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Dave is the bright spot in the world who contributed to this week’s articles. You too can contribute by sending articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, posting articles in the comments for discussion, and Having a Happy Friday!
Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker Magazine interviews director David Cronenberg about his new film The Shrouds and how grief for his recently late wife seeped into the process:
Cronenberg: I mean, I absolutely felt like I was dying. Whether I actually was or not is a different thing. But there’s no question that grief puts a huge strain on your body, and the body reacts to it in terms of increased inflammation, cellular deformities, neurological defects and all of that stuff. It may seem to some a romantic notion that if not long after one person dies, the partner of that person also dies, but that does happen because of the stress of grief and the inability to bear life without that other person. Art has never been therapy to me, and making this movie was not cathartic for me, but it was necessary, nonetheless.
Bright Wall/Dark Room‘s Abigail Oswald explores the text messages in Personal Shopper:
In the modern gig economy, you might as well also be a medium. Maureen’s skill set seems to transfer simply enough between roles. Human as radio dial, tuning herself to the frequencies of others—only some of them happen to be dead. Maureen has taken to spending her free time looking for signs. A tap turns on. A funny feeling. The shape of a cross on the wall. The sound of a knock on a hard surface—once for yes, twice for no. But perhaps most significantly: Maureen begins receiving texts from an unknown sender. If you’re searching for signs, a phone notification seems simple enough. Maybe it’s not such a stretch to think that 21st-century ghosts have incorporated texting as a mode of communication.
At Wired (by way of Ars Techinca for nonsubscribers) Ryan Broderick writes about the legacy and death of 4chan:
I had a front-row seat to the way those timid men morphed into the violent, seething underbelly of the Internet. The throbbing engine of reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because resentment was the only language its users knew how to speak. I traveled the world in the 2010s, tracing 4chan’s impact on global democracy. I followed it to France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil as 4chan’s users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet through racist memes, far-right populism, and cyberbullying. And, in a way, they did. But the ubiquity of 4chan culture ended up being an oddly Pyrrhic victory for the site itself.
At her substack, Elizabeth Nelson reflects on researching Atlantic Records’ founders and how their joy in music is being snuffed out:
[Ahmet] Ertegun and [Jerry] Wexler’s insatiable zeal for the music they loved is inspiring, but also saddening in our contemporary context. As is made clear in abundance throughout Liz Pelly’s excellent, demoralizing recent book about Spotify Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, Spotify founder Daniel Ek and the other executives in charge of what is contemporary popular music’s most vital platform could scarcely care less about music if they made a concerted effort. With its infamous algorithm and borderline sadistic withholding of royalties from musicians in an effort to maximize shareholder profits, Spotify is a cautionary tale about what happens when the things that move us body and soul are left to be administered by those whose intentions are purely profit and status driven. The impoverishment isn’t suffered merely by the artists being cheated out of their cut of the streaming pie — it’s borne by all of us whose lives and passions have been soundtracked by the presence of great music, both mainstream and obscure. It’s borne by those whose curiosity might drive them far from the consensus-driven bubble that Spotify cultivates and desperately protects. It is truly one of the saddest developments I have ever seen in my life.
And for The New York Groove, Virginia K. Smith interviews Andy Cush for tips on fighting back against the algorithm, and creates a primer for how to discover new music:
Sometimes I’ve been known to follow radio shows to other platforms if called for; I still subscribe to the mixcloud account of LAFOS (the Lost and Found Oldies show), which I heard once upstate on Vassar’s radio station WVKR, and whose host has credible evidence he’s Bobby Darin’s illegitimate son. The host banter is like nothing any large language model could ever dream up, and more to the point, the music unfailingly hits.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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State of the art special effects, little attention paid to plot - what's changed over the past 120 years?
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What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Seven, “Soul Mates”
This episode has picked up, not advancing the plot but at least having more fun details. For one thing, it has Keith Szarabajca and Carl Strukyen in it; the former is a Psi-Corp agent disguised as an ex-Psi-Corp agent who attempts to assassinate Londo, with the resolution hinting at wheels within wheels that we really ought to have uncovered by now, and Szarabajca has the line of the episode (“You can explain it to the Magistrate.” / “I will explain it in Hell.”). It’s also because we finally see G’Kar again – he’s my second-favourite character after Delenn, because he’s the one with the strongest and most practical sense of what he wants at any given moment; when he shows up to Londo’s party wearing shoes (as opposed to the custom of going barefoot) and is asked if he’s aware of the insult he’s implying, he simply and gleefully replies “Indeed!”
Weirdly, the comedy subplots are the best part. Londo has three wives and, due to his rising star (which is the sole way this is tied into the larger plot in a direct way), has been given permission to divorce two of them, and he chooses to keep the one who is openly hostile to him as opposed to the others who lie to his face and stab him in the back. Jerry Lewis once said humour is about telling you what you’re about to do, doing it, then saying you did it; I think that most accurately describes corny humour, which happens here.
The other comedy subplot is Delenn adjusting to having hair and getting Ivanova’s help in learning how to maintain it; this mainly works because Mira Furlan had a very strong dignity to her that he can gleefully undermine, Sideshow Bob style.
Peter David wrote this episode!
Sinners
OWNAGE. This doesn’t actually have any real vampire action until about two-thirds of the way through the film, but that doesn’t matter; others here have remarked it seems overstuffed with ideas, but honestly I appreciate its density. This is one of those wonderful movies where I would have happily watched a movie about a pair of Black twin gangsters operating a bar in the Mississippi Delta even without the vampires; this is a movie more about the Blues than anything else, and I deeply appreciated the way the music was intertwined into both aesthetic and themes; Coogler makes the convincing argument that the Blues is inherently Black, and that music is inherently a part of the Black experience, in a sequence with much the same point as my favourite Elvis scene and a loud demonstration of the movie’s brilliant editing. In theory, it’s weird to have Irish music, of all things, be tied into the vampires, but it’s inarguably aesthetically awesome to have these two musical forms at each other’s throats (the friend I saw it with thought the vampire music ended up drifting into heavy metal).
But the genre stuff is cool as hell as well; the vampire rules are close enough to standard mythology and, when they do riff, riff in wonderful ways; the red eye effect was fucking boss, and the fact that the vampires tried to appeal to Black people through the idea of rising above oppression was a great spin on the mythology. I love the way they sped through all the obvious beats, too – my single favourite moment was the vampire leaping impossibly into the air and the movie cutting away before he’s even reached the apex.
The second half becomes a gleeful demonstration of vampire tropes; I loved the initial sequences of vampires trying to talk their way into the house – especially Cornbread, who gets so obviously desperate as he goes along – because they really were dripping with tension. There were three things I didn’t care for: the flashforward opening, the corny flashbacks to dead characters at the climax, and I was less and less crash-hot on the ending as I got further away from it. I don’t like the vampires suddenly having morality and a sense of their old selves; it undermines the horror for me.
Separate Tables – Life at a shabby residential hotel on the English shore. Where David Niven lies about his life and service record and is perv who molests women in the cinema. Where abusive drunk Burt Lancester and manipulative ice maiden Rita Hayworth are a divorced couple who still have sparks. Where Deborah Kerr is a woman-child under the thumb of her prudish mother. And where only Wendy Hiller, owner of the hotel and in love with Burt too, seems mature enough to handle things. There is a genuine attempt to approach serious adult questions here, no doubt carrying over from the original (and somewhat different) play. But a Hollywoodized smoothing over of things, Delbert Mann’s limited directorial talents, and just some rather unlikeable characters (especially the abusive drunk) make this a bit of a slog. Most of the cast does their best with the material, and Hiller might deserve her Oscar for this, but it just comes up a bit short.
Kojak, “A Shield for Murder,” first half – The fourth season’s single two hour episode – as usual divided into two parts for syndication and streaming – has Kojak investigating why a young man – whose girlfriend is in prison for murdering her mother – would try to kill a rising Assistant DA. The deeper Kojak digs, the most obfuscation he gets from the ADA and more red tape gets dumped on him from above, in part because the ADA’s patron is a very powerful and rich party funder. As we leave off, the order has been given to kill Kojak. So far, so good, as it’s clear the coverup is hiding something dark, and as the political intrigue Kojak is facing is as interesting as the mystery. The big name guest for this one is Geraldine Page as the political fixer, and she is great. Other guests include Mary Beth Hurt (married already in 1976 to William) as the seeming matricide, Charles Kimborough as the ADA, and Kenneth McMillan as a corrupt cop.
Is it this film where in one of David Niven’s autobiographies, he tells the story of one of his actor friends seeing him in this and calling out to his wife something like: “Look dear, it’s David and he’s actually acting”?
The Pitt, “4:00”
Really deft mood shift with the burn victim, with the show rooting the scene more in Whitaker’s innocent, heart-first POV before we get the matter-of-fact prediction from Langdon: the show usually makes these moments feel heightened, and so playing this one in a flatter, fatalistic way makes it more surprising and gives it all the more impact. I do not care about McKay and Chad. (Although McKay continuously insulting her ex in front of their young son is probably a bad idea.) I should’ve seen Javadi getting rankled by the baseball kid’s overbearing father coming, but somehow I didn’t, and it was a nice, plausible eruption. I like how Robby processes McKay’s decision to call the cops about the kid’s “elimination list,” thinking it over and ultimately deciding to broaden/complicate his empathy–which was originally with the trouble kid in front of him–to include the girls the kid could harm. Making it about how to handle a moral conflict on a pragmatic level, rather than treating empathy like a zero-sum game, really works for me.
Obviously the Big Plot of the episode is Santos coming to Robby with her concerns about Langdon, and it’s interesting how Langdon completely blows it early on by anticipating her doing it–he might have had better luck playing this off if he hadn’t been so obvious about trying to discredit her in advance. His big scene with Robby is emotionally affecting, especially as he keeps trying to not open his locker and bluster his way out of it, and every second he delays makes Robby more and more convinced that the worst is true. Great, earnest, heartbroken acting from both Ball and Wyle: “Could a drug addict do what I do?” “Apparently.”
But wow, the set-up for Langdon’s nervous reaction to hearing someone technically call him a “junkie” is almost hilariously clumsy. How did that writer’s room conversation go? “We need someone to call him a junkie so he can overreact to it, but the person calling him that has to be talking about something else.” “Oh, maybe they call him an adrenaline junkie.” “Great! How can we set that up?” “Maybe he talks about how he’d like to buy salmon for dinner on his way home from work!” “…And then the person who calls him an adrenaline junkie because of that is doing it as a joke?” “No, no. Completely sincere.” Nothing says adrenaline junkie like grilled salmon!
Draft Day
Not the actual coverage, the incredibly dumb Kevin Costner movie. This actually has an incredible cast–even aside from the Big Names, we’ve got small roles filled out with W. Earl Brown, Kevin Dunn, Timothy Simons, and Patrick St. Esprit (aka Lester from The Shield)–so people must have thought this was going to be good. It is not, but I have nonetheless seen it way more times than I’ve seen Citizen Kane, because it’s extremely entertaining to make fun of it. Full of nonsense and characters who do not remotely know how to do their jobs (or even how to count, apparently), despite the movie painting them as incredibly competent. Ridiculous in the extreme. Honestly, certain bits of this are almost transcendently dumb–yes, let’s stop in the middle of Draft Day to sprinkle my dead father’s ashes on the playing field! We’re not busy at all! And this definitely won’t freak superstitious athletes out!–but it’s like the movie uses that a bizarre route to rewatchability. If you enjoy boggling at things, this has a density of things to boggle at the way a Zuckers film has a density of jokes.
Until recently there was an upscale mall in D.C. called the Mazza Gallerie which had a movie theater. The mall was in a 20-year decline (they finally tore it down in 2023), and the sign of this was there was a poster for this movie as a coming attraction for the better part of a decade. The movie theater was on the third floor, but they put up posters in an empty space on the first floor to advertise to the foot traffic. But then eventually all the other first-floor tenants (except the McDonalds) left, so there was so little traffic it wasn’t even worth it to change out the posters anymore.
This feels like a singularly appropriate movie to be in that position. Just a sad sign that there aren’t better times coming.
One of my favorite moments in “hey, screenwriter, can you make this location we cleared work for us” is when the team’s owner meets with Costner at a closed water park and drops a couple water metaphors on him to describe the situation. I like imagining the prelude to that scene. “This day is crucial, meet me at The Water Works at 8am.” “Aren’t they closed? It’s a Thursday. In April.” “They’ll open it for me, this is too important.” “We have conference rooms here.” “I think you’ll understand why the water park is necessary when we get there.” (One hour later). “We can’t afford to LEAK talent. Someone is coming out of this draft ALL WET.”
I don’t prefer dumb movies, but I think a healthy movie ecosystem has some dumb ones because the movies are focused on delivering a particular story to a particular audience, strict logic be damned.
It’s always killed me that Langella drags him to that closed water park just to better illustrate his (dumb) metaphor, but I’d never thought about what that meeting request must have looked like. That does make it even better.
I like the “healthy movie ecosystem” idea. I’d rather have smart movies than dumb ones, but if they’re going to be dumb or bad, I do want them to be fully committed.
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972)
I was never as obsessed with Pink Floyd as a teenager as I was with other classic rock bands, and I think that has benefited Floyd in the long run. This dive into their pre-Dark Side catalog, along with showing some of the recording of Dark Side, felt fresh and interesting to me. The filmmaking is interesting, with enough lateral camera movement to make a bad Wes Anderson joke, as well as some interesting proto-music video effects. The contrast between Gilmour and Waters when they talk about their equipment and the ability to create unique sounds is interesting. Gilmour doesn’t want to lose the human touch while Waters is eager to play with all his gizmos. The film does a good job of balancing the lionizing aspects of the concert film (the cuts to the gong silhouette in the sunset are gorgeous) with humbling things a bit (Nick Mason just wants a slice of pie without the crust please). I really loved the whole experience of this one.
I’m looking forward to seeing it on Sunday — at the 4:20 showing, no less. To prepare, last night I listened to Obscured by Clouds. I’m telling ya, if it weren’t by a band called Pink Floyd, this record would be praised as an overlooked 1972 gem. One song sounds like James Gang; another is an interesting precursor to one of the big songs on The Dark Side of the Moon.
Oppenheimer – FINALLY completing my Barbenheimer double-bill after a 22 month interval. This is relentlessly paced for a 3hr biopic which is quite impressive, and the cast is absurdly stacked. I admired it consistently but it just isn’t the kind of film I’m capable of loving, I don’t think. Glad to have seen it though, an impressive bit of filmmaking and I enjoyed seeing Alden Ehrenreich getting a solid role again – revisiting the whole Coenography recently only solidified Hobie Doyle as one of my favourite characters they ever came up with but his career since then has been a little wobbly. Hopefully this leads to more good stuff because there’s something about his screen presence I really enjoy.
I hope you got a lot of popcorn during that 22-month intermission.
He is bizarrely the best part of Cocaine Bear, which is bleak for a movie called Cocaine Bear.
I’m gonna have to check it out at some point, just for him.
I feel the same way. I actually think Nolan has grown as a storyteller, and Oppenheimer is probably his best work, but it remains somewhat sterile. (Maybe disconnected is a better word.) I enjoyed it very much, but if I had an Oscar ballot it would have gone to Barbie.
It’s definitely not my favourite Nolan but I agree that it might be his best work, it feels like he’s operating at a very high level but in an area that just isn’t quite for me.
Films like OPPENHEIMER, combining history with a huge dallop of narrative complexity and aesthetic control, are entirely my shot of smack, but Nolan pushes those elements to such an extreme that they squelch other expressions of cinematic pleasure. There is a huge amount of content he is combining both in terms of story and formalism here, integrating modernism, morality, and conflict between the self and institutional structure that is dazzling, but the intelligibility of its functionality is the show’s singular objective. It’s an abstract impression of thought that flattens emotional connection, like a watch that shows us how it keeps time but whose form lacks a complimentary enhancement of its instrumental objective. Nolan has made colder films than this, and like some of those efforts there is a subjective sense of purpose, usually recovery from loss, that animates the narrative, occasionally reminds us that there is a humanistic substrata beneath his monumentally abstract integration of style and content. That balance between human intimacy and narrative logistics is more balanced in INTERSTELLAR, where Spielberg’s influence feels quite pronounced.
Volver, which I hadn’t seen in about 18 years but had remembered so vividly. It helps that it’s such a beautiful movie even when dealing with really nasty subjects, which is of course Almodovar’s thing. The central plot doesn’t have the squishy moral awkwardness of some of his other films, which makes it less boldly complicated and problematic than The Skin I Live In or Talk To Her, but also gives it a certain moral purity and clarity. Nothing is totally predictable either if you haven’t seen it before, but events unfold as if distributing a universal justice to these women. Fantastic performances, like Cruz as Raimunda returning (eh? eh? the title means return!) to a self-expression she didn’t know she badly needed, but especially Lola Duenas’ expressions and neurotic reactions as Sole. (“Is there something I don’t know?” “…Oodles.”) My friend speaks a little Spanish and said the translation is reductive however, which is disappointing.
This was the first Almodovar film that I saw and I think it’s still my favourite, although Pain & Glory also knocked me out.
Same, that or Talk to Her.
Babylon 5 — they blew it (the president) up! You maniacs! Except his death has been, if not exactly foreshadowed, the kind of thing you sort of expect when an important to the plot character has been lurking in the background for so long. And I’m mixed on the up-blowers, on one hand it makes a lot of sense for a show about the vastness of space and the beings therein to introduce new beings no one knows about, it’s a big universe out there, but dramatically it is less interesting to have a bunch of randos we have not met driving the story, even if the characters we know are still involved. More interesting is Delen’s big change, I’m just glad she finally finished stacking her stupid blocks.
WEDNESDAY
Adolescence
Episode 3. “Episode 3”. First time.
If the previous two episodes were largely contained and immediate, this takes it even further, with the crux of it being the murder suspect kid and the trial psychologist alone in a room. There are some brief scenes outside but it’s mostly just them in a room and it’s a spellbinding acting duel, with Owen Cooper as the kid going veering wildly from one feeling to the other while desperately trying and failing to get his audience’s (the psychologist and us) sympathy, and Erin Doherty as the psychologist trying hard to stay cool, put her foot down and not betray how shaken this kid gets her. Pretty incredible TV, with the one-shot strategy giving it a theater sensibility that amps up the psychological impact.
Andor
Season 2, Episode 1. “One Year Later”. First time.
As the title implies, it’s been a year. We catch up with Andor in the middle of a solo heist, first with a good scene of tradecraft between him and a double agent, then with a hilarious scene as he can’t quite get a handle on the Imperial prototype ship he’s stealing. That’s only the start of his problems, as his getaway is interrupted by a very dimwitted band of rebels, who take him prisoner while they bicker with each other about what to do next. Their blundering is cross-cut with a cabal of Imperial officers, including Ben Mendelsohn’s big honcho from Rogue One and the ISB crew from Season 1, plan the bureaucracy for an upcoming planetary genocide. The contrast between how the Imperials run things and how the rebels don’t is illuminating.
Elsewhere, it’s time for the arranged wedding between Mon Mothma’s daughter and her financier’s son. It’s a three day wedding, so many opportunities for family drama arise, specially as Luthen Rael, who has definitely not invited and has a cover to protect, shows up. Skarsgard asking where the navy is going to was very funny. And Kleya and Vel seem to still hate being with each other in a way that’s very fun to watch. Plus, Kleya seems even more cynical and bitter than before. (Wonder’s if Vel’s girlfriend is even still alive.)
Elsewhere elsewhere, Andor’s friends are lying low on a farm, waiting on him to come back. It’s all setting up some major trouble to come but we get important info on what they’ve been up to now that they’re in the rebellion. Plus, Adria Arjona is a star.
Season 2, Episode 2. “Sagrona Teema”. First time.
A weaker episode than the first, mostly because the rebels holding Andor hostage only get dumber and dumber, even as they start killing each other over petty shit. Someone I know compared them to the Judean front in Life of Brian and I can totally see it, while realizing that kind of thing isn’t what this show does best. Like the Judeans, they’re silly in a destructive way, more dangerous to each other than to anyone else. And seeing them in action really drives home what makes a guy like Andor (who’s on top of things even while shackled to the floor and surrounded by these guys) so valuable for the rebels.
Back at the wedding, the father of the bride gives a terrific speech, a beautiful encapsulation of a selfish, hedonistic shortsighted way of life but not entirely devoid of virtue. He likely still has no idea that his wife is setting him up as the fall guy if they ever come looking for her. And now Luthen has Tay dead in his sights, even as they smile and nod and listen to Perrin. Still unsure what Luthen was really at the wedding for.
Super tense, scary scene between Bix and an imperial officer at the farm. Could have gotten super ugly.
THURSDAY
Adolescence
Episode 4. “Episode 4”. First time.
The murder suspect’s family prepares to celebrate his father’s birthday, even as they still deal in a very real, intimate way with the fallout of the kid’s actions, thirteen months later. It’s an incredible tour de force from Stephen Graham especially, every bit his son’s father, trying to hold it together for his birthday and keep a semblance of family going. Heartbreaking stuff, especially when the truth comes down hard and more so later when a glimmer of hope comes through, against all odds.
Did you just get through the first two? We watched the first two Wednesday and got to the third last night.
Correct, we saw the first two episodes of Adolescence this week and I wrote them up under yesterday’s article: https://www.mediamagpies.com/a-short-film-about-personal-fx/
I meant Andor.
Right, I started the third one last night and finished it this morning. I’ll write it up on Monday but it’s great TV.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“How nice of you.”
What did we read?
Herbert West – Reanimator!, HP Lovecraft
I consider this second-tier in Lovecraft’s works, and that’s mainly because the ideas are so good in spite of the weak prose. Lovecraft is at his weakest when he’s inefficient. Almost everything good about this is improved upon tenfold in the film adaptation, with someone who has a stronger eye for plot and can deliver the full gory implications; the scientific headless horseman thing is a great idea, but I feel it works much better actually shown. The great bit that isn’t shown in the movie is West taking his experiments onto the battlefield in World War One; a vivid and cool idea that logically flows from the story.
Though, this does have one of Lovecraft’s most vivid and cool characters in Herbert West, admittedly in a body of work generally bereft of them, though I think West is so awesome he points to a different direction Lovecraft could have taken. He feels like a precursor to Joseph Curwen in how he takes qualities Lovecraft admires – steely intelligence, procedural thinking, great education – and pushes them in an evil direction.
West is a great character. I think he might have the most pastiche and spinoff fiction of a Lovecraft character. There is so much. A good place to start is with some of Pete Rawlik’s books. He’s created an entire Wold Newton-like universe around West (and Wingate Peaslee) and creating a timeline of all the other West fiction.
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin – In the 1920s, facing the possibility of that European control of the rubber industry could hamstring him, Henry Ford got the idea to create a town in Brasil that would raise rubber trees by the thousands and grant him that which he loved most: self-reliance. It failed. The book is half a history of the project, run by men who were sometimes good managers and sometimes not, but never scientists or farmers or experts (as Ford hated “experts”). And half a bio of Ford, who Grandin at once calls out for all his worst characteristics and seems to have a grudging respect for. The result is a well written and well researched work that occasionally gets lost in the details and that struggles to reconcile Grandin’s overall anti-capitalist streak with that odd admiration for Ford as visionary and even as defender of small town life. The book ends with an epilogue about Brasil today, and there are moments when it seems like Grandin would prefer Ford to the people burning down the Amazon and would prefer small town life to big cities. So a recommendation for the overall work, but with those small caveats.
Midshipman’s Hope, by David Feintuch
The first book in a long series of ’90s military SF. I don’t think I’ll read more of this, and the prose never rises above “functional,” but I am sincerely charmed by how earnestly Feintuch pursues his exact vision. It’s competent (if never more than competent), but in a way, it reminds me of The Room, just because the specific emotional drives and fantasies here are so overt and so obviously running the show. There’s a revealing bit where a character throws in, seemingly as an aside, that society has no more compulsory education–what?–and that as a consequence, the average population is much less educated than it would have been a few centuries ago–yeah, that makes sense, interesting that this isn’t in the grand tradition of SF authors taking crackpot social plans and making idealized societies out of them that will work because the author says they do, cool that this is a worldbuilding tidbit with complex effects on the world–and therefore, the character says almost word-for-word, that’s why we have to run everything like it’s the Napoleonic War in space. And you realize that the entire future history of Feintuch’s universe has been reverse-engineered to produce “Napoleonic War in space.” Which I would have read anyway! You don’t have to be so specific in showing your work!
Nicky Seafort, the protagonist, also exists to angst over every choice he makes and be forced, forced! into taking on more power and doing seemingly terrible things, all so he can be temporarily hated before ultimately (of course) being regarded as a hero. There is an unintentionally hilarious scene where he’s forcibly promoted from midshipman to captain even though he’s not qualified, but he has to go along with it even though it horrifies him, you see, because the rules wouldn’t allow for anything else. And he’s so noble in being bound to the rules that he’ll follow them no matter what, even if he wants out. This poor guy doesn’t even get to say, “Look, I’d love to stand down as captain, but if I break regulations, there’s a chance I’ll be hanged.” No, he’s so noble that never even enters his mind. It’s just his oath.
This is 300+ pages of a guy feeling horribly guilty about what Honor Obligates Him to Do (and occasionally what he does in a bad mood, but much more rarely), and then ignoring all his obvious successes to wallow in feeling like a monster, with multiple people trying in vain to point out that he’s actually the hero of the book and everything he does is miraculously justified anyway. A copy of this should just spontaneously appear in every angsty teenager’s room at some point, honestly.
Thieves’ Dozen, by Donald E. Westlake
Collection of Dortmunder short stories. Dave said these were fine but not memorable, and he’s right. Entertaining enough–though the last story, which is about an alternate Dortmunder (John Rumsey) conceived when it looked like Westlake might lose the rights to the name, is a bit of a slog–but never achieving grand heights, in part because the limited space doesn’t let them get the right pile-up of jokes. Still a lot of fun, though. My favorites were “Too Many Crooks,” featuring Dortmunder and Kelp robbing a bank in the middle of another, unrelated bank robbery, and “Now What?”, where Dortmunder–smuggling a brooch in a ham sandwich–is forced to make the world’s slowest, most cop-infested getaway.
The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis
Per Casper’s recommendation in the last WDWR discussion! This maybe isn’t quite as strong as The Screwtape Letters, but it’s still beautifully written and often illuminating: one of the parts that will stick with me most is how the Ghosts (from hell/purgatory, and Lewis’s idea about how those concepts work in relation to eternity is great) keep being urged to simply let go of minding something–if they can’t be happy for someone else, they could at least stop stewing in their own resentment, and that would be enough to start making them “real.” There’s a kind of exasperated gentleness to that, a demand not even for virtue but a cessation of useless self-torment: and indeed, a recurring theme here is that to escape hell, the Ghosts need, first and foremost, to be capable of genuinely thinking outside themselves, at least for a moment. Necessary advice to me in all my neuroticism, honestly.
Other highlights include the painter who has gone from painting because he’s fascinated by light and wants to express what he sees to painting because he’s grown enamored with the paint itself, with technique utilized with no referent to anything outside of his own skill and tools, and, more than anything else, the way a Ghost’s lizard (embodying lust), once killed, is joyously recreated as a much more vibrant, boisterous stallion who can be embraced.
“Napoleonic War in space” hey, this sounds pretty cool!
“Nicky Seafort, the protagonist” *backs away, shaking head in disgust* Come on, man. Any story of this nature is going to run up against Patrick O’Brian but the bullshit honor denying/justifying sounds especially tedious, Jack Aubrey has none of that and that makes his honor an active thing that makes shit happen, not an obstacle. And also a near-tangible thing in the sense that it can be taken away, when this happens in the series it is gutting.
“There’s a kind of exasperated gentleness to that, a demand not even for virtue but a cessation of useless self-torment: and indeed, a recurring theme here is that to escape hell, the Ghosts need, first and foremost, to be capable of genuinely thinking outside themselves, at least for a moment.”
“Exasperated gentleness” is a great way to describe Lewis’ tone and why it ends up aggravating me. Lewis’ demand to think outside the self is great, the problem is Lewis takes it as, ahem, gospel that once you get outside the self that ultimately the only direction is toward the Christian god. Which he has already found and he is kindly if impatiently waiting for you to catch up to. It’s trading one limited viewpoint for another rather than taking the opportunity to explore, and weirdly a hectoring tone would feel more honest and reflective of that.
Science fiction keeps trying to make “Napoleonic War in space” work, and I support the dream, because I too constantly want that vibe, but I feel like no example I’ve seen can live up to Patrick O’Brian. Solution: resurrect O’Brian, give him a bunch of space opera stuff to set a tone, and then turn him loose.
I find my focus really captured by that middle ground of exploration – opening up to the world around rather than getting stuck looking inward – without feeling that this automatically demands conversion.
re: worldbuilding
I often find in my own writing that there are certain plot points I want to do, and as a result, certain things must be true about the world, like, for example, there are no cops, or perhaps there’s no formal state whatsoever. My instinct is never/em> put all the explanation up beforehand; it’s like telling a lie, where you don’t volunteer information you don’t have to, because you’re trying to get the audience invested in the action you’re presenting. As a result, when I read exposition-heavy stuff where the exposition is rationalisation rather than the point, I get very amused.
This, exactly. There’s a much more deftly done example in the same book, where the radiation you’re exposed to in space produces a certain kind of cancer if people only start having significant exposure to it for the first time as adults; if you start spending a lot of time in space around 12 or 13, your odds of developing it drop significantly. This is effectively there to justify having a space navy where people start careers as children, a la Napoleonic-era midshipmen and ship’s boys, but with that one, Feintuch doesn’t announce that’s why it’s there. And it gets a second-order complication, because we see someone who should have had lower odds of the cancer still dying of it and forwarding the plot in another way.
“Cessation of useless self-torment” is a way of characterising some unhelpful thoughts that I have found very useful.
It’s interesting how even having a concise, clear way of formulating the problem can help with it. (Once, I realized that I kept doing things I knew made my anxiety worse, and so I literally put “stop ruining own life for no reason” on a to-do list for the day, and it was surprising how much good it did.)
Got 8 different books going right now, especially with audio, but I’ll sum up fast.
The North Water, Ian McGuire – Pretty good though The Terror delved into similar notions with more depth and the treatment of indigenous people feels vaguely condescending, the work of a white liberal trying too hard. (Ah, Lovecraft County…)
The Power Broker – now at Robert Moses’ bizarre god-emperor-esque behavior later in life, including a Jones Beach seasonal theater that may as well be entirely for his pleasure. The tour of the mayors who typically capitulated to Moses’ meglomania and scheming is brutal.
Pimp, Iceberg Slim – A nasty piece of work and the next sixty years of pop culture don’t exist without it, especially Snoop Dogg, Donald Goines, The Shield, and pimp culture going mainstream…for better or (much) worse. But it is honest and hard and truthful, at least as Slim tells it. 50+ pages in, he doesn’t sugarcoat how he treated women and what it got him.
Robert Moses running the Jones Beach theater for his own personal entertainment and having mostly bland taste was bitterly funny to me, and of course–by that point in the book–it comes as no surprise that he likes running the shows for two years so that by the second year, there are even fewer people coming to him and there’s even less chance he might accidentally make social contact with someone poor.
I drove to JFK last weekend, my first time in NYC since reading The Power Broker, and now it’s like there’s pop-up text everywhere: oh, I know why those bridges are low, and it’s really shitty. Oh, I’m now personally familiar with the governor this school is named after. Oh, that’s one of his overpasses, wonder what thriving neighborhood it ruined.
The Jones Beach Theater is still there, and I suspect Moses would be pleased with the general whiteness of the acts, though I bet he would have hated seeing Bob Dylan there.
https://www.northwellatjonesbeachtheater.com/shows
No way! 99 Percent Invisible does mention that Jones Beach is probably Moses’ greatest achievement. May have to check it out.
Been a very long time since I was out there – not really a beach person these days – but I remember it fondly. And it seems to have held up.
Bitterly funny is right, Moses’ fetishistic obsession with recreating the 1900’s becomes increasingly bizarre with time (which seems to happen with a lot of nostalgic artists – they’re recreating when they’re young and not interrogating that era, right?)
You Like It Darker Stephen King – Halfway through, several short stories and almost done with a novella in the center, only King would bury what would be a fine short book inside 250 pages of other material. The guy is still as compulsively readable as always. Also, one character walks with four blocks of my old house in a smaller city where the character lives, in typical King detail his route is described in all the businesses he passes and yep, good eye for details on the Google Map there, Steve. Except wait… you make mention of pandemic masks but that Hy-Vee grocery store closed in 2018! Is this some of that alternate universe stuff inserted in here? Are you implying Kansas is under the sway of the Dark Tower? It’s a Dark Dome that rules these parts, another structure that’s in your wheelhouse, get on that in the paperback edition.
Stephen Donaldson, The Mirror of Her Dreams — The next series by the writer of the Thomas Covenant books which I adore starts with this 600-pager. It took me three weeks to read the first half and four days to read the second. The idea (as I think I’ve mentioned previously in this space) was to start with a main character who is completely passive and then show her begin to develop some agency. And it’s a pretty interesting idea. But it was tough to pick the book up just for another 30 pages of Terisa dithering about things over which she had no control.
Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology — The opposite problem! This is an anthology of poems (originally published for the most part as a newspaper column) about small-town life at the turn of the 20th century, each one told by a the spirit of a deceased resident of the titular town. And in the first half of the book they are searing and brutal and spare; e,g.,
Amanda Barker
Henry got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
That Henry loved me with a husband’s love,
But I proclaim from the dust
That he slew me to gratify his hatred.
Knowlt Hoeheimer
I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the country jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal
Bearing the words, ”Pro Patria.”
What do they mean, anyway?
Or finally
Minerva Jones
I am Minerva, the village poetess,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
And all the more when “Butch” Weldy
Captured me after a brutal hunt.
He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.
Will some one go to the village newspaper,
And gather into a book the verses I wrote?—
I thirsted so for love!
I hungered so for life!
(If it’s any consolation, Butch Weldy gets his a few pages later).
But then after about half the book everything gets sort of airy and there’s a lot more about salvation and the world to come. Apparently Masters had come in for a lot of criticism for his cutting depiction of his neighbors, so he backed off. Or maybe he just ran out of things to say, but he still had to make the weekly deadlines for the paper. It’s short enough that it’s worth reading even so, but the fall-off is still greatly disappointing,
Scott Turow, Presumed Guilty — Turow’s 14th novel set in and among the legal community of the fictional Kindle County, and the third following Rusty Sabich, the main character of his debut novel, Presumed Innocent. An enjoyable read even if it doesn’t muster the tension of the earlier book, it exists in part to give Rusty a reasonably happy ending, but also to confront him with his part in the tragedies that dogged his earlier life.
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul — The second and last of Adams’ novels about Dirk Gently, holistic detective. The idea behind them is that every event is connected in absurd and unpredictable ways. And the book is creative and thoughtful and funny (albeit less a farce than the Hitchhikers books). But the problem with both Gently books is this high concept robs them of narrative momentum. Because Gently’s theory of deduction is just to wander around and experience events until they resolve themselves. And it works, but it makes it hard to propel the action.
I now have this picture in my head of Turow at his writing desk, blocked and anxious but then crossing out “Innocent” and writing “Guilty” after “Presumed” and getting right back in the groove. Of course! It’s so obvious!
And agreed on Long Dark Tea-Time, it has a great conceit and funny parts but it meanders very hard in the back half for the reasons you lay out. I wish I liked it more but I don’t know the character avoids that problem, although the first one did a better job.
Gently is a supporting character in the first one, so his meandering nature infects that book less.
The first one has the benefit where the joke is that actually, the whole thing completely holds together; I remember rereading it for the first time and being bowled over by the clue hiding in the very first paragraph. The second one doesn’t quite pull that off.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Science is up! A subject I am not qualified for in a building where I want to be. Typically science sub days mean episodes of Nova or Earth or Life or (if teacher’s been absent a lot that year) Oceans. This classroom is on episode three of Life (“Mammels”) and I don’t think these nature videographers get the respect they deserve. If Leo gets an Oscar for marching fifteen paces from video village and pretending to get attacked by a bear, these people deserve at least an overheated speech from an Academy member. Waiting for weeks or months on end to be in the right position to get a lion attacking a hyena, then catching it from multiple angles? That’s dedication to craft. Every time there’s a closeup of an animal you can’t get close to, all I can think of is the length of lens they must be using and marvel at how steady the shot is.
This room has live animals for the Biology students to care for and is adjacent to a greenhouse for the Horticulture class. Quite the setup, a peek into the emerging scientific minds of Canada’s future.
Hell yeah, I love nature videos!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhuA1dZHoOU
Extremely tempted to put this on and demand respectful silence for the whole duration.
Struggling not to despair over everything lately, it feels like the UK is falling over itself to catch up with America in terms of enabling the far right and pushing pathetically into fascism. The recent Supreme Court verdict reversing established trans rights has sent a bunch of my friends into complete panic and it feels like one of those grim moments where everything collapses in on itself and the fight is lost, although I hope that’s not true. Went out to a protest in my city last weekend and that helped a little, 500+ people showed up at short notice and the speakers were fantastic. But then you go home and everything’s terrible again.
In more mundane matters, trying to get to grips with having some managerial responsibilities at work now – mostly using my newfound powers to complain, because nobody has really explained what else is expected of me so I might as well at least use my moment in the spotlight to point out some of the stupid flaws in the current process. I don’t like the job so I might as well try to make it better, right? And if it backfires and I get pushed to one side, all the more reason to find something better. Anyway in my second management meeting there was a concerted push to get everyone to use AI more. Fuck that, fuck that forever.
Positive: Weather has been good and I’ve been getting more exercise. Hoping it will result in feeling better at some point because everything else is making me feel worse.
Fuck that AI nonsense. Got into a bit of a discussion with a friend last night, their work uses it so they use it and think it has some value for summaries and whatnot and man, just no. But these are large institutions and they have a lot of weight to make this stuff happen. Sort of like your (and my) terrible government! But they are not inevitable, glad you found some relief at the protest.
I need to try to be rational when arguing against it because I know it does have SOME applications in specific situations… but it just feels like all of technology is pushing it as a one-stop fix for everything and that leads to disaster. But if I’m going to successfully argue against it then I need to read up more about it and ugh I don’t want to
Yeah, I am in the same boat. The starting point for most discussions seems to be “this has some good uses, we just need to use them well” and I think that is the problem — it already starts with some acceptance, and from there you can only go to total acceptance. The starting point should be “this has no good uses unless you specifically prove otherwise,” put the adopters on the defensive.
A rescission bill is definitely coming to Congress Monday and will seek to claw back monies already distributed to public media. Lord knows what this will do to my company’s budget, as well as the industry. (And lord knows how you take back money you already distributed.) The likelihood is that GOP types who in the past supported at least some funding for NPR and PBS will roll over for their master, but it is not beyond the possible that a few could remember their previous votes. If by some chance you live in a district for such a Congressperson or Senator, please consider raising your voice.
Meanwhile, my wife’s employers announced they plan to sell their building and rent space elsewhere. Parallel to my employers’ long gestating plan to move offices. It will be interesting to see who moves first, and to where. It’s a very unsettled time in the NYC commercial real estate space, between and the emergence of the hybrid workplace. I think her employers have also decided this is a good time to sell and to plow the purchase price into their mission or endowment (she too works in nonprofit). And just for fun, the building my company is in, is underwater, due as much to mismanagement as anything else. (I always get a kick from saying an office tower is underwater.)
Oh, and it’s busy time at work, with board meetings coming and a lot of other stuff.
Away from that, my father in law is returning and for some reason didn’t communicate his plans till my wife tracked him down. He’s been a lot less communicative of late, though I feel like there is a game going on between him and my wife to see which one reaches out to the other first. She said she would call him Wednesday and didn’t call till today. For all that they are close, I think she might avoid talking to him. (I do the same with my mother, TBH.)
Doing pretty good! Almost done unpacking in my new place and it’s quieter (half a mile from my old one) EXCEPT for what I think are a father and son in repeated domestic disputes. I did knock on their door at 6 in the morning (they woke me up near 5) and ask them to keep it the hell down, but the older guy had already called the cops. Then there were three cars here and nothing happened.
Otherwise, work’s going well beyond one hiccup and I got a twenty cent raise! Only downside is they’re adding another in-office day on Mondays starting in August.
This you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts1hzoZpnfo
I’ve been writing a shitty novel. That sounds like deprecation, but it’s something I’m chasing with full clarity of vision; I’m making a full-fledged effort to make a living at writing books with my eye to self-publishing on Kindle, and the first step is knowing how to format it correctly. I don’t want to waste time writing something really good only to get to the end and lose all motivation when I found I fucked it up in conception. So I decided to write a novel that breaks all my understanding of good storytelling – it’s dramatically inert, it’s absurdly unrealistic and implausible, the worldbuilding is contradictory and self-serving, much of it is me rambling about topics too banal even for an essay on Star Wars, and to top it all off, it’s in first person.
I’m about 14k in to an expected length of 50k and I’m having the time of my life. The fundamental problem originally was ‘how do I write at length about something I don’t care about?’, because I can’t really do anything I’m not fanatical about, so when I decided specifically to commit to a shitty novel, that opened me up considerably. The process is enormous fun; lifting from things without actually plagiarising, and working random, previously unimportant shit from my day into writing. This actually, legitimately feels like good practice for coming up with the basic ideas and has opened my perspective up enormously.
This sounds like a lot of fun, although I’m also amusing myself imagining the result becoming a surprise bestseller as you find yourself trapped writing shitty novels for an insatiable public. Not too unlike Lucas with Star Wars, come to think of it.
That actually does sound like a lot of fun!
That sounds like a ton of fun, and it’s not even the first time I’ve heard “write something deliberately shitty” as a tip for breaking certain kinds of blocks or initiating certain kinds of creativity. I know I love giving myself permission to indulge in some really sloppy shit.
Year of the Month update!
May’s year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 2nd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Moon Pilot
May 9th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Bon Voyage!
May 15th: John Bruni: L’Eclisse/Il Sorpasso
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
And there’s still time to sign up for any of these movies, albums, books, et al from 1999!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez – Summerteeth/The Soft Bulletin/Utopia Parkway
TBD: Lauren James – Storm of the Century
Apr. 25th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Disney on DVD
Apr. 29th: Dave Shutton: American Pie/Class of 1999