Disjointed Observations

The End

2010-05-29T04:43:00.005-05:00

Find me now at the new Disjointed Observations.

Here's the issue: this space is stale and stagnant, at least for me. It's creation was necessitated when I took a class in the Fall of 2007 in which digital submission of writing required, and I hadn't though to use it past those ends. Eventually I found it a decent forum for responding to things I read or musing about other topics that arose as I pursued my degree, but those impulses never manifested themselves into a sustained or compelling effort for me. And if it failed to be those things for me, there is slight chance that it would be those things for someone else.

I started watching Lost only this January and made my way through five seasons in six weeks as I looked forward to the final season's premiere. Curiosity sent me searching the interwebs, stumbling across the work of paid critics like Jeff Jensen from Entertainment Weekly and Alan Sepinwall, who has recently taken his very good blog to Hitfix.com. These guys were writing the sort of analysis I could only hope to produce, and ridiculously late I began to realize that this was something I could be doing too. Perhaps not for multiple television programs as I rarely watch more than a few, but for the sorts of things that interest me and might be of interest to others. In fact, I had a good time writing however briefly about the use of hypertext in film a few months ago; I am a fool for not producing this sort of content more often.

This interest in Lost coupled with the unbelievable hype that surrounded the final season introduced some new scholars to me as well. Aided by my long overdue embrace of Twitter, analysis of episodes were constantly being referred by those I followed, and I found myself with more than I could handle in terms of trying to figure out the importance of sideways-universe. But these writers produced content about a lot of things, not just Lost, and rather than being paid to write for a web/print publication, they were often graduate students or young professors--people who are walking the same path that I am, aside from the small fact that they are producing ideas while I am not.

So this (obviously) needs to change. For one, it means shutting this space down and starting up a new one, a fresh one, that will hopefully inspire me to get more done. But more importantly, it means rethinking the way I approach writing, both in this sort of online space as well as more traditional ones. Not only do I want my posting to reflect my research interests, I also want there to be a more personal element to what I write. Example: I now realize that the sort of job I have now is not the sort of job where I am setting myself up for a big payday. Neither good/bad, it is a reality. The only way for me to earn more money is to work harder, longer. I want to work smarter. It takes the same amount of effort to write a post read by one person as it does a post read by a million. If I can find a way to get paid a penny a reader, I'd be working smarter, even with far fewer than a seven-figure readership.

I have lagged far behind my peers when it comes to engaging with new media. As I now am researching a degree in the digital humanities with research interests firmly lying within the ways communication in digital spaces affects communication in non-digital ones, I need to not only engage with such things but also note my observations. I'll almost certainly continue to record my thoughts on Star Trek and mainstream fiction/nonfiction books, but I hope to write a lot more a lot more often.

This isn't the first time I have made such a vow, but with all the free time I find myself with as my wife finishes her degree while I merely work a few shifts a week, I feel it is the time. The current plan is to go live on a new site within a week. Of course, I will publicize the shift all over the place and put a link at the top of this entry, but this space will remain inactive, as a relic. Maybe I will import the content, maybe not.

I'm keeping the name though, it's too good.

Reading List: April 2010

2010-05-04T23:51:00.004-05:00

After returning from the PCA/ACA National Conference last month, I was contacted by a couple of professors from SUNY Potsdam who are editing a book on digital rhetoric inviting me to submit my presentation as a chapter, assuming I could get it done in under two weeks. Knowing a good thing when it falls in my lap, I jumped at the opportunity, integrating a portion of my thesis with my conference paper in order to make a broader, and more lengthy, argument. So that's how I spent the last half of April and a major reason why nothing got posted here.

Now I have joined a group of colleagues in preparing an article on Facebook & Pedagogy, which will almost certainly be published. Not exactly in my area of research, but a peer-reviewed publication will be very advantageous at this stage in the career. And after receiving a call for papers from Modern Fiction Studies, I am beginning a look at the way the third season of Star Trek: Enterprise dealt with the cultural climate in the US after 9/11. I'm sure I'll find an angle somewhere, and even though I am unlikely to be published in such a prestigious journal at this stage, it's a win/win scenario because I can always send it elsewhere if it doesn't pass muster. It's also nice to sit around and watch hours of Star Trek guilt free.

I also found out this afternoon that I was placed on the wait list for Florida's program, so I am hoping that with the book chapter, the co-authored paper, my analysis of Enterprise and 9/11, and a revised paper I did for a Writing Center Theory & Practice course, I'll be a sure thing come next year.

Anyway, last month I completed 7 books and 4 graphic novels, which were:

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Queen & Country: Operation: Morningstar by Greg Rucka & Brian Hurtt
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons
Fables: The Great Fables Crossover by Bill Willingham, et al.
The Needs of the Many by Michael A. Martin
Queen & Country: Operation: Crystal Ball by Rucka & Leandro Fernandez
Reality Hunger by David Shields
Queen & Country: Operation: Black Wall by Rucka & J. Alexander
Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith
Synthesis by James Swallow

Wish I would have had a little time to give these works a proper review, but here's a quick shorthand.

The Good: Wallace, Shields, Simmons, Rucka, Smith, Swallow
The Bad: Willingham, Gawande
The Ugly: Martin

Thoughts and comments are encouraged and appreciated.

The Decalogue: Seven

2010-04-22T06:25:00.005-05:00

Seventh Commandment: Thou shalt not steal.

In recovery, addicts will often refer to their behavior when using as an act of theft. If you are getting drunk rather than spending time with your children, you are stealing the presence of a loving parent from them. If you are ducking out of work early in order to catch happy hour, you are quite literally stealing productivity and the employer’s right o have a worker focused on his or her job. This message is rendered explicitly in the seventh film in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue, an affecting and well produced entry even if it seemed slightly transparent to me.

Majka, a young college senior, lives with her parents in the housing complex that unifies each entry in the series. She has a six-year-old daughter who live with her, Ania, but this daughter is being raised by her parents as Majka’s sister, and her mother, who was never affectionate or supportive with Majka, fawns over Ania and is quite close to her. Majka wants to flee with Ania to Canada, but needs her mother’s permission to obtain a passport for the girl.

Already the theft is obvious. Majka has had her daughter stolen to be raised as someone else’s, just as she has had the support of a parent stolen by her mother who lacked fairness and affection for her. Ania too has had her true mother stolen from her. It is arguable that such thefts were beneficial for some involved: Ania is likely better off in some ways not being raised by a teenager, and the freedom from childrearing responsibilities allows Majka to remain in school, with all the opportunities such advancement allows. Yet Kieslowski isn’t a moralizer; theft is theft, no matter how one may justify it.

As the story progresses, Majka steals Ania from show at the children’s theater and takes her to Wojtek, Ania’ father. The two met when he was hired as a literature professor by Majka’s mother, only to fall in love with the sixteen-year-old Majka and impregnate her. He is initially uncomfortable, yet warms to the young girl as time passes. Majka intends to blackmail her mother for permission to take Ania with her to Canada. Even at this point we can see theft in virtually every action one character takes in relation to another, both literal and figurative. And such actions recur until the narrative’s end and, one can imagine, continues on.

Kieslowski’s narrative is so effective because it allows on to view strained relationships the way those in addiction recovery often do: as acts of theft. While the story provides characters and situations with which to practice such an evaluation, it is in our own lives that such analysis can be the most painful, yet also provide the basis for much healing.

The Decalogue: Six

2010-04-16T02:48:00.003-05:00

Sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not commit adultery.

In the sixth film of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue first seems to be about a naïve young man who develops an obsessive attraction to a woman he doesn’t even know. Both he and the woman he admires live in the same apartment complex that serves as a link between the characters in each episode. Tomek is a shy young man who works in the post office by day and by night spies on his neighbor Magda with a telescope he has stolen specifically for this purpose. As we see Magda through Tomek’s gaze, we learn that she is a bold and confident woman, an artist, who shares her bed with several men who make frequent visits.

In order to get closer to her, Tomek calls her home but says nothing when she answers, sends her fake money order notices so that she is forced to come into his post office, steals some of her letters and reads them, and even goes so far as to get a job as a milkman just to get close to her apartment. When one of his fake notices causes a confrontation between Magda and his manager, he feels guilty and confesses everything to her. When she asks why he has done all these things, he replies that he loves her.

For Magda, love means the carnal act, the playful banter that has no deeper emotion behind it. There is no such thing as true romantic love. But despite what one might think by merely reading about Tomek’s actions, his love is not carnal at all; instead, he simply loves her. Since he is so shy and innocent, presenting no threat to her, Magda toys with Tomek, putting on a show for him by positioning her bed in front of the window and seducing a lover when she knows he is watching. When informing her lover that they have been spied upon, he flies into a rage and punches Tomek. Now it is Magda’s turn to feel guilty.

After accepting Tomek’s offer to go to an ice cream parlor, Magda hears him tell all about his love for her. In a truly erotic scene, she tries to entice him into the sort of love she knows, only to have it end disastrously as Tomek runs away in horror. Now the tables are turned as she uses binoculars to try and find out what has happened to him. His innocent ways have awakened something inside of her, yet he has slashed his wrists and is taken to the hospital.

The film isn’t about adultery, as neither Tomek nor Magda are married, but instead about adulterated love., love that has become debased. Many of the scenes place the viewer as a gazer, emphasizing the male eye of the camera, yet desensualizes that look to come more into line with the views on love of Tomek rather than those of Magda. Yet he himself has been the subject of a gaze the entire time, that of his godmother, who understands his loneliness as she herself is lonely after her son has left and never really returned home.

This sixth entry is as much Magda’s story as it is Tomek’s, for her concern for him changes the way she conceptualizes love, marking that change as the crux of the narrative. Yet after Tomek returns from the hospital and encounters Magda, he tells her that he doesn’t look at her anymore. She has changed, but now her love is as unfulfilled as his once was. The redemption of love is blunted by the dismissal of one’s affection. Magda is now in the place Tomek inhabited in the first scene, and Kieslowski’s slam cut to end the film is jarring and effective.

The Decalogue: Five

2010-04-07T04:40:00.004-05:00

Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill.

Krzysztof Kieslowski begins the fifth entry in The Decalogue depicting three characters who are initially separate, but whose paths not unexpectedly cross as the narrative progresses. By choosing to leave almost all contextualization out of the story as it opens, he is able to reveal needed information when it will be the most effective in terms of creating a certain sensibility with the viewer. In fact, this is Kieslowski’s most polemic entry thus far.

The director introduces the three main characters separately, using distinctive cinematography that uses almost no establishing shots in order to make the three men seem even more isolated. In fact, the extensive use of close-ups on each individual throughout the film serves to make the narrative seem more abstract, to make the characters seem less like individuals and more like types.

Jacek is a young man not quite twenty-one who is angry and seems alienated as he wanders the city, looking for and causing trouble wherever he goes. He drops a rock off a bridge and onto a car’s windshield as it drives underneath, causing an accident. He scares away pigeons who are being fed by an old lady, even as she asks him not to. Piotr is a young, handsome lawyer who is interviewing with a job at a prestigious law firm. He is firmly committed to the highest ideals of justice and stridently opposes the death penalty. And the taxi driver is a middle aged man who is mean spirited and unsympathetic. He leers at young girls, scares small dogs with his horn, and promises to wait for a couple only to drive away without them.

It doesn’t take long for one to realize that Jacek is going to commit a murder, which logically must be the taxi driver. The murder isn’t quick and easy as we often see it portrayed in entertainment; instead, Jacek strangles the man, beats him with a pipe, drags his body towards a body of water to dump it in, realizes the man is still alive, and then as the driver begs for his life, smashes his head with a large rock.

Cut to a year later. Piotr is serving as the defense attorney for Jacek, whereby they immediately lose their appeal to stave off the death penalty. The rest of the film portrays the cruelty and detachment of the state when implementing the harshest of all penalties.

Yet what separates this film from the typical polemic against the death penalty is the nature of both victims: neither is a sympathetic character. As an audience, we realize that the killing of the taxi driver I not justified even though he is presented as a bad person. And with no doubt about the guilt of Jacek from either the state or the viewer, an argument against capital punishment is automatically more difficult to make. Nevertheless, as we learn the first real information about Jacek just before he is taken to be hanged, that his young sister was killed by one of his friend’s with a tractor after he and Jacek spent the afternoon getting drunk when they were thirteen or so, he becomes more than just grist in the argument.

At the start of the film, Piotr mention that vales in Poland are declining, and thus as people ask themselves whether they are doing things of value, that definition is constantly shifting. What Kieslowski is trying to impart with this film, from my perspective, is to ask how society should respond to this shift, a shift that produces small sinners like the taxi driver and egregious ones like Jacek. Does it merely punish those who have lost their way, or does it try and restore those lost values to the individual in question? By depicting the machinery of the state to be just as valueless and inhuman as Jacek, his execution serves only to further erode the values of the society.

We often have arguments over the penal system here in America, asking whether it is for punishment or for rehabilitation. The state claims it’s the latter, but recidivism rates would argue that it is in fact the former. Even if it could be proven that the death penalty served as a deterrent, it still wouldn’t make executions moral. Instead, imagine if the resources for Jacek to seek counseling after his sister’s death had been in place. Perhaps he would have remained at home, as he speculated, and the murder never would have taken place. Or perhaps if the sort of moral society Piotr was lamenting the loss of would have existed enough that two thirteen year old boys wouldn’t have been getting drunk and driving a tractor. While the abstract nature of the story clashes with the intense characters of the previous four films, Kieslowski argues effectively here that killing itself is wrong and that a society who engages in killing as punishment is contributing to the problem of moral decay, not combating it.

From Space Exploration to Time Travel

2010-04-05T23:15:00.000-05:00

While attending a panel on time travel this weekend at the National PCA/ACA Conference in St. Louis, a panel that at one point was so boring that I prayed to time travel to the end of it, a fellow audience member asked a question that has had me thinking since: what are we to make of the professed shift from science fiction narratives centering around space exploration to those centering on time travel?

Of course, this shift is not comprehensive. A presentation by Korcaighe Hale examined the selection of historical events in three time travel shows ranging from the later 60s to the early 90s, but with shows like Lost and Flashforward dominating the airwaves and others centered on exploration, like Enterprise, incorporating elements of time travel into their mythologies, it’s not hard to argue that this shift has taken (or is taking) place. But what reasons could there be?

One person acknowledged that as we learn more and more about our universe, about how unlikely it is that we will ever be able to leave our solar system, such stories of exploration no longer have real traction. I suppose this is true to some extent, though it’s not as if a show like Star Trek took the science all that seriously and viewers didn’t seem to have big problems with that. I have another idea, but as I am severely ignorant of much of science fiction and its discourses, I am going to argue through the prism of Trek and let my argument be judged as in/adequate based on such a decision.

Why did the public so engage with the space exploration narrative central to Trek in the late 60s and through syndication in the 70s? Coming out of the policies of brinksmanship in the 1950s, where the Eisenhower Administration moved to contain communism within the Soviet Union, it seems to me that a show about a peaceful (military) explorers spreading a message of human rights and a celebration of the individual would have some traction from a purely patriotic standpoint. It allowed the viewers of that era to identify the positive intentions of their government separate from the unpopular policies by which they were implemented.

But with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need to spread the message of anti-communism was no longer necessary, and as a result, the sort of space exploration narrative eventually lost its traction as well. Sure we had The Next Generation going strong through 1994, but even the popular Deep Space Nine abandoned the exploration format in order to tell the story of a Federation trying to broker peace in a rapidly changing galactic landscape, arguably analogous to the state of the world after the fall of the Soviet Union.

We now live in a world where we aren’t threatened with death every day, on a societal scale at least, and thus we can relax from spreading our message and take time to appreciate the differences between us and others by studying how we got here. And thus the time travel story resonates, for we can go back and see what choices shaped our society, how different (and the same) people were in the past versus today. And we forecast what will happen to us in the future along these same principles.

I’m not even sure I totally buy this, but it seems a framework for a larger discussion can begin here. It’s even possible that I will be presenting a paper on this topic at next year’s conference, but before I get ahead of myself, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, perhaps contextualizing this argument within the greater scope of science fiction literature, but certainly offering your own takes even if they blow my hypothesis out of the proverbial water.

Reading List: March 2010

2010-04-01T22:39:00.003-05:00

Right now I am in St. Louis at the PCA/ACA National Conference where I am presenting my paper on hyperlink cinema tomorrow afternoon. I've attended a few panels over the past two days, including a great one comparing changes in baseball as being reflective to changes in the nation (and the reverse). I also have been immersed within the world of adaptation studies, trying to decide if that is a possible home for at least some of my interests. I'll likely be writing about some of what I've heard in future entries here.

Only seven posts of substance last month, but I am proud of them. I thought I'd blow through Kieslowski's Decalogue, but spacing them out has made for a more relaxed and reasoned response. That said, I hope to be done before April is over.

On the academic career front, I have some acceptances but as of now no funding, meaning I'll likely be taking a year off. In many ways this is a good thing: it gives my wife more time to finish her degree; more time for my house to accrue some value before I have to put it on the market; another year of banking real money before taking the huge cut to teach. Yet I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed, that it didn't feel like a step backwards. I have some ideas on how to make myself a better candidate to programs that will probably suit me better next year, so I am confident that I'll land in a better spot eventually, though on a day to day basis this is occasionally hard to remember.

March saw me avoid reading a novel for the first month since, well, before I started keeping a list. I'm still unengaged by literary fiction, though I may take a look at an occasional story or novel w/r/t adaptation studies in the near future. The best book I read was Nonzero by Robert Wright, an application of game theory to cultural and biological evolution. Since I finished this the night before leaving for St. Louis, I haven't written thoughts on it yet, but look for those in the future. Anyway, I read 4 books and 4 graphic novels last month:

Bomb Power by Garry Wills
Reading Judas by Elaine Pagels & Karen L. King
The Return of Depression Economics by Paul Krugman
Astro City: The Dark Age: Brothers & Other Strangers by Kurt Busiek & Brent Eric Anderson
Queen & Country: Operation: Broken Ground by Greg Rucka & Steve Rolston
Rasl: The Drift by Jeff Smith
Batman: Cacophony by Kevin Smith & Walt Flanagan
Nonzero by Robert Wright

Thoughts or questions about anything, whether related or not, are welcome as always.

Batman & the Failure of Moral Absolutism

2010-03-28T21:57:00.005-05:00

Earlier this week I read Kevin Smith’s new collected Batman tale, Cacophony, which takes the villain Onomatopoeia from his run on Green Arrow from about ten years ago (!) and sends him after the Caped Crusader. Smith acknowledges in his introduction the series’ main weakness, the excessive dialogue in the first issue, but he then overcorrects in the final two, leaving too much unsaid. The guy can write dialogue, and while I could have done without the reference to a green merkin, the shift made the later issues seem too sparse.

Anyway, Onomatopoeia really serves as a catalyst for a Batman/Joker story in which the Joker is shot, the bullet nicking his aorta, and Batman must decide whether to seek help for him or pursue Onomatopoeia. Knowing what one does about Batman, that he is a thoroughly good person despite the fact that he beats the shit out of petty criminals on a regular basis and spends millions of dollars on gadgets that could otherwise be used to clean up Gotham’s slums, it’s obvious what decision he makes. Even with Jim Gordon arguing forcefully that the Joker is a horrible person who killed a school full of children earlier in the series and should be left to bleed out, Batman can’t do it. This leads to a pretty good scene at the series’ end where the Joker, filled with anti-psychotics, explains to Batman that he will never be at peace until he is able to kill him. So the dilemma is that Batman can’t live with himself by killing the Joker, but if he had killed him then the Joker would be at peace and Gotham would be (relatively) safe, or if he himself was killed then the Joker would be at peace. Not terribly compelling, but Smith did a reasonably good job with it.

But what bothers me is that such a conversation is so blindingly obvious that it needn’t have happened. Of course Batman couldn’t kill the Joker, for his character is good while the Joker is evil. There’s no grey area, and thus by not protecting all life, the character would be forever tarnished. But placing such a virtuous character in such a situation makes for a disingenuous story, because who among us wouldn’t let the Joker bleed out in that situation? Batman didn’t shoot him, in fact he let the shooter escape to save him. So we, the audience, are Jim Gordon arguing for real justice and the understanding that moral absolutes are at times counterproductive, while Batman remains better than humanity. This of course may mean that as a result of his moral stance, Batman isn’t so much better than humanity, but that he stands apart from it as an Other.

This sort of thing isn’t unique to Batman and comic characters, but also infiltrates the realm of the utopian future society in Star Trek. So-called evolved humanity at times seems so distant from current humanity as to be unrelatable, something that obviously doesn’t click with viewers as exemplified with Voyager and Enterprise. The Federation has moral absolutes about how other people should be treated, how a society should act, so it prevents them from violating said morals for the greater good. In fact, some of the most popular and resonating episodes of Star Trek involve someone breaking the moral code to effect a necessary change, like the members of Section 31 or Captain Sisko conspiring with Garak to bring the Romulans into the Dominion War.

I don’t want to get into a metaphysical discussion about why the ends can sometimes justify the means, not just because it is an unwinnable argument but also because it’s not important here. I merely want to make the point that by setting up characters or societies with moral absolutes that are inviolable, an honest portrayal of the human experience will be near impossible to convey, for while we may one day hope to be like Batman or to live in the utopian Federation, it nevertheless will be difficult to ever relate to these types of characters as their experiences and worldview are necessarily so different from our own.

The Decalogue: Four

2010-03-23T18:18:00.004-05:00

Fourth Commandment: Honor thy father and thy mother.

Krzysztof Kieslowski didn’t set out to create simple parables with The Decalogue; instead, he sought to complicate the binary nature of the Ten Commandments and demonstrate greater implications of their dictums. In the fourth film, based around the commandment to honor one’s parents, Kieslowski expands his story to encompass the societal relationships between parents and children and the rigidity with which we adopt these roles.

The story tells of Anka, a beautiful twenty-year-old drama student, who lives at home with her father, Michal. The two have a very close, personal relationship, since Anka has been raised entirely by her father following her mother's death when she was only five days old. One day Michal leaves on a business trip for a few weeks, and during his absence, Anka discovers a letter in his desk that says, ‘to be opened after my death.’ As anyone would be, she is tempted to open the letter and read it anyway, dishonoring her father’s wishes that it remain unopened until his demise. Ultimately after much agonizing, she determines to open it and finds a letter addressed to her from her mother.

Now the simple moral is already in place. Anka’s father requested that the letter not be opened until he dies, yet she opens it anyway. And the letter serves as a Pandora’s box, for all that once was will be irrevocably altered now that it has been opened. When her father returns, Anka angrily confronts him with what she has learned from the letter: that Michal is not her real, biological father. She is angry that she was never told the truth, but her father responds that he never knew the contents of that letter and was never sure about the truth of this, himself, and so he always delayed revealing her mother’s letter to her. To Kieslowski’s credit, he does not allow the moral compunctions of the two characters to remain at this level, delving deeper into their relationship in a manner that one is unaccustomed to seeing even today, when so-called taboo subject matter is so common.

The rest of the film is essentially a long, beautifully photographed conversation between the two in order to get to the bottom of things. Anka is committed to knowing the truth and avoiding deception, and she gets Michal to swear to revealing his true feelings, no matter how painful. In the ensuing conversations, she reveals to her father that she has always a more than straightforward filial feelings for him—she has always had ambiguous, long-suppressed urges that suggested to her the romantic love between a man and a woman. She then gets him to confess that he too has had similar unrealized feelings for her. The implication from all this is that now that she was a mature and biologically unrelated woman, there was no moral law standing in the way of their consummating their long-held-back love.

Of course, society would recoil from such an arrangement, and as a viewer I couldn’t help but feel a bit of revulsion myself. Yet just because such behavior is not often addresses in literature or popular culture does not mean that such feelings are nonexistent, or even all that rare. While making his audience quite uncomfortable, Kieslowski is able to express a story that seems to reveal an aspect of the human condition worthy of further thought and introspection.

The morning after these searing revelations, Anka runs to her father and confesses that she had never really read her mother’s letter. The whole story about Michal not being her father had been a forgery, a fake letter in her mother's handwriting to show to Michal. Both she and her father may have their suspicions about her true parentage, but the truth still remains buried and unrevealed in her mother’s letter. Nevertheless, this lie of Anka's has led to the revelations of other truths concerning the real feelings between the two. She now asks Michal what they should do about the real, still-unread letter. But even with the truth still unknown, the Pandora’s box has still already been open, for the two have been playing the social roles of father and daughter for twenty years; an ability to shift into new roles as romantic partners seems not just improbable but likely impossible.

Anka’s lie reveals a continuation in the pattern concerning ‘honoring’ her father and her mother. On the surface of things, she has dishonored her parents in many ways, especially when she lied to Michal about having read the letter after opening it against his wishes. And her culminating action at the end of the film concerning the disposition of the real letter is also a dishonoring of her mother's wishes, in a way, as she decides to burn it without knowing the contents. Yet through these actions she and her father come to the conclusion that violating the social roles of father and daughter is impossible for they have inhabited them for so long. Her father is her father, perhaps not biologically as the remnants of the burned letter suggest, but rather because he played the role of her father for twenty years. It’s a cliché to say it, but it’s true, and as Anka and her father adjust to the altered relationship created as they confessed their desires, they respect the social roles and thus boundaries in the filial relationship, which of course is a way of saying that they honor it.

The Decalogue: Three

2010-03-21T15:27:00.003-05:00

Third Commandment: Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

After a very mixed two week stretch in which guarded highs and lows feeling like I got punched in the gut have left me disoriented and directionless, I realize that what I need is to just continue to write while I pursue some options and wait on situations to further develop. More on this in a week or two when I know more about it, but as I watched the third film in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue about a week ago and haven’t written anything about it, I’ll take it as an opportunity to dip my toes back in the water.

Kieslowski misfires in the third entry in his series, something that caused me to have little to no opinion on the film and thus little inclination to sit down and write up thoughts on it. On Christmas Eve, Janusz returns home from his job as a taxi driver dressed as Santa Claus in order to amuse his small children. On the way into the building, he passes Krzysztof, the professor whose son died in the first film, reminding the viewer of the importance of family and the extent to which these events all take place in a small fixed area. Paralleled to Janusz and his family, we also see Ewa visit her senile aunt at a nursing home. As we soon learn, Ewa and Janusz were former lovers and will spend most of the night together, though unromantically. Later most of the town attends a Midnight Mass and the two notice each other in the congregation.

While the events of the first two entries are associated with the internal journeys of the characters within, the weakness in the third entry stems from the lack of direction for these characters and their journey. Ewa comes to Janusz to ask his help tracking down her husband who has gone missing, the two spend the bulk of the narrative trying to find him, and then Ewa admits at the conclusion that he left her three years ago when he discovered Ewa and Janusz together. Kieslowski slowly reveals all the background information, so the viewer is engaged in pursuing a mystery him or herself, which parallels the characters, I suppose, though I wasn’t all that invested in deciphering the clues.

Nothing is resolved with the events of the episode. Ewa having confessed to Janusz her deception, realizes that while he is the only one who truly knows her (after her husband left and her aunt is rendered senile), he is now unavailable and feels little more than fond nostalgia and pity for her. Returning home, Janusz’s wife asks whether he was out with Ewa and whether that meant he’d be gone at nights from now on; he replies no, and that brief scene at the very end is so well acted that I wish we had seen a focus between these two characters with Ewa playing a secondary role.

Where I am baffled is how this story relates to the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy. Assuming that Christmas Eve, one of the holiest days, is representative of the Sabbath, perhaps Janusz should have remembered to put his priorities with his family and not be so torn with regards to his feelings for Ewa. But perhaps he helps her out of a sense of doing what is right, especially on the Sabbath, and by not giving in to a desire to sleep with her, is an example of not violating the Sabbath.

In all, this is a weak entry that up until this point had been a stellar series. A friend tells me that the fourth film was the most powerful for her, and I look forward to reviewing that for you tomorrow.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)

2010-03-10T05:49:00.005-06:00

I’ve read perhaps five times the number of plays I’ve seen, a ratio that skews horribly the way one approaches drama. Often people say that plays are meant to be seen and not read, but while begging the question then why they are published and sold to the mass market, it is a valid point. Several playwrights that have garnered heavy acclaim, like Sam Shepard and the late Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, were ones I didn’t care for all that much upon first reading them. It was only when seeing their works brought to life that the power of their drama came alive for me, and the limitations on merely reading a play were forever etched in my mind.

One could make a very similar comparison to John Krasinski’s new film, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and its source material, the stories of David Foster Wallace. Though he takes some creative liberties with the material, which we’ll explore in a moment, he essentially just produces dramatic readings from the text and films them, sometimes in a straightforward manner and sometimes not, creating a power within these stories that I didn’t feel the first time I read them almost ten years ago.

Wallace’s stories contained long interviews with men which basically amounted to monologues as the interviewers dialogue was excised and replaced solely with the letter ‘Q’ in order to indicate that something had been said. Apparently and experiment to write a narrative in which the main character is neither seen nor mentioned, Krasinski takes this idea and brings the interviewer to life as Sara Quinn (Julianne Nicholson), a graduate student who attempting to examine the impact of feminism, and to get over a messy breakup, by recording the desires and fears of men.

The film has received its share of negative reviews, and in a way I see where this is coming from. What basically amounts to a loosely collected series of monologues, one can sometimes feel that they are watching a college’s theater review rather than a cinematic narrative. But as all monologues can be judged on the strength of their actors, Krasinski has done well to cast the film with a powerhouse ranging from the comedic likes of Will Arnett and Will Forte to a very good performance by Dominic Cooper. But what really engaged me was the way that certain scenes were filmed, the way certain stories were told, in a more effective way than was possible for Wallace when he was writing on the page. Such adaptations to the strength of the medium is always and engaging topic for me, and I’d like to discuss just two here.

In one delightful sequence, Josh Charles presents the exact same speech five times to different women in order to break up with them. Krasinski cuts from scene to scene throughout the unbroken monologue, showing Charles and the different women in different locations without breaking the narration. It’s incredible and hilarious, and example of hideous behavior for sure, but one that is rendered so effectively in this medium as opposed to recitation in an interview which is what one would have gotten by just filming the page being read.

The second scene involves an overheard conversation between two men, one played by Law and Order: SVU actor Christopher Meloni. Meloni’s character relates a scene he witnessed when getting off an airplane and seeing a woman in a hysterical breakdown over the failure of her lover to return from breaking up with his girlfriend. Krasinski begins in the coffee shop where Sara overhears the conversation, but Meloni’s character relates the story, the scene shifts to the airport and again we have unbroken narration as we witness what happened. Meloni is in the scene, but is telling it to his friend at the same time; thus, when he speaks to the woman in his story, he actually turns to her and speaks. Yet he speaks of many things he wasn’t witness for, like the lead up for the trip that the boyfriend was making to break off his other relationship, and we see that happening, but by detaching from that coffeehouse and showing us the story, we no longer are watching Sara overhear a story with hideous actions, but we lose the mediation as we become the ones overhearing the exchange. In both of these cases, Krasinski adapts the verbatim narration in Wallace’s stories to make them successful in the medium of film, a perfect example of how such a transition can work.

This isn’t to say that I found the movie to be a great one, though the performances were stellar. The tone of the different men are sometimes hard to reconcile with the tone of Krasinski’s overall narrative. For example, there is a powerful scene in which Frankie Faison tells Sara about his father who worked for years as a bathroom attendant and is joined in the scene within the bathroom by his father as a much younger man. Their interaction, sort of a dual-monologue if one will forgive the contradiction in terms, is easily one of the most stirring performances in the film. But this jibes poorly with the protestations of Will Forte on how he loves everything about all women.

Everyone knows Krasinski for his role as Jim Halpert on the US version of The Office, and while it may be hard for some to see why he is being considered for the role of Captain America, watching his dramatic turn here makes the role seem more plausible. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is not a great film by any means, but it is a film worth your time, both for aspects of its narrative and for the insight into the way some men think. It might not be all that different from what a man close to you thinks himself.

Bomb Power by Garry Wills

2010-03-06T04:13:00.005-06:00

There is a simple and straightforward thesis to historian Garry Wills’s new book Bomb Power: the atomic bomb altered history down to its deepest constitutional roots by redefining the presidency with regards to the function of the Commander and Chief. He claims that it ‘fostered an anxiety of continuing crisis, so that society was pervasively militarized. It redefined the government as a national Security State, with an apparatus of secrecy and executive control’ which in turn redefined Congress as the ‘executor of the executive.’

Wills quickly moves the reader through episodes in the developmental history of the bomb, emphasizing how its development led to damages to both liberty and the constitutional system of checks and balances; with secrecy surrounding the project at such a premium, there was virtually no oversight from Congress. Shockingly, President Truman wasn’t even made aware of the existence of the atomic bomb until nine days after he assumed the presidency.

Wills acts as an iconoclast when examining the Cuban Missile Crisis which he asserts was caused by an overactive Kennedy Administration. That warheads were placed in Cuba as a deterrent against the use of American missiles in Turkey was not something that could go public; therefore the Soviets were portrayed as the aggressors and executive secrecy was invoked to cover up the quid pro quo of the missiles in Turkey being removed in exchange for removal of the Cuban missiles, a telling that seems absent from most accounts of JFK hagiography. And as is well known, Congress is granted the authority to declare war in the Constitution, but war hasn’t been declared after Word War II. Thus, Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan have been wars waged without the moniker from Congress, which often retroactively approved military actions the president had already ordered.

But where Wills really begins to make a worthy point is in his lengthy screed against the centralization of power within the executive branch, often referred to as the unitary executive. While I am familiar with the excessive use of presidential signing statements that were commonplace within the administration of George W. Bush, I was unaware that up until President Reagan and his Attorney General Edwin Meese, these signing statements were mostly ceremonial expressions of the executive branch’s receipt of a law from Congress. Under Meese, the statements were transformed as a way for the executive to impose meaning on legislation by dissenting from clauses it disagreed with, interpreting mandates, etc. Essentially, the constitutional authority to write the laws were being usurped by the executive, who got the last word on legislation with these signing statements, statements that have also been used by the judiciary in ruling on the application of these laws. In essence, the executive branch can disagree with a portion of a law in a signing statement, be sued for violating the law, and then be exonerated by the court citing the signing statement in question. But the author fails to link these signing statements to the influence of the bomb, placing it within the legacy of Vietnam and the War Powers Act, but failing to note that signing statements are used for all sorts of things, not merely national security/military issues. Such an oversight drastically weakens the argument just when he is trying to contextualize the bomb's influence in the politics of the past decade.

Wills is right that the bomb poses profound challenges to American constitutional governance. Congress's sole authority to authorize war is difficult to reconcile with the five minutes President Obama would have to decide whether to order the launch of nuclear weapons in retaliation if the United States were under missile attack. The end of the Cold War should allow alternative ways to balance nuclear deterrence with deliberative decision-making, though the antiquated secrecy apparatuses remain in place. Secrecy is required to interdict nuclear proliferation or prevent adversaries from learning how to undermine the deterrent effects of U.S. nuclear forces, but reforms clearly are necessary to prevent secrecy from being used to cover incompetence, folly, criminality and military-industrial aggrandizement, all areas in which Wills points to multiple abuses.

Wills is effective in presenting the argument that the unitary executive and the secrecy with which it is free to act must be adapted to a post-Cold war paradigm in which the ability annihilate an opponent is not the solution to any problem our country faces. But Bomb Power fails to offer solutions as to where such reforms might take place, something that is lacking in what is otherwise an interesting if not a compelling read.

The Decalogue: Two

2010-03-03T05:21:00.004-06:00

Second Commandment: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

The powerful second volume in Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue concerns Dorota, a woman seemingly in her thirties who is seeking consultation with an elderly doctor who lives in the housing complex in which the totality of the series is situated. The doctor is a senior physician at the local hospital and lives alone, having lost his family years before. Dorota’s husband is ill and resides in the doctor’s ward, and she is urgently trying to find out about his condition, specifically the chances of his living through the illness. This information is revealed quite slowly over the first act, featuring close-ups on the two characters as they go about their routines.

The doctor is gruff and seems detached from human caring. As Dorota implores him for knowledge on her husband’s condition in their apartment building, he replies that family consultations take place on Wednesday afternoons during a two-hour period. Yet this detachment is revealed in the way he tells an old and often repeated story to his housekeeper, his only friendly acquaintance within the film. He slowly tells her about his children, wife, and father, who all lived with him when he was a young doctor. The stories have a bit of charm, the sort of wistfulness that reminded me of my own grandfather with a gruff exterior. But during an air raid during World War II, the entire house is destroyed killing everyone inside; the doctor only lived for he had yet to return home from the hospital. This dispassionate storytelling serves to demonstrate how far he has insulated himself from the feelings that arise when one lets themselves form a familial attachment.

Dorota is so insistent on seeing the doctor that he finally relents, and then we learn the dynamics of her situation. She is pregnant, but not by her husband who is lying near death in a hospital, but instead by her lover. She claims to love both men, and we believe her because of the way she speaks about both of them and the way that the doctor says he has seen her and her husband together. Dorota wants to know whether her husband will recover, for if he does she must have an abortion, but if not she could keep the child and be with the lover. Up until now, she has been unable to conceive and feels that this is her only chance to be a mother.

Such a setup presents a delightfully complex problem for the doctor, as he knows that medical science cannot accurately predict whether her husband will live or die. Yet, he does try and offer some statistical information, claiming that there is perhaps a 15% chance of survival. As she tries to discuss the issue with him on multiple occasions, attempting to force a solid opinion on what she should do, he is slowly drawn back into the life of another person; he begins to care about her.

In a brilliant final sequence, Dorota, agonizing over her decision, resolves herself to terminate the pregnancy, knowing that even if her husband dies, such an act will prevent her and her lover from ever being able to be together. She informs the doctor of her decision to let him off the hook for the fate of the unborn child, yet he surprises her with an emphatic declaration that she not have the abortion because her husband is going to die. She wavers and asks him to swear, which he does, thus violating the commandment to not take the Lord’s name in vain. In a final twist, Dorota’s husband recovers and thanks the doctor for saving his life, telling him that they are going to have a child together. He then asks the doctor is he knows what it is like to have a child, which sadly he does.

While this episode was highly satisfying and for me more unsettling than the first volume, the commandment forbidding one to take the Lord’s name in vain has always been a nonstarter for me, though I am unable to explain why this is so. The doctor makes an oath that Dorota’s husband will die, yet as he is in no position from which to make such a certain determination, which he admits earlier in the film repeatedly, it is obvious that he making the sort of claim that only God would know, thus invoking God into an oath from which he has no real place. The irony of the story is that both the doctor and Dorota must live with the knowledge that the unborn baby is not that of the husband who will raise him, perhaps because the doctor’s implicit invocation of God into the oath may have indirectly led to the healing.

The idea that the Lord works in mysterious ways and that science cannot predict everything is a sobering one, yet as this was pretty much the message of the first volume in the series, such a quick repetition seems unnecessary and even a bit redundant. So while I found this film to be especially resonating, I don’t think its power will diminish in my mind for a long time, I am not sure that it works too well within the greater framework of the series. Further reflection on this question will be necessary as I continue through the films.

Reading List: February 2010

2010-03-02T03:41:00.004-06:00

For some reason these monthly recaps of my reading have also become a place for me to keep those who read this space updated on my scholarship and academic life, and though I am not all that traditional, I do not like change all that much either. As such, I haven't spent as much time as I would have liked working on my conference paper on hyperlink cinema, but I do have a decent outline. Currently, I am working on the tone, wanting to move away from the style of reading a paper to tailoring a presentation for an audience, a skill in which I possess some talent that I would like to further cultivate. I've spent a lot of time the past week or so watching the presentations given at the various TED conferences, and I'm planning something along these lines. If this approach is successful, I think it will go a long way in helping me make a name for myself in the field, for hopefully at future conferences I will start to generate preliminary buzz. That said, I worry that such an approach may not be met with respect due to being outside the norm. However, I have got to be me.

March 1st was the date by which graduate programs were to let me know their decisions on admission to a doctoral program, yet that day ended without a letter, email, or phone call. Perhaps that's holding them too strictly to a standard, but somehow I feel like if my application would have come a day (or more?) late then it wouldn't have been accepted. The stress over the uncertainty is palpable, for so many decisions that affect not only my life but also the lives of my wife and others wait in the interim. And while a friend of mine received an acceptance email last week, I am unsure whether or not to wait on a letter like I did for college thirteen years ago.

To the point of this post, a list of the books I read in February, there were 4 books and 7 graphic novels. Here is what they were:

Ex Machina: Dirty Tricks by Brian K. Vaughan & Tony Harris
Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk
Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns by Geoff Johns, et al.
You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
Green Lantern: Agent Orange by Johns & Philip Tan
DMZ: War Powers by Brian Wood & Riccardo Burchielli
Precipice by David Mack
Green Lantern Corps: Emerald Eclipse by Peter J. Tomasi & Patrick Gleason
Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman
Flight, Volume 4 edited by Kazu Kizbuishi
Strangers in Paradise: Pocket Book 1 by Terry Moore

Anyone interested in technology or Web 2.0 needs to read Lanier's book, something I should have written about while I still had a copy. I was a bit underwhelmed by the Green Lantern stories, making me a bit skeptical concerning Blackest Night, though I'll almost certainly read it. And I think Chuck Klosterman is doing the sort of thing with journalism that I'd like to do in academia: writing seriously, if humorously, about semi-serious things.

Give me some feedback, ask me some questions, tell me about your most recent dream, etc.

The Decalogue: One

2010-03-02T00:20:00.006-06:00

First Commandment: I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before Me.

The first film in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue concerns a university professor who trains his young son to use reason and the scientific method, but is confronted with tragedy when he is subjected to the unpredictability of fate. What follows is a synopsis of the action with some rambling commentary that would likely be helped with additional thoughts and criticisms. Please oblige.

The professor, Krzysztof, who shares a name with the director, lives alone with his eleven-year-old son Pavel in the housing complex around which the action of all ten films is based. Pavel’s mother lives elsewhere and is now only a peripheral presence in his life; the boy is now looked after by his Aunt Irena when his father is occupied. Kieslowski quickly establishes that Pavel is a gifted child, showing him ask his father for a mathematical problem to solve and then inputting a formula onto a computer to determine its solution.

Even without a mother, Pavel seems to be happy and well adjusted, with a close and loving relationship with both his father and aunt. His father treats him with respect, playing intellectual games with him and honestly sharing his thoughts. Over breakfast early in the film, Pavel asks his father about the existential dilemma we all know so well: what happens to us after we die? His father answers that all that is left is memories in others, that any notion of a soul is one that helps the less rational cope with their mortality. Yet there is a difference n the two adults who look after him; Pavel’s aunt believes in God and feels there are limits to what science can explain, further adding that the father’s rationalism is not incompatible with a belief in God. Such an assertion is much more palatable than the usual dichotomy with which we are assaulted in the religion/atheist debate, a welcome middle ground from which those fighting on the fringes seem even more ridiculous than before.

For Krzysztof, the nature of reality, i.e. what is, is only what we can understand and manipulate, only what can be expressed semantically using logical constructions. Everything else must be held in doubt. In this, he embraces the mainstream position of the educated class. In a lecture later on, Krzysztof, whose field seems to be computational linguistics, discusses the great difficulty of expressing all the various cultural associations of people and their language. But he stops near the end of his lecture and speculates that with more computational resources, new algorithms and such, it may be possible to create a computer that can replicate a human, one that can have an authentic aesthetic experience. Many of us are familiar with scholars who argue that there is no fundamental difference between neurons firing or not firing in a brain and a computer program in which such a pattern is replicated. One thinks that Kieslowski placed such scenes within his film in order to demonstrate that by failing to reconcile religious and rational thinking, a rationalist may not just be putting something else before God, but putting himself in the place of God if he thinks he can create an artificial person.

One day in the winter, Pavel wants to try out his new ice skates on the frozen lake. Krzysztof shows Pavel how his mathematical modeling computer program can determine whether the ice on the lake will be thick enough to allow safe skating. It should be based on whether the air temperature over the preceding few days was low enough, what would seem to be a simple enough calculation using physics. The pair observe that the program returns values that indicate that the ice will be safe, but like a good father, Krzysztof goes out on the ice after Pavel goes to sleep and tests it with his own weight.

However, the world isn’t always predictable, even with the laws of physics at hand. One afternoon while Krzysztof is at his desk writing in his notebook, he notices a mysterious black spot spreading across the page. It turns out to be ink from an unexpectedly cracked ink bottle. What seems to Krzysztof and the viewer to be shocking and unpredictable is easily enough explained, but only in retrospect. No matter how rational the thinker, there are some things which cannot be foreseen. Yet this begs the question of whether some sort of hypothetical massive computational model could adequately account for all variables and predict the future, which would be a win for rationalism for sure, but in building such a model wouldn’t we be creating God the same way that Krzysztof believes we could create human thought within a computer?

And in the film, the unexpected happens when Pavel is skating on the ice and it breaks, and the last third of the film follows the father as he deals with this tragedy. A simplistic interpretation would conclude that God has punished Krzysztof for placing science and rationalism before him by taking his son, but the film is more complex than that. As Krzysztof and Irena grieve together, neither has an answer for why this has happened, and Kieslowski makes us empathize with these characters, as we realize that we have so little control over our own lives as well. The director is not advocating a certain course of action nor adherence to any rule, but rather is establishing a universal truth in what happens to this father and his son.

The Decalogue: An Exploration in Ten Parts

2010-02-28T22:57:00.003-06:00

‘The commandments work not like science but like art; they are instructions for how to paint a worthy portrait with our lives.’ –Roger Ebert

Sometimes I find it hard to believe that even as recently as two years ago, I not only knew practically nothing about film theory, but I probably hadn’t seen more than a dozen movies in the preceding five years. I’m not just speaking of trips to the cinema either, which are incredibly rare for someone like me who find sitting closely with strangers in the dark an especially troubling proposition, but I didn’t watch movies on DVD or television much either. I had attention problems for sure, but the medium wasn’t one of great appeal for me.

Last year I took a class in film theory and feminism, and the last few months have seen me make small strides in integrating the medium of film and television into my research interests in remediation of the digital. I watch a film almost every day, and while I can’t seem to read a novel anymore, I have no issue watching a fictional film. My own personal research in both film and cultural criticism has led me to read quite a bit of Roger Ebert, which in turn has spurred me to watch films I otherwise would not have, especially in the areas of foreign cinema.

With a desire to use this space to do something a little different and perhaps a bit more personal, I have decided to watch The Decalogue, the acclaimed 1989 ten-part television series from Poland, which was directed and co-conceived by Krzysztof Kieslowski, and weigh in each night with thoughts on that episode in particular and the greater moralistic implications in general, as the mood strikes me. I’ve never done anything like this before, so it is a bit intimidating, but I feel it will help me work through my own thoughts on the series while perhaps serving as a blueprint for how to do reviews that are meaningful to me as well as to an audience.

Each film in Kieslowski’s series is based upon one of the Ten Commandments and are based within a large housing project in Warsaw, where characters from the different films appear in others as there is often some relationship between people living in such a tight community. Rather than focusing on the difficulties in Poland at the time, the director focuses instead on moral issues that have a more universal, and therefore timeless, appeal. Much of what I have read about the series suggests that the stories are populated not by characters from a typical Hollywood drama who have a problem they most overcome, but instead with characters who are like real adults: happy with some things, sad about others, but with complex motivations and at times contrary inclinations.

What is so exciting about watching the film and providing commentary here is that I have no real notion of how it will go. What texts will I seek out to enhance my understanding of The Decalogue, and how will I present them to the audience? How much will I be personally affected by what is shown on the screen? What sorts of discussions may be generated by such an experiment? Such questions are what makes such an endeavor so thrilling, and I hope some of you find yourselves engaged in what transpires.

Moon (2009)

2010-02-25T02:00:00.009-06:00

Sometimes it’s not so much what happens in a story, it’s how what happens is told. So even if I can quickly figure out what is going to happen, I try to let that go and let the story reveal its twists on its own terms. This is sometimes easier said than done, especially when a story is full of unlikable or one-dimensional characters (Grey’s Anatomy, I am looking at you), but it is a principle I try and maintain.

Thus, what bothers me about Duncan Jones’s debut film, Moon, isn’t that I figured out at the end of the first act what was going to happen, but rather that as the events unfold, the director fails to make the issues raised resonate in any but the most superficial way. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t like the film, which is fairly haunting and reminiscent of previous films in the sci-fi genre, just that I was a bit disappointed with a film that has gotten so much praise from so many quarters.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the only worker manning a lunar outpost where he manages a large, mostly automated mining operation that provides relief from the energy crisis that strikes the Earth at an unspecified future time. He lives with a friendly, super intelligent computer named GERTY (voice of Kevin Spacey), who speaks in a tone that instantly reminds one of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. He is approaching the end of his three year stint, excited to go back home and reunite with his wife and young daughter. He hasn’t been able to communicate with them in anything other than recordings due to a failure in the satellite.

Bell has an excellent work ethic and makes sure his job is done correctly, yet he is a bit of a slob with his appearance. One day he is involved in an accident while riding in his LEM. He is somehow rescued form the wreckage and awakes in the infirmary with no real memory of the events that transpired. Quickly discerning that GERTY is keeping something from him, forbidding him to leave the compound even when necessary to repair some of the excavation equipment, Bell manages to trick GERTY and leave, only to find the wreckage of his craft with someone inside. Him.

I don’t wish to give away too much of the film, yet I would like to drop one more spoiler likely to be guessable to anyone whose read the previous paragraph anyway: the two men are clones. And it is this revelation, along with the isolation in which Sam has lived for three long years, that raise significant existential issues. But rather than addressing said issues, Jones seems more eager to just move along the story, dropping a line here and there but failing to delve into the really interesting parts of the film. I wasn’t disappointed that I figured out hat was going to happen almost immediately, but that there wasn’t really any additional payoff beyond these revelations when they finally occurred.

All this said, I still enjoyed the film and would recommend it with the above reservations. The intense solitude and Spacey’s voice as the robot are in the best tradition of 2001 and Solaris, and a worthy entry into the subgenre of isolated men in space. Sam Rockwell is also excellent, as two very different men with identical DNA. I just wish that Moon would have been a deeper film, taken an extra ten minutes to really explore issues raised by long term isolation and cloning. Jones is apparently working on another film entitled Mute, which will take place on Earth following the events of Moon with a cameo by Rockwell as Bell. Perhaps we will get some of the depth this story warranted in the follow-up.

District 9 (2009)

2010-02-09T16:14:00.008-06:00

It isn’t difficult to understand why District 9, a South African film directed by Neill Blomkamp was nominated for Best Picture in the expanded category at this year’s Oscars. It is an exciting film that does some amazing things with special effects, especially in representing the alien ‘prawns,’ and the whole point of doubling the field from five films to ten was to allow such crowd pleasers into competition in order to make the awards seem more relevant. I watched the film last week, and while I see why others are so fond of it, I was slightly disappointed by the way the film’s narrative was executed.

Twenty years before film’s beginning, a huge spacecraft appeared and stationed itself directly over Johannesburg. An exploratory team discovers over a million sick and starving members of an alien people who have no leader. Morality being what it is, the people of South Africa began to care for this leaderless population, and set up a section just outside of town and directly underneath the ship called District 9. Flash forward twenty years and the place is a slum, a horrible place inhabited by creatures that are rendered as disgusting and animalistic. A drain on the economy of Johannesburg and a source of great angst for the citizens, a decision is made by the government and military corporation Multinational United (MNU) to move the 1.8 million aliens to a new camp 200 kilometers away. Tasked to lead this relocation is Wikus Van De Merwe, played engagingly by Sharlto Copley, a field operative from MNU.

All this is established within the first ten minutes. What seems like a ridiculous amount of exposition is crafted into the main narrative through the device of the documentary. A series of interviews and broadcasts, taking place after the film’s main timeline is complete, provide the viewer with all the information listed above. These interviews not only set the stage for the story to play out, they also provide a richness that makes the story more believable, answering questions like where the rest of the world stands on the alien issue and other concerns necessary for verisimilitude but outside the needs of the film’s narrative. News reports form Johannesburg, complete with cameramen on the ground with Wikus as he serves notice of the evictions to the aliens as well as overhead shots common to anyone watching a breaking story on cable news, provide us with the bulk of the first act. However, even while most of the first act is shown from this perspective, Blomkamp breaks from this conceit into classical film narrative in order to introduce two aliens who are preparing some sort of mysterious black fluid, which Wikus later finds and is accidentally sprayed with.

Straying from the idea that the audience is only privy to the information being shown because it was recorded feels like a misstep to me, though it is near impossible to imagine how Blomkamp would have presented the rest of the story if he hadn’t. The aliens have weapons that have some sort of biological lockout, meaning they can’t be used by humans. After being exposed to the black liquid, Wikus’s arm begins to change into that of the aliens, making him capable of firing these weapons and of great interest to MNU, the evil military corporation run by, coincidentally enough, Wikius’s father-in-law. It’s understandable that the story moving in such a direction necessitates the shift away from the documentary format, but because Blomkamp presented so much of the early parts of the movie through this perspective, the change feels a bit jarring, at least to this viewer. By transitioning from the documentary to the news report to the omniscient eye of film, he loses some of the magic that drew me into his story.

In the third act, Wikus escapes MNU and teams up with the alien who created the black liquid in order to retrieve it so he can return to the mothership and restore Wikus to human form. Without giving away the film’s ending, Blomkamp returns to the documentary device at the conclusion, with journalists and others speculating on the questions left at the end of the narrative, some of which is dramatic irony since the audience knows things that the citizens watching such a documentary wouldn’t.

Perhaps it is not the choice to move from documentary to news report to classical film narrative and then back again that irks me, but rather the lack of a segue to ease the viewer into the changes. District 9 presents itself in the first act as being a narrative composed of previously recorded material (in the film’s universe) only to drop it abruptly and embrace a classical style. As I said before, it is near impossible to conceive of how the film would change had Blomkamp stayed with the documentary format, so I don’t fault him for going the way he did; it is a good film, and one worth seeing.

Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk

2010-02-07T06:36:00.004-06:00

I’ve known about Gary Vaynerchuk for a few years now; being in the restaurant industry and selling a lot of wine turns one onto new approaches in the name of the almighty dollar. But I avoided his business book Crush It! for several months because his manic style just wasn’t all that appealing to me. But after one of the professors on my thesis committee recommended it to me, I finally found myself, copy in hand, wondering if the principles he lays out for building a personal brand can really help me and if I have the energy to fully exploit them.

Vaynerchuk wants you to find the one thing you want to do more than any other and then build a personal brand around it. The immediate problem for me? I have no idea what I want to do more than any other. In fact, I think such a dilemma has been a struggle for a long time now, as I am unenthused about this blog yet unwilling to abandon it. How does someone with near equal fascination with foreign policy, Green Lantern comics, NASCAR, and Scrooge McDuck supposed to figure out what he is truly passionate about? However, one thing seems to be overarching in not only my academic research but also the above wide ranging interests: narrative. I dig how stories are told, how events unfold and are presented to an audience. Currently, I am blowing through LOST at an incredible pace, not only because I want to figure out what happened with the Dharma Initiative, but also because the use on nonlinear narration gets me literally excited.

So Vaynerchuk wants me to build a brand around this interest. First is to set up a blog and start reaching out to likeminded individuals by coming up with the topics for fifty posts. I already have a blog, though honestly I think I may be moving it soon to a domain with more freedom (more on that when and if it comes). But I wonder if I really can sit down and come up with fifty topics. That’s ten weeks at five posts a week, a total that I have been aspiring to without actually really trying. So this evening, as I sit and watch the Super Bowl, I am going to brainstorm certain topics that might fit these parameters. Even if I can't come up with fifty, maybe I can come up with twenty and at least get started.

Getting your name out in the community is another of Vaynerchuk’s missions for the entrepreneur. Not only does he want relentless promotion of your content across a wide range of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of other sites I’ve only heard of, he wants you out there on specific forums, responding insightfully to others discussing your interests. I’ve already adopted a few of these myself, but what I really don’t do is participate in the larger conversations about narrative. The reasons are plentiful, but they boil down to a failure to remain comfortable with the unstructured communication blitz one encounters in all sorts of places online; it’s hard to parse what is relevant and real. However, joining Twitter has helped me adjust to this slightly, so perhaps I am moving in the right direction. And if I am engaged in discussion about narrative with others, that seems less a task to be completed as it does a passion to be fed.

Monetizing such an enterprise is where Vaynerchuk seems a little weak. For a person who does not offer tangible goods for others to purchase, there seems little one can do really make a living off something like this. Sure, you might end up getting some advertising revenue and be asked to speak at a few places, but pulling in something in the mid-five figures seems nigh impossible. That said, if I pursue my research further in getting a PhD and working in academia, branding myself as one of the guys to talk to when you want to know about disjointed narratives will serve me well. Perhaps I couldn’t earn my living purely through a thriving blog about narrative and technology, but it could supplement my work as a scholar and give me the opportunity to attend conferences on someone else’s dime.

Writing everyday will also help me hone my personal style, hopefully working out some of the disastrous kinks when it comes to me writing humor. Again, a study in narrative.

This post is not a review of Vaynerchuk’s book, nor is it likely to be of use to anyone reading it. It’s merely a way for me to work through the issues that Crush It! inspired after I finished it, and to formulate a plan on where to go from here. Let’s see how it goes.

Reading List: January 2010

2010-02-01T18:32:00.008-06:00

Though the past couple of months have seen posts of substance, said posts have been infrequent at best. I hope they have been entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking, and while I hope to post more often, I wonder if I have the discipline to actually knock out thoughtful posts on a more frequent basis. Nevertheless, discipline is something I sorely need to improve upon in several walks of life, so I shall try. Progress on my conference paper has been proceeding fairly well, though I need to organize my thoughts again and define the parameters of my question in order to adequately yet concisely address the emerging film genre of hyperlink cinema.

Over the past month I only managed to complete six books and two graphic novels, which is due to a changing emphasis on my reading. Joining Twitter has provided me with a near constant stream of links to new stories and essays on film, and I started to watch Lost online, which I have generally enjoyed. Anyway, I've decided to return to the old format of capsule reviews instead of a dry list, so here it goes:

1. The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe: Obama for America campaign director Plouffe recaps how the current administration navigated the tumultuous primaries and slaughtered John McCain in the general election. A fascinating behind the scenes account, the author too often shoulders the responsibility for anything that went wrong and rarely characterizes any candidate missteps as mistakes, proving his loyalty but making one wonder how accurate such an account is. It would be interesting to read the Obama sections in Game Change, to compare and contrast.

2. Green Lantern Corps: Sins of the Star Sapphire by Peter J. Tomasi, et al.: After the Sinestro Corps War, new lanterns across the color spectrum were created and have led up to the current Blackest Night storyline. The Star Sapphire Corps represent love, and as the Guardians order that relationships and love by Green Lanterns are forbidden, a hole in the feeling spectrum is filled. Overall, I found the story to be mediocre, seeming only to be putting pieces into place for later storylines. In addition, I've never really liked Guy Gardener, so Tomasi's work here doesn't resonate with me on two levels. I'm taking steps to get the collections on the Red and Orange Lanterns, so expect updates to follow.

3. Flight, Volume 3 edited by Kazu Kibuishi: The third excellent collection in this series. Overall quite entertaining, though I was a bit disappointed that certain storylines that continued from the first volume to the second weren't followed through here. That aside, such collections collect and display emerging talent, and I look forward to reading more by several of these creators in the future.

4. Mendoza in Hollywood by Kage Baker: I am interested in the mythology surrounding Baker's Company, but it only serves as a background to a mediocre story about a British plot to steal California during the Civil War. The narrative is bogged down with a twenty page recount of a D.W. Griffith film, and I struggled to make it through the whole thing. I understand that there is more of a focus on the Company in future novels, but I honestly don't know that I'll be going back.

5. The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott: Heaps of praise made me want to read this new 'crime memoir' by an author whose work I have previously enjoyed, and while this was a decent book, it falls short of the expectations I had for it. While covering a murder trial, Elliott simultaneously investigates his relationship with his father, who abandoned him into foster care as a teenager, as well as his penchant for masochistic relationship. Good, entertaining, just not great.

6. Let's Talk About Love by Carl Wilson: Highly recommended. Read my thoughts on this book here.

7. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman: Klosterman writes intelligently about pop culture; in this book he has new essays on topics like the liberalism of the NFL, time travel, and the parallels between David Koresh and Kurt Cobain. Such essays are fantastically entertaining, but even at their most insightful, they seem to lack resonance. Perhaps this is one of the hazards of writing about pop culture, a lesson that perhaps I should learn in a hurry.

8. Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde: Fforde's new universe imagines a future in which social castes and protocols are regulated by one's individual color perception. Protagonist Eddie Russet is looking to marry up when he and his father are shipped to one of the outer territories, where he learns that the rigid rules of society have a dark side as he begins to question the status quo with the help of Jane, a Grey who exists as a menial servant due to her apparent lack of color perception. While the story moves along quickly enough, the creation of this world seemed to take precedence over telling an entertaining yarn, setting up for future stories at the expense of this one. However, a new work by Fforde is always welcome, and I am excited to read future stories set within this universe.

There it is. As always, I welcome comments, questions, corrections, unrelated hilarity, and other notes of substance. I'll endeavor to post more often over the coming month, but of course, I've said that before.

Let's Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

2010-01-26T01:59:00.005-06:00

While I may never forgive Carl Wilson for getting that Titanic pan flute music stuck in my head for the better part of a week, it is his fantastic book on the French Canadian singer Celine Dion that has me doing the unthinkable: getting me to reconsider why it is that I dislike the pop star. Let’s Talk About Love is part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series about various record albums (I read a dry one about Let It Be by Steve Matteo last month), but this book isn’t really about the Dion album or the singer at all. Instead, it uses her as a prism by which to investigate the nature of taste itself.

What motivates aesthetic judgment? Why does a woman who has sold tens of millions of record albums cause so many others to run screaming when they hear her voice? Wilson compares the ideas of Kant, who would have us believe that taste involves a universal instinct for beauty-assessment, with those of Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist who maintains that taste is never disinterested, but instead a form of cultural capital. In other words, those who hate Celine Dion are not merely making an aesthetic choice; it is an ethical decision made in order to elevate oneself above her fans, who tend to be poor, middle-aged, white women from Middle America. While we use what we like to define who we are and who we are not, we do the same with what we dislike. And as much as this bothers me on a personal level, the (perhaps) subconscious elevation of myself above others, I find it to be almost inarguably true.

Though Wilson does undergo a sort of journey as the narrative progresses, seeing Dion in Vegas and comparing the messages in her songs to his own life as he endures a painful divorce, he never is won over, becoming a fan. But what he does come to believe by the book’s conclusion is that we should move toward a new sort of ‘democratic’ criticism, where we aren’t so much open to all sorts of new ideas, but rather where we refuse to indulge in those cultural capital instincts that elevate us above another taste set, no matter what it is. While Wilson seems to limit himself to the medium of music, such principles remain applicable to just about anything that is judged on taste.

Pop criticism has always tried to articulate the genius behind the underappreciated or devalued. And while there are now canons in rock, rap, and country (not to mention other media like film and television), why should Celine Dion be beyond our capacity for praise. What Wilson accomplishes with Let’s Talk About Love did not make me like Dion’s music, but did help me understand what its appeal might be to others. By defining schmaltz as ‘an unprivate portrait of how private feeling is currently conceived,’ a label that is slapped on Dion’s music by all sorts of people including me, Wilson is able to turn the definition onto other genres of music. After all, he writes, ‘you could say that punk rock is anger’s schmaltz.’

Extralinguistic Texts in Film/TV Narrative

2010-01-17T14:49:00.005-06:00

To finish my minor in Literature last spring, I took a class in Film & Feminism, my first real exposure to critical approaches of the medium. And while found the class to be a bit underwhelming, I was able to familiarize myself with much of the seminal critical articles in film literature and make the connection that the critical approach to film and to television isn’t all that different. As a result, I have been rethinking my investigation of hyperlink cinema and George Landow’s axes of hypertextual development through this prism, and where I was previously stymied by examples of extralinguistic texts in film, a word of advice from my friend Steve Mollmann has sent me in the right direction.

Landow maintains that hypertexts contain extralinguistic texts, as claimed in his second axis for identification. Whether than take the approach of identifying linguistic elements that are nonnative to film, my focus here is on narrative and there are many elements of narrative that take place apart from the narrative presented on the screen, especially in shows like Lost and Heroes and even in films like the George Lucas’s prequel trilogy. And while I cold run through Landow’s four axes pretty quickly with regards to a show like Lost, I want to pause here and look at how complex the narratives become because of their reliance on other forms of storytelling to inform their narrative.

Perhaps Heroes, which debuted in 2006, is a good place to start. The show, of course, relates the experiences of ordinary men and women discover they have superhuman powers. The story emulates the storytelling style of American comic books as well, an example of remediation, and while the premise is straightforward, the narrative world imagined by creator Tim Kring and the writing staff is a complex one. A viewer is able to watch the show as it comes on each week and receive a more or less complete experience. However, NBC selected this show to expand into the digital space, creating a television show whose primary narrative outlet is supplemented by web comics and other strategies that expand the universe of the show, providing back stories and additional character development outside the confines of the screen. I would argue that such a use of extra-narrative strategies is an example of the extralinguistic elements that Landow asserts are a central component of hypertexts, embodied here within the medium of film.

As the first season progressed, the web comics often provided additional background information on the main characters from the show, but about halfway through a new character, named Hana Gitelman was introduced. Although appearing briefly onscreen in two episodes, the character primarily exists within the supplemental material. Thus we see that the creators are in fact using the web comics in order to enhance the world their characters inhabit, and make the connection between events in the web comics and effects in the television show. In comic 68, ‘The Man with Too Much Brains,’ teenager Matt Neuenberg is introduced with the ability to remember incredible amounts of information. He ‘downloads’ the Company’s database in order to prevent it from being accessed by Gitelman, who has the power to control transmissions, showing that a plot hole in the series can be filled in the supplemental material. In yet another example, comic 115, ‘Truths,’ relates the thoughts of Arthur Petrelli in the moments before his death, something difficult to do with effectiveness within the medium of television, and impossible within the episode because it would have derailed the overall narrative, yet possible in this additional medium and providing a richness to the character and scene that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

Heroes also has been expanded in a novel, Saving Charlie, detailing what happened when Hiro traveled back in time by six months in an effort to save her from being killed by Sylar, only to lose her to some sort of cancer in the episode ‘Six Months Ago.’ Again, the supplementary material is able to tell stories that aren’t practical to tell on television, due to narrative momentum and cost concerns.

While I could go on and on, I believe that I have effectively demonstrated the use of extralinguistic texts affecting film narrative, which would again indicate that film is indeed remediating the digital into itself. In fact, television shows like Heroes perhaps are a better example of hyperlink cinema, at least analyzed through the perspective of George Landow, but there are examples in film as well. Most obviously, there is the prequel trilogy of Star Wars in which characters had huge histories in cartoons and such that are completely unapparent in the film. I still have no idea who General Grievous was, or what the hell he was supposed to be.

Should I branch towards television in examining hyperlink cinema? 24 is the most often mentioned show in the genre, but it seems like I may want to ground my paper in film since I put ‘hyperlink cinema’ in the title. I would imagine that I will blend the two, but what do you think, about this or anything else? Feedback is greatly appreciated.

George Landow & Hypertext Evaluation

2010-01-07T01:18:00.003-06:00

I’ve spent the past two years working on novels that contain visual media, arguing that they can be considered hypertexts existing in print rather than electronic form, and thus can be analyzed using tools developed for hypertext. In fact, I maintain that the definition of hypertextuality must be expanded to include such works, for analyzing them with the traditional literary techniques can leave the new possibilities for literary creation unseen. In making this argument, I relied heavily on the work of George P. Landow, specifically the four axes he developed for determining whether a text could be considered hypertextual in nature or not.

In examining hyperlink cinema, the supposed new genre of movies influenced by the Internet that contain a playfulness with time and interwoven storylines, I think it is important to use some of the same techniques in order to determine if one can actually see the remediation of the digital within these films, and to attempt to determine if their existence is confined to a certain genre or a precursor for a coming revolution in film and film studies.

The first axis of hypertext that Landow identifies is the most vexing in terms of evaluating hyperlink cinema: does the text involve reader choice, intervention, and empowerment? By its very nature, a film possesses none of these traits. Films exist on large reels, meant to be fed one after another at a constant pace while the viewer merely watches; it is a passive experience in many ways. And while one might say that as films are created and produced digitally more and more often, we might begin to see efforts that allow for an audience to affect the narrative as it progresses, the films that have been categorized as hyperlink cinema retain the traditional approach of passive viewership. Yet even as we realize that the medium of film limits the hypertextual nature of a narrative, we begin to see how the hypertext has influenced these films despite the medium’s restrictive nature.

Landow’s second axis maintains that hypertexts include extralinguistic texts. While in the novels I mentioned before extralinguistic texts can refer to the visual media included (among other things), the way one goes about defining extralinguistic texts in a film is a bit trickier. In fact, while I know what devices I have categorized as extralinguistic in films, I am a bit of a loss as to understand why they exist outside the language of film. More research is in order.

I didn’t post this for a couple of days because I wanted it to be a fully formed thought, but then I realized that such missteps are the heart of research, and if I intend to research and write this paper through a sequence of blog posts, such missteps should be visible. And, this is the sort of time that the community here could suggest possible ways to interpret the extralinguistic in film. Thoughts?

Meanwhile, I am going to do some more research into new media and revisit this in the coming days.

2009 Reading Statistics

2010-01-01T07:17:00.009-06:00

I wasn't going to post this until tomorrow or the next day, but since I can't sleep due to anxiety over graduate school applications, I compiled all the data as the sun came up. Each month I post a list of the books I completed over the previous one, so there is no need to recap that here. Yet this does give me the opportunity to reflect upon how I spent my reading time, and perhaps how I could better spend it in the future.

This year I completed 240 books, plays, and graphic novels, surpassing my previous high last year of 230. Since statistics are fun for everyone, or at least me, here is how it all breaks down:

35 novels (14.6%)
17 short story collections (7.1%)
42 works of nonfiction (17.5%)
144 graphic novels (60%)
2 plays (0.8%)

With an overwhelming majority of my reading coming from graphic novels, the overall total here appears greatly inflated. And while I enjoyed making my way through series like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming's Powers series, I wasted a lot of time reading things like Ultimate X-Men & Spiderman. I doubt that will be happening again in 2010.

The biggest reason for the shift in these demographics is due to the economy, at least indirectly. I was out of work for a period at the end of 2008, and as a result things got a bit tight. In order to save money, I switched from buying books frequently to utilizing my public library on a weekly basis, if not more. Fortunately, I live in a large enough town to have a better than average library system. The huge numbers of graphic novels are directly due to my ability not only to easily read pretty much any comic I wanted on a whim, it also took what would have cost maybe $1000, even at a used book store, and made it free.

I'm also very surprised that the number of novels I read fell by almost 50% from last year, something I am at a loss to explain. Both nonfiction and short story collections remained relatively even, but I suppose the ebb in my interest in fiction, which I touched on early this evening, has been more protracted than I had originally believed.

For 2010, I predict that these numbers will go down for a number of reasons. The first, I have exhausted much of the library's supply of graphic novels, at least ones that I am interested in, and there isn't much on the horizon that I really want to read. But more importantly, as I apply to another graduate program, I plan on being incredibly busy (and happy) come the fall semester, assuming someone lets me in and greases the financial wheels. As a result, I'll have less time to read, at least casually, but I think I am finding real satisfaction with my academic work, so it is a trade I will happily make.

I used to come up with a list of my top five books of the year, but this year I think I'll pass. However, here are some authors I read this year that I hope you will check out: Dan Chaon, Aleksandar Hemon, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Stieg Larsson, Tom Bissell, & Maile Meloy.

Reading List: December 2009

2010-01-01T03:34:00.004-06:00

I've lost pretty much all interest in reading fiction. No, scratch that, I am still interested in a few things, but in practice I seem to be bored and unable to read more than a dozen pages at a stretch. This is quite uncommon for me, but I suppose its cyclical and eventually I'll get bored with foreign policy and economics and go back to it. Likely, the lack of interest is due to being out of school, with its constant grind of academic reading, and being used to internalizing information like that as opposed to casual fun reading. The habit is hard to break.

This month's pick is The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo, which highlights the flaws in modern thinking about politics and the economy, trying to shift the paradigm of actors from believing they can act as architects in a system they can control (which doesn't work, obviously) to understanding that such things are more of an ecosystem, with all sorts of actors responding differently to events and to each other, creating an environment that can at best be managed. It's not so much that Ramo offers up any solutions, but rather this change in thinking will allow us to succeed where we are failing horribly now.

SuperFreakonomics was good, though lacked the cohesion of the first book. And the main criticism, that the chapter on the environment, should be faulted more for straying from interesting microeconomics than for lax science. The new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book was pretty bad as well. But Kazu Kibuishi's Flight anthologies were entertaining and demonstrate what some of the best new comic artists can produce, though the stories were a bit light on the unorthodox construction that I enjoy so much.

Anyway, last month I finished eight books and four graphic novels, and this is what they were:

And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer
The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History by John Ortved
Three Nights in August by Buzz Bissinger
The Great Movies II by Roger Ebert
The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo
Green Lantern Corps: Ring Quest by Peter J. Tomasi & Patrick Gleason
SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Flight, Volumes 1 & 2 edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Let it Be by Steve Matteo

Right now I am reading David Plouffe's account of the Obama presidential campaign and Vali Nasr's book on the rising Islamic middle class. Maybe I'll squeeze a novel in before too long.

Questions, comments, random unrelated notes that entertain, etc.

Hyperink Cinema: An Investigation

2009-12-30T08:01:00.004-06:00

As N. Katherine Hayles has cautions critics to avoid ‘applying critical models designed for print’ to works of electronic literature in fear that ‘the new possibilities opened for literary creation and interpretation will simply not be seen, she neglects to consider whether the models conceived for electronic literature might be used on works of print, and whether this might cause the scholarly community to reevaluate works using this new critical framework. This idea forms one of the central ideas in my thesis, that the recent proliferation of images and other visual media into print fiction demonstrates that the digital is being ‘remediated’ into print, to use Jay David Bolter’s term, and thus it seems prudent to apply the critical apparatuses developed for hypertext to these works in order that one doesn’t miss the ‘new possibilities’ brought about by this shift.

Therefore, a similar approach seems appropriate when examining the films that fall under the new category called ‘hyperlink cinema,’ a term coined by Alissa Quart that acknowledges the influence of the internet and multitasking on the narrative structure of said films. As with the remediation of the digital into print, examples can be found that predate our modern conceptions of when such a shift would likely have begun, sometime in the late 1980s perhaps, but the majority of the films accepted as falling under this umbrella were produced in the past fifteen years.

While Quart and Roger Ebert seem to mostly define the hypertext film as one in which the characters inhabit separate stories, where we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another, an explanation that is adequate for the audience of their reviews if not the scholarly community, a more specific analysis of how such films achieve these narratives is warranted. Therefore over the next few weeks, I will be exploring different films in an attempt to provide an adequate description of the genre, a beginning from which scholars can investigate the digital influence on the narrative of film. These investigations will also serve me as I prepare to present a paper on this topic at the PCA/ACA National Conference in St. Louis this March.

Grounding this inquiry will be the work of George P. Landow, who has developed four axes by which one can analyze a text to determine of it meets the criteria of hypertext: reader choice, intervention, and empowerment; inclusion of extralinguistic texts; complexity of network structure; and degrees of multiplicity in and variation in literary elements. I may modify these definitions a bit, such as suggesting that ‘extralinguistic texts’ be interpreted as devices which are non-native to the genre of film, and to focus heavily on the complexity of the network structure, analyzing how different facets of a film are ‘linked’ to others, and how that is akin to the links contained in a hypertext.

And while this exercise will allow me to simultaneously research a paper and provide content for this space, I also hope that you find it enjoyable. While the majority of the content will be of this nature, and hopefully will exceed the current pace of three posts a month, there will likely be thoughts on other things too, such as a link between comics and film that I need to read up on and perhaps some insights into the economic costs of airport screenings. Feel encouraged to add your voice to the mix, but more than that, I hope you find what you red here interesting.

Baseball & Breast Cancer

2009-12-13T23:57:00.004-06:00

A certain confluence of reading came across my desk over the past two days, leading me to make a connection that I otherwise likely would have never considered. For some reason, I got very interested in looking up a book that Buzz Bissinger wrote about Tony LaRussa and the St. Louis Cardinals a few years ago, Three Nights in August, and while it contained some incomprehensible analogies, it was a decent enough book, which I finished yesterday evening. Written a few years after Michael Lewis’s seminal Moneyball, much of the editorializing Bissinger indulges himself in is refuting the ‘bunk’ that sabermetricians like Bill James have more or less proven statistically, a position that websites like the recently retired Fire Joe Morgan have ridiculed for its ignorance.

In this morning’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, mathematician John Allen Paulos illustrates why the government’s task force on breast cancer screening’s recommendation that asymptomatic women under the age of fifty need not undergo mammograms is mathematically a sound one. As anyone who even marginally keeps up with the news already knows, this caused a furor and was quickly sucked into the ever declining discourse on national healthcare. Despite what seems counterintuitive, tests for a relatively rare condition can have a false positive rate of about 1%, which can be quite misleading when the rate of an occurrence is less than 1%. I won’t go into his math, but it’s a short article and easy to understand.

And Paulos is right to remind us that most people don’t think probabilistically, nor do they respond correctly to very large or very small numbers. Think of the uproar ten years ago when mice being force fed aspartame in relatively gargantuan amounts got cancer. It doesn’t mean that other people might not come up with different conclusions using similar data, but to argue against the recommendations from the government panel, one must present facts in his or her argument, not merely use invective.

And this brings me back to Bissinger and statistics. I understand that many things the so-called Moneyball people say seems counterintuitive, and so the average person might be quick to reject them because they just don’t seem to be possible. Take for instance the argument that the player with the best on base percentage on a team be batted in the leadoff position because over the course of the game, that player will have the most at bats. The rest of the lineup would be structured accordingly, the player with the second highest on base percentage being batted next, etc. This makes sense on the surface because it is impossible to score runs without getting people on base, and it is impossible to win games without scoring at least one run. Having the most people on over the course of night should lead you to have the greatest ability to score runs and give you the greatest chance to win the game.

So why doesn’t anybody do this? Well, baseball managers and GMs don’t think probabilistically much more than the typical person. But let’s say they did. For as long as anyone can pretty much remember, the idea has been for a team to try and get a couple of quick men on base before the third-fourth-fifth part of the lineup, the three players with the most power, come up to try and knock them in. It doesn’t seem to matter that over the three games covered in Bissinger’s book, Kerry Robinson (OBP .281 in 2003) led off all three games while Albert Pujols (.439), one of the greatest players to ever put on a uniform, hit third, and thus got fewer chances at making an impact with his bat.

Let me run with this for a minute. Let’s say that LaRussa decided to buy into this strategy and placed Pujols as the leadoff hitter. Fans and the media, again like most of us not used to thinking probabilistically, would ridicule the move because even though it makes a certain amount of sense when you actually do the math, most people who listen to or broadcast on sportstalk radio aren’t doing the math. So unless it works, and works quickly, LaRussa (and the GM who let him do it) may be ordered to switch back or risk losing their jobs. But what would that result be based upon? Invective, and nothing more than the argument that ‘it’s never been this way before, so if this new plan was going to work someone smarter than LaRussa would have figured it out already.’

What is so frustrating to people like me, people who don’t think probabilistically but still understand that statistics are a science, is that the opposing argument not only adds nothing to the discussion, it is dismissive. Just as popular opinion has been against the recommendations of the breast cancer panel, it is against the sabermetricians who are looking at baseball in new ways. And while it may make a certain amount of populist sense to side with popular opinion, siding against science is always going to leave one standing in opposition to facts, a position from which it is very hard to win an argument.

Unless, of course, you can yell very, very loudly.

Star Trek's Hypocritical Federation

2009-12-08T12:47:00.002-06:00

Can there be any doubt that Quark is the most moral character on Star Trek Deep Space Nine? While his bible, the Rules of Acquisition, may not be something that I agree with, he places it as the centerpiece of his life, citing it frequently, and using it as a guide to pursue his endeavors. Whether we think that family should be exploited for opportunity or women should be treated as subservient is beside the point: Quark has a code of ethics that he sticks to in virtually every situation.

Contrast this with Captain Sisko, a man who allows men to be killed and bribes another in order to perpetrate a lie to the Romulan people and ensure that they entered the Dominion War on the side of the Federation. Much has been made of this episode, yet the judgments usually come down on the side of Sisko, whose temporary abandonment of a moral compass perhaps leads to the greater good, at least from the perspective of the Federation and its allies.

Also consider the outright hostility and contempt that Sisko and other Federation and Bajoran characters feel towards Quark. That he remains steadfast in his unpopular beliefs even in an atmosphere where his very personhood is looked down upon, is something that would be lauded if we just stripped away some of the descriptors.

For a society that claims to respect other culture’s beliefs, the members of the Federation that we see on television seem to sit in judgment quite often, and not just in the case of the Ferengi. When Worf seeks to end his brother’s life at the latter’s request, he is threatened with prison and questioned severely for attempting to perform a legal and customary ritual between consenting people in his culture. In the episode ‘Waltz,’ in which the Defiant is looking for a marooned Captain Sisko in the brief window before they must return to protect a convoy, Doctor Bashir sneers at Worf when the latter says that it would be dishonorable to fail to return to the convoy, claiming that he doesn’t care much for Worf’s honor.

Is it possible to reconcile the lofty ideals of Federation society with the way we see such behavior portrayed on screen, behavior for which I have only provided the briefest of examples? In many ways, the Federation is merely a stand-in for the modern day United States, a superpower who uses its military and economic strength in order to force other countries to behave in a way the United States thinks is correct. The Federation does pretty much the exact same thing, forcing new members to meet certain criteria in order for acceptance. We also rarely see any dissention by members of the Federation against the central government, creating the impression that societies cede their individuality to some degree in order to gain the military and economic strengths the Federation wields. The respect for these alien societies seems to be an abstract notion, which to be fair is often reflected in American society regarding cultures in other countries.

I am sure there are all sorts of colonialist and imperialist critical frameworks that could be applied to this issue in order to better understand the gap between what the Federation is said to be and what evidence shows it is. Obviously, this is a rough outline of these ideas, or what might actually be two separate ideas, but with the new direction I am hoping to take here, I hope the following conversation will help clarify some points and hopefully muddy the waters a bit as well. Please, weigh in.

Reading List: November 2009

2009-12-01T13:13:00.006-06:00

Despite a decision over two weeks ago to shift the focus of this space, noting has yet happened because (1)I have been busy and stressed, and because (2)I just haven't felt as though I have had anything worth saying. Yet my commitment to the change remains theoretically strong, so hopefully I will spend some time this month writing about interests of mine.

There are several films that fall into the hyperlink cinema genre that I have yet to watch though they sit in my living room, and I have also been pondering the seeming cultural superiority that Star Trek's Federation inhabits yet simultaneously denies, especially as this pertains to the Ferengi and Deep Space Nine. Thoughts on such topics shall, hopefully, be forthcoming.

In November, I completed 5 books and 5 graphic novels:

The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Are the Humanities Inconsequent? by Jerome McGann
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite by Gerard Way & Gabriel Ba
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America by Jeph Loeb, et al.
Green Lantern: Secret Origin by Geoff Johns & Ivan Reis
Invisible by Paul Auster
Assignment: Earth by John Byrne
The Umbrella Academy: Dallas by Way & Ba

Unreserved recommendations for The Umbrella Academy, which is a cross between a typical superhero family and a Wes Anderson movie. Auster's new novel was also decent and a departure from his last few works. However, I was quite disappointed in Chronic City, not because it was bad but because it was just mediocre and I expect better from Lethem. And while Loeb's Captain America story wasn't very good, he did do some interesting things with the layout and using 70s era artwork, with the reduced color scheme, to contrast modern sensibilities in flashback portions of the narrative.

Questions, comments, et cetera, ad nauseum.

A New Direction (Hopefully)

2009-11-14T03:40:00.004-06:00

Over the past few months, I have pondered whether or not to cede this forum to wherever it is all the abandoned internet observations go to die. However, I still have a readership of a few dedicated friends and colleagues and I do not want this forum, and the specific connections it engenders, to go away and therefore be of no use to me or anyone else. At the same time, a resounding emptiness has settled over the intellectual part of my brain as I have finished my thesis and all that remain are the formatting changes the graduate college will invariably cast upon me whether I followed their style guide to the letter or not. However, such a project leaves many future avenues for investigation, hopefully by me as I further my academic career, so I have decided to use this space to write, in short pieces, about the questions I hope to answer.

My thesis dealt with the influence of the digital on print, specifically how such influence affects composition and narrative in contemporary novels like House of Leaves and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that contain a variety of visual media. Meanwhile, I have become a fan of the films of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, in which narratives are related in a nonsequential and often disjointed manner, especially in 21 Grams. Rudimentary research revealed to me the existence of a genre of film called hyperlink cinema, of which Inarritu's films are primary examples. As I already am interested in what Jay David Bolter has called the 'remediation' of the digital into other media, such a term suggests that hyperlinks, which are a component of hypertexts, are being remediated into film and influencing their narratives. I am skeptical of a straightforward interpretation such as this, but it bears investigation, and I will hopefully be conducting it here with the intention of presenting a paper at the 2010 PCA/ACA Conference in St. Louis this March.

With my primary research interests centering around the graphic construction of narrative, it should surprise no one that I have a scholarly interest in comic books. In yet another attempt to develop a conference paper for the University of Florida's ImageNext (which I hope to attend assuming I can get a travel grant), I want to investigate the use of the nine-panel (or even six-panel) page in contemporary comics, especially as it is used to as individual panels and a larger cohesive picture at the same time. This is much less grounded in theory at this stage, and much more supported by my singular amazement at one particular page in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. But as proposals are due at the end of the year, I should hopefully stumble upon something before too long.

Several colleagues have expressed surprise at my willingness to put all my scholarly ideas in a public forum before I take steps to insure they are published (thereby giving me all the credit). I find that a bit of an antiquated view, and think the benefits of outside discussion greatly outweighs the slim chance that my work will be hijacked or plagiarized. In addition, writing is a lonely business, and working out ideas here will allow me to keep plodding towards my ultimate goal of working full time as an academic, hopefully helping me deal with the fact that I have to work more and more in my service industry job just to make ends meet. Help keep the eyes on the prize, so to speak.

Please, let me know what you think about this decision, and more than that, feedback will do nothing but help me as I implement these plans. Many of you are academics, or at least academically inclined, and I suspect that you have an idea or two about such topics already. In fact, I would be open to using this space with other authors who are attempting to jumpstart their own research in a similar fashion, assuming of course that the content was relatively the same.

Reading List: October 2009

2009-11-01T01:37:00.003-05:00

Almost no new content here over the past month, though there are two ways to look at that. The first is that no content means no readers, which does not bode well for a blog that I am struggling to figure out what to do with anyway. However, I did write about 20,000 words this month as I finished my Master's thesis and successfully defended it, so it is not as if I did nothing.

Yet the former is what I have been mulling the past few days. A big problem I have with this space is that I don't really know what it is here for. I occasionally post reviews of books I read or films I see, but those reviews vary not only in quality but in substance as well. There seems to be no unifying theme, save me, and while the readers here are all people I know from elsewhere so no problem is immediately apparent, no one drops in here via Google and sticks around because they have no relationship with me and no attachment therefore to the content.

So my goal in the next month is twofold: one, revise and submit my thesis to the graduate college; and two, decide what, if anything, I want to continue to do with this space. It needs to be about something, or what's the point?

Last month I finished only 12 books/graphic novels/plays:

Swamp Thing: Reunion by Alan Moore, et al.
The Walking Dead: Safety Behind Bars by Robert Kirkland & Charlie Adlard
The Great Movies by Roger Ebert
The Last Generation by Andrew Steven Harris & Gordon Purcell
Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
Troublesome Minds by Dave Galanter
Omega the Unknown by Jonathan Lethem & Farel Dalrymple
Final Crisis by Grant Morrison & J.G. Jones
Fables: The Dark Ages by Bill Willingham, et al.
God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza
Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman & Andy Kubert
Reasons to be Pretty by Neil LaBute

Further updates as events warrant.

Troublesome Minds by Dave Galanter

2009-10-15T04:08:00.004-05:00

Though it may not seem to be the case upon a cursory glance, the academic writing I have been practicing as a graduate student has influenced the content here quite a bit. The obvious would be the attention given to topics such as the distribution of comics on the iPhone or reviews of works like Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture. But the less obvious is in the way I approach pieces that I review, for an effective way to generate content is to disagree with a portion of a work and then present the reasoning behind it.

I have been highly critical of the Star Trek line Pocket Books has been producing recently, which has drawn the ire of some. While I stand by everything I have written, it gets old to be constantly criticizing, so where I didn’t feel I had a lot to say about Dave Galanter’s Troublesome Minds, I wanted to write about it to maybe help a copy find its way into a reader’s hands as well as to demonstrate that I have no axe to grind.

With a line seemingly consumed with continuity and having every book tie into three others in direct and indirect ways, Troublesome Minds is a refreshing change. Set within the original five-year mission, the Enterprise attempts to make first contact with Isitri only to wind up responding to a distress call and preventing the death of one Isitri by an assemblage of others. This man, Berlis, claims not to know why those from his homeworld wish him dead, and by intervening Kirk is placed into a bad position: return him to his colony and protect him, or turn him over to be killed.

However, Berlis is what is known as a troublesome mind in his telepathic community. The Isitri do not have vocal cords and virtually all are deaf; they communicate through their thoughts. People like Berlis arise from time to time and subject the world to inadvertent slavery for their minds are so strong that all other Isitri bend to their will and they become despotic. As Berlis makes his way back to his homeworld, Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise must try and prevent him from taking over the world and thus plunging them into war with a rival power who fears the innovations possible when a troublesome mind takes over.

While the novel has been praised in the deaf community due to its use of hand signals to communicate between the non-telepathic humans and the Isitri, I found the ethical quandaries our heroes were faced with to be the driving force of this book. Before he has a chance to think twice, Kirk violates the Prime Directive and intervenes, but rather than becoming focused on a rule that loses all sense when examined, Galanter proceeds by exploring how Kirk and Spock will face the tough decisions that their intervention has brought about. Obviously mind control is bad, but to what extent will they go to prevent it? By intervening against Berlis as he controls a planet, does Kirk side with a rival alien power bent on his extermination?

Where I thought Galanter could have improved was the consideration of what was to be done with Berlis assuming he could be captured and prevented from influencing his people. The idea of banishment was addressed, but in such a scenario I found it a little difficult to believe that no one would recommend the obvious, no matter how distasteful: maybe killing him is the only answer. Yet as the novel played out, Galanter placed characters in even more morally ambiguous situations and kept any resolution from being a pat one.

With such a simple story, it was also interesting to see how Galanter went about assembling a story in which so many obvious solutions weren’t possible. For example, as soon as I thought about just beaming up Berlis and warping away, and explanation was given for why that wasn’t possible. Galanter also problematized the idea of an assassination, demonstrating that Berlis’s hold over his people would not dissipate immediately following his death but diminish over time. None of this is a criticism; instead, by being able to tease out the seams in his narrative, it was possible to see and appreciate how Galanter went about assembling it. The dialogue literally sounded like it was straight out of an episode from the 1960s, something that I think few authors are able to replicate.

Troublesome Minds isn’t a great novel, but it is a solid one. And it also feels like an important story, where problems aren’t black and white and solutions leave the reader pondering rather than having everything go back to normal at the end.

The Limey

2009-10-09T00:46:00.011-05:00

Though one may first think of Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey as a typical revenge film, a close viewing reveals that so much more is going on, both with regards to the directing and the character work. Played by Terence Stamp, Wilson is a British ex-con who flies out to Los Angeles after his daughter dies in a car crash in order to find out what happened and settle the score with those that have wronged her. Though the daughter's death was apparently an accident, Wilson suspects more was going on and looks into her relationship with Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), a music producer.

Both Stamp and Fonda carry with them the roles they played in movies in the 60s, and that helps inform the audience of their motivations here. The personal relationships are stripped to a minimum, and thus the audience is largely in the dark on any backstory, causing a sort of subconscious reliance on what we know of the types of characters Stamp and Fonda usually play.

The film frequently features dialogue and background sound from previous or future scenes juxtaposed with a current scene. Dialogue from one conversation, for instance, may find itself dispersed throughout the film, articulated for the first time long after its chronological moment has passed, as a sort of narrative flashback superimposed over later conversation, to complete a character's thought or punctuate a character's emphasis. Certain touchstones include Wilson sitting on the airplane thinking of his daughter and Wilson’s conversation with Eduardo (Luis Guzman) after arriving in LA. This causes certain shots to have different meanings depending upon where one sees them in the film. Soderbergh plays with the editing not to just be unorthodox, but to use the grammar available in film to its full effect though it is in ways that conventional filmmakers have eschewed.

A similar technique is also used when introducing the character of Valentine, where Soderbergh uses future scenes from the movie to establish a trailer of sorts to introduce the character. At that time, the audience doesn’t know that it is seeing into the future of the narrative, though it starts to become more clear on a second viewing that the editing is playing with the concept of memory.

For example, when Wilson first meets Elaine (Leslie Ann Warren), a single conversation is depicted as taking place in three different locations simultaneously, with cuts back and forth as the conversation progresses. Though this makes absolutely no chronological sense, it works because the entire movie acts as a sort of memory play, and if one has a conversation over several hours with another person, they may not recall exactly what was said where but will remember the salient details of the conversation. Yet the memory analogy breaks down a bit for we see no through the eyes of one person, but rather (or at least) two: Wilson and Valentine.

Though a violent film, most of the violence is kept at a distance. In a well-praised shot, the camera stays back on the street as Wilson walks into a warehouse and kills several men inside. As the lone survivor runs away, Wilson walks out with blood splattered on his face, causing one to imagine what happened and have more impact because of that. Later at a party Valentine is throwing in his house, Wilson head butts a bodyguard and throws him over the side of a balcony to his death (shown here). But this is shot from inside the house and the action takes place over the shoulder of Fonda, keeping it again at a distance, and honestly making it funnier.

Not to be overlooked is the insertion of clips from a 1967 film called Poor Cow in which Terence Stamp played a petty thief. Wilson's daughter died as an adult, but each time he thinks of her he sees her as she was when she was still a little girl. Those scenes of her childhood, and of Stamp as a younger man, come out of Poor Cow, which was shot by Ken Loach in a sort of grainy documentary-esque style that really makes it seem that they are memories rather than just clips from another movie.

I saw this movie back when it was originally released, but I was young and didn’t know much about film then. Today I still don’t know much about film, but I know a lot more than I did, and this honestly is one of the most creative movies I have watched in a long time. Soderbergh is a great director, one of the best today, and this is as good a film as any to see that. Watch The Limey, if not for the editing and directing, then for Stamp, who has one of my favorite monologues in a scene with veteran character actor Bill Duke.

Myriad Universes: The Last Generation

2009-10-06T00:44:00.003-05:00

With alternate versions of our heroes being popular in just about every television show ever broadcasted, it’s no surprise that the same would hold true for a franchise like Star Trek, who has gone to that well many a time. Last year, Pocket Books published six short novels set entirely within universes that had been irrevocably altered due to some major event with which readers are familiar having a different outcome. Overall, I enjoyed the two collections (which I reviewed here and here), and look forward to a third that hopefully will be produced next year.

So I guess it is no surprise that IDW would choose the Myriad Universe format for its first ‘crossover’ with Pocket Books. Entitled The Last Generation, the five issue collection tells the story of what Jean-Luc Picard’s universe would be like had Captain Kirk not stopped the planned Klingon assassination of the Federation president in Star Trek VI. As you might imagine, it doesn’t turn out so well.

Klingons conquered Earth in the interim, and Will Riker and Geordi LaForge have somehow come across an android named Data and are trying to get him into Resistance hands while keeping him away from Klingon ones. Their cell is none other than that run by Jean-Luc Picard, a single ‘father’ for his nephew, Rene, after his brother was killed by Klingons. Everyone else is pretty much in the resistance cell too: Beverly Crusher, a battle hardened Wesley, Yar, O’Brien, etc. Even Ro Laren, though how a Bajoran made it into an Earth resistance cell against Klingon imperialism is never addressed. Though not necessarily a bad start, it seems like only a slight deviation from Yesterday’s Enterprise, where the Federation was about to fall to the Klingons rather than it already being the case.

Just before Riker and LaForge lose Data to the Klingons, Captain Sulu of Excelsior shows up to save him. Apparently he has a cloaking device and has been fighting the Klingons for seven decades even though his ship looks like it is in perfect condition. Data was apparently created to be able to detect errors in the timestream, and he has pinpointed the death that Kirk failed to prevent as the deciding factor that hey must risk everything to go back and fix. Thus the crux of the series relies on a plot device that has been well used before now, and the obligatory twist at the end makes little sense. (I know that character is insane, but he doesn’t seem to ever work in the stories in which he is used.)

There’s a lot not to like about the execution, especially the way Wesley is treated. He is just a teenager but a good fighter who looks up to Picard as a father except when he doesn’t. After his girlfriend is killed, we are treated to a completely unbelievable scene in which he blames Picard. Later he shaves his hair into a Mohawk and puts on warrior paint, convinces O’Brien and others that Picard is crazy and they should subvert his plan to go back in time and change history, and then screws everything up before being taught a lesson at the end.

While I can handle a slight derivation of an old plot, writer Andrew Steven Harris seems to have missed the whole point of Pocket’s series. Rather than taking characters we know from an alternate universe and have them attempt to put right what once went wrong, the idea was to see how characters we know would have been different if history had gone a different direction. The six novels did this in different ways, but were about characters in their own universe, not in a changed one. By turning his whole story on trying to change what happened differently, Harris loses what made the whole concept so interesting and dooms his project to be written off as a rehash of a plot we’ve seen ten too many times. It reduces the emotion we might have for these characters because their entire history is treated as imaginary and derivative. And if Harris just had to go this way, why not complicate the issue a bit: sure Picard could change the past, but that would mean a universe where his nephew is dead because of a fire. Sure the life Rene has now isn’t ideal, but at least it’s a life.

Old DC Star Trek artist Gordon Purcell pencils the series, and he is as good as he was back in the old days. The characters look remarkably like their actual counterparts, with the exception of Wesley who just didn’t really work for me. That said, the layouts are occasionally confusing, with important panel divisions being lost in the gutter. The series also had some creative cover designs, like a refashioning of the sixth movie poster as well as the reimagining of the X-Men ‘Days of Future Past’ cover that is shown here.

All in all, a disappointing execution of a story that seems to have been misconceived in the first place.

Reading List: September 2009

2009-10-01T07:42:00.004-05:00

Severe lack of updates this past month for a lot of reasons, but for the most part due to a focus elsewhere. My thesis shall be finished on time, though I foresee a frantic weekend of rewriting after I get notes from my advisor and before I submit it to my committee. All said, it is actually going pretty well and I just might be able to massage the content into a journal submission or two.

I have no idea how much content I will have time or desire to post this month, but I am sure I will think of something. I may even take bits of my thesis and alter them into blog posts. Anything to procrastinate. Anyway, in the month of September I read 9 books and 8 graphic novels, and this is what they were:

Open Secrets by Dayton Ward
Rose by Jeff Smith & Charles Vess
Stupid, Stupid Rat-Tails by Smith, et al.
Enough About Me by David Shields
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar, et al.
Nobility of Spirit by Rob Riemen
Half in Love by Maile Meloy
The Soul Key by Olivia Woods
Powers: The 25 Coolest Dead Superheroes of All Time by Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming
Swamp Thing: Earth to Earth by Alan Moore, et al.
The Nobody by Jeff Lemire
The Walking Dead: Miles Behind Us by Robert Kirkman & Charlie Adlard
The Broken Shore by Peter Temple
Ron Carlson Writes a Story by Ron Carlson
The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio
The Impostor's Daughter by Laurie Sandell

Dan Chaon is the best writer that nobody reads, and Await Your Reply was a damn good book. The short story collection by D'Ambrosio is also worth your time, but you should avoid Lemire's The Nobody and Temple's boring mystery novel.

Please ask questions and/or offer opinions about anything here.

The Soul Key by Olivia Woods

2009-09-13T03:14:00.008-05:00

No one hesitates to tell me that I am in the minority when I state my preference for Bajoran religious and political stories above all others in Deep Space Nine. And perhaps I am one of the few who has lamented the absence of further stories involving the Ea’voq, Bajor’s sister planet in the Gamma Quadrant, since Rising Son. But I think that Olivia Woods’s new novel The Soul Key surprisingly blends the recent mirror universe emphasis with the Prophets and their many followers in an effective way.

The novel finally fills in the backstory from the point Iliana Ghemor escapes her Cardassian prison up until the present storyline, including how she came to wield power over Taran’atar. As some reviewers have noted, there is a greater focus on her than on any of the regular characters, but this in fact is due to necessity of allowing the readers to experience her story in order for the overall story to advance. Ghemor’s motivations and actions not only help one understand her better, but also are used in order to contrats her with Kira Nerys and the Ghemor from the mirror universe, all of whom play critical roles in this story and the saga to come.

After returning from the Prophets, Benjamin Sisko called Kira his ‘Right Hand,’ and we see the weight of that pronouncement in the conclusion of this tale. While the Ea’voq are only mentioned, I got the feeling that they would be seen again in the near future. And finally the Ascendants were shown preparing for their apocalypse, only to be surprised by what happens. I don’t want to give anything away, but The Soul Key wraps up the mirror universe arc and moves back towards the religious angle that has been neglected for the last few stories.

Speaking of the mirror universe, after reading so much about that reality’s Miles O’Brien, not to mention seeing him in numerous television episodes, I was surprised and disappointed at the way he was portrayed here. Though scenes from his perspective are often written to show his sense of doubt over his ability to lead the rebellion, nothing made me think that he would suffer the sort of emotional breakdown described in these pages. The other mirror universe characters, from Eddington to Keiko, are static here. But what is so enjoyable is that fleshing them out isn’t necessary; one need only read other entries set in the mirror universe to get ales focusing on them, to one degree or another. That it all holds together so well yet so loosely shows editorial oversight clicking on all cylinders.

Unfortunately, with the termination of Marco Palmieri, editor and creative force behind the post-television Deep Space Nine fiction, we may never see the story that this novel sets up all the pieces for. With the next novel being announced as taking place three or so years in the future, it seems likely that the readers will receive a certain amount of filler that could very well gloss over events occurring in the interim. That’s not to say that I do not have faith in David R. George, only that a work so conceived likely won’t address the parts of the relaunch I am most interested with to the degree I would like. So it is with a certain bittersweet feeling that I review The Soul Key, a good novel that could unfortunately represent the interruption point of a very good series.

Jeff Smith's Bone-Related Material

2009-09-03T02:26:00.004-05:00

Jeff Smith’s comic saga Bone is one of the best fantasy stories I have ever read; sort of Lord of the Rings meets The Smurfs. After wanting to pick up the ancillary volumes for some time, I finally did this week. It’s a mixed bag, with neither coming close to the magic of the core titles.

Jeff Smith penned Rose and brought in Charles Vess to do the artwork in a prequel starring the title character, who readers will know better as Grandma Ben. Basically, this story fills us in on exactly how Rose’s sister Briar becomes the embodiment of the Lord of the Locusts as depicted in the main comic. Unfortunately, nothing much is added to what we already knew, and as such the story is a bit disappointing. In fact, the only major characters not to be shown in the main comic are two dogs that Rose can speak with telepathically.

Vess’s artwork is different stylistically from Smith’s, and it is a better match since the story lacks the humor prevalent in Bone. But it caused this reader to feel like he was reading something that didn’t mesh well with the original saga, something that took characters he knew and interpreted them differently. The magic of Smith's series is in the blend of the cartoonish with the Bone cousins and the rat creatures paired with the fantasy element of just about everything else. That blend isn’t here, Vess’s artwork is anything but cartoonish, and certain events were surprisingly graphic and violent for what is aimed at a younger audience.

If Rose is missing humor, Stupid, Stupid Rat-Tails has it in abundance. Written by Tom Sniegoski and drawn by Smith, this comic manages to seem familiar and yet new, with the founder of Boneville, Big Johnson Bone, as the lead character. As he explores with a newly won monkey, Big Johnson must help a collection of baby animals find their parents who have been taken by the rat creatures. And unlike Rose, we learn things here, like why the rat creatures are depicted as having no tails.

Obviously intended for a younger audience than the main series, this volume can make one a bit weary at times. Big Johnson is the stereotypical exaggerator, and while Sniegoski manages to make this work in action scenes, it doesn’t so much work in the relative peace at the start of the comic. That said, this would make a nice volume for a younger reader, especially as it includes another story called 'Riblet,' about a young boar who bullies the other baby animals until he turns his antics on the rat creatures.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any more Bone-related material out there for me to look into, which is sad because I enjoyed the original collection so much. I’ll be glad when Jeff Smith puts out some new material, hopefully before too much longer.

Dayton Ward's Open Secrets

2009-09-02T03:17:00.003-05:00

Dayton Ward ties up the loose ends left over from Reap the Whirlwind in the latest novel in the Vanguard series, Open Secrets. Commodore Reyes was arrested at the end of the previous book for allowing classified information to be disseminated by a reporter, and we get the fallout from that decision here. T’Prynn, intelligence officer who had a mental breakdown, suffers her malady and, of course, eventually recovers. The saga of the Shedai artifacts and the search for information continues as well. But unfortunately, this is about all Ward does.

Rather than recap all the action, I’ll just say that if you are interested in Vanguard then this is something you should read. It’s not a bad novel; it just doesn’t stand on its own at all. What new material there is seems only prelude for David Mack’s Precipice, which will continue the series later this year.

One of the interesting aspects of the series is the way that Shedai technology and the meta-genome are precursors to later events with which readers are already familiar. For example, a man is completely healed much like would happen with a dermal regenerator in TNG. Carol Marcus’s very appearance lets us know that this will be an avenue to Genesis, at least to some extent. And Ward helps set the stage for not only the Organian intervention into a Federation/Klingon war shown in the episode ‘Errand of Mercy,’ but also the colony of Nimbus III shown in one of the movies, Final Frontier I believe. Yet rather than this sort of thing being secondary to the story, it seems that Open Secrets is an exercise in reconciliation as story.

The novel also suffers from time lapse between its publication and its predecessor’s. Frankly, I had a hard time remembering what happened, even with a short primer at the novel’s beginning. It is always a delicate balance between killing a previous reader with unnecessary exposition and helping an unfamiliar or forgetful reader gain some sort of orientation, but I felt Ward erred on the side of too little here. While I have seen his prose style being ripped in reviews, I found it adequate if uninspired. The author likely would be served well by spending a little more time on style, but it was hardly sub-average for contemporary Star Trek fiction.

And with the title of the novel being Open Secrets, one would expect that some secrets would be revealed. Unfortunately, what is revealed leaves the reader with more questions than answers. A novel that seems to just be dealing with the fallout of the previous entry while moving characters around to set them in place for the next, Ward’s book is adequate though unsatisfying.

Reading List: August 2009

2009-09-01T02:11:00.004-05:00

Rather than use this monthly post as a place to worry in writing about the lack of progress I am having with my thesis, I'll just say that things are getting written and even if I end up writing 20,000 words over a long weekend I will have this finished and defended by Thanksgiving so I can apply to PhD programs and do this all over again in a few years. My motto: Live and Don't Learn.

Not much content this month, especially with at least three reviews being scrapped when I found they had nothing original or (potentially) enlightening to say. I worked for a while on something about Disney's acquisition of Marvel this afternoon, so maybe that will see the light of day before long. Jenny Davidson did an interesting meme tonight, so maybe I will break a self-imposed rule and do it here tomorrow.

Last month I finished 9 books and 9 graphic novels. Here is what they are:

Bob Schieffer's America by Bob Schieffer
Uncanny X-Men: Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire by Ed Brubaker, et al.
Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll
Star Trek: Countdown by Mike Johnson, et al.
Cooperstown Confidential by Zev Chafets
Swamp Thing: A Murder of Crows by Alan Moore, et al.
X-Men: Emperor Vulcan by Christopher Yost & Paco Diaz Luque
Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon
The Father of All Things by Tom Bissell
100 Bullets: Wilt by Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso
Uncanny X-Men: Divided We Stand by Brubaker & Michael Choi
Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye by Robert Kirkman & Tony Moore
Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
Castle by J. Robert Lennon
Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

Read Lennon, Meloy, and Hemon, a favorite of mine. And don't read any more X-Men comics; I'm done with them after these pitiful volumes. Comments, questions, some small sign that people actually read this?

The State of Star Trek Literature

2009-08-26T22:50:00.004-05:00

It was announced today that Star Trek books editor Margaret Clark was laid off in another round of cutbacks from Simon & Schuster. Though I have been highly critical of her work, I have mixed feelings about the move. But while fanboys on the interwebs are justifying the move as being solely based on overall market conditions and not on her performance or the sales of her books, something that has been bothering me for a while about the Star Trek line has crystallized.

In 2001, Pocket released Avatar, a two-book story set after the events of Deep Space Nine that continues the story of those left on the station. Well planned and written, it became a favorite and a bestseller, leading to likely the most acclaimed run of books in the history of Star Trek literature. Tight, cohesive, and innovative storytelling made the series a success, at least for the first ten or so books.

Of course, other such series have been planned and executed to varying levels of success. After Nemesis, a new series following Captain Riker on Titan has been pretty good, as has the TOS-era Vanguard, which takes place on a space station near Tholian space. But there have been misfires as well. The follow-up to Enterprise has been mixed, and the first four books following Voyager were abysmal. However, they sold well, or at least well enough to continue, and as the overall universe became more and more complex, the references between various novels began to increase as well.

But as can quickly happen, these references at times became cumbersome, especially for those uninitiated to the larger mythos. This leads me to my point, which unfortunately I can’t back up with sales numbers as they aren’t available: the audience for Star Trek books isn’t growing. Rather than making the novels accessible to a wider audience, the stories got tighter and more interrelated. This is great an appreciated if you are like me, a person who reads nearly everything, but for a casual reader this can be infuriating. Riker and Troi have a kid now? Tucker is alive and a Romulan spy? Didn’t he die in the show? The same paradox happens all the time in the comic industry; reward the dedicated readers even though doing so is alienating the casual and/or potential fans.

Then there comes the recent Star Trek movie, which has currently grossed over $256 million domestically. Other than the novelization, the first book to exploit such a hot property won’t be released until next June, a full year after the movie debuted. By then the film will be out of the public’s mind, whereas a book released in the next couple of months could really capitalize on its popularity. Such decisions by the editorial staff aren’t helping bring new readers into the fold, and IDW has proven that tying into the film makes a lot of economic sense.

Editorial decisions like this make me wonder if Clark really had a long future as an editor on the line. She didn’t seem to work well with some of the better authors, and her books couldn’t stay consistent with each other. Not situating her company to take advantage of the wild success of the film in a timely manner is yet another strike.

I’m not saying Clark should have lost her job, but even though I don’t have a business degree I understand that companies are out to make money. Structuring a line so that is hard for new readers to gain access doesn’t help sales increase; in fact, it insures sales will decrease because you are going to lose some people to attrition anyway. So while I am not happy Clark is gone because I now must worry about the future of the stories with which I have become engaged, to some extent at least, I’m not sure that this wasn’t something that any of us could have seen coming eventually.

The Father of All Things by Tom Bissell

2009-08-18T02:22:00.003-05:00

What promises to be a memoir of a father, his son, and the legacy of the Vietnam War falls short on all counts in Tom Bissell’s The Father of All Things. Bissell’s father was a Marine officer in Vietnam and together the two travel back to the country where they travel the countryside, talk to other veterans, and relive the war. Yet the book failed to resonate in an emotional way, something surprising since Bissell did such a good job making his travels in Uzbekistan meaningful in Chasing the Sea.

The first section of the book intersperses a second-person narrative of what Bissell’s father was going through around the time of the fall of Saigon in 1974 along with a blow-by-blow account of the evacuation of the embassy. The pacing of the mass exodus from Vietnam is rendered in a way to make a real impact; such a complex and detailed historical narrative seems a bit out of place within a so-called memoir about the effects of Vietnam on a father and son. The imbalance is likely what makes this so hard to reconcile: the evacuation of the embassy outweighs the narrative on Bissell’s father by a factor of at least three to one.

The second and most substantial portion of Bissell’s book takes a broader view of history, though it too is interspersed with the travels of the author and his father in the country. The historical accounts are done within the context of the travel narrative, for example the section dealing with My Lai is placed as the father and son visit the area, yet again the history seems to overshadow the relationship between the two travelers. Bissell seems to be more interested in providing history than in actually describing the effects of the journey on his father or demonstrating how his father’s experiences in Vietnam affected the way he was raised. It’s not that these issues aren’t addressed, just that they aren’t given enough depth to prove truly interesting or make one feel as though he/she is not just reading an actual history book.

The brief third section provides an account of over a dozen grown children whose fathers were in the war, fighting for the NLA (North), AVRN (South) or the US. In these twenty or so pages, more emotion is rendered than in the previous 350. Though not quite long enough to provide true richness, these snapshots of the children’s views of their fathers was stirring, perhaps more so to me for my father also served in Vietnam.

I suppose that the true problem with this book is that it reads like a bloated magazine piece, which is what it started out to be. I am a big fan of Bissell’s work, but what seemed an ideal read for someone in my position (roughly the same age as Bissell with a veteran father), ultimately was disappointing and failed to provide any illumination on what effect Vietnam had on not just the relationship between the author and his father, but between a larger population of veteran fathers and their sons.

Cooperstown Confidential by Zev Chafets

2009-08-12T23:58:00.001-05:00

Zev Chafets thankfully spends little time describing the physical Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, focusing his book Cooperstown Confidential instead on the intangibles that make up the glorified institution: the collection of mortals who make up the rules, the writers who vote on the players, and those in charge who make and remake the rules every couple of years

Of course statistics count more than anything in baseball, yet a lot more goes into getting into the Hall that that: cronyism, prejudice, and financial self-interest play a large part as well. Chafets addresses a variety of factors that have influenced those who make the rules (a committee of former baseball executives and other such types) and those who vote on the players (the Baseball Writers Association of America, for which one must regularly write about baseball for a major newspaper to be a part). The current big issue surrounds players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens who have been accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs, which theoretically has given them an advantage over the competition.

Rule 5 of the Hall of Fame’s Rules for Election states that a player will be voted on based upon their ‘record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.’ Baseball writers have been keeping Mark McGwire out of the Hall by using such a clause and many are on record as saying they shall do the same for Bonds and Clemens. Yet Chafets duly notes that the Hall presently contains cheaters (spitballer Gaylord Perry), members of the Ku Klux Klan (Rogers Hornsby, Cap Anson), severe alcoholics (Three Finger Brown), and all around sociopaths (Ty Cobb, who legendarily beat up a man with no arms for heckling him). Why are these guys in and people like Bonds and McGwire likely to never make it?

In one of the best chapters in his book, Chafets uses Bonds to launch into a chapter detailing racism in the game and the evolution of blacks in the sport. There are now far fewer blacks playing in the majors than there were as recently as a decade ago while the proportion of Latinos has risen dramatically. Gary Sheffield made headlines a few years ago by claiming that baseball teams preferred signing Latino players over blacks because Latinos were less outspoken. Sheffield's controversial comments reverberated throughout the game, though his opinion has been seconded by Latino players like Neifi Perez. Then Chafets further delves into prejudice in the game going back to the Negro Leagues and the age of Jackie Robinson. Robinson lobbied for black managers in his lifetime but did not live to see his dream come to fruition.

But the piece of this book that makes it worth reading is the chapter on the Mitchell Report, the study of steroids in baseball compiled by former US Senator George Mitchell that named Clemens as a steroid user, among many others. Chafets argues convincingly for something I personally have felt all along: greatness can only be judged by evaluating one against their peers in the same time period, and as the estimates of players using PEDs often being as high as 50-75%, one can’t separate known users from unknown ones and vote accordingly. That steroids might make a great player slightly better, but definitely won't make an average player into a Hal of Famer is also emphasized.

Baseball players are just like the rest of the population, full of faults, some being worse than others. But getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame should have less to do with how nice you are or how many charities you were involved with than with what happened on the field. Chafets even goes so far as to argue that steroids could be legalized and prescribed by doctors to be taken appropriately. Seemingly, this full disclosure would remove a lot of the integrity issues that PEDs have caused. This makes a bit of sense logically, yet I doubt that this idea has any practical application.

While not the best book on the Hall of Fame, which would be Bill James’s Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?, Cooperstown Confidential is engaging and addresses important and diverse issues. While the depth isn’t always what a reader might hope, one still feels a greater sense of understanding about the politics behind the institution.

Reading List: July 2009

2009-08-01T02:33:00.009-05:00

I've spent this month doing only two things: worrying about finances and hating myself for being so unproductive. In this time of economic strife at home and abroad, the former seems justified, yet since I can do little to change my situation at the moment, I should probably just let it go. Yet the latter is so awful, so eroding of the edifice of my soul, that I have no (good) excuse for not making a major change.

Despite the fact that another month has passed, I still have accomplished very little on my thesis. Now I have a delineated outline and a scope of what exactly I am hoping to accomplish, most of that was done over three weeks ago with the help of my adviser. Words are on the page, but I cant seem to get any real work done in one session, and my sessions tend to occur a week or so apart. This month necessitates a reversal, so I am going to try and hit 1000 words five times a week. This seems reasonable.

Dedicated readers will have noticed that I only posted three times of any consequence in the past month, the lowest total since I started to actually maintain a blog last winter. Again, I hope to change this, but I must say that finishing my degree (for which I have spent enough to buy a decent luxury sedan) must take precedence over a format in which I have yet to earn a dime.

Rather than just making a list this month, I am going to return to an old tradition that I stole from Steve Mollmann. In the month of July, I read 18 books and/or graphic novels:

1. Ultimate Spiderman: Hollywood by Brian Michael Bendis & Mark Bagley: The webslinger gets all meta when Sam Raimi begins to film a movie based on news reports of Spiderman's exploits. Sort of fun, but without anything really meaningful to say.

2. Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander: The title made me pick up this book. That said, this memoir is about so much more than growing up in a dysfunctional Jewish Orthodox family; the idea that God is all knowing and all powerful, if used to scare children, can ravage their lives as adults. For example, saying that if you masturbate you will forever burn in hell, submerged in a vat of all the semen you ever ejaculated manually. So it's funny, but there is something not at all humorous about the way such teachings, which one believes as gospel when there is no other influence, can cause so much angst and literal trauma. I really wish I would have written more extensively about this book.

3. Ultimate X-Men: The Most Dangerous Game by Brian K. Vaughan & Stuart Immomen: Mutants accused of capital crimes are sent to an island where they are hunted as a form of execution. But the twist? It's all filmed for the worst reality television ever. Craptacular.

4. Ultimate X-Men: Hard Lessons by Vaughan, et al.: All over the place and not too interesting to boot, this collection suffers from being comprised of storylines that have virtually nothing to do with one another. Also, they kill Gambit and give his powers to Rogue, who now can touch people. She's the most interesting one solely b/c she can never touch anyone! Yawn.

5. Ultimate X-Men: Magnetic North by Vaghan & Immomen: Better, but only relatively. Lorna Dane accidentally commits a terrible crime and the mutants under Emma Frost team up with the X-Men in order to protect her from being sent to superhero-Guantanamo.

6. Losing the Peace by William Leisner: Overall, a book I thought was okay. Read my thoughts here.

7. Ultimate X-Men: Phoenix? by Robert Kirkman, et al.: To be honest, I don't remember much from this, aside from a 'date night gone awry' story.

8. Better by Atul Gawande: Read about my thoughts on this collection of essays by the New Yorker writer here.

9. 52, Volume 2
10. 52, Volume 3
11. 52, Volume 4 by Geoff Johns, et al.: Probably better as an exercise than it was w/r/t story points, I still enjoyed this collection. However, it reminded me how far out of the loop I am in the DC Universe (Barry Allen is alive?!?!?), so I may have to pick up a bunch of collections in the near future.

12. Ultimate Spiderman: Carnage by Bendis & Bagley: One of the most iconic deaths in comics history is interpreted here as a random killing by a bad guy. Bendis should be fucking ashamed of himself. Maybe I'll write more about this, but it's probably already been done.

13. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers: One of the best books I have read this year. I wanted to write about it, but I just couldn't find the words to do it justice. I'm looking forward to making it through the rest of Powers's work in the coming year.

14. Treason by Peter David: Why did I read this book? For what one should expect from a recent New Frontier book, this is as good as any. But it just didn't work for me.

15. Beware of God by Auslander: This collection of short stories is thematically quite similar to the memoir (written afterwards). While the stories were pretty good, I felt I had already read the 'real' account and their effect was subdued.

16. Ultimate Spiderman: Superstars by Bendis & Bagley: Wolverine and Spiderman switch bodies in one of the stupidest stories ever told.

17. IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas by Chuck Klosterman: Entertaining collection of Klosterman's journalism over the past decade. He's funny and occasionally says something insightful. I wish I could write like this.

18. Full Circle by Kirsten Beyer: For what this set out to do, tie up Christie Golden's story threads and get Voyager back to the Delta Quadrant, it did well enough I suppose, though the prose is uninspired. And I'm not sure where Chakotay was in this book. Sure, there was a guy named Chakotay, but he was a whiny douchebag who isn't even presented consistently. From now on, Brendan Moody will be responsible for keeping me up to date with Beyer's work so I don't have to read it; he likely will be unable to resist her next novel this fall.

That's it. Perhaps all the time I spend reading might be better served writing. Actually, I'm pretty sure that 'perhaps' should read 'certainly.' Questions, comments, et cetera, ad nauseum.

Trimming the Canon

2009-07-13T22:55:00.003-05:00

A group of contributors at The Second Pass have compiled a list of ten books that should be stricken from the canon. As it says in the introduction, this ‘is a list of ten books that will be pressed into your hands by ardent fans. Resist these people. Life may not be too short (I’m only in my mid-30s, and already pretty bored), but it’s not endless.’

Among the list are several books I have read, and I have to agree that some of these choices seem justifiable to me. For example, I really did enjoy Don DeLillo’s White Noise when I read it about ten years ago, but it read as dated even then. Sure it’s prescient, but when what it was prescient about is itself old news, perhaps it isn’t a crime to skip this.

Also must concur with the elimination of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I only read this novel because a friend of mine told me it was the best novel he had read that year (2006, I believe). As The Second Pass notes, the plot is secondary and the characters so vague that they can be nothing but archetypes. The prose can be commended separately I suppose, but when putting it in service to such a mediocre tale, it makes a person wonder what the point is.

Perhaps a bit more surprising is the inclusion of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which I read in high school and thought was for the same sorts of people who thought ‘enlightenment ala Robert Pirsig’ was cool. Maybe I just don’t get the Beat writers. But the exclusion of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections was quite shocking. Not so much because of the call for decanonization, but instead that it is part of the canon in the first place. I really liked the book when I read it last month, but would I have classified it as a must-read? Of course not.

I’ve begun to wonder what other books might be excised from the foreboding list of all literature that you must read. The Merry Wives of Windsor for sure, as well as Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, a novel I found so incredibly overrated that it put me off of later-Roth for the better part of a year. The poetry of Sir Philip Sidney. But with the loose definition of canon used by The Second Pass, perhaps it wouldn’t actually be that hard to get rid of things, even books I loved. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was fantastic, but no one is going to read that in fifty years.

I suppose lists of ‘canonical’ books are interesting because they give a reader a place to start, but as the piece points out, the lists are so long that one has nowhere near the amount of time to actually make it through everything (even leaving out the great books that would be written between now and the end of that reader’s life). So the impulse to throw out some of the ‘canon’ to make it more manageable makes sense, but somehow I doubt throwing out ten books really makes all that much of a difference.

A question: which books have you read that you would consider recommending against and adding to the list?

Better by Atul Gawande

2009-07-10T23:22:00.000-05:00

If we wanted to save more patients’ lives in the medical system, is it more important to fund research that could perhaps find cures, or would it be more appropriate to invest time and money in improving the standards already in place? The tendency for us to say ‘more research’ is almost a given, but Atul Gawande, surgeon and staff writer for The New Yorker, argues that the later can have far more drastic effects.

In Better, Gawande explains that in medicine, as in nearly all human endeavors, variations in performance create a bell curve where most participants are merely at or below average. In this collection of essays, he studies this idea in the medical community and looks to find what separates the positive deviants from the rest.

Gawande writes about such the importance of hand washing, something one would think is a given in hospitals and doctor’s offices, yet shockingly staph infections in hospitals are transmitted to 30% of patients, a number that could be reduced dramatically using tools already in place. The doctor also covers ethics in medicine, from the use of chaperones when examining patients of the opposite gender and the role of doctors in capital punishment.

In covering medical interventions in slightly abnormal pregnancies, he makes a strong case that many caesarian sections are given when the old method of using the clamps on an infant would work just as well with an equal or better chance of complications. When studying the differences between a first class treatment center for cystic fibrosis and an average one, Gawande argues that the main difference is the ability of the medical staff to treat the person more than the disease and to be willing to think outside the box when it comes to diseases with which we have made relatively little progress on a cure.

In a stirring conclusion in which he offers five pieces of advice to medical students on making a difference in patients’ lives, Gawande says that it ‘often seems safest to do whatever everyone else is doing, but a doctor must not let that happen—nor should anyone who takes on risks and responsibilities in society.’ Technology provides many solutions and enables advances in areas previously thought impossible. But it is human ingenuity that underpins technological advance, and sometimes it is simple human practices that have the biggest impact.

Better is an entertaining and informative collection of essays with lessons that go beyond the specifics of practicing medicine. I look forward to reading more from Dr. Gawande in the future.

Losing the Peace by William Leisner

2009-07-07T08:27:00.005-05:00

As has been noted numerous times in this space, I was not a fan of the universe-changing Destiny trilogy. However, I have found the follow-ups to put an interesting spin on said events, so I was looking forward to reading the first full story centering on the Enterprise after the devastating Borg attacks, Losing the Peace by William Leisner. Full disclosure necessitates that I note that while Leisner and I have never met, we do have a friendly relationship on several Trek discussion boards and are mutual friends on LiveJournal.

Being refitted at McKinley Station, the crew of the Enterprise awaits their orders while taking leave. Unsurprising to anyone, the fact that the Federation is not in a position to send the fleet into unknown space becomes clear when President Bacco informs Picard that his ship will be needed close to home.

The refugee crisis is impacting several planets, especially the ocean planet of Pacifica, which you will of course remember is home of the Selkies, the race of Aili Lavena of the Titan. Beverly Crusher and Commander Kadohata lead a team to assess the refugee situation and provide what assistance they can. Leisner’s depictions of the refugee camp don’t really evoke the sort of crisis he trying to convey, but later in the novel, the reactions of outsiders to the 70,000 people stranded and living in tents does a lot to drive this home. But this situation overall serves not only a critique of the limitations of bureaucracies, but also of the very people those bureaucracies serve. Too often we think of government as the solution to our problems, as if there is a button on their desks they need merely press to provide assistance. The tension between the refugees and residents of Pacifica make this point without overstatement, and Leisner should be lauded for pulling this off.

However, the personal fallout from the crisis fails to be effective, but honestly this isn’t really the fault of Leisner. Instead, it is a result of the overall planning of Destiny and its aftermath; rather than seeing Earth or Betazed destroyed, we get Deneva. So the brunt of the crisis falls to seconday characters and cameos rather than squarely on the shoulders of the characters we have spent over twenty years investing emotion in. We first see this in the novel through the eyes of Arandis, the Risian played by Vanessa Williams in the worst episode of Deep Space Nine ever conceived. Risa was destroyed in the invasion, so it works pretty well to use her as a perspective to the crisis, but again it is hard to really feel the impact when the character is merely a guest star.

The invasion of the Borg wiped out the family of security chief Jasminder Choudhury, but she is such an undeveloped character that it is hard to empathize. In addition, the slimmest chance that her family is still alive is unrealistic to her for her family was apparently so good that they would never take a seat on an evacuation if it meant someone else would be unable to go as well. In fact, we later find out that her whole region was apparently saintly, for they left dozens of seats open rather than evacuate. I think that Choudhury’s struggle to deal with the deaths of her family might have been more compelling if she wasn’t all that close to them in the first place. Is she hadn’t spoken to her parents in years and wasn’t really upset about that situation, then the regret of never being able to make amends if she wanted to one day would be nonexistent.

Geordi deals with survivor’s guilt towards the beginning of the novel, but in unrealistic fashion apparently confronts these problems and heals himself in about fourteen seconds. The scenes as written work pretty well, but I kept feeling that these issues could have been drawn out over the whole novel, not only adding another subplot, but making the reader really see how characters they have invested in are suffering.

As the novel progresses, Picard disobeys orders only to have the clichéd result of that disobedience being the solution to greater problems. Admiral Akaar makes the brief but compelling case that the chain of command exists so that the wisest and most intuitive are at the top issuing orders, but that Picard obviously knew better in this and other situations so he is going to be promoted. His new position: director of relief efforts concerning the Borg invasion. But as must happen in order for the stories to continue, he turns down the promotion.

I’ve been all over this type scenario for years, but when the Federation is in a time of dire crisis and the powers that be have selected Picard as the man to lead the efforts in rebuilding, he feels no impetus to do so, no patriotic obligation to serve where he might most be needed. It’s not that I want Picard to no longer be in command of the Enterprise, rather I am tired of him being offered promotions that require the lack of verisimilitude when he turns them down. The impetus is to present Picard as a true explorer, but to me that doesn’t ring true with the character as presented. If he played his cards right, Picard could be the next president of the Federation; am I supposed to believe that someone isn’t whispering that into his ear?

Despite the main crux of this review, I think Leisner did a pretty good job with showing the fallout of the war. Without the overarching and strict plot structure, he is able to provide what amounts to a character piece. As the immediate aftermath of Destiny passes and the Federation gets ready to deal with the new threat of the Typhon Pact, it is nice to get such an intimate look at these characters and the aftermath of the Borg invasion.

Reading List: June 2009

2009-07-01T03:43:00.006-05:00

I feel as though I have wasted the past month. I have written little, whether here or for school, and much of my reading has been confined to comic books. While I do have a paper in mind analyzing the layouts of Brian Michael Bendis, I am not sure that I can really call much of what I did read 'research.' As much as it pains me to admit, I am not sure that I work all that well alone. Rather, I tend to be much more productive with tight deadlines and when I am attending class where I can bounce ideas off and gain new insights by listening to my colleagues. Last summer was quite unproductive as well, but since I am done with classes forever, or at least until I pursue another degree, I need to learn how to get some real work done.

Anyway, the library turns out to be a great source of comics. Since I started using it as my main source for obtaining books, I've read at a much quicker pace than I usually do. Of course, it helps that I can just sample things without shelling out a penny. Minus the large amount of taxes I now pay, of course.

Continuing my quest to actually recommend something for you, I would have to say that Bill Bishop's The Big Sort was by far the best book I read this past month. I intended to write up some thoughts on it, but it all just seemed to be summarizing Bishop's arguments. Along with the work of Ken Robinson and a timely trip home to see my family, this book made me not only better understand the environment I was raised in, but has caused me to question in what sort of environment I want to raise my own children. Bishop argues that our immediate culture (neighborhood, peer group, church, etc.) have become homogenized over the past thirty years as people purposefully though often unconsciously move to be with people that think the same way they do. Check out the review on the New York Times website.

In the month of June, I completed 26 books and/or graphic novels:

The Push Man and Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Ultimate Spiderman: Public Scrutiny by Bendis & Mark Bagley
Sleepwalk and Other Stories by Adrian Tomine
Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff
Ultimate Spiderman: Venom by Bendis & Bagley
The Chris Farley Show by Tom Farley, Jr. & Tanner Colby
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Decimation: X-Men: The Day After by Peter Milligan, et al.
Civil War by Mark Millar & Steve McNiven
Shards and Shadows edited by Margaret Clark & Marco Palmieri
The Big Sort by Bishop
Batman R.I.P. by Grant Morrison & Tony S. Daniel
Sin City: Hell and Back by Frank Miller
Ultimate X-Men: New Mutants by Bendis & David Finch
Ultimate Spiderman: Irresponsible by Bendis & Bagley
Abandon the Old in Tokyo by Tatsumi
Not the End of the World by Kate Atkinson
Ultimate Spiderman: Cats and Kings by Bendis & Bagley
Ultimate X-Men: The Tempest by Brian K. Vaughan & Brandon Peterson
Ultimate X-Men: Cry Wolf by Vaughan & Andy Kubert
X-Men: Deadly Genesis by Ed Brubaker & Trevor Hairsine
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Remix by Lawrence Lessig
52, Volume One by Geoff Johns, et al.
Ultimate Spiderman: Ultimate Six by Bendis & Hairsine

Seeing as I am still not using this blog in the way I had intended originally nor the way I had thought of going a few months ago, I have no idea whether or how often I will post here again. I wait until something strikes me, but you see how productive that has been. Questions, comments, etc.

The Plagiarism Allegations Against Chris Anderson

2009-06-26T23:52:00.001-05:00

Though you might have trouble finding it now that the round the clock coverage of dead celebrities has flooded all media of any kind, earlier this week Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review discovered several instances of plagiarism in Chris Anderson’s new book, Free. I’ve been looking forward to this book for a few months now, having read The Long Tail back in February.

I’m not all that interested in going back over something others have done better, but I do want to briefly note something. Anderson and other Web 2.0 figures vociferously defend the right of creators to mash-up other works and create new things out of them. When remixing video/audio, it isn’t often that one is really accused of plagiarism; no one is trying to pass off the actual rapping of Dr. Dre as their own. Yet when writing, such a mash-up doesn’t signify the input of others in the same way, something I struggled with in May when I tried to do something by barely rewriting a couple of dozen articles about the Kindle into several sustained arguments. I included links as a sort of citation, but only because I was so uncomfortable with the process.

Anderson’s book is not a scholarly work, but that doesn’t mean he should be excused from citing his material appropriately. That said, I think the argument could be made that he was ‘sampling’ the work of others and integrating it into a larger whole that makes a different, or perhaps just broader, point. Maybe I can put it better another way.

Imagine this: rather than printed text, let’s say that Anderson is making a video. He uses the same pieces he is accused of plagiarizing in his video, but instead of taking them from other printed texts, he instead uses clips of the authors giving a speech where they say the same things. Why is this not plagiarism too? Does the fact that someone other than Anderson would be on video enough of a citation?

In fact, plagiarism is a broad term. For instance, were I to do something in one of my graduate classes like Anderson has done here, it would be considered plagiarism. As would me downloading an essay off the web and turning it in as my own work. But the latter is outright fraud, while the former could be characterized as merely careless. Inadvertent plagiarism shouldn’t be excused, but it likewise shouldn’t be considered the same crime as deliberate copying. Even scholarly, uncited copying was rampant for years and years until the attitude toward citation became a norm.

This is an unfortunate situation, and to his credit, Anderson has owned up to his error and been quite apologetic. Yet I worry that with all this negative coverage, people will be put off of what could be a book full of good points. The mere fact that Anderson didn’t use quotation marks when he should have does not render his argument null and void. He was wrong, but it might not be as bad as it’s being made out to be.

Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows

2009-06-19T23:59:00.000-05:00

I intended to write a blow-by-blow review of each story in this book, but I find myself unable to summon that sort of effort. In fact, I’m not really sure what made me seek Shards and Shadows out after all these months; perhaps something to do with upcoming DS9 books tat take place in the Mirror Universe, perhaps a lack of genuine passive fun when it comes to my reading pile. But what I do know is that despite some failures, the collection of short stories is worth your time.

Two years ago, Pocket published six short novels that took place entirely within the Mirror Universe, as depicted in such memorable Star Trek episodes as 'The One Where Evil Spock Had a Goatee.' The experiment was a success, and shortly thereafter this collection was announced in order to tie up some loose ends and expand the universe. For instance, Margaret Wander Bonano explains how Captain Kirk acquires the Tantalus Device that allows him to disappear people, all the while fleshing out the character to seem more than the raging mad man he was depicted as in the episode.

Stories that take place later during the Klingon/Cardassian Alliance and the Terran Rebellion set the stage for some of what surely will follow in the upcoming DS9 book The Soul Key. Susan Wright pits Intendant B’Elanna Torres against Kes in a psychological, telepathic battle. Keith R.A. DeCandido tells an interesting epistolary story about the politics and scheming of the Alliance command. Jim Johnson follows Keiko Ishigawa and her adjustment to life as one of the top commanders in the Terran Rebellion.

This isn’t to say that all these stories are good, Johnson’s is a story we’ve seen a million times with someone set up to look like a traitor even though we know she won’t be because she’s the hero, but they do weave a broader tapestry of the universe and blurs the line between the good/evil division that the DS9 episodes reduced the struggle to. Other stories miss the mark entirely, like Michael Jan Friedman’s ‘The Traitor,’ which focuses on Luc Picard who was so uninteresting in The Worst of Both Worlds and has an ending that renders the entire story pointless.

And while I understand that the fiction-only characters have a following, stories like James Swallow’s ‘The Black Flag’ about the mirror equivalents of the Vanguard crew and Peter David’s next tale concerning New Frontier are too insular to really work here. And where cameos of characters might work on television, the medium of print doesn’t handle the tossing out of names for their own sake so well. I might have been more interested in Pennington than in a Reyes with a laser eyeball. (If you have no idea who these people are or why you should care, then I think you understand my problem with these stories.)

Though it has been praised by those I respect, I found the worst story of the collection to be Dave Stern’s ‘Nobunaga.’ First of all, I hate stories that end up as a dream, simulation, etc. Secondly, and this may not be a fair criticism, but with the ending of Age of the Empress depicting the resurrection of Archer, I wanted to see the story picked up from there. Instead, we get nothing more than a couple of sentences to bridge the rift, not to mention an Archer that much more resembles the one from our universe than the one depicted in In a Mirror, Darkly.

There are stories that really work well here, like Wright’s and DeCandido’s, some that are just fun like Mack’s and Christopher L. Bennett’s, and a couple that just didn’t really work for me. Nothing lives up to the tall bar that Mack set with The Sorrows of Empire, but the collection does succeed in fleshing out the mirror universe, making it a place that really calls for more stories to be told. This book rekindled an interest in the fiction line that I felt was fading fast, and now I am looking forward to picking up some of the newer releases.

The Chris Farley Show

2009-06-18T19:07:00.005-05:00

No one was more surprised than me to see a biography of Chris Farley show up on the several of the Best of 2008 lists last year. Like a lot of people, I was a fan of Farley in the loosest sense; I enjoyed him on SNL and will admit to laughing quite a bit at Tommy Boy, but for the most part he seemed like a one-note comedian. I was surprised to find out just how talented and therefore tragic his early death was by reading The Chris Farley Show, an oral history of sorts compiled by Farley’s brother Tom and professional writer Tanner Colby.

I picked up the new paperback copy two weeks ago and flipped through it, surprised to see that the majority of the text was made up of compiled quotes from interviews with those close to Farley. The book is structured into three sections, called acts, which follow a fairly predictable pattern. Act One leads up to Farley joining the cast of Saturday Night Live, Act Two deals with the struggles with addiction and sobriety, while Act Three chronicles the decent into addiction that ultimately killed the man. Predictable as this may be, the different perspectives provided by using the actual voices of interviewees rather than the clinical voice of a traditional biography offer real feeling in insight not just into Farley, but also into some of the well-known people who knew him.

Farley wasn’t a stand-up comedian, but rather an improvisational actor, something that shouldn’t really surprise anyone who has followed some of the more successful casting choices on SNL since. Yet what isn’t so widely known is that almost everyone who knew him thought that he could have made a fine actor, even be an Oscar contender, if he could just find the right vehicle and get his act together. I had not heard that David Mamet had written a script for Farley based on the life of Fatty Arbuckle, only to see the project wind up forever in limbo due to Farley’s inability to get insured due to his drug problems. Since finishing the book last week, I have often wondered what such a movie would have been like. And with Jim Carrey winning a couple of Golden Globes, it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine Farley being honored as well.

Farley’s struggles with his weight were a source of his comedy yet painful for him at the same time. He struggled with wanting to break free of the roles he seemed confined to, where ‘everyone always laughs when Fatty falls down,’ and into something more complex and fulfilling. Such a struggle is commonplace among such actors, yet the book illustrates his feelings with such emotion tat it is hard not to be moved.

Tom Farley is the force behind this project, and he should be commended for the frank portrayal of his brother’s life that is shown in this book. Things aren’t whitewashed at all, and a nuanced picture of the life of Chris Farley shines through. Different people remember events differently, and both voices are heard. This is especially true with regards to the famous Chippendales scene with host Patrick Swayze. Its popularity can be testament to it being a success, but many like Chris Rock argue that it demeaned Farley in a way that surely led him further into addiction for a skit that had no real comic payoff beyond laughing at a fat man.

Unfortunately, Farley seems to be viewed as another John Belushi, a SNL star who just couldn’t escape his addictions. But as The Chris Farley Show demonstrates, he was much more than that. For those interested in reading a compelling story of misunderstood man told in a unique way, the stars have aligned for this is the book for you.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

2009-06-06T23:57:00.003-05:00

‘The alarm bell of anxiety’ that Alfred and Enid Lambert hear ringing on the first page of The Corrections will ring for the reader as well throughout the first 12 pages of Jonathan Franzen's much-hyped third novel. The belabored metaphors suffusing these pages and the hysteria of an episode in which nothing more happens than the mailman comes to the door will make even the most forgiving of readers wonder, ‘Should I actually read the next 540 pages of this?’

The answer is yes. Not only does the novel immediately improve, but the realization that Franzen probably intended the difficult beginning comes quickly, when Chip, Alfred and Enid's feckless middle child, is introduced. Fired by the college where he taught for sleeping with a student, Chip relocates to New York City where he takes up part-time legal proofreading, writing for an arts monthly, and begins work on a screenplay entitled ‘The Academy Purple,’ which opens with a six page monologue. ‘My idea,’ Chip tries to explain to his girlfriend as she's leaving him, is ‘to have this 'hump' that the moviegoer has to get over. Putting something off-putting at the beginning, it's a classic modernist strategy. There's a lot of rich suspense toward the end.’

It seems too obvious to be a coincidence — the hump at the beginning of the screenplay reflecting the hump at the beginning of the novel, especially as the care and control that Franzen exerts over his characters, their relationships and the locales they inhabit in the remainder of the novel becomes apparent. Nothing else in the book is as clunky as the opening pages.

There is not much plot to The Corrections: Enid, the social-climbing, prudish, delusionally optimistic matriarch, wishes to reunite her family in the fictional midwestern city of St. Jude (St. Louis) for one final Christmas. The enthusiasm of the other family members for a holiday together is muted.

Alfred, afflicted with Parkinson's disease and increasingly addled by dementia, is too concerned with his weakening mind to pay much attention to Enid's plans. Irascible and emotionally distant, the principled, repressed man is left confused and only occasionally lucid; he struggles constantly to comprehend what's around him, but it's an effort he's growing weary of, a mental state artfully and disturbingly described by Franzen.

The Lambert children are wary of returning home for their own reasons. Gary, the eldest son, a banker, is married to the beautiful but manipulative Caroline, who refuses to travel to St. Jude and wages war on Gary through their three sons, bribing the boys with Broadway tickets and computer games to stay home with her in Philadelphia. Chip, who impulsively flies to Lithuania with the ex-husband of his ex-girlfriend to start up an Internet fraud scheme, is seeking to avoid what he sees as the multiple failures of his life. Denise, the youngest child, is a hip, tense, talented, workaholic, sexually confused gourmet chef, whose separate affairs with the owner of the restaurant she works for and his wife get her fired. None see time spent together as the means to alleviate any of those issues. That all three are in St. Jude by Christmas morning is surprising to Enid and the reader until he/she realizes that for the book to work a final gathering of the family is necessary and therefore inevitable.

Franzen's ability to craft over 500 compelling pages out of this small domestic drama is a credit to his skills as a novelist. He manages, with the novel's relatively small cast of characters and minimal storyline, to cover topics as diverse as consumerism, the restaurant business (though not altogether accurately), the love-hate tension of intimate relationships, the collapse of Lithuania's political system, metallurgy, the stock market and cruise ship culture.

The book's only distracting flaw is a lengthy bit about Axon Corporation, a biotech firm developing a 'revolutionary' treatment for brain disorders and mental illnesses. Gary and Denise attend an investment luncheon given by the company; there's a video, and a painful question and answer session. This portion is a too-blunt bit of social commentary, and a not very original one. The trend to medicalize quirks of personality and moods, and consumers' willingness to be medicated, has been thoroughly examined many times before, and as a central theme of the novel, fails to resonate.

Franzen's commentary is more effective, his satire more cutting, when embedded in a character's activities or opinions. Enid, expecting an elegant, sophisticated experience on a cruise up the East Coast, is confronted instead with people wearing T-shirts marked with sayings such as ‘Old Urologists Never Die, They Just Peter Out.’ Her resentment — ‘It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive’ — is double-edged. Enid wants to be those people even as she reviles them.

The real success of the novel, though, lies not in the commentary but in the characters — Alfred and Enid are especially alive. They evolve, in the course of the novel, from being caricatures of Midwestern suburbia to being fully realized people, with a complexity and dignity rare in fictional characters, even as their progression diverges dramatically. Alfred declines to the point of needing a nursing home; Enid reveals a capacity for self-awareness and growth not hinted at in the book's beginning. The remaining Lamberts and the other characters are less-finely drawn, although each has a distinctive voice and perspective not likely to be confused with any other character. Franzen’s only real misfire is that the denouement seems to implicate one character as responsible for the ills of the others, and with his removal from the playing field, everyone else’s life gets remarkably, if perhaps coincidentally, better.

Near the end of the novel, Chip has an epiphany. He realizes why no one, including himself, liked his screenplay: He'd written a tragedy instead of a farce. 'Make it ridiculous,' he says to himself. It seems like another insight from the screenplay into the novel, perhaps one Franzen had himself in the early drafting process, a reminder that to read the story of the Lambert family too seriously is misguided.

The Push Man by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

2009-06-02T15:31:00.002-05:00

Japanese culture, at least here in the west, seems to be portrayed as fairly monolithic. When the current lament of lazy youth is heard, it refers to the seemingly inability that Magnavox or some other company will have in maintaining their cutting edge efficiency. Perhaps for this reason, the stories of sewer workers and prostitutes’ husbands in Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s The Push Man are so shocking; we see a side of Japanese society that obviously exists, but is almost always hidden. In a culture of conformity like Japan, an individual can be more lonely and isolated than one can imagine.

The sixteen stories here are consistent in their style. Many are set in an industrial Japanese city and feature a mostly-silent man who works in a factory. For example, in the first story, ‘Piranha,’ a factory worker comes home to his wife, and she tells him she wants a million yen to start her own business. He reads in the newspaper about an insurance payout when a bus rolls over, and the next morning he thrusts his arm into his machine. He gets a million yen as compensation for the ‘accident,’ and his wife is happy. He now stays home while she works, and entertains himself by buying some piranha fish. Soon she starts complaining about him sitting around all day looking at his fish, and threatens to leave him. He becomes furious and grabs her arm, forcing it in the fish tank. When he lets go, it is covered in blood, and she leaves him. He kicks over the fish tank and goes searching for a new job at another factory, this time one especially for the disabled.

All of the stories are dark in tone, showing people hurting each other, failing to communicate, cheating, selling themselves or having their hopes dashed. It is often sexual desire or the duplicity of women that cause men to rush into disaster. However Tatsumi is not a misogynist. The men's downfall stems not only from women, but also from their own lust, aggression and stupidity, and so the author is an equal-opportunity misanthrope.

Like all Japanese comics, they were originally printed to be read from right to left, but as editor Adrian Tomine explains in the introduction, such a layout is usually met hostilely by Western audiences, so Tatsumi rearranged each panel to be read in the traditional Western way. This works fairly well, as the frames are all independent of one another, yet I think I would have preferred to read it in the original layout. I disagree that Westerners are inherently hostile to the format; take a look at the Manga section of the bookstore the next time you’re there.

I decided to read Tatumi’s work because I realize that I have almost no knowledge of Eastern comics and wanted to rectify that. However, instead of reading authentic Japanese comics, I got the Americanized version that doesn’t help me gain any insight into how the comics are laid out, a particular research interest of mine. I suppose I will have to seek out an education in Eastern layout through another artist.

Tomine edited this book as well as others, expected to be released by Drawn & Quarterly once a year. While I enjoyed this collection, the brevity of the pieces coupled with reading them in a condensed timeframe caused a bit of overkill. In the second collection, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, the stories are more substantial, and I am looking forward to that.

Reading List: May 2009

2009-06-01T06:24:00.004-05:00

Last month I decided that rather than merely list all the books I had read, I would also make a strong recommendation that readers of this blog go out and pick up a copy of what I considered the best of the lot. Fortunately, the book I picked last month I had previously reviewed. However, I didn't have a chance to review Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because I finished it right before I had two big projects due in school.

The book succeeds due to Larsson’s two protagonists -- Carl Mikael Blomkvist, a reporter filling the role of detective, and his sidekick, Lisbeth Salander, aka the girl with the dragon tattoo -- who make this novel more than a run-of-the-mill mystery: they’re both compelling, conflicted, complicated people, idiosyncratic in the extreme, and interesting enough to compensate for the plot mechanics, which seize up a bit as the novel begins to resolve itself. Knowing that Larsson was able to complete two sequels before his death in 2004 is exciting, for I am not ready to let these characters go.

On the school front, I shall spend the next few days revising a document for my thesis that I should have finished months ago. Then I'll start planning the actual outline and hopefully will be able to get started writing sometime towards the end of the month. This said, never underestimate my laziness nor my ability to get distracted by just about anything.

The month of May saw me finish 34 books and/or graphic novels, and this is what they were:

100 Bullets: Dirty by Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso
Replay by Ken Grimwood
What the Gospels Meant by Gary Wills
Superman: For Tomorrow by Azzarello & Jim Lee
All Star Superman, Volume II by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely
Sin City: That Yellow Bastard by Frank Miller
X-Men: Endangered Species by Mike Carey, et al.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
X-Men: Messiah Complex by Ed Brubaker, et al.
Ultimate X-Men, Volume II by Mark Millar, et al.
Sin City: Family Values by Miller
House of M by Brian Michael Bendis & Olivier Copiel
Over a Torrent Sea by Christopher L. Bennett
Green Lantern Corps: Recharge by Geoff Johns, et al.
Ultimate Spider-Man: Double Trouble by Bendis & Mark Bagley
Genesis by Bernard Beckett
True Enough by Farhad Manjoo
Ultimate X-Men: Ultimate War by Millar & Chris Bachalo
Green Lantern Corps: To Be a Lantern by Dave Gibbons & Patrick Gleason
Sin City: Booze, Broads, and Bullets by Miller
Decimation: X-Men: The 198 by David Hine & Jim Muniz
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine
Superman: Last Son by Johns, et al.
Swamp Thing: The Curse by Alan Moore, et al.
Ultimate X-Men: Return of the King by Millar, et al.
The Element by Ken Robinson
Ultimate Spider-Man: Legacy by Bendis & Bagley
Shortcomings by Tomine
Green Lantern: Tales of the Sinestro Corps by Johns, et al.
Ultimate X-Men: Blockbuster by Bendis & David Finch
The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 edited by Joyce Carol Oates
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 10 edited by Dean Wesley Smith

Not hard to see that the bulk of the readings for the month, and the year to date for that matter, are graphic novels or collections of individual issues. I am still slightly interested in Marvel's Ultimate line, but the interest is waning. To be honest, I don't think I was more than moderately satisfied with any of the collections I read this month from either DC or Marvel, except maybe House of M. I'm also hoping to read some long form fiction, read 500+ page novels, this summer since I am finished with my coursework.

As always comments and queries are strongly encouraged. I hope to post here much more often over the coming month, yet we know how such vows have gone in the past.

The Mystery Genre

2009-05-31T23:41:00.001-05:00

I suppose the term ‘mystery story’ is basically a huge umbrella term for any number of subgenres: the detective story, the romantic suspense, etc. Perhaps a necessary element is crime, and more specifically murder, and the seeking of a successful solution to the mystery at hand. Suspense arises in the course of the seeking of said solution, which laces those pursuing the perpetrator and/or innocent victims in jeopardy. Yet, it seems that much of what we consider ‘mystery stories’ doesn’t fall neatly into these categories.

As Joyce Carol Oates writes in the introduction to The Best American Mystery Stories 2005, ‘crimes can occur without mystery. Mysteries can occur without crimes. Violent and irrevocable actions can destroy lives but bring other lives together in unforeseeable, unimaginable ways.’

In reading this collection of twenty stories, I found myself enjoying the stories that didn’t neatly fit into the classic definition of the ‘mystery story.’ Edward P. Jones’s ‘Old Boys, Old Girls,’ follows a man in prison and afterwards, yet there is no real mystery to be solved only the effects of the man’s lifestyle and incarceration to witness as he cautiously reunited with a family he hasn’t seen in twenty years. Daniel Orozco’s ‘Officers Weep’ is an interesting tale of two cops falling in love told through the device of a police blotter. Scott Turow’s ‘Loyalty’ is about a man struggling to find himself after leaving his wife, with the crime elements only incidental to the plot of romantic/filial love.

Oates picked these stories because they embody a different way of looking at the genre so defined by Sherlock Holmes and Law and Order. It’s not necessarily about the crime and apprehending the suspect, but instead about how situations that very well may be criminal affect those going through them, whether as perpetrator or victim. Or bystander for that matter.

This past year, I have begun to read more and more fiction classified as ‘mystery’ because of some of the fiction marketed as ‘literary’ had large mystery elements and were some of the stories I enjoyed the most. I am prone to believe, as Michael Chabon has said time and again, that genre classifications are hindering and unnecessary, so I don’t want to compile some sort of list that surveys what I personally like and dislike about the nebulous ‘mystery genre.’

Instead, I’d just like to say that novels such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson and In the Woods by Tana French are some of the best fiction I’ve read this year, and are two novels that a year before I probably never would have looked into I wasn’t a person who really read ‘mystery.’

None of us are immune to being elitist or viewing the world with blinders, especially when it comes to choices we make in our entertainment. Just a reminder that you, and definitely I, may be missing some damn good stuff.

Tales of the Sinestro Corps

2009-05-29T23:39:00.000-05:00

Though it took a while to track down a copy, I managed to lay my hands on Tales of the Sinestro Corps this week and was fairly pleased with what I found. This collection reprints the companion material that was released during the Sinestro Corps War series last year, which I discussed here and here. Yet aside from the content in this volume, I have begun to have serious questions about how the various comics from such events are compiled and then marketed in the collected editions.

Throughout the Kyle Rayner arc of the Sinestro Corps War, much emphasis is given to a painting from Kyle’s childhood that was so important to him that other Lanterns took great steps to get it for him after he managed to fight off Parallax. Yet not until the Ion special reprinted here do we find out just what is so meaningful about the painting, something that a dedicated reader of the individual titles would have already known because though the story takes places within Kyle’s mind as his body is held hostage by Parallax, it takes place concurrently with the main action and so this individual issue was released at a time to make reading the concurrent events side by side would have more resonance and make more sense.

Yet when DC put together these volumes, the Ion special was reprinted here is what is essentially a collection of side-stories from the Sinestro Corps War. As such, some of these tales were much less moving than they could have been. The specials involving the Cyborg Superman and Superman-Prime also are told somewhat concurrently with the main action, but from the perspective of the villains. There is a historical component to the issues to help orient readers unfamiliar with what has come before, but most of the content is germane to the actual storyline of the war.

What I am getting at is that with the way such comic events are published, with a main narrative and then half a dozen secondary ones, simply compiling the issues into a linear form doesn’t really do the material justice. While I understand that dropping the Ion special into the middle of one of the first two volumes might have hampered the flow and tension, not including it robs one of the main character’s arcs of necessary content.

The problem is that there isn’t a logical way to consolidate all this content. At first I was going to recommend that instead of two volumes and a companion one, the Sinestro Corps War be printed in three volumes, but to be fair there is a lot of content here that would do more harm than good in the primary narrative. But what I have realized is that this story wasn’t conceived to sell collected editions, at least not primarily. Instead, the idea was to sell individual issues, and from what I have been able to find, it was a huge success.

In many ways I am beginning to reconsider whether or not I want to continue to wait for the collected editions or instead start hitting the comic shop every week gain and read such stories the way they were conceived to be read. As I anxiously await the Rage of the Red Lanterns and Agent Orange collected stories that lead directly into Blackest Night, I am delaying myself from reading something available right now, in a purer form. It had been my thoughts that comic series were being conceived more and more as what would sell as a collected edition, and while this is true, it hasn’t changed the way that stories are being told all that much. Apparently, direct sales of individual issues are the lifeblood of superhero comics and much more influential than I had realized.

Novel Excerpts Disguised as Individual Stories

2009-05-26T23:56:00.001-05:00

There are only a handful of authors that warrant me paying full price for a hardcover they day a new book is released, yet Jonathan Lethem is one of those writers. Since his upcoming novel Chronic City has been announced for a few months now, I’ve begun to wonder about its content. More specifically, I’ve begun to wonder about how much of that content I have already read and what such practices might mean for the future of publishing.

It took little searching to find what I believe to be the cover copy from the novel:

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties. Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning.

Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.

After reading ‘Ava’s Apartment,’ a short story by Lethem in the latest issue of The New Yorker, I had all but determined that Perkus Tooth would be a major figure. While I enjoyed the story about Perkus in The Book of Other People, which came out last year, I didn’t find this latest story very compelling. Without giving it away, it involves a sort of rejuvenation and change in the man’s mind that one can see easily as being the turning point of a novel. My problem here though is not with these stories, but with so much about the character’s history and arc being established outside the context of the novel, not only reducing suspense but also creating a weird sense of déjà vu when encountering it within the novel itself.

Back in November, Lethem published ‘Lostronaut,’ again in The New Yorker. It is an epistolary story told only by using the letters sent from an astronaut trapped in space. Rather than a standalone story as I had assumed, it appears to be directly from the novel as well.

Back in 2001, I began to come across several stories by acclaimed novelist Tim O’Brien that I had yet to read. Culling them from the websites of a variety of publications, I enjoyed them immensely. Then in July of 2002, I went to B&N on the day his new novel July, July was released and quickly read through it. Imagine my surprise when I had previously digested about half the book, word for word, for free, thus being disappointed on two levels.

All this said, I understand why such things are done. For one, the publishing industry is having some problems, so merely be printing a few stories from an upcoming work of fiction, an author may be able to earn quite a bit of extra money (especially if they are publishing in The New Yorker). From a marketing standpoint this makes sense as well, with samples of a novel going out to a wide audience that otherwise may not have heard about the book. Indeed, this is done every week by someone publishing nonfiction, especially if that nonfiction concerns the Bush Administration or the war in Iraq. And while I accept all this, it still irks me that after waiting two and a half years for another Lethem novel, and about five years for a good Lethem novel, I’m not going to be able to experience the work freshly, and instead will remember just enough to have the situation gnaw at me.

In addition, I would imagine that stories will be pulled from novels even more often in the age of the Kindle and given away for free in the hopes that a reader will like it enough to buy the whole work, much as I predicted might happen with the introductions to a lot of books.

Perhaps I should get over it, and indeed this thought process did lead me into some interesting areas of amateur analysis. I would imagine that come October, you will be able to read my thoughts on this work.

The Element by Ken Robinson

2009-05-25T23:58:00.000-05:00

Coming to the conclusion of a Master’s program that stresses pedagogy (as separate from curriculum and assessment), I have become fairly interested in the ways that modern educational practices in the US have failed students. As a student in public schools, I never felt that I was taught anything of any great import; instead of learning how to learn and think critically, I was forced to memorize equations and produce crafty visual aides, like a mobile I once made of Odysseus in a high school honors class. And as I am of the age where as a married man I am expected to begin to procreate, it has become important to me to attempt to understand how I can prevent my children from suffering a similar fate.

After watching Sir Ken Robinson’s speech at the 2006 TED conference a week or so ago, I felt that he had struck a nerve. As a person who is excited by performing and creating, I was receptive to his ideas that such things are considered impractical by society and thus children are steered towards other, more acceptable, pursuits. A few days later, I picked up The Element, his book concerning the titular principle that all people will be happier and more fulfilled if they can find a passion for something and cultivate it, no matter what it may be.

With all his references to education in the speech, I expected Robinson to evaluate the educational system and offer a plan for change. Instead, this book should be labeled self-help, for it fits in that genre much more than it would one on education. I suppose it is unfair to fault the book for not living up to my expectations, yet it is rare that I am so disappointed with a work.

Essentially, we just receive an extended version of the TED speech. There are dozens more examples, yet none really seem to be all that enlightening. In fact, as Robinson notes, reading about a large number of healthy, successful people can leave those unhappy and unsuccessful, the targeted readers of such a book I would imagine, distressed. The ideas contained within the book are sound, as best as I can figure, but there wasn’t the sort of individualized, practical advice that is so common with self-help books, no plan to help bring the Element into one’s life by following a number of steps. Perhaps such a general aide would be unworkable, yet its absence felt a bit lacking.

Only in the final chapter of the book does Robinson really begin to critique the education system. However, this analysis is so generalized that it could have been written by anyone with a moderate knowledge of the standardized test culture that has revolutionized, in a bad way, the educational process.

While Ken Robinson does in fact demonstrate the need for cultivating the Element within our children, he fails to offer a path with which we can make this happen. That said, The Element was able to help me realize ways in which my own childhood was problematic in this regard, and as such I hope to be able to provide my children, or rather any children whose lives I am a part of, the sort of encouragement to pursue the things he/she is interested in.

Superman: Last Son

2009-05-21T23:59:00.000-05:00

While I enjoyed Superman: The Movie quite a bit when I saw it as a kid, Christopher Reeve was never the embodiment of Superman for me. Instead, that fell to George Reeves, the actor who played Superman in the 1950s television show that I watched with my father many, many times growing up. I say this because while I am intrigued by Richard Donner’s mythos about Superman that was shown in the first film and in much of Superman II, I am by no means a purist.

When I found out last week that Donner had co-scripted a Superman tale with Geoff Johns, titled Last Son, I took steps to secure a copy with all due haste. Reading that the story involved General Zod, I was expecting essentially Donner’s Superman III (sans Richard Pryor). Again, his vision isn’t scripture to me, but Superman is a character so transcendent that no one mythos can contain him. Like the old Greek myths, Superman’s tale can be told in many different ways and still be true to the character.

The story starts promisingly, with Superman reminded by the Fortress of Solitude’s AI, in the guise of his father Jor-El, that despite his appearance he is not human. Returning to Metropolis, he stops a strange meteor from crashing into the city only to find within it a young boy. After the boy is analyzed by the government and later kidnapped by Superman to prevent him from being harmed, he and Lois briefly discuss adopting him and then name him Christopher.

We get another dose of Donner when three more ships/meteors crash, and who would emerge but Zod, Ursa, and Non. Enraged by their depiction in the Fortress of Solitude’s AI, they vow to destroy Superman and take their place as rulers of Earth. Eventually, they trap Superman in the Phantom Zone from which they have emerged.

Trapped, Superman witnesses the Kryptonian invasion, and he can't do anything to stop it. Mon-El, whom Clark sent to the Zone when he was younger, appears before him. Last I heard, Mon-El was named M’Onel, and was a member of the Legion in the 30th century. He explains what is going on and then using one of the same ships/meteors, Superman returns from the Zone to find the city enslaved and the buildings transforming into Sunstone structures. He turns to Lex Luthor for help against the criminals when he is attacked by Bizarro, the Parasite and Metallo.

As the squad moves out, Metallo uses various forms of kryptonite to kill the Kryptonian outlaws. When using gold, a half dozen of the criminals fall out of the sky with a ‘splat. When using red, one criminal's DNA shifts irregularly changing him into a bug, allowing Metallo to step on his head and crush it. Parasite takes pleasure in siphoning Kryptonian powers from many of the escapees. Bizarro goes toe-to-toe with Non, another mindless brute, as they exchange grunts and tests of strength. Luthor goes after Zod's main fortress, seeking to have the Phantom Zone forcefully ‘recall’ all who had been inside of it. Speaking with Lois, she discovers that as a side effect, Luthor intends to trap Superman within the Zone along with all of the escaped criminals.

For some reason, he doesn’t get sucked back into the Phantom Zone, but Christopher must return to close the breach. Later, speaking with Mon-El, Superman asks for help in locating the boy in the vast Zone.

Since Johns is such a pro, it I hard to see Donner’s input into the script. What seems like his touch could be read as homage, so it is quite hard to critique the director’s role. But what makes this story really suffer is that it is so bogged down in post-Infinite Crisis changes that a casual reader like myself was often lost. When did Mon-El get trapped in the Phantom Zone? When did multicolored forms of Kryptonite reappear? (Though in their defense, the way it was introduced with the ‘splats’ of the Kryptonians was pretty cool.) Since reestablishing these things is of some importance, it’s hard to fault the inclusion, yet for something supposedly so big (from a marketing standpoint at least), perhaps this tale should have been told out of continuity. Yet even as I type this, I realize that I was really excited to think about how different Superman’s life would be if he had a son, and since it was an in-continuity tale, I was interested from that perspective.

There are some other issues as well, most noticeably Luthor’s claim that if he weren’t constantly being foiled he would have cured cancer and ‘helped those who can’t walk walk again.’ First of all, this sort of wink to Christopher Reeve’s unfortunate quadriplegia is a bit unsettling, yet I am pretty sure that Reeve was already dead when this comic went to press. It just struck me as in poor taste.

In all, Last Son is disappointing mostly because it doesn’t decide what it wants to be: a follow-up to Superman II or a story reestablishing things post-Crisis. Trying to do both made both halves suffer. That said, I would be interested in seeing Donner do some more work with comics in the future.

Over a Torrent Sea by Christopher L. Bennett

2009-05-18T23:42:00.004-05:00

In yet another follow-up to the events of Destiny, Christopher L. Bennett lets us know how the Titan crew commanded by Captain Riker is handling the aftermath in Over a Torrent Sea. My immediate objection to this book was the fact that the mission of the exploration of uncharted space would continue. After the Federation has been decimated during the huge Borg invasion, the last thing that makes sense is sending a ship back out into the unknown, especially with the rise of a new opponent, the Typhon Pact. However, this is addressed early on in a conversation between Riker and some admiral, and though I don’t agree with the decision, at least commonsensical problems with the idea were not ignored.

The novel concerns the exploration of a planet made up entirely of ocean and inhabited by sentient manta ray/jellyfish types that communicate through songs. This of course gives much of the spotlight to Aili Lavena, the Pacifican conn officer who lives in a sort of reverse scuba suit that is filled with water all the time. Meanwhile, Counselor Troi is getting ready to give birth to a daughter. Noticing that the planet, cutely named Droplet, is about to be struck by a large asteroid, the Titan decides to blow it up in an attempt to save the creatures on the planet. Things go awry, and as a result Lavena and Riker are trapped together on the surface.

While the usual issues with Bennett’s writing are here in abundance, especially the idiotic epiphanies by characters that are delivered in clunky straightforward dialogue, his creation of the planet’s ecosystem and lifeforms is interesting. Much like his previous Titan work, Orion’s Hounds, he seems to be a better creator of worlds than he is a storyteller. In fact, I would wager that he is the most intriguing current writer when it comes to new alien scenarios, yet the worst when it comes to characterization. Why this is the case is hard to fathom, especially after his fantastic debut using TOS characters in Ex Machina.

Twenty years before this novel, Riker and Lavena had a one-night stand. These things happen. Why it remains such a big deal two decades later is hard to fathom, and the emotional climax of the uncomfortable relationship the two have on the planet is ridiculous. So Riker slept with her before? He’s portrayed as a guy who has quite a few notches on the bedpost, so running into someone he’s previously had sex with can’t be all that rare an occurrence. So why does this bother him so? Why is his attraction to her so troubling if he has no intention of doing anything about it? He’s just married, not a corpse.

Meanwhile, as Titan is adrift after blowing up the asteroid goes horribly wrong, chief medical officer and talking dinosaur Dr. Ree kidnaps Troi and steals a shuttle, eventually landing it on a pre-warp world and delivering the baby in a hospital that is surrounded by police from that world. Apparently, his species sees males defend the child, and the fear of Troi for her child and the grief from Tuvok losing his son during Destiny cause this freakout and Prime Directive violation. What makes this so stupid is not the events themselves, but their conclusion. Twice in just a few months Ree has attacked Troi, this time violating all sorts of laws in the process, but since he wasn’t ‘responsible for his own actions,’ he gets off with a slight slap on the wrist and is even encouraged by Riker. If someone were to kidnap my wife and prevent me from seeing the birth of my first child, even if not in their right mind, I would not only punch that person in the face, but would throw them off my ship. Maybe Ree shouldn’t go to prison, but the idea that anyone on that ship would ever be able to trust him again is ludicrous. This is the sort of PC bullshit that gives Star Trek a bad name.

All in all, this book was only slightly disappointing. Having the chance now to read Bennett’s two Titan novels along with Greater than the Sum, which was specifically written to bridge two novels, it isn’t hard to conclude that he is a much better author when he has no fixed endpoint to adjust everything to. In fact, I wonder with his affinity and talent for world building if he wouldn’t be better suited to working in a different medium, perhaps creating worlds for a video game. Over a Torrent Sea continues the Titan saga about as well as can be expected.

Kindle: Project Wrap-up

2009-05-12T03:15:00.001-05:00

Creating this mash-up was much more difficult than I expected. For one, trying to combine s many sources into an argument, especially when one’s sources aren’t necessarily even making an argument themselves, was a bit trying. The project was in a mess until I split up the sections into separate parts because it was just too big an its electronic nature made it impossible to step back and look at the bigger picture in a way I could have had I been writing a more traditional paper.

At the same time, avoiding plagiarism has been ingrained in me over the years of higher education, and for the most part a project like this consists of editing and using others’ work. I included links to show where I obtained most of the words I used in these posts because I was uncomfortable with publishing them as my own, even with a disclaimer.

I also had to cut out some of the funnier aspects of the project when they didn’t really fit within any of the sections I opted for. For example, how will the Kindle affect literary snobbism? If you have 1,500 books on your Kindle — that’s how many it holds — does that make you any more or less of a bibliophile than if you have the same 1,500 books displayed on a shelf? (For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you’ve actually read a couple of them.)

The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms.

To some book lovers and editors, there are myriad reasons to deplore the Kindle. Publishers will no longer get the bump that comes when travelers see someone reading, say, the latest James Patterson and say to themselves: ‘I’ve been meaning to get that. I think I’ll buy a copy at Hudson News before I hop on the train.’

And as books migrate from paper, it means the death of the pickup line, ‘Oh, I see you’re reading the latest (insert highbrow author’s name here).’

A blogger on Amazon also published this chart to explain the process of determining whether or not to opt for an ebook version of a title.

But the most interesting aspect of this project for me was learning that in fact the purpose of Amazon’s Kindle is likely less about selling the hardware as it is to acclimate consumers to purchasing ebooks, much in the same way that Amazon helped consumers become comfortable with using their credit cards over the internet. And that is why the iPhone Kindle application is telling; you get all the advantages of reading on a Kindle without buying the very expensive hardware.

My guess is that with the new PDF technology in the DX, it will become less an issue of whether one can take a book from one device to another. But with the huge head start, Amazon is betting that when you can pick from any eReader program out there, for free becuase programs are separate from hardware, you’ll stick with them.

Previous entries can be found here:
Introduction
Current Snapshot
Future of eBooks & their Marketing
Competition & the Future of the Kindle
Newspapers & Magazines
Textbooks & Use by the Handicapped

Textbooks on Kindle & Use by the Handicapped

2009-05-12T02:46:00.003-05:00

Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said.

Amazon has worked out a deal with several textbook publishers to make their materials available for the device, Gonick added. The new device will also feature a more fully functional Web browser. The Kindle's current model, which debuted in February, includes a Web browser that is classified as ‘experimental.’ Five other universities are involved in the Kindle project, according to people briefed on the matter.

A larger-screen Kindle would enable textbook publishers to better display the charts and graphs that aren't particularly well suited to the current device, which has a screen that measures just six inches diagonally. But digitizing academic books could also hurt the thriving market for used textbooks on college campuses. Of course, this would be even better news for Amazon and publishers, since now they only get one sale for a book that may be used by up to a dozen students because of this resale market. In theory, this would mean that prices might decline, since the publisher of that same book would get 12 sales instead of 1 and could pass on the savings to the consumer while still retaining a tidy profit for themselves.

This chart from a college-bookstore association shows where all the money goes and also implies that 55.9 percent of textbook costs could be saved if they were delivered digitally, bypassing college bookstores. Amazon wants as much of that 55.9 percent as possible. That's a whole lot of profit for an industry estimated to be worth $8.6 billion.

But not all students are convinced reading textbooks on a Kindle would be a good idea. ‘I’d need five Kindles just to hold a single thought while writing essays,’ said Marius Johannessen, who is studying for his master’s in information systems at University of Agder. ‘Books work just fine.’ In other words, there is nothing like having half a dozen books splayed open on the table in front of you while you desperately write a paper.

Students pointed out plenty of other issues about the DX to Wired.com. For instance, students often loan textbooks to one another, and currently that’s not practical with a Kindle, as you’d have to loan your entire reader and library. Also, the beauty of paper textbooks is the ability to highlight sentences, underline keywords and keep all of them open at once. While the Kindle does have highlight and notes tools, the reader is sluggish with performance, and the keyboard is unnatural and clunky to type on.

I would imagine that the publishing industry will be closely following the experimentation at Case Western Reserve University very closely over the next year. If it is a success, Amazon may be able to get themselves into dozens of universities by the fall of 2010.

Someone tabulated 700 of the responses in that Amazon thread (that represents about 75 percent of all the posts) about what age buyers of the Kindle were and broke out the numbers. Here they are:

0 - 19: 5%
20 - 29: 10%
30 - 39: 15%
40 - 49: 19.5%
50 - 59: 23%
60 - 69: 19.5%
70 - 79: 6%
80+: 2%

We can't call this the most scientific poll ever taken, but it's probably a good indicator of the Kindle's age demographic. If you add it all up, over half the owners are over 50 and 70 percent are over 40.

If you look at the Amazon thread, a lot of senior folks bought the Kindle--and now the Kindle 2--partially because the digital reader is easier to handle than regular books for arthritis sufferers. It also helps that you can increase the font size, if you have trouble viewing small print in books.

Amazon is in a bit of battle with publishers who tend to think that e-book sales are cannibalizing their print books sales. However, comments from seniors saying they're able to read more now that they own Kindles helps Amazon's pseudo-statistical case that e-book purchases are incremental/additive, rather than cannibalistic of their print sales.

The Author’s Guild also has a big problem with a function on the Kindle 2 that allows a user to enable a Stephen Hawking-like voice to read the literature aloud. It claimed that the computer-generated voices, so-called ‘text-to-speech’ functions, are expected ‘to improve rapidly’ and undermine lucrative audio-book sales.

While this is still being debated, the people at Dvice use the Kindle and iPod Shuffle to illustrate the emotional content delivered by these voices.

Kindle & Newspapers

2009-05-11T09:45:00.000-05:00

Perhaps most appealing about this new class of reading gadgets is the opportunity they offer publishers to rethink their strategy in a rapidly evolving digital world. The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions. And publishers have found that they were not prepared to deal with the recent rapid decline of print advertising revenue.

Publishers could possibly use these new mobile reading devices to hit the reset button and return in some form to their original business model: selling subscriptions, and supporting their articles with ads.

Subscribers get updates once a day over a cellular network. Amazon and other participating publishers say they are satisfied with the results, although they have not released data on the number of subscriptions that have been sold.

The screens, which are currently in the Kindle and Sony Reader, display no color or video and update images at a slower rate than traditional computer screens. That has some people in the magazine industry, in particular, keeping their hopes in check until E Ink evolves.

Another hitch is that some makers of reading devices, like Amazon, want to set their own subscription prices for publications and control the relationship with the subscriber — something media companies like Condé Nast object to. Plastic Logic and Hearst have said publicly that they will take a more open approach and let media companies deal directly with readers and set their own prices.

Then there is the looming presence of Apple, which seems likely to introduce a multipurpose tablet computer later this year, according to rumor and speculation by Apple observers. Such a device, with a screen that is said to be about three or four times as large as the iPhone’s, would have an LCD screen capable of showing rich color and video, and people could use it to browse the Web.

James Moroney, CEO and Publisher of the Dallas Morning News, who would like to see a limited anti-trust exemption so publishers can talk about pricing, thinks that would help when it comes to negotiating with a company the size of Amazon. He told the Senate: 'The Kindle, which I think is a marvelous device, the best deal Amazon will give the Dallas Morning News—and we’ve negotiated this up to the last two weeks—they want 70 percent of the subscriptions revenue. I get 30 percent, they get 70 percent. On top of that they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device. Now is that a business model that is going to work for newspapers? I get 30 percent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon? That, to me, is not a model. Maybe what Plastic Logic comes up with or what Hearst comes up with, might provide a good model but today Kindles are less than 1 percent penetration in the U.S. market. They’re not a platform that’s going to save newspapers in the near term.'

Arthur Sulzburger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, came out to do a song and dance about how the Kindle is an exciting new opportunity for journalism at the recent pres conference debut of the Kindle DX. The New York Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post all signed up for pilot programs to subsidize the cost of a DX if the buyer agrees to a fixed-length subscription and lives ‘outside the delivery area of the paper. (Since I get the NYT delivered to my home, I’m probably out; the details of this deal are, frustratingly, being withheld until this summer.) The last Kindle handled papers just fine with 6 inches. So why start touting newspapers now with the DX?

Advertising. After the press conference, a reporter asked an Amazon rep whether there's any advertising that accompanies the newspaper content. After a pregnant pause, she said there wasn't but that she wouldn't rule it out in the future.

Now the big screen starts to make sense; the more real estate for text, the more real estate for ads. The DX appears to be a sleeper agent, waiting to be activated to fight the good fight for the future of journalism. As of now, Kindle users pay a subscription fee to get the newspapers delivered, but they're ad-free. At some point soon, I suspect we'll see ads—possibly even interactive ones—running alongside the content. When that happens, the newspaper content will have about as much room left as on a 6-incher.

Kindle Competition & the Future of the Device

2009-05-11T01:55:00.001-05:00

It is always nice when the industry rumor mill starts validating what I have been saying for months, namely, that rumors of a ready-to-release Apple netbook actually refer to a supersized iPod touch.

Described as having a larger touch-screen than the Kindle's 6-inch display, while being physically smaller than the Amazon device, Apple's baby has been dubbed a ‘mediapad.’ The larger screen would be a more pleasant way to view movies or the Internet than an iPod or iPhone and the device could have decent speakers, too. By using a touch screen, Apple could save space necessary for Kindle's keyboard, resulting in a smaller device. While not pocket-sized, the Apple mediapad would be easy to carry and offer an entertainment experience a smaller device could not match. Reading a book might be such an experience, right?

The Kindle for iPhone app is on a screen is just too tiny.  I do not own a Kindle and have little interest in paying over $350 for what, to me, would be a single-purpose device. An Apple mediapad would doubtless do everything an iPod touch does, only larger. And it could do everything a Kindle does, too, only in color.

I cannot imagine that Amazon really wants to be a consumer electronics hardware company. Its investment in Kindle was necessary to kick-start the e-book industry. Many companies had tried e-books previously, without much luck. Amazon has shown that an e-book reader can find customers, provided the content is available. Amazon has the content part nailed and will, presumably, be happy to see Apple create a much larger installed based of e-book-capable hardware than Kindle ever will.

A popular prediction is that if Apple really does the mediapad, Kindle will go away. But, probably not until Apple can reach a $350 price for its rumored new product. That make take a while, as estimates are that the super iPod touch will cost $500 or more when/if it is released.

In which case, the Apple mediapad and Kindle will coexist for a time, but eventually there will be no need for the Kindle and Amazon will be happy to be out of the hardware business.

Jeff Bezos today announced that among books that are available for the Kindle, 35% of the copies Amazon sells are Kindle editions. This is a surprising number (at the Kindle 2 unveiling in February it was 10%) and is further proof of the huge land grab that Amazon is now enacting. Only slightly mitigating those sales figures is news that the DX will support the commonplace PDF format, leaving the door open for a future in which most ebooks sold can be read on any reader, no matter what company manufactures it.

Think of what that means. Amazon has tens of millions of customers. It sold 500,000 Kindles last year, Mark Mahaney of Citigroup estimates. So even if it has twice that many in distribution, that is a lot of e-book buying by a small number of people. The Kindle must have an enormous penetration of what is a very distinctive, and for Amazon, quite lucrative, segment: very heavy buyers of books.

Amazon has also been making waves on the device agnostic side of things with last month's purchase of Stanza, the popular free ebook application for the iPhone. Amazon had already unveiled the Kindle app for the iPhone, and this move further solidifies its presence there (and presumably in the app-centric ecosystems of future smartphones).

The Kindle itself, of course, is the main focus. The longer that Amazon can keep its hands on the ebook market (a market that will eventually embrace open formats, one has to assume), the longer Amazon can rake in its monopoly profits. The iPhone moves, as well as the decision to support PDFs on the DX, meanwhile, are a smart hedge and a tacit acknowledgment that ebooks will one day be predominantly sold in formats that aren't tied to any one device.

Chris Anderson made the idea famous that you can make something and sell it to the masses, that can be a great business. But sometimes selling something to a much smaller group can also be quite lucrative, if you pick the right product for the right customers.

A large percentage of the books are bought by a small number of readers. We hear a lot about the long tail — how most items in a product catalog have a small volume of sales. But the same curve can be applied to customers of most businesses. The “head” — a relatively small number of people — represent a disproportionately large share of profits.
Amazon already served many of those people with its mail-order store, and it built a product that a large number of them have adopted. Most of the rest of its customers — the long tail who read a book every now and then — shrug and ask why they need another gadget when they already have a phone and computer.

By contrast, mass adoption was critical for the iPod, which earns money for Apple mainly through hardware sales. Apple has said it runs the iTunes store at only a small profit. And most people get most of their music from CDs, file sharing or other sources that don’t bring dollars to Apple.

The Kindle is about selling books, not eReaders. There is very little book piracy at the moment, and Amazon no doubt sells the vast majority of the books read on the Kindle. Why wouldn’t it? Its wireless store is amazingly convenient, and its prices can’t be beat: $10 or less for a best seller.

On a conference call with investors in January, Mr. Bezos even said that the Kindle hadn’t cannibalized the company’s paper book business: ‘We see that when people buy a Kindle, they actually continue to buy the same number of physical books going forward as they did before they owned a Kindle. And then incrementally, they buy about 1.6 to 1.7 electronic books, Kindle books, for every physical book that they buy.’

Apple’s proposed device would no doubt be a mass-market product with many uses and a very different proposition than the Kindle. It would be interesting to see how the market reacts to a color, back-lit, touch-screen device with much shorter battery life than the black-and-white Kindle.

In some ways such a device may undercut the new markets Amazon is staking out for the new Kindle DX: students and news fans, both of whom may value color and speed more than book readers. Moreover, a Web-oriented interface would offer, at least for now, free content from newspapers and magazines. In fact, one might assume that the only reason the DX was announced only a few months after Kindle 2.0 is to get the media discussing the applications of the device, especially the textbook application that will be discussed here later this week, before Apple could steal their thunder.

But Amazon has already hedged its bets here. It has a Kindle application for the iPhone that most likely will also run on the new Apple device, potentially competing with an Apple e-book store.

An interesting technology that is going to affect the e-book reader industry in the next year or so is the screen from the One Laptop Per Child. Mary Lou Jepsen came from One Laptop Per Child. She invented the screen, which is actually called Pixel Qi — Pixel Q-I. It’s based off the E-Ink technology and LCD, and it’s mashed together, and it creates a color version of E-Ink that you can actually switch between this LCD with full movement to E-Ink in low-light situations and low power and things like that. So she’s going to be shipping those devices, the screens in November or so which means that we’ll probably start seeing them in the market place in the next year or year and a half, which should be really interesting if we assume that they won’t be edged out of the market.

The Future of eBooks & Their Marketing

2009-05-10T00:18:00.000-05:00

Now that books are finally entering the world of networked, digital text, they will undergo the same transformation that Web pages have experienced over the past 15 years. Blogs, remember, were once called ‘web logs,’ cultivated by early digital pioneers who kept a record of information they found online, quoting and annotating as they browsed.

With books becoming part of this universe, ‘booklogs’ will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, ‘In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.’) You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.

You might think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

This great flowering of annotating and indexing will alter the way we discover books, too. Web publishers have long recognized that ‘front doors’ matter much less in the Google age, as visitors come directly to individual articles through search. Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper.

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens's day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind.

There are also those authors who are exploiting the nature of the electronic writing space available with devices like a PDA. Arguably the most popular and best known genre of electronic literature is hypertext fiction, distinguished by its many links between blocks of text known as lexias. Prior to the Internet, distribution of literary hypertext still shared many characteristics with print novels. As with a paperback copy of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight, readers of Patchwork Girl were restricted to engaging with that story in ways limited by the constraints inherent to a CD ROM: just as we can’t add or substract pages from a printed book, a CD ROM-based hypertext like Patchwork Girl is restricted to the contents that are on the physical disc. Unless a new edition is created, no new information can be added to the work. Unlike Web-based hypertext, for better or worse it cannot be updated or revised without a whole new physical product being produced, making it really just another computer program, one that lacks the interconnectedness found on the Web.

Michael Joyce has created the terms 'exploratory' and 'constructive' hypertext in order to denote the differences between pre-Web and Web-based hypertexts, and he considers exploratory hypertexts like Patchwork Girl and Victory Garden to be more in line with the 'output' readers would associate with contemporary book culture. In exploratory hypertexts, the relationship between the text and reader is not terribly different from a reader’s relationship to a novel like Ulysses or Tristram Shandy.

The economics of digital books will likely change the conventions of reading and writing as well. Digital distribution makes it a simple matter to offer prospective buyers a 'free sample' to entice them to purchase the whole thing. Many books offered for the Kindle, for instance, allow readers to download the first chapter free of charge. The ‘free sample’ component of a book will become as conventional as jacket-flap copy and blurbs; authors will devise a host of stylistic and commercial techniques in crafting these giveaway sections, just as Dickens mastered the cliffhanger device almost two centuries before.

It's not hard to imagine, for instance, how introductions will be transformed in this new world. Right now, introductions are written with the assumption that people have already bought the book. That won't be the case in the future, when the introduction is given away. It will, no doubt, be written more to entice readers to buy the whole book.
Clearly, we are in store for the return of the cliffhanger.

As the publishing industry is now in a position where devices are starting to become good enough for people to buy eBooks in significant numbers, publishers are becoming increasingly anxious to adapt to the changing scene amongst their consumers. Their concerns over which format to use and which device will be the ‘killer device’ are growing. Should the gamble on the Kindle and get into bed with Amazon, or hold out and see what happens with the rumored new Apple eReader device or even something else. Unlike the music industry, publishers have never needed to think about which device to publish their books for. The device was the paper and print. If you publish regular novels which just has text and no illustrations, there is one format for you. If you publish cookbooks, for example, then you need a format that can handle the more complex text and images.

Computer games developers and publishers have always needed a device to be purchased on which their games can be played. In the early days, it was a computer. Then specialized devices came along and the manufacturers of the devices started to battle it out for domination and Sony was the early winner with the Playstation. Microsoft brought out the Xbox and Nintendo discovered a new market with the Wii.

But the games publishers and developers learnt fairly early on that the platform did not affect their development and publishing of games. The games developers (the equivalent of authors) created ever more immersive and graphically stunning games to make the most of the power of the games consoles, which could be played on either an Xbox or a Playstation. They just developed ‘compiler’ programs and ‘architectures’ through which their games adapted to the platform for which they had been purchased. Games publishers want to be able to distribute their games onto as many platforms as they can.

The good thing about books unlike a newspaper is that they are likely to be read again. Not read as many times, perhaps, as often as a track is played on a MP3 player, but an eBook has a longer life than a newspaper article, nevertheless. A game is likely to be played several times before it swapped or exchanged. Of course, most games come on a disc. But, increasingly, games are being played online and soon they will be downloaded to consoles when broadband speeds increase. So, in that sense, publishers will be ahead of games developers.

A game can be rented from Blockbuster for a few nights, or purchased from the store or online. eBooks will need to be adaptable enough to allow different forms of ownership and payment such as borrowing from a library, renting from an online store, as well a perpetual license when bought outright.

Book publishers should think like this too. They just need to carry on finding good authors, and marketing the books well and let the device manufacturers fight it out amongst themselves on which device will be the most popular. In the meantime, they need to grow their digital capability to be able to deliver eBooks in several different formats and study how companies like EA Games work to get some idea.

The Kindle: A Current Snapshot

2009-05-09T23:56:00.001-05:00

The general consensus among those in the publishing industry is that writing and reading are doing just fine. It’s the intermediaries that are failing. Sara Nelson, formed editor in chief at Publisher’s Weekly, discussed the ineffective supply chain management among publishers at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April. That supply chain needs to deal with 300,000 books published annually, which led Nelson to two points. ‘This is a gatekeeper issue,’ she said. ‘We simply publish too many books. We need more midlist novels and less of the celebrity books that challenge the bottomline of publishing conglomerates. The supply chain is broken. In the 20th century you got books to distributors and they got books into stores, and reps from publishers into stores telling buyers what to order... that doesn’t work anymore. The more you publish, the more overwhelming it is, and you need somebody to help you through the morass of choices.’

One audience member commented that because of the economic structure and relatively low price of e-books, ‘writers are then screwed.’ Richard Nash, former head of Soft Skull Press, responded, ‘No, that is not true. Printing accounts for 12% of production cost, thus there is actually more of the pie for the writer to get.’

Let’s take a minute to investigate this claim. Assuming that what Nash said is accurate, one would expect that the difference between the print version of a book and the Kindle copy would be 12%, leaving out that he price may be artificially low in order to encourage buyers. This week, Colson Whitehead has brought out a new novel called Sag Harbor that is priced at $24.95. The Kindle version on Amazon is only $9.99, a difference of about 60%. Yet Amazon offers the book at $14.97, a difference between the Kindle version of only 20% from the actual price. So on the surface, Nash’s assertion would appear to be true, even though an author's actual share is probably about a nickel or so.

In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. An author will write an arresting description of Thomas Edison's controversial invention of the light bulb, and thanks to hundreds of inbound links from book-bloggers quoting the passage, those pages will rise to the top of Google's results for anyone searching ‘invention of light bulb.’ Each day, Google will deposit a hundred potential book buyers on that page, eager for information about Edison's breakthrough. Those hundred readers might pale compared with the tens of thousands of prospective buyers an author gets from an NPR appearance, but that Google ranking doesn't fade away overnight. It becomes a kind of permanent annuity for the author.

For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music. Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.
This fragmentation sounds unnerving -- yet another blow to the deep-focus linearity of the print-book tradition. Breaking the book into detachable parts may sell more books, but there are certain kinds of experiences and arguments that can only be conveyed by the steady, directed immersion that a 400-page book gives you. A playlist of the best chapters from Middlemarch, Gravity's Rainbow and Beloved will never work the way a playlist of songs culled from different albums does today. Nor will many sustained nonfiction arguments like Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat or biographies like David Michaelis’s Schultz and Peanuts.

Yet that modular pricing system will have one interesting, and laudable, side effect: The online marketplace will have established an easy, one-click mechanism for purchasing small quantities of text.

Tellingly, the Kindle already includes blog and newspaper subscriptions that can be purchased in a matter of seconds.

Skeptics may ask why anyone would pay for something that was elsewhere available at no charge, but that's precisely what they said when Steve Jobs launched the iTunes Music Store, competing with the free offerings on Napster. We've seen how that turned out. If the Kindle payment architecture takes off, it may ultimately lead the way toward the standardized micropayment system whose nonexistence has caused so much turmoil in the news business -- a system many people wish had been built into the Web's original architecture, along with those standardized page locations.

Tomorrow’s post will deal how this new economic structure may affect the way books are produced and marketed.