Girl Detective

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation.

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, a book about organizing without organizations, gave a speech recently (16-min. video here, via Making Light; transcript here) in which he argued that the information age is akin to the industrial age, and what society has been spending its cognitive surplus on over the past decades is not gin, but sitcoms.

Shirky’s a good speaker; I recommend taking/making time to watch the video. He says that projects like Wikipedia are a societal shift away from consuming alone, toward consuming, producing and sharing content. He implies there is a limited future for passively received media. I see the self-destructing music industry as a good example. I also think that the more cognitive surplus there is, the greater the tendency for information to be free, meaning both available and at no cost.

I’m probably preaching to the converted and singing to the choir here, since many of you are bloggers and commenters who produce and share. But Shirky’s ideas have lingered since I watched the video, and I’m interested to see how many examples of movement beyond consumption to production and sharing I’ll notice in the coming days.

I was perplexed when I saw The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Michael Zulli. It looked like a nicely produced hardcover graphic novel, typical of Dark Horse, a publisher of upscale, quality books. Yet something didn’t feel right, and it was the $13.95 price tag. Nice HC GNs are usually $20 and up. This one was thin, though. Once I read it, I understood. This was not a graphic novel, or even a graphic novella. It was a graphic short story, gussied up in hardcover and given a price about double what it would be if the book had been released like most one-shot stories, in a perfect-bound softcover for $6.95.

Enough geeking about the packaging though. The story starts off clumsily, I thought, with three friends eating sushi, talking about the end of some event involving a woman they call Miss Finch. Then the narrative is picked up by one of the three, years later. This double flashback didn’t work for me: end of event, years after end of event, beginning of event. When I finally got myself situated in time, though, I really enjoyed the story. It’s vintage Gaiman, based on an old prose short story of his, beautifully and evocatively painted by Zulli, one of Gaiman’s collaborators on Sandman. Dark, adult, fantastic, odd and funny, it’s a quick, enjoyable read.

Worth $13.95 in HC, though? Methinks not, though I don’t begrudge the creators my money. Gaiman and Zulli are both local, so some of it is staying in my community.

Woo. Iron Man is a lot of fun. I am a comic-book geek (not redundant, by the way), but I’m not very familiar with the Iron Man story. I still enjoyed this movie a lot. Robert Downey, Jr. is great as Tony Stark, a playboy weapons tycoon who undergoes a crisis of conscience. Paltrow is a good foil. Terrence Howard is strong as the military friend, and Jeff Bridges is over the top, but appropriately so given his role.

Warning for geek boys: my husband G. Grod was very, very disappointed that Black Sabbath’s song Iron Man was not used in the film as it was in the trailer. Instead, it was sampled throughout.

After a disappointing season 3, I’ve been enjoying season 4 of Battlestar Galactica, and dread the break that I know will come all too soon. I fantasize that I’ll rewatch all the episodes in the break, but I know myself, and my time, and my need for sleep, so I doubt it’ll happen. Lots happened on last night’s episode, but a few things stuck out for me–so spoilers for this ep below.

Tigh was the one to respond to Nicky’s crying and change his diaper. I pointed this out to my husband, G. Grod, who shrugged and said, “He’s Tigh. He’s the XO. He gets things done.” Interesting that neither Tory nor Galen responded to care for the kids.

Tigh’s visions of Ellen are similar to the ones that Baltar and Six have of each other.

I did NOT like how Tyrol looked at Nicky late in the episode; will he try to pull a Cally, even though he doesn’t know what happened? Aaron Douglas has always been one of the best actors on the show, and that’s saying a lot.

And Lee’s hair has gotten longer. It’s poofily civilian.

I thought The Jane Austen Book Club was a very good film, and faithful to the spirit, if not the letter of the book, which I also thought was very good. I found it so well done that I not only watched all the extras, but stayed up late to do so.

Austen completed six novels, and the book club has six characters, whose joys and troubles overlap as they work their way through Jane’s oeuvre. The movie is very well cast. Each actor does a good job of embodying their character’s charms and quirk. Hugh Dancy is Grigg, the only male in the group. He wears spandex better than he adopts an American accent. Emily Blunt is smoldering as the repressed Prudie. Maria Bello is intimidating as a control-freak dog breeder and matchmaker; she went a little nuts with the Botox though. Her forehead hardly moves. Kathy Baker has appropriately wacky hair and outfits for the spacy Bernadette. Amy Brenneman is sympathetic as a recently divorced parent, and Maggie Grace is charming as the reckless Alexis. Jimmy Smits and Marc Blucas do a great job in supporting roles as well. It’s a wonderful ensemble, and the movie clips along at a satisfying pace through a year of their lives.

Aside from the performances, what I loved about this movie was its obvious love for reading in general, and Jane’s books in particular. Each segment focuses on one character, and one book. Each character is shown reading each book. With one notable exception, most of the editions are different, and obviously cherished; they look lived in. Penguin, Oxford, softcover, hardcover, they reminded me fondly of my shelves, where I have different editions of works by Austen and the Brontes.

The extras did a good job of rounding out the film. One on Austen interviewed two scholars to give details on her life. For example, one of the things known about Tom Lefroy is that he ran out the back door one day when Austen came to visit, and returned the visit days later in the company of his 13yo cousin. “Hardly the stuff of passion,” one of the commentators notes, wryly, in what may be a small dig at Becoming Jane, which imagined a torrid romance between Austen and Lefroy. I skipped the extras in Becoming Jane; that film took so many liberties with fact that it hardly seemed a reliable reference. Extras on The Jane Austen Book Club included an analysis of which character reflected which novel, as well as a brief but entertaining glimpse of the red-carpet opening of the film. A behind-the-scenes featurette wasn’t the usual puff piece; it included interesting background for how the charactes were cast, and how the film received financing. For example, Maggie Grace is an Austen geek; she’s read all the novels, short stories and letters.

If you like reading Austen, and enjoyed Fowler’s book, you’ll likely appreciate the movie. It’s done skillfully and with care. If you’re lukewarm or unfamiliar with either, it might just prompt you, as the book did with me, to seek out all of Austen’s novels.

For Battlestar Galactica geeks (redundant?), I did a little googling of the significance of the number seven, which is the number of the last unknown Cylon model. From Religious Tolerance:

The Greek Phythagoreans believed that the number seven pointed symbolically to the union of the Deity with the universe. This association was picked up by the Christian church, especially during the Middle Ages. Seven was regarded as having sacred power, as in the seven cardinal virtues, seven deadly sins, seven sacraments, seven churches mentioned in the last book in the Bible, Revelation, etc.

More, from Wikipedia and Bible Wheel.

My guess is Baltar, not Starbuck or Adama.

Continuing my way through Bryan K. Vaughan’s widely acclaimed post-apocalyptic comic-book series Y the Last Man, I finished Volume 5, Ring of Truth. Several important things take place, most notably the explanation for why Yorick Brown and his monkey Ampersand were the only male mammals to survive the plague. Between a murderous ninja (redundant?), and a hallucinating Hero (capitalization intended), Vaughan throws some backstory and red herrings into the mix. It’s a fast-paced story that caused me to switch after book 5 to the monthly individual issues, since I couldn’t wait the many months for the next collected volume to come out. Now that the series is done, however, I recommend you seek out the volumes, not the individual issues. They’re filled with distracting ads; the collections are concentrated story.

I read on in individual issues to the end putting off both a nap and bedtime; I value sleep so much, given its lack in my life because of small kids, that this is a high compliment. I cried at the last issue, yet found it hopeful and satisfying. Y is a good story, with strong characters, and lots of savory subplots that support that strong overarching narrative.

A new episode of Bones aired this week, and I was glad for its return.

Did anyone else recognize the actress who played Sweets’ girlfriend April as Delia Fisher from My So Called Life, the nice girl who had a crush on Ricky? Her name is Senta Moses.

The trademark Bones banter was in the forefront, the snoozy murder in the background, and there were some excellent scenes featuring all the main characters.

There was no mention of this season’s big bad, Gormogon, but a recent blurb in EW said the identity would be revealed this season. When asked if it was Sweets, the creator laughed. I hope that meant it’s absurd, because he’s a great recurring character. Why do I think it’s not absurd? He obsessed over the file in an ep earlier this season, and as a psychologist has access to impressionable and possibly criminal young boys.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is very good. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Morning News Tournament of Books, and the Pulitzer.

Oscar is a pudgy social outcast whose family came from the Dominican Republic. In short segments, we learn about him, his sister Lola, his mother, and finally, about the narrator Yunior and his relationship to the family. Theirs is an immigrant story, about the old world and the new, told in a unique snappy, geeky, Spanish-slang-filled patois. Is the family’s string of tragedies a curse, “fuku”, or is their survival good fortune? Is it just life?

The world is full of tragedies enough without niggers having to resort to curses for explanations.

That’s Yunior’s take at one point, though he wavers. What the reader thinks is left open. There are passages of magical realism, of unbelievable survival, of astonishing love. This book reminded me of Middlesex because of its old/new world ancestral histories, and of Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay because of its brazen comic-book and sci-fi/fantasy geek love. My only regret is that I was whisked out of each character’s life just as I got deeply into their story.

Rachel Donadio’s recent back page essay in the NYT book section on literary deal breakers got a lot of comments, and a lot of linkage.

Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed – or misguided – literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.

Like most bookish bloggers, I could rattle off books or authors that make me cringe. It’s too easy, though, and really, too potentially offensive. As soon as I say I hate x, someone else would say they loved it, or at least didn’t hate it.

More fun, I think, are literary dealMAKERs. My friend LXN worked in a bookstore, and when my soon-to-be friend Thalia asked if they had any Diana Wynne Jones, they bonded about Dogsbody, and Thalia got invited to a potluck at LXN’s. At that party, Thalia and I both saw the list of books for LXN’s book group, and asked to join. On my first date with now-husband G. Grod, he saw Watchmen and Sandman graphic novels on my shelf, and knew we were off to a promising start.

So the question I put to you is, what have been literary dealmakers for you, in friendship or in love?

Last November, children’s book author/illustrator extraordinaire Mo Willems announced that he was writing a new Pigeon book, and that the title began, “The Pigeon Wants A…” School kids were invited to write in with their guesses. The publisher received over 13,000 replies; many schoolteachers galvanized their classes for group replies. (Links thanks to ALoTT5MA)

Well, April 1 was the announcement date. Here is what the Pigeon wants. Unfortunately, it may be what my son, 4yo Drake, wants too.

We’ll get the book. Not the other thing, though.

I’m sure all you geeks know that Battlestar Galactica returns tonight for the first part of its last season, number 4. There is a funny, helpful video at Scifi.com called What the Frak is Going On, to help remind us of what’s gone before, since it’s been so frakkin’ long. The video is 8 minutes, but fast paced and well worth watching. It reminded me of why I’ve loved the show, and still have hope for a strong last season.

The Morning News announces the winner of The Tournament of Books. It’s one I haven’t gotten to yet, though on deck after Marianne Wiggins’s Shadow Catcher, which is at bat. The tournament, the judging and the commentary were lots of fun, and I’ve really enjoyed the books I’ve read because of it, and look forward to the ones I haven’t got to yet.

Today is the first “zombie” match in the Morning News Tournament of Books–critical darling Then We Came to the End, which I just finished and loved, goes up against Remainder, which I’ve not yet read, and which one reader of this blog hated. Can Ferris continue his march to the final, or will he be defeated by a zombie, hungry for brains, and notoriously hard to kill?

The Nonist has posted lovely images from Candida Hofer’s book of photographs, Libraries. (Heads up thanks to Becca.) I had a hard time choosing which to post, since they’re stunning. While the Nonist jokes that it’s like porn for book nerds, I beg to differ.

Sexy? Yes. “Porn”? No. Art, baby, art.

In anticipation of the May 22 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I re-visited Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in a long time. Entertainment Weekly did a good feature on the series, and had this to say:

Raiders obliterated those wheezy old rules [of beginnings, middles, and ends] by plunging headfirst into the good stuff. In fact, it is a movie entirely made up of good stuff–115 minutes of unrelenting climaxes stacked up on top of one another.

It was good in the theater when I was thirteen; it’s good at home now that I’m forty. This is such straightforward, pure entertainment that Spielberg and Lucas made it look effortless, though this is belied by its near inability to be duplicated.

I started Laura Lippmann’s What the Dead Know yesterday. I went to bed at 10:30. When I couldn’t sleep, I happily got up and read for another 90 minutes. I don’t think I’ll be posting much till I’m done. Which I hope is soon.

I reread Fforde’s Eyre Affair because of my recent re-read of Jane Eyre, and because I hope to venture further in the Thursday Next series, which many friends have recommended to me. EA is great fun–a thumping good read. It contains some clumsy writing, but this hardly intruded on the breakneck pace of the story.

Thursday Next is a literary detective in a fictional England that so loves literature that citizens routinely change their names to that of their favorite poet; there are about four thousand John Miltons in London alone.

Claire Tomalin’s recent Guardian piece on her Milton collection of poems was linked to this week from Arts & Letters Daily. It gave me some timely insight into why Milton was Fforde’s fictive first choice.

After the theft of Dickens’ original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit, Thursday pursues a villain named Acheron Hades. He’s nearly invincible though, as he can read minds, is bulletproof and doesn’t appear on camera. There is a wild chase (but not a wild good chase; see below for why not), guns, vampires, evil corporate goons, an unending war, time travel, and many wonderful scenes with Mr. Rochester.

For other books I’ve read this year and last year, plus music and movies, visit my shelves at Gurulib.

From Dictionary.com, because the relevant passage in EA eludes me:

wild goose chase
1592, first attested in “Romeo and Juliet,” where it evidently is a fig. use of an earlier (but unrecorded) literal sense in ref. to a kind of follow-the-leader steeplechase.

Even if you don’t think you have six minutes, start watching Evolution of Dance and I suspect you’ll be there till the end, like I was. It’s a hilarious montage of pop dance moves over the last fifty-plus years. I almost spit out my Darjeeling when he did Thriller, though I question his placement of the Oompah Loompah song on the timeline.

My husband G. Grod sometimes uses Youtube videos to entertain the boys while I’m making dinner. 4yo Drake’s favorite is Fatboy Slim’s That Old Pair of Jeans, with juggling by Vova. I think Evolution of Dance will be a hit with the boys, while also giving us ideas for other videos to look up.

Oh, the geek in me loves how simple and functional this is, especially the bookmarking feature. Link from Boing Boing.