern suburban man, but as I got further into Pete's head, I realized that it was more like Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier than either of those two authors.

Pete is delusional, but not in the dramatic unreliable narrator kind of way. He isn't hallucinating or experiencing dissociative personality disorder. Rather, he's kind of clueless. He believes in a black white moral scheme, where right is right and wrong is wrong. At first, we're told this through conversations with Elaine, Pete's wife. Pete is determined to judge Laura, Joe's daughter for the crime she allegedly committed, whether or not Pete knows the full story.

Pete is rich and successful; with social stability, he's able to judge freely. He comes from a privilege reference point. What he doesn't see is that it is this privileged vantage point that doesn't allow him to contemplate a world beyond black and white, wrong and right. Because he doesn't see this, and the reader surely can, the tragedy is more heartfelt. We're always a step ahead of Pete because of this. It doesn't make the story any less or more tragic. Pete is just trying to do good.

Even when faced with a morally murky choice, Laura's crime is still at the top of the hierarchy of heinous crimes. Why not? For Pete, a physician who's job it is to save lives, the taking of life is the ultimate sin. He has no conception of any other option than to judge murder as sin.

There is a lot of subtext to this novel, and a lot is through the unreliability of first person narration. It's all done so skillfully and subtlety. Even without the subtext, the novel can be enjoyed on its own. Lauren Grodstein, the author, has a simple and clear style that manages to get into Pete's head and project masculinity (or at least, Pete's conception of masculinity). This is an author who hasn't written a novel in her voice but named the voice after somebody else. A Friend of the Family is narrated in an entirely new voice, not the author's and nobody else's. That feat alone is worthy of praise. Luckily, she blends this voice with a rather gripping plot.

It's a trainwreck, a tragedy that you can sort of see coming. You know how novels like this end: with heartbreak. But how the novel arrives at this point is surprising and extremely suspenseful. This isn't The Hunt for the Red October, but it is utterly mesmerizing. I rushed breathlessly to the end, hoping for some sort of happy ending but knowing that this wasn't possible. The structure of the novel, nonlinear full of prolepsis and tons of analepsis, is never confusing or off-putting. It's always clear, and Grodstein draws the reader into the web of plot with well-drawn characters.

Because Grodstein has made this voice so strong, it's hard to tell where Grodstein herself stands on this. Obviously we know that the world isn't a morally binary place, so we can safely assume that Grodstein pities both Pete and Laura for their respective transgressions, but what of her gentle pokes at suburbia? Both Joe and Pete make jokes and references to the much maligned and mocked affluent neighborhoods, and this piece of the puzzle fits in with Pete's position as judge and jury, but does Grodstein herself think less of suburbia? Or is it simply another place for tragedy to seed? Or is suburbia res ipsa loquitur? The difficulty of surmising this is praise-worthy itself.

A Friend of the Family is a modern masterpiece of plotting, character development and technique. There's only a few missteps, such as an overly long climactic showdown (or two) and sometimes the folksiness of the little town is grating. Otherwise, this is a fantastic enthralling and compelling read. A surprising delight.

[After writing this (and I swear this is true) I read the NY Times review and it mentions Ford Madox Ford as well. See? I can be insightful]

Seasons End

2011-09-06T11:26:00.001-05:00

So watch the old world melt away

A loss regrets could never mend

You never miss it till it's gone

So say goodbye, say goodbye

- Marillion

Summer of 2011 has ended, and it has been magnificent. Not just the weather, but my life. This has been one of the best summers of my life - maybe not the very best, but definitely in the top three.

The end of summer is often seen as a sad event, a transition to colder temperatures, school, the leaves falling off the trees, but I'm seeing this as the finale to a long stretch of wandering, searching for what I really want to do, and I think I've finally found the answer: what I wanted to do for years - get my PhD. This summer was the period at the end of a five year sentence, and it was a fantastic end.

Really, the beginning of the summer was the end of exams, moving out of my apartment, and into a new one, and then a trip to Kelowna BC for my grandfather's 80th birthday, which was a fun celebration. We hiked up a mountain. I got sort of drunk. I ate delicious salmon and avocado, as if they were both harvested that very day. It was fun to take a vacation for the first time since 2008, other than a terrible camping trip in 2010 which I'd much rather forget, honestly (everything was so fucking damp). It was even fun to take an airplane, a convenience which has ameliorated since the last time, I have to say. There was a screen in the back of every seat that charted our progress, provided altitude and weather information, and an estimated time of arrival. It was excellent. I read Stendhal's The rouge et le noir over the course of this trip.

I went back to work at Moxie's - normally I would say this is a step backward, and really, the whole summer was about stepping backwards, but at least this time, I really like my job. The crew in the kitchen is phenomenal, and I don't dread going to work. The kitchen is full of some of the wittiest people I've ever met, and I feel like I always have to stay on my toes in terms of comedy. Working at Moxie's is always going to be frustrating; the company makes some boneheaded decisions sometimes, such as the new veggie burger which contains rice, cottage cheese and mozzarella (I know, right?). But at least, I like the people. It's fun working at Moxie's again, even if that means a different location.

I moved back in with my parents. Definitely not ideal. But sometimes you have to take a step backwards in order to take a couple steps forward. They're letting me live relatively rent-free. They re-did my bathroom and my bedroom, so it's not entirely the same. Life is different. My parents are a lot happier and relaxed nowadays. I think they like having me around. My bedroom isn't as full as it used to be, thanks to the mass selling of my stuff, which makes the room feel bigger than it used to be.

Plus, it's nice getting away from the old apartment, a place of strong memories. As much as I loved the apartment, everything that I associate with it is just too much. I needed to get away from it. So I moved in with somebody else, which was okay, not bad but not fun by any measure, and then now into the parents' house. It's nice having pets and it's nice having access to all the amenities of a house, like a backyard and a large kitchen.

Other than the current situation, this summer featured the Pride Parade, which is in my top ten favourite fun things I've ever done. I had such a blast. I was really drunk and I was checked out by numerous guys and girls! I got my new favourite sunglasses there, which my mother hates, and I got a whole bunch of memories. It was awesome. The drinking didn't really stop there, either. I did lot of a partying with friends and coworkers over this summer. In the past two years, thanks to a not-so-healthy relationship, I was adverse to going out because that always meant my ex would become rowdy and drunk and annoying - "do this shot" "chug this straight vodka" as if the only way we could have fun was through copious intake of alcohol. But since I became single, I've been going out a lot, hanging out with people, getting tipsy. I got blackout drunk once or twice, which is fine with me, but not all the time. It was nice, letting go and being social. I don't think I've been this sociable since my previous breakup in 2008. I even went on a road-trip to Minneapolis with some friends.

I dated a couple girls. Neither of them worked out if only because I felt nothing for them. They were rebounds, honestly. After the second girl, I figured that I should just stop trying to date entirely and let whatever happens happen naturally. I found that the minute you stop looking for something is the minute before you find it, so I'm just going to coast amicably with myself and continue to work on the project that is me.

I weighed 178.5 pounds this morning. I feel fat and have been for a couple weeks, but I'm not sure why there is a disconnect between my mental image of myself and my actual presence. I've been eating poorly the past couple weeks but exercising a bit, so I think I'm losing muscle weight and gaining fat? Maybe? Or is there a cognitive disconnect between what I think and what I am? This is intriguing stuff. I thought I weighed 195 or 190, but the digital scale refutes this mental estimation. I know enough about psychology to figure that my mind is playing tricks on me, the kind that causes other people to develop serious body-image issues because all they ever see is fat when they're actually dangerously underweight. I'm not saying this is going to happen to me. I'm saying that I simply need to maintain an active and healthy lifestyle, including exercise and diet and with time, my two images will reconcile.

I think it's wonderful that over the course of the summer, not only did I manage to maintain a numerical weight goal, but I also managed to make new friends, be extremely sociable and read an incredible number of books. I read over 50 books since the beginning of May. A lot of people won't even read 50 books in their lifetime. I have eight books that I have read but haven't yet reviewed for this blog. Eight! The backlog is stunning. I never thought I would get to the point where I couldn't keep up on the blog end of things, where the reading would over take the writing, but here I am. I think it's amazing that managed a balance of friends, responsibilities, and pleasure. I went to the gym, read, went out and worked sometimes all in the same day. This is a big difference from where I used to be a year ago.

Now that university is about to start tomorrow, I'm about to finish the goal I set on Goodreads of 85 books in a year. At my current pace, I'll surpass last year's total no problem. I'm fully prepared to have my reading speed reduced by the onset of academic reading and assigned books (which still count as books read, I'll have you know).

University is going to be different this time around, I think. First of all, I'm smarter, older and more mature. I won't be as arrogant or as annoying. I plan to make friends. I plan to make important connections that will help in the future. I think I'm going to get a lot more out of school this time. I also need to get all A's across the board in order to increase my already decent GPA. I can do all this. I can manage this. I'm taking three honours courses and two undergrad courses, which is a lot, but I think I can do this. I'm excited and nervous about school. But I'm walking into these classes with five years of autodidacticism and a degree. I'm going to be older than most of the kids, and I'll have read a lot more than they have in the past five years... on average. I don't think I'm better than everybody, I just think I have the benefit of experience.

This summer has been fantastic, and it's time to close this particular chapter in my life. I wanted to capture that elation I feel, that excitement about the possibility of the future. I'm still looking forward to whatever happens, and as long as I can manage my weight, my social life and my real world responsibilities than everything is going to be okay. I've capitulated to the ongoing tension between what I really should be doing (PhD) and what I have been doing these past five years. This summer was the perfect climax to this wilderness of aimlessness. I couldn't ask for better friends or better times or better weather this year. I can't wait for next summer. I can't wait for the rest of my life.