Solomon Mao's

Amendment One: Which Side Are You On?

2012-03-03T08:17:00.001-08:00

I rarely get political here, but every now and again something comes along which needs speaking out about. My home state of North Carolina’s upcoming vote on “Amendment One” is one of those things. The text of the amendment reads as follows:

“Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.”

This will be put up for a vote before the people of North Carolina on May 8, 2012 during the state primaries. If the amendment passes, it will become a part of the North Carolina State Constitution. There are an enormous number of concerns about this bill’s language, and the effect it could have on domestic violence laws, child visitation, employment benefits, and end of life arrangements for any kind of unmarried couple. These ramifications will wind up being decided by the courts. While certain legislators have dismissed concerns about these potential issues, in other states with similar amendments the courts have indeed interpreted the law as invalidating such contracts and arrangements between both same-sex and opposite-sex couples.

In other words, Amendment One is poorly written, ill-conceived, and really bad law. My wife, K. Dale Guffey, has spoken out about this with eloquence and passion both on her blog and in two PSAs for Neighbors for Equality and the recent Race to the Ballot initiative. She’s a graduate of the Law School at Wake Forest University, and one hell of a smart cookie, so check her out to learn just how bad this law is.

But you know, for me, the problem with Amendment One isn’t that its bad law because it’s poorly written, etc, but because it’s bad law because it’s immoral, unethical, and bigoted. Any student of American history will tell you that describing the United States as a nation “with liberty and justice for all” is not an accurate reading of the facts of that history. What I can also tell you is that our history is full of people who refused to accept the injustice they found, who stood up in Reconstruction and risked their lives to try and create a South where African-American men could exercise political rights alongside white men. Who pushed through the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and tried to enforce them, only to be defeated by violence and a nationally deep-seated racism. Yet who never stopped working and speaking out, refusing to allow white supremacist governments to re-write the histories unchallenged. Others took to the streets in mass and twisted the arms of the U.S. Congress to send an amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving women the right to vote to the states for ratification. Tens of thousands, though living in forced second-class citizenship here at home, nonetheless eagerly enlisted in the Armed Forces to fight in the muddy hellscapes of France in World War One, and on the land, sea, and air in two hemispheres in World War Two.

Our history is filled with people who faced dogs, tear gas, water-cannons. People who faced bullets and bayonets and military cannons. People who sometimes lost the fight, but never surrendered, and came back to win the wars. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s did not spring up full grown from Martin Luther King’s forehead, but was rather a culmination of a century of struggles, of hopes raised and crushed and raised again. Who in the South today can hear the racist, pro-segregation rants of Strom Thurman and George Wallace without wincing? Oh there are a few, I know, but thank God that most of us shake our heads in disgust and pity and anger that our parents’ or grandparents’ generations could have held such beliefs.

All of that changed because people, some great, but most just average folk, stood up and said “No. This is wrong, and I won’t have it.” In the face of dogs and guns, in the teeth of batons and masked riders in the night, in spite of rape and death and burning, we the people finally cried “Enough!”

And white women began to vote.

And African-American men and women finally began to vote.

More Americans began to have a say, and therefore a stake, in our country.

Well, for anyone out there who has looked at the Civil Rights marches in D.C., Selma, or Birmingham and thought, “Man I wish I had a cause like that, something noble and good to really get behind!” I have news for you: Amendment One is that cause.

Again we are faced with an attempt to deny basic civil rights to American citizens. Again efforts to claim those rights are met with vitriol every bit as bigoted as Thurman and Wallace’s anti-desegregation rants. Again bigots are trying to use God to enforce hatred and intolerance. As was done with African slavery. As was done with Freed People’s rights, as was done with Women’s rights. As is being done with the rights of homosexual people in this country right now, even as I type this.

Right now, people on my street, in my town, in my county, and across my state are denied the right to make a legal contract that anyone else, so long as they are not ~~first cousins~~ (turns out NC will let first cousins marry, just not "double first cousins") and are at least 18 (without parental permission), 16 (with parental permission), or 14 (if already pregnant) can make in North Carolina with a few dollars and a trip to city hall. That ain’t right. You know it ain’t right. Replace “homosexual” with “African-, Asian-, Hispanic-American” and you damn sure know it ain’t right!

This is it, folks. The Civil Rights movement isn’t over, and it’s come to our very doorsteps. History awaits us. What will you say when your children or grandchildren look to you and ask about the Civil Rights movement of the early 21^st century? When they ask, “Which side were you on?” how will you be able to answer?

I know what’s right, and it’s not denying my fellow American citizens their legal rights. We don’t often get such a clear opportunity to align ourselves on the right side of history, and the right side of every single thing we believe in as a people. Be on the right side of history and make your posterity proud of their heritage. Vote “NO” on Amendment One on May 8!

Get Involved in the Fight for Civil Rights

Neighbors for Equality

Protect All NC Families

Equality NC

Book O' the Fortnight: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

2012-02-07T06:33:00.000-08:00

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

This fortnight's book is one of the most intriguing and exquisitely written I have read in a long time. In a very small nutshell, the novel follows a weekend in the life plus flashbacks of "Mark Spitz," a survivor of the zombie-apocalypse who is currently involved in an operation to re-take and clear out a chunk of Manhattan Island and New York City. The Marines have done the heavy lifting, dropping in barricades around the Zone and eradicating 98+% of the normal seek-and-eat zombies, but afterwards small, para-military sweeper teams like Mark Spitz's are sent in to take care of "stragglers," zombies which, for whatever reason, never quite adjusted to being zombies. Instead of mindlessly attacking and eating any living human they come across, they spend their un-lives stuck in a repetitive loop: operating a long-dead copy machine, answering unringing phones, even lowering and raising fry-baskets into empty deep-fryers in the back of a Micky Dee's.

Now, before you get excited at the prospect of another Zombieland-style zombie-apocalypse novel Readers Mine, be warned: this is not your average zombie-apocalypse novel. In fact, what Colson Whitehead has written isn't a zombie-apocalypse novel at all. Instead he has written something both far more original and far more traditional and universal: he's written a novel about the human heart in conflict with itself set in a post(?)-zombie-apocalypse world. This novel is really quite brilliant, but unfortunately the fact that it isn't really a zombie novel has cost Whitehead considerably in terms of high-star reviews on places like Amazon. In the end it is rarely genre-novels that give fields like horror, SF, fantasy,mystery, etc a bad name. It is the fans, and zombie-apocalypse fans have proven true to the type with Zone One. In other words, since it turns out not to really be a zombie-apocalypse novel, those who picked it up expecting a comfortable romp through familiar generic territory are left confused and angry, so they blame Whitehead for betraying their expectations. In the process they miss out on an incredible work of fiction.

To my mind, Zone One is about trauma, and how the human mind and spirit tries to deal with it, and adjust to a world that is irrevocably changed from the one they are familiar with. Mark Spitz spends a lot of time wandering through his past via often sudden, quasi stream-of-consciousness vignettes. These trips give the reader a look into both the pre-apocalypse world, and Spitz's months of survival and constant movement after Last Night, to the eventual beginnings of a kind of national recovery and Reconstruction. The problem is that Spitz grew up in a world very similar and only a few more years advanced technologically than our own, a world with which we are intimately familiar and which is now gone forever, destroyed by the "plague." (Whitehead's use of "Reconstruction" to describe the efforts of the rebuilt American government is a nicely ironic twist on classic "Redemptionist" novels of the early 20th century, which celebrated the antebellum American South and reviled the historical post-war Reconstruction efforts of the North.)

However, Spitz adjusted to the post-First Night world, and actually became extremely good at surviving, at staying alive and uninfected/eaten in a country where the revenant dead vastly outnumbered the living. His problem is that he cannot seem to adjust to this third era, where, supposedly, the survivors are to take back what was theirs and rebuild the lost world. Yet everyone knows that a true resurrection of the past is impossible. Too many have died, too much has been endured by the survivors. (Indeed, Whitehead gives the reader a wonderfully dark strain of comic relief with the universal effects of PASD, Post-Apocalyptic-Stress-Disorder, where modern psychology meets the end of the world.) Spitz is separated from the two worlds where he knows the rules and now is being asked to adapt to a third, where no one knows the rules.

Spitz's trauma(s) run deep and true, and Whitehead's style gives the reader a continuous sense of weightlessness, of being adrift, and trying to find an anchor or sure footing on a fun-house floor. Anyone who has ever experienced the death of a parent or loved one, especially at a young age, will recognize this uncomfortable micro-gravity. How can the world continue to go on after X? Why does it? It has been irredeemably changed, yet doesn't seem to recognize the fact! Trauma challenges our necessary assumption of personal importance, and in the case of Zone One, our assumption of human importance. Individually, in predictable environments, we usually manage to adapt. But what if, as Whitehead asks, the environment is fundamentally unpredictable? How much change do we have in us? How malleable is the human mind, how adaptable the human spirit?

And given a choice in worlds to live in, would we really make the apparently obvious and sane choice?

This is a great book, and deserves to become a classic, cult or otherwise. It's available for Kindle as well, so go and grab it. You'll dig it.

General News and Something to Remember

2012-02-02T09:26:00.000-08:00

Well Readers Mine, it's been a couple weeks again, but they've been busy ones, and I must warn you that today is not the day when you'll see a substantive new post here, but expect a new Book O' the Fortnight by week's end.

So what's been going on? Well, last week, Mockingbird and I celebrated our birthday (we have the same one, you see. Different years, but the same day) with a series of dinners, many cool presents, and by sleeping in until 11 and enjoying the extra snuggle-time. Meanwhile, school has cranked back up for both of us, me on one side of the desk, and she on the other, which also means the commuter marriage has resumed, and I am once again feeling the growing suspicion that my real permanent address is Interstate 85. So it's been the usual round of quizzes, exams, assigned readings, short papers, figuring out topics for long papers, etc, but this is the last semester I'll be facing those particular tasks -- at least in an undergraduate setting. Graduate school applications are all out and I should start hearing from a couple of the schools as early as the end of this month. (Crossed fingers, prayers, and good vibes are all welcomed and encouraged!)

The Avengers coming May 4, 2012

Of course, amongst all of this normal stuff is work on Wanna Cook? The Unofficial Guide to Breaking Bad, which is proceeding well, but in the re-watching and note-taking phase is somewhat time-intensive (as I expect the writing will be as well). Still, so far the project is a lot of fun and my co-author and I are having a blast analyzing and critiquing the episodes over the phone almost nightly. I also have the paper for the Fifth Biennial International Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses coming up in Vancouver in July, for which I have, for the first time ever, applied for a passport. And finally, just yesterday I was presented with an offer that I couldn't refuse in the opportunity to write a brief essay about The Avengers, directed by Joss Whedon, for the forthcoming The Essential Whedon Reader from Syracuse University Press. So many incredible opportunities have come my way this year! But the plate, Readers Mine! The plate, she is very full!

Between school deadlines and writing deadlines, I expect to be something of a rapidly typing recluse from mid-April to mid-July, in which time all of the various deadlines fall. It is doable, but you can see that I'm going to be a bit busy in the coming months. (By the way, if anyone ever tells you that writing is not really working, politely take them out back and hit them in the head with a shovel, because they are obviously insane and therefore likely a danger to themselves and others.)

Here's the thing, though: I am going to be incredibly busy doing something that I love and that I have wanted to do since I was 10! I got sidetracked for several years along the way, but I'm here now, and finally following Joseph Campbell's incredibly sensible advice: "Follow your bliss." Not to mention that I'm doing a good chunk of it in the company of an incredible woman and partner (who also happens to be the love of my life) who feels exactly the same way.

When things get a bit overwhelming, it is good to remember this last part -- and to give thanks.

Thank you.

Breaking Bad Season 1

2012-01-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

Hello Readers Mine!

It's about time for another update on the Wanna Cook? The Unofficial Guide to Breaking Bad project, so, since I've finished an annotating re-watch of Season 1, I thought I'd ruminate on some of what struck me as I watched these first seven episodes again. So, for those of you who haven't seen Season 1, or even Seasons 2 - 4:

!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!

Cooking in the Scrub Desert

One thing I want to note at the get-go is that Breaking Bad is one of those rare shows where the cast and crew hit the ground running. There is no "Season 1 Slump" where everyone involved is still finding the groove. Breaking Bad starts where most shows hope to be by the end of Season 2, with fully developed characters, seamless casting, and an integrated production of the highest quality. This is a rare thing, Readers Mine, and well worth emphasizing!

To start with some of those production values, the camerawork in Breaking Bad readily comes to the fore, and with good reason. In the DVD commentaries for this season Dean Norris (who plays DEA agent Hank Schrader in the show) notes early on how "filmic" the production values on the series are. (I don't think it's inappropriate to refer to the camera-work as cinematography, though with the wonderful proliferation of Quality TV out there right now, we really need a new word for high-quality, carefully constructed, artistic camera-work on TV, the "art of making television" rather than movies. Televideography?) Breaking Bad is filmed like a movie, not as we are used to seeing TV shows, with limited camera angles and perspectives, but with a proliferation of viewpoints and shot-angles which become part of the narrative itself.

Time-lapse film-work leaps to mind here. Taking advantage of the dramatic scenery, wide-open spaces, and beautiful skies over the New Mexico desert, Gilligan and Co. do a brilliant, visually stunning job of incorporating the passage of time into their story. I'm thinking particularly of the shots of the RV, yellow smoke streaming from the roof-vents as Walt and Jesse (or Jesse and Badger!) cook, while around it, in sequences that are viewed in merely seconds, the sky changes, sun sets and rises, clouds stream by, the scrub and prairie grasses are blown about by the winds, and shadows flow, grow, ebb, and grow again as 24 or more hours of film (or more likely digital recordings) are run up to a high speed, turning the accomplishments of many hours into a moment. (My apologies to Shakespeare, but if you're gonna steal, steal from the masters!). Just beautiful stuff!

Perhaps the shot I most associate with Breaking Bad however, is the up-and-through-from-under angle. I'm sure there's a technical name for this shot, but I don't know it - yet. What I'm talking about are those wonderful angles where we get a bottom-up view of the action, usually seeing "through" a solid surface.: as Jesse tosses Emilio's body into the tub and splashes hydrofluoric acid over it while bemoaning his situation in a hilarious soliloquy, in the cold open of "...And the Bag's in the River," when we see this weird reddish stuff covering the screen, which is revealed to be the partially liquefied remains of Emilio as Walt swipes an arc through the mess, allowing us to look up at him on hands and knees in a filtered breath mask as he cleans up the sludge that was once a human being. You'll see this shot used judiciously again and again throughout the series, and it never fails to grab the attention.

Gilligan and Co. also do some really wonderful, subtle work with parallel shots in Season 1. Consider Walt waking up on the bathroom floor after the credits for "The Cat's in the Bag..." The scene opens with a view of Walt, eyes closed, his face pressed against a hard surface, and the shot angled vertically (the top of Walt's head at the top of the screen rather than to the side). He wakes, startled, rises up as we reorient to realize that he was laying on the floor after all, and wipes his mouth where he has drooled in his sleep. This same shot and waking sequence is repeated in the next episode "...And the Bag's in the River" when Walt regains consciousness in Jesse's basement after passing out during a coughing fit as he brings lunch to the chained Crazy 8. This parallelism is a brilliant connecting conjunction in Walt's life, showing us that no matter what's going on, what acts and situations Walt goes through, it's all being done/experienced by the same, all too human guy, who drools in his sleep.

Okay, I think I'll wrap this up now, though I had intended to go into some more stuff, particularly the early set up of Hank Schrader's character as the series' really good guy, the wonderful married-couple chemistry between Bryan Cranston (Walt) and Anna Gunn (Skylar), and what the hell a javelina is, but this post has gone on long enough I think. In any event, Season 1 is re-watched and many notes taken, so now it's on to Season 2, where things get even better!

Book O' the Fortnight: Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors

2012-01-16T10:06:00.000-08:00

Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors
by Jennifer K. Stuller

Regular readers will recognize the author of the current Book O' the Fortnight from previous mentions here in connection with Slayage and Geek Girl Con, and it is well known that she's one of my favorite people. I met Jennifer K. Stuller at Slayage 4 in St. Augustine, where she gave an incredible presentation on pop culture influences on Joss Whedon's works. At the same conference, we bought her book Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology, which she was kind enough to inscribe for Dale and me. I'm kind of ashamed to say that it took me until late last year to sit down and read it cover-to-cover. Don't get me wrong, her book wasn't sitting idle. I dipped into it regularly, reading a chapter here, skimming a section there, diving from index to mid-chapter to see what she had to say about a particular interest here and there, but I just hadn't settled in for the entire journey.

I'm glad I finally did!

Stuller self-identifies as a pop culture historian, and Ink-Stained Amazons shows the truth of that claim. Her research and methodology are impeccable, and she presents her findings in a narrative that is both fascinating and fun, using a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach that sets her work firmly within the changing historical context of the past century or so. More, her writing is immediately accessible, and thoroughly enjoyable. She begins by briefly outlining her focus, being female characters in popular culture which meet at least two of four criteria: 1.) a narrative that "borrows from, or resonates with, classical themes and/or elements of world mythology," 2.) has "an element of the fantastic," 3.) "a uniquely identifiable skill or power," 4.) and "a mission or purpose that benefits the greater good." These criteria set, she then gives the reader an excellent historical overview of female superheroes from William M. Marston's Wonder Woman to Dark Angel's Max Guevara, covering kick-ass female heroes in comic books, comic strips, books, movies, and TV along the way. Importantly, Stuller places the development of these figures within the larger socio-cultural context of (particularly) American culture and the emergence, growth, and change of the feminist movement.

Stuller is also unflinching in her analysis of the successes and failures of both the larger culture and the feminist movement's various "waves." She maintains an admirably clear and unbiased historical lens throughout (which trust me, Readers Mine, is an incredibly difficult thing to do when writing about a subject that one is passionate about!). From classic historical narrative, Stuller moves in the second section of her book to the mythological and cultural underpinnings and story-structures of female superheroes, combining history, feminist criticism, Jungian archetypes, Campbellian comparative mythology, and fan-love into a powerful in-depth analysis of the successes an failings of specific characters and narratives, from The Avengers to Modesty Blaise, to Xena the Warrior Princess, Charlie's Angels, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and Dark Angel to name just a few. She examines the strange lack of female to female mentoring, positive maternal figures, and realistic female relationships in popular culture, as well as pointing out where such stories have appeared.

With some of the problems and potentialities of fdemale superhero narratives outlines, Stuller concludes with a look at the women who are creating the modern crop of female superheroes. From actors like Nichelle Nichols, Whoopi Goldberg, Lucy Lawless, Lynda Carter, Sarah Michelle Gellar, among others, all of who take their positions as potential role models very seriously, to writer/blogger/activists like Mary Borsellino, Gail Simone, Trina Robbins, and Angela Robinson, who are on the front lines of creating today's female superheros and working against old tropes and entrenched male-centric storytelling, Stuller gives the reader an inside look on the still growing, still evolving history of the female superhero who today is more and more often being brought to life by women.

Stuller's final chapter asks the question "Where do we go from here?" Which she answers with an unflinching "foreward!" In spite of failures, in spite of resistance, in spite of steps forward being accompanied by steps back, the next step is to continue, that each of us, whatever sex, whatever gender, may find in these modern myths the stories that inspire us, and that, in Jennifer K. Stuller's own words, enable us to find "heroes to relate to, and ways to live heroically."

It is a remarkable, fun, moving and inspiring book, one that I'm glad is on my shelf, and who's author I am so very proud to call a friend. Go buy it.

To Work! The Breaking Bad Re-Watch Begins!

2012-01-09T17:02:00.000-08:00

Well, Readers Mine, the hard work on Wanna Cook? The Unofficial Guide to Breaking Bad begins tonight inthe form of an episode-by-episode rewatch with pen and pad in hand to takenotes which will (hopefully) evolve into pieces of the book. I’ve made my noteson tonight’s episode, and thought I’d share some quick thoughts about it hereas an update. So…

!!! SPOILER ALERT !!!

Episode 1.01 – “The Cat’s in the Bag…”

Which is best summed up by Walt’s half-whispered “Oh shit,”when Crazy 8 wakes up in the back of the RV.

This episode is notable for the first appearance of severalrecurring shots and places in the series. The camera shot up “through” thebottom of the tub as Jesse tries to get rid of Emilio’s body is just a lovelycamera angle, and we’ll be seeing this one fairly regularly throughout theseries, to the point where it becomes something of a trademark piece ofcamera-work for the show. I love the ceiling-down shot of the flipping quarterabove a blurred-out Walt and Jesse as well. Gilligan and Co. quickly becamemasters of using beautifully filmed, unusual camera angles to underscoreimportant moments in the show.

We also see the first incarnation of Jesse’s house, stilldecorated and furnished in the style of his aunt. As the series progresses, thehouse will become another character on the show, evolving right along withJesse and serving as a vehicle for the external manifestations of his mentaland emotional states. Jesse will always try to come home to this place, no matterwhat.

As far as the storyline goes, things are beginning to getdeeper and deeper for Walt in this episode, as Crazy 8’s survival moves him wellbeyond the realm of justifiable homicide in self-defense into considerations ofpre-meditated murder. Jesse too is in over his head with a dead body, a guy chainedup in his basement, and Skylar showing up to lecture him for something he hasn’tdone on top of everything else!

It is here that BreakingBad brilliantly reveals its intrinsic humor – twisted though it may be. Jesse’svarious struggles with Emilio’s corpse are some of the finest moments ofpitch-black comedy in the history of television, and I admit to laughing outloud several times: as Jesse “tries on” the plastic bin while in the hardwaresuperstore to see if a body will fit in it; during his entire monologue as he’sdousing the body with hydrofluoric acid (“Yeah, and how’s about I send over mypsycho-bitch wife to break your balls and threaten you? God, that’d behilarious.”); and of course, the wonderful moment when the grisly, acid-washedbody-goo drops from the ceiling and all over Jesse’s hall-floor below. Theexpressions on Jesse and Walt’s faces are priceless! Somehow I doubt the ThreeStooges being on in the background is at all coincidental, and what a perfectway to underscore the fact that these two guys are completely out of theirdepth and therefore doomed to screw things up. The humor is what makes the showbearable, especially in later episodes and seasons. Without it, it would justbe too dark to stand.

Okay, so we’re off and running. Stay tuned for furtherupdates as we progress through the show, and though I can’t promise to postabout every episode as we go, I do promise to keep Solomon Mao’s updatedregularly, and you can find me on the interwebs by name on Google+, and as@EnsleyFGuffey on Twitter. Be sure and look for Dale there too as @KDaleKoontz,and follow our updates at #WannaCook.

Until next time – be well.

Breaking Bad Book Deal!!

2012-01-06T09:37:00.000-08:00

Well, Readers Mine, we've been keeping it under wraps until we had actually signed the contract, but as of 3 January. K. Dale Koontz and I are officially writing Wanna Cook? The Unofficial Guide to Breaking Bad for ECW Press!

I've been a fan of the show since I first saw a pair of khaki's floating down out of a pure blue New Mexico desert sky in the cold open of the pilot episode. To be fair, I was watching said episode on DVD at the urging of the one and only David Lavery, but from then on I was hooked, and the show has -- incredibly -- just gotten better and better. The list of awards Breaking Bad has garnered would take up more space than you'd want to read here, but as an example consider that Bryan Cranston, who plays one of the central characters, Walter White, will be up for his fourth consecutive Emmy for his work on Breaking Bad, and if he wins, it will be the first four-peat in TV history.

The show is truly amazing. Cinematic, brutal, compelling, beautifully written, filmed, and acted, I have absolutely no hesitation in saying that it is, beyond a doubt, the finest show on TV. So you can see why I wanted to write about it. As part of this diabolical scheme, I hooked K. Dale Koontz on the Breaking Bad pipe with Season Four last year, and when the opportunity came to put in a book proposal, we got together and started cooking. Not-so-long-as-you-might-think-story-short, the book will be on the shelves in either early or mid-2013, depending on how AMC decides to air the final 16 episodes of the series.

Therefore, you can expect to be seeing a lot of material on Breaking Bad here in future. As a means of helping us keep our deadlines (as well as an exercise in "New Media Marketing"), Dale and I will be posting regular updates on the book's progress. You can find and follow me on Twitter as @EnsleyFGuffey, as well as on Facebook, and Google+ as Ensley F. Guffey. In addition, of course, I'll be posting updates here at Solomon Mao's, both in main posts and in a new sidebar section to the right called "Wanna Cook? Updates" (I am nothing if not original.) You can also follow along over on Dale's blog and you can follow her on Twitter @KDaleKoontz. We'll be posting under the hashtags #wannacook and #breakingbad.

The first major deadline for the book is June 15, when we have to turn in a draft covering the first 4 seasons, and then we'll be rewriting that section as Season Five is airing, after which we bust our butts to get the final section covering S5 in. We'll be breaking things down into smaller chunks with self-imposed deadlines as we go, and I'l be sure to keep Solomon Mao's updated, one way or another. So wish us luck and go ahead and stash $20 somewhere, because you know you'll want to buy the book!

Christmas Noir No. 9

2011-12-29T16:35:00.000-08:00

From behind came a scream of pure rage. Sugarplum Mary looked over her shoulder and saw Mrs. Claus pause in the kitchen doorway, her lace trimmed white apron was splattered with dark brown stains and her eyes were wide and not at all sane behind her round, wire-rim glasses. Raising a heavy cleaver in her right hand, Mrs. Claus screamed again and charged across the chocolate checkerboard floor.

Mary felt hot breath on the back of her neck, and then she was grabbed by the collar of her dress and yanked up and back, out of the Gingerbread House and into the snow-swirled night. Blitzen's great horns passed on either side of her and she landed astride his broad, shaggy shoulders, automatically grasping at his coat of shaggy coat of fur. Blitzen reared and his font legs kicked the door shut on the charging horror in the kitchen. Quick as frostbite, the great reindeer hopped backwards and leapt into the air just as Mrs. Claus came through the cottage door, splinters of layered gingerbread flying to all sides, her great cleaver swinging as Blitzen and Mary shot over her.

Blitzen was fast, but not quite fast enough. Mrs. Claus' cleaver carved a line of red pain across inside of his right hind-leg. "Santa's fucking balls that hurts!" he screamed.

Their flight over the house wavered, but Blitzen recovered with a snarl, lowering his head as they pushed into the snowstorm. Mary looked down at Christmas Village and gasped. Below them the cafeteria building next to the toy factory was engulfed in flames and while the surrounding elves and reindeer were doing their best to fight the blaze, their efforts were obviously too little, too late. The place was an inferno and the flames lit the arctic night like a hellish flare.

Sugarplum Mary turned away, and leaned forward to speak to her rescuer. "Blitzen, thank you, but I thought, I mean Sparky said that..."

"That I was behind all of the strange stuff happening lately?" Blitzen snorted in disgust. "Elves. I don't know how you people manage to breed, sometimes. Sparky went off half-cocked, as always."

"Well what is going on, then?"

"Tell you what... how's about we get somewhere safe where we can get back on the ground, then maybe slap a fuckin' band-aid or ten on Mother Christmas' little parting gift, and then I'll fill you in. Until then, why don't we play a game I like to call 'Shut the Fuck Up Mary'?"

They dove into the night, the only sounds the whistling of the air and Mary's quiet sobs.

BtVS's "Chosen" Live on Twitter From My Living-room Tonight

2011-12-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been one hell of an eventful year Readers Mine, and one of those events is coming to an end tomorrow night at 8pm EST as the final post in the Great Buffy Re-Watch of 2011 goes up on Nik at Night. Great praise and burnt offerings go to the one and only Nikki Stafford (who has written lots of books you should buy) for what turned out to be a full year's worth of chasing down guest bloggers, editing and formatting posts, organizing the whole shebang, and cranking out not one but two blog posts every Tuesday night on top of all the other writing, editing, child rearing, and husband-wrangling this remarkable woman does. Many thanks Nikki! You're just insanely cool.

The Slayer and the Scoobies

In honor of the Great Buffy Re-Watch Finale, a few of us are getting together from our various points on this good Earth at 7pm EST to re-watch "Chosen," the final televised episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and to Tweet about it as we do so. You can find all of the fun under #gbrfinale over on Twitter, and of course, you're welcome to get there by following me via the handy and nifty button you see under the pic of yours truly at the top right of the page.

For those who may not be either fond or familiar of/with Twitter, you can follow the entire re-watch and Tweet-fest by simply typing in #gbrfinale in the search box at the top of the Twitter page, which will give you all the posts by everyone taking part in the live-Tweet. Then just sit back and watch the fun, or, even better, grab the last disc of Season Seven and watch and Tweet along with us. Remember, we're starting tonight at 7pm EST, and we'd love to see you there!

Christmas Noir No. 8

2011-12-19T07:36:00.001-08:00

Donner slid-staggered on the ice-covered flagstones, allfour of his legs going wide before he caught his balance and his hooves dugthrough the almost invisible ice sheet. He snorted, cursed under his breath,and looked up at the home of the Krampus. It rose from the glacial ice likesome clay-mation holiday special anachronism, the rough-cut stone of its thickwalls a dark and brooding presence looming out of the blowing snow and Arctic night.No Disney fantasy or late medieval royal whim of a castle, the Fortress of theKrampus was the real thing, a squat and deadly 14^th century fortificationthat promised only murder and pain to anyone unlucky enough to enter its walls.

Donner reached out, caught the bell-chain between his jaws,and pulled. From within came the first few bars of “Jingle Bells,” rendered inthe screams of children.

“Fucking Krampus,” Donner muttered, and settled in to wait.

Equality

2011-12-15T06:58:00.000-08:00

My wife and I live in North Carolina, where the state's General Assembly has whipped up a referendum to change the state constitution to define marriage as being only between a man and a woman. Of course a law stating the same thing is already on the books, so what the GA is trying to do with the proposed amendment is to make it more difficult to challenge that law through judicial review. I'm pleased to report that that many people in my state are speaking out against this amendment, and against discriminatory marriage laws in general. On a statewide level, Equality North Carolina is working hard, and I'm delighted to report that another group, Neighbors for Equality, has sprung up in a little town near my home whose biggest claim to fame is a private Baptist university. Neighbors for Equality is currently running their Twelve Days of Equality campaign, where ordinary citizens are asked to speak out against "Amendment One" and for equality. My wonderful wife is a part of this campaign, and has also been speaking out on her blog, and I am, as usual, so extremely proud to be married to such an incredible person. It's a shame that everyone in my state isn't allowed to experience that kind of pride... Yet.

A Very Whedon Christmas!!

2011-12-14T02:00:00.000-08:00

In a nod to the holiday season, I'm pleased to announce the first-ever Whedon Christmas Shopping Guide here at Solomon Mao's!

Joss Whedon his own bad self!

In the comments below you'll find a (hopefully) wide selection of the best writing on the work and worlds of Joss Whedon, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Dollhouse and beyond, by some of the most brilliant and talented minds around. Here at last are the perfect gifts you've been searching for, and just (barely!) in time for Christmas!

At this point I have to give a nod to John Scalzi, who's series of Whatever Shopping Guides inspired this little effort. You should read his blog and books too!

Here's the rules:

This comment thread is for authors and editors of books on the works of Joss Whedon and the Whedonverses only. Please do not leave other comments, as they will be removed by the moderator.

1.) Posts by authors and editors of books only. If you are not the author/editor of the book you're posting about, please do not post.

2.) Your book must currently be in print and available.

3.) One post per author, please. Those among you who have authored/edited more than one book, feel free to post about multiple works, but all in the same post please.

4.) Please keep your description of your book brief and entertaining, as if you were talking to someone at a signing who might buy your book!

5.) Include a link to your book at an online bookseller. You can use standard HTML link scripting, a useful guide for which can be found here.

6.) Feel free to share and link to this blog post on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, or any other social media.

7.) As noted above, comment posts that are not by authors/editors promoting their own books will be deleted by the moderator.

Okay: now tell us all about your book!

Christmas Noir No.7

2011-12-12T19:03:00.000-08:00

Sugarplum Mary the Christmas Elf carefully tensed andrelaxed the muscles in her legs, trying to keep her blood circulating and wardoff the pins and needles that were threatening to settle in from so many hoursspent cramped in the small cabinet. Suddenly, from outside the Gingerbread Houseshe heard the muffled sounds of shouting, quick and panicked, but she couldn’t makeout what was going on through the thick butter-cream coating on the House’sexterior. Her every nerve came alive, however, when she heard Mrs. Claus pushup out of her candy-cane-back chair and move towards the front of the house,where the sugar glazed windows looked out onto Tannenbaum Lane. Now was herchance, probably the only one she would get. She waited until she heard the oldwitch’s heavy tread leave the dining room, and made a supreme effort.

Sugarplum Mary threw open the cabinet door and lurched outonto the checkerboard dark and white chocolate tiles of the kitchen, alreadyturning for the back door, when her legs, numb despite all of her efforts,betrayed her sending her sprawling with a crash as she instinctively grabbed atone of the lollipop stools around the kitchen island to steady herself andbrought it down with her instead.

“Mary?” said a delighted voice from the front room, “is thatyou dear?”

Mrs. Claus’ feet thudded on the floor, moving quickly.Crying now, Sugarplum Mary scrabbled across the kitchen floor on all fours, hernails leaving deep furrows n the hard chocolate flooring, as she heard theinsane woman enter the dining room, just one small room away. Mary reached thedoor, desperately clutching the rock-candy doorknob. “Pleasebeunlockedpleasebeunlocked,”she chanted under her breath like the holiest rosary.

The doorknob turned, Mary fell out into the cold night, hermouth already open to call for help when she saw the great, hard hooves beforeher.

“Hello, Mary,” Blitzen said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Christmas Noir No. 6

2011-12-11T16:37:00.001-08:00

Polly Mistletoe rolled her pretty green eyes. “Oh it’s notthat bad, silly! Okay, there’ve been a few accidents, bu…”

“Accidents?!?” Comet shouted, his nostrils flaring. “Accidents?A full third of the Christmas Elves burned alive, Rudolf torn into bloodygobbets and scattered over a square mile, Sparky gone, Sugarplum Mary nowhereto be found, and that psychotic bitch Mrs. Claus out roaming around doing Godknows what, and you think it’s all accidental? Reindeer shit!”

“You’re blowing everything out of proportion, Comet!”

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” He leaned in close; his wide antlersthudding against the wall on either side of Polly, pinning her in place as hiswild eyes bored into hers, his hot breath on her fine-boned face. “This isn’t sometwinkly-ass vampire movie, Polly! This is real, and it’s ugly, and you have gotto face up to it. Someone is trying to kill every single one of us, and if we don’tfigure out what the hell is going on, they’re going to do it!”

“It’ll be okay, though. Santa…”

“Santa?” Comet snorted. “The only thing that sack of fat isinterested in is finding the bottom of every bottle in Miami. No. Santaabandoned us a long time ago, Polly. We’re on our own. God help us, but wereally are.”

Christmas Noir No. 5

2011-12-09T18:48:00.001-08:00

Third shift was in the cafeteria when the fires started.Later it would be discovered that the alarm and automatic fire suppression systemshad been carefully sabotaged. By the time the Kitchen Elves realized there wasa problem, it was far too late. The staff and worker elves had all beb welltrained for just such an emergency, however, so at first everyone remainedorderly and relatively calm. Until the doors to the outside wouldn’t open. Notthe main entrances or the rear, and the side doors were blocked by the fireswhich were burning hot and fast, fueled by acetone accelerants that had theElves all but surrounded in mere minutes. The panic started then, likesomething out of an old disaster story, the elves pushing against each other,the ones in front slowly being crushed against the unmoving doors, and everyonescreaming, screaming as the fires moved in. That was what woke the rest ofChristmas Village – the screaming. The screaming of the Elves.

Christmas Noir No. 4

2011-12-08T18:56:00.001-08:00

The snow fell more quickly now, coating his shoulders andthe uppermost curves of his antlers. It was nights like this Donner wished hestill smoked. Sparky and Sugarplum Mary had been missing for days, Santa wasnowhere to be found, and Rudolph. Christ, what they’d done to Rudolph! To hellwith it. Spotting a huddle of elves huddled in the sodium-arc glow of theWorkshop’s loading docks, Donner shook off the snow and ambled over. The groupof four little creatures fell silent as they noticed him.

“H-hey, Donner,” Skip the Christmas Elf said, “w-what’s up?”

“Got a smoke?” thereindeer asked. The elf blinked, shivered, and dug out a butt, lit it for thewaiting reindeer. Donner took a deep drag and sighed, thick grey smoke flowingout of his wide nostrils. “God that’s good. Thanks, Skip.” He turned to leavebut the Elf’s voice stopped him.

“What are you gonna do now, Donner?”

Another drag, another, deeper sigh. “The only thing I can,”Donner said. “I’m going to see the Krampus.”

The Elves eyes widened in shock, and the wind picked backup, howling down the empty streets of Christmas Village. “The Krampus?” LittleGinny Gumdrop Elf asked. “Jesus wept.”

“Yeah,” Donner said over his shoulder as he moved into the night,“so will the rest of us before this is over. Whoever’s left, that is.”

The Elves looked after him until he disappeared into theblowing snow, and then scurried back inside.

Christmas Noir No. 3

2011-12-07T16:59:00.001-08:00

Sugarplum Mary the Christmas Elf clutched her knees to herchest and tried not to breathe. The cabinet she was hiding in had no lock, andsmall as she was, and unarmed, she wouldn't stand a chance against the horrorstalking the Gingerbread House. "Mary!" came the deceptively soft,comforting mother-voice, "Marieeee! Come out, come out where ever youare..." One of the candy-cane chairs squeaked across the hard-chocolatefloor as it was pulled out from the lollipop table, then groaned as it took theheavy weight of its new occupant. "That's okay, sweetheart, I can wait. Ican wait all winter, if need be."

Christmas Noir No. 2

2011-12-07T16:58:00.001-08:00

Outside the wind came off the Arctic Sea like sleetingrazors, and the Aurora lashed the night with neon fire, but inside the stable,everything was absolutely still. Comet shook his head, blowing air from hisnostrils with explosive disgust to try and clear his nose and throat. No use.The smell of the blood was cloying; old pennies and rusted iron in an ozonehaze. Rudolph had died hard.

Christmas Noir No. 1

2011-12-07T16:56:00.001-08:00

From somewhere behind him there came the unmistakable soundof a pump-action shotgun chambering a shell. Sparky the Elf suddenly felt acold certainty that he would never see the North Pole, Santa's Workshop, orthat bastard Blitzen ever again...

Infidel by Kameron Hurley is the Book O' the Fortnight

2011-11-28T18:20:00.001-08:00

You may have noticed some changes here at Solomon Mao’srecently, Readers Mine. I decided it was time to refresh the look of things alittle and add some new bells and whistles, among which is the Book O’ theWeek, which you see to the upper left. The theory is that every week I’llchoose a book I’ve read and really enjoyed, write a quick review post, and thenleave a linked cover shot up until the next week. Of course, in reality, I’vehad Vernor Vinge’s Children of the Skyup for a good two and a half weeks now, so maybe I should call the piece the “BookO’ the Fortnight,” which doesn’t sound all that bad actually.

God's War by Kameron Hurley

Anyway, I’m pleased to put up Kameron Hurley’s Infidel as the new Book O’! Hurley’s arecent discovery on my part, as I picked up her first novel, God’s War, this summer and pretty muchwas instantly hooked on the worlds she has made and the words she uses to makethem. God’s War and Infidel are the first two books in aseries set on the planet Umayma (an Arabic name meaning “high mother” or “littlemother”), a world originally fundamentally hostile to human life which was roughlyterraformed many centuries ago and thus at the time of the novels is merelyinhospitable. Not that you can really blame the planet. See, the terraformingwas carried out by semi-mythical “magicians” using bugs, bioengineered insectswhich presumably breathed in whatever mix of atmospheric gases was originallypresent and belched out a good ol’ nitrogen-oxygen-argon-etc mix, and brokedown and fertilized the soil, made the water drinkable, etc, etc, until theplanet’s putative population, until this time eaking out an existence on theseveral moons around Umayma, could come on down, though they may have done sobefore things were quite ready. Of course, like all human technologies the bugshad – well – bugs, and sometimes theterraforming… got interesting.

Anyway, the settlers were largely of a faith derivedfrom Islam, with a few non-Muslim groups thrown in. At first Umayma had aplanetary government and a kind of all powerful, all female planetary specialforces/religious police force, the bel dames. As in “sans merci.” Soon enough,people being people, this set up went to hell, several separate nations statesemerged from the chaos, and two hundred odd years ago, two of those, Nasheenand Chenja, started a war that’s been going strong ever since, fueled byreligious intolerance, nationalism, and chemical and biological weapons thatmake a genegineered ebola-smallpox hybrid look like dessert topping.

Out of this world and this war steps Nyxnissa so Dasheem, “Nyx”– ex soldier, ex-bel dame, and one of the hardest boiled anti-heroes to comedown the pike in a long while. Nyx isn’t just hard, she’s brutal. Not driven,but ruthless. Just to give you some idea, here’s the very first line of God’s War:

“Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, onthe edge of the desert.”

Yeah. Like that. Hurley’s prose is tight and hard, sometimescoming so fast and clipped that it reads like the sound of a master chefchopping celery. Nyx is a product of her world, and Hurley somehow makes youwant to love and hate her at the same time. Her foil is Rhys, a tall drink ofwater, half-assed magician, and observant Muslim who is soft where Nyx is hard,and hard where she is, unexpectedly, soft.

I’m not going to go into the story of Infidel here, because it’s the second book in the series, andbecause the tale it tells is inextricably bound up in the world Hurley hascreated. This truly is one of the most magnificent examples of world-building I’veseen in decades, and the characters are a part and parcel of that building. Beadvised, this ain’t your granny’s SF/F. Hurley pulls no punches, gives noeasy answers, and she shies away from nothing. Race, religion, gender roles,sex, drugs, violence, war, politics, business… all of that is here in all of itsrotting glory, but there are also people desperately looking for something tobelieve in, something to live by and for, even if they have to invent it forthemselves. I’ve seen Hurley’s work called “feminist science fiction,” “bugnoir,” even “bug punk.” Whatever. I call it fast-paced, well written,meticulously detailed, character-driven, bad-ass writing, and I think you willtoo.

Buy her stuff. You’ll like it.

The "First Triumvirate," in Review

2011-11-20T10:47:00.001-08:00

The last decades of the Roman Republic were dominated by theambitions and machinations of three figures: Cn. Pompieus Strabo Magnus(Pompey), M. Licinius Crassus, and C. Julius Caesar. Any examination of theperiod from 70 to 44 BC inevitably hinges on one, two, or all three of thesemen at any given time, and therefore their biographies become essential to thestudent of the period. In their attempts to reveal and evaluate the lives ofthese figures, Robin Seager’s Pompey the Great: A Political Biography, Allen M. Ward’s Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic, and Richard A. Billows’ Julius Caesar: The Colossus of Rome, present thereader with both the best and worst of the art of historical biography.

Cn. Pompeius Strabo Magnus

RobinSeager makes no bones about his intent with his Pompey the Great: A PoliticalBiography, stating in his preface that “the subtitle of the present work isintended to warn the reader to expect no treatment of the detail of Pompeius’wars and no estimate of him as a commander,” and indeed, the following sixteenchapters give only the briefest treatment of Pompey’s military career. Seagerbegins with a brief introduction giving an overview of Roman political historyfrom 133 – 79 BC, and begins his biography proper with the career and death ofPompey’s father, Cn. Pompeius Strabo senior. He then proceeds chronologicallythrough Pompey’s life, paralleling political events in Rome with Pompey’soverseas dispositions, paying particular attention in both cases to Pompey’stime in the East from 66 – 62 BC. Seager presents a portrait of Pompey as a manof overweening ambition and political acumen, whose desire for public recognitionfrom the Senate as the traditional ruling body of the Republic was both inopposition to his life-long willingness to stretch the unwritten Romanconstitution and traditions, the mosmaiorum, to the breaking point, and yet also functioned as a restraint onthat same ambition. As Seager concludes, “[Pompey’s] eagerness for honors to begranted him willingly had compelled him to acknowledge the right of the senateand people to deny him if they chose. He had wanted to be the dominant figurein the senate, but in a senate that was still the ruler of Rome… Pompeius thendid not want to destroy the republic.” Seager places the blame for thatsquarely on Caesar’s shoulders, but does not neglect to point out that Pompey’sown actions did little or nothing to preserve the system he so desperatelysought command of and approval from.

M. Licinius Crassus

Allen M.Ward presents the reader with another political biography with his Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic.Here again, Crassus’ military career is only briefly described, and his final,fatal campaign against the Parthians almost not at all. Ward too devotes hisfirst chapter to setting the historical scene, and uses chapter appendices tothis and chapters VIII and IX to provide the reader with detailed prosopographicaldata which serves to illuminate his research process and the conclusionsreached in the chapters themselves. These appendices strike a nice balancebetween relying on overly long footnotes and the traditional consignment of theappendices to the back of the book, and serve well in providing the reader withfurther information without bogging down the primary narrative, which proceedsin chronological order from the scarce sources surrounding Crassus’ birthca.115 BC to his defeat and death at Carrhae in 53 BC. Ward is particularly painstakingin his analysis of the known political and legislative events in Rome with aneye to discovering the probable prime movers behind various proposed laws,prosecutions, defenses, speeches, and other public performances in Rome duringCrassus’ career. Ward presents Crassus as something of a moderate optimate; an inherently conservativepolitician who was nonetheless generally amenable to compromise when possible,and who “often tended towards the viamedia,” the middle road.

C. Julius Caesar Dictator

Richard A.Billows’ Julius Caesar: the Colossus ofRome, is part of Routledge’s RomanImperial Biographies series, and proves to be a readable and conciseaddition to the many biographies of Caesar. Billows begins with a prologue thatalso serves as a bibliographic essay with an emphasis on works which challengethe traditional interpretations, and which Billows, while not necessarily inagreement with them, credits as valuable lenses for providing freshperspectives on his subject. Billows also provides historical background andcontext in his first chapter, devoting fully a fifth of his text to the historyof Rome and Italy in the second century BC, before proceeding chronologicallythrough Caesar’s life, with the exception of chapter VIII: “Caesar’s Place in RomanLiterature and Culture,” a thematic interlude placed between the flightnorthward of the tribunes M. Antonius and Q. Cassius in late 50, and thecrossing of the Rubicon in early 49. Billows’ Caesar is a popularis through and through, becoming the central figure in amovement that Billows sees as springing from, and directly connected with the Marianand Cinnan movement of the 80s BC. He also fixes Caesar as the lynchpin in whatRonald Syme has termed the “Roman Revolution,” and his associates and followersas the power behind it both during Caesar’s life, and beyond.

Takentogether, these three biographies provide an uneven look at the three men whocomprised what historians refer to as the First Triumvirate. Ward is workingfrom the fewest sources, and thus is necessarily the most reliant onprosopographic and legislative analysis. Though he is careful to acknowledgethe problems inherent in this approach, his analyses are impressive, and moreoften than not, convincing. He also provides a valuable counterpoint to thetraditional portrayal of Crassus as a paragon of ruthless greed, pointing out thatboth Pompey and Caesar became far wealthier than Crassus, yet were notcondemned for their wealth due to the way in which they acquired it: byconquest. Crassus, who made his money through business deals and speculationwhich were considered beneath the Roman nobility, “became the subject of ahostile literary tradition that was set by his political enemies, who scornedthe methods Crassus adopted…” Nonetheless, due to the paucity of sourcematerial, and the fact that Crassus seems to have often preferred to workbehind the scenes rather than openly on the public stage, makes Ward’s efforts,even at their best, more speculative than not.

Seager confrontssimilar problems, and handles them poorly. His political and legislativeanalysis often seems to be naïve, as when he states that the assignment of theforests and cow-paths of Italy as the provinces of the consuls of 59 was not amove by the optimates in the senateto curtail Caesar’s growing power and ambition by denying him the prospect of aforeign war. According to Seager, “at the time when the allocation [ofprovinces] was made… Caesar had not yet been elected, and even if the optimateshad already felt certain that he was bound to take one place, they would nothave wanted to rob their own candidate Bibulus of a proper command.” To suggestthat the optimates, no strangers tothe realities of Roman politics, could not foresee that Caesar, who had wonelection to every magistracy on the cursushonorum up to the praetorship in the first year he was eligible, and whosestatus, wealth, and political power had only increased during his propraetoriancommand in Spain, was almost certain to secure the consulship, is bordering onthe absurd.

Seager’sgreatest fault, and one shared with Ward, is his choice to largely omit anyexamination of Pompey’s military career. The distinction between civil andmilitary power in ancient Rome was nonexistent, and each affected the otherprofoundly. In the case of Pompey, his entire political career was predicatedon his military activities, and largely consisted in repeated attempts tosecure special commands, and with them, praise and power in Rome. It is notgoing too far to say that without his military achievements and ambitions,Pompey would have had no political career, or if he had it would have been afar different, likely much less pivotal one. In a very real way Seager givesthe reader half a man, and half the story.

Ward toofails to detail Crassus’s military career, though he does slightly better thanSeager with his discussions of Crassus’ service during Sulla’s civil war,though Crassus’ role in the victory of the Battle of the Colline Gate in 82 BCdoes not receive nearly the attention which it deserves, nor does hissuccessful campaign against Spartacus in 72/1. Most unfortunately, however,Ward chooses not to detail Crassus campaign leading up to Carrhae at all, thusomitting the vital ending to Crassus’ tale. Again the choice to focus on thepolitical at the complete expense of the military, particularly when examiningRoman statesmen, proves to be a grave error.

Billows,does not fall into this trap, and combines astute political analysis—thoughnot, perhaps, at the level offered by Ward—with a thorough understanding of theimportance of Caesar’s military career to the man and his life as a whole.Billows does an excellent job of covering Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, and theCivil War against Pompey while also tying these campaigns into the largerpicture of Caesar as statesman. Indeed, over all, Billows’ work is of highquality, and made even more impressive for being so complete within the spaceof some 263 pages. The one place where he stumbles is in the thematic chapterVIII, mentioned above. Though it provides valuable information, it is oddlyplaced within the narrative, and disrupts the heretofore chronologicalstructure of the historical narrative to no truly good end. This chapter mighthave been of better service as an appendix, or even woven into the primarynarrative as part of Caesar’s life in the 60s BC. Another glaring weak pointlies in Billows claim that the young Octavian was to have served as Caesar’sMaster of the Horse during the Parthian campaign planned for 44/3, a claim forwhich Billows presents no source or argument, and which the present reviewer’sresearch turned up no evidence. These oddities aside, Billows provides the bestof the three biographies reviewed here, and certainly one of the best resourcesfor a student of the period, combining his bibliographic prologue with astandard bibliographic list at the end of the text.

Though eachof the biographies reviewed here has its strengths, neither separately nortogether do they provide a complete picture of the First Triumvirs, or of theirtime. At best they provide a starting point for further research, and a generaloverview of the period from which to begin such research. There is still muchto learn, and one hopes many more biographies on all three of these men tocome.

Filmic Adventures

2011-11-16T11:08:00.001-08:00

So during the recent way-too-many-plates-spinning-at-oncehiatus from Solomon Mao’s, I did manage to watch a few flicks, so I thought I’dtake a moment here and spout off some reviews.

Bridesmaids: F

Sometime in September, Mock’ and I lost count of just exactlyhow many people had raved about this movie to us, so one night at Family Videowe broke down and rented it. Rest assured that if you are one of the people whorecommended this move to me, you will pay. So women can do gross-out comedy aswell as men. Okay. What else you got? Look! Women in groups are bitchy, fake,manipulative, insecure, and jealous of and among each other! Isn’t that funny?Nope. Not really. What else? Oh, I see, this film is a TWO-trick pony, and bothof them are bad. Look, people, this isn’t character-driven humor, it’scharacters written around a style of humor, and badly. I think Mock laughedthree times in the first forty-five minutes, and I admit to laughing once, butthe laughs weren’t all that hearty, and once we’d seen all two of the moviestricks—repeatedly—we turned the thing off and went on to better, and funnierthings, like clipping our toenails. I can count on one hand the number of filmsthat were so bad that I just couldn’t finish watching them, and Bridesmaids is one of them.

Hanna: D

Oh look, its TheBourne Identity meets Run Lola Run,only with better actors than the former and much less interesting than thelatter! Not to mention plot holes large enough to steer a Maersk container-shipthrough. For instance, why, exactly, is it necessary to activate a radio-homingbeacon and thereby let the evil CIA-Bitch (played by the usually amazing CateBlanchett, who really disappoints here) know where young Hanna is when Hannaand her “father” have managed to disappear so successfully for at leastthirteen or fourteen years? Seriously, if they can’t find your cabin inBF-Finland, they probably won’t be able to catch up to you in, say, London,either. Also, what’s with the awesomely ineffectual Euro-trash, metrosexualassassin whose habit of constantly whistling loudly would seem to provide anytarget plenty of warning that he’s in the neighborhood. Rather than creepy,that little tick turned out to be clownish. I’m not sure I get the press aboutHanna being such a strong female character, either. The entire film revolvesaround Hanna doing just exactly what her father has trained her to do and thebad guys expect her to do. Hanna is more puppet than empowered female.

Inception: C

The theory here seems to be that if the action and pacingare kept fast, are combined with some truly stunning visual effects, and aidedand abetted by the skills of Leonardo DiCaprio and Ken Watanabe, the audiencewill fail to realize exactly how little sense the premise upon which the entirefilm hangs makes. In truth I’m a big fan of both DiCaprio and Watanabe, butneither actor is anywhere near the top of his game in this film. I’m going tostep aside here and let Trey Parker and Matt Stone finish this review with aclip from South Park’s “Insheeption” which pretty much sums this movie up:

Insheeption
Get More: SOUTH
PARK Stan Marsh,Mr. Mackey,more...

The Bad Sleep Well: A

Ah! Thank God for Akira Kurosawa! (NOT the first time I've said that.) This very dark piece from 1960is a tale of greed, revenge, and murder. Koichi Nishi (played by the incredibleToshiro Mifune), enacts an elaborate ruse in order to take revenge against the corruptpost-war Japanese corporate system. The film is a surprisingly brutalindictment of a corporate culture in which loyalty to the company is theultimate measure of a man’s worth, more important than friendship, family,love, or any traditional moral code. Decades before No Country For Old Men, Kurosawa crafts an evil which is equallydisturbing, and perhaps even more horrifying than the Coen brothers’ Chigurhfor being so ruthlessly mundane. Warning: there’s no happy ending here, justbrilliant, scathing filmmaking.

Puss in Boots (2D): A

To wrap up with the most recent film here, it’s a delight tohave enjoyed this animated adventure as much as I did. Puss (voiced by ascenery-chewing Antonio Banderas), turns out to be from a place that resemblesExtremadura more than a little, and has all of the legendary traits of theregion. He is dashing, daring, proud, foolish, undefeatable, and absolutelysure of himself. He is also unapologetically male in the Don Juan mode. Pussmeets his match, however, in the dangerously lovely Kitty Softpaws (SalmaHayek), as he becomes involved in the twisted and nefarious schemes of HumptyDumpty (Zach Galifianakis). The film has some lovely bits, particularly aflashback sequence in which Dumpty is revealed to have been in the backgroundof every major plot point of the story, the rotundly ovoid puppet-masterleading Puss to disgrace and dishonor. The cast obviously had tremendous funwith the film and it shows in every frame. The story was very well done, and I don’tfeel as if I missed anything by eschewing a pair of clunky plastic spectacles.3D had nothing to add except the usual “oh look, it’s kinda like it’s comingnear me, sorta,” and I’ll pass on paying three extra bucks for that!

So, anyone else been watching movies lately?

What's On My TV, Part II

2011-11-07T15:46:00.000-08:00

Deadwood: A+.

David Milch’s masterful HBO series is one that I’ve beenwanting to revisit for some time now, and lately I’ve been relaxing a couple oftimes a week with Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), Seth Bullock (Timothy Oliphant),and the rest of the magnificent cast of this one of a kind show. Milch comes atthe 1870s American western frontier and boomtown from seemingly every directionat once, and with meticulous attention to every grime-encrusted detail of amining-camp staggering its way towards becoming a town along streets paved inmud and excrement, both animal and human. The language is foul, yet rises toincredibly delightful heights of poetry echoing, and I believe firmly slidinginto, iambic pentameter. Milch brings the dirt, violence, cursing, and fuckingof humanity on the edge of the world vividly to life in this genre-defyingpiece of art. There’s never been anything like Deadwood, before or since, but there is hope, as Milch returns toHBO this December with Luck.

Alphas: B-.

The strangely re-named SyFy network, lately more famous forits C-grade TV movies than shows, came up with in interesting twist on an oldtrope that has a hell of a lot of promise. Basically, there are certain peoplewho are born with extraordinary abilities, like super-strength, far beyond theusual human norm. However, such genetic gifts are seemingly always accompaniedby some sort of disability. The super-strength results in metabolic overload guaranteedto eventually bring on a massive heart attack, for instance. Or the ability tounderstand any language, or create new ones, and write unbreakable code beingaccompanied by severe apraxia. As Dr. Lee Rosen, David Strathairn leads a solidcast including the breakout Ryan Cartwright as Gary Bell, an autistic who canpull all types of electronic signals out of the air without any technologicalaid, and whose on-screen chemistry with Bill Harken (Malik Yoba), theafore-mentioned super-strong guy with a dodgy heart, is simply brilliant.Unfortunately, the show’s primary romantic entanglement between Nina Theroux(Laura Mennell) and Cameron Hicks (Warren Christie) tends to bring the show toa screeching halt with their wooden dialogue and clunky attempts at acomplicated relationship. Which is a shame, as both are fine actors, asChristie proved to my satisfaction in his recent big-screen role in Apollo 18. In addition, at the end ofthe series’ first season, the most interesting of the “bad guys”, the genius apraxiclinguist Anna (Liane Balaban), was killed off in favor of a far moreconventional (and boring!) Big Bad in the form of the urbane immortal StantonParrish (John Pyper-Ferguson). Alphas has been renewed for a secondseason next Summer, though, and the show still holds a great deal of promise,so we’ll see.

Grimm: + (only two episodes have aired at time of writing but itlooks good!)

The big surprise for me this season has definitely been NBC’sGrimm, from Joss Whedon alums DavidGreenwalt (Buffy the Vampire Slayer,Angel) and Jim Kouf (Angel). Theseries is a generic hybrid, mixing urban fantasy/fairy-tales with police drama.Nick Burckhardt (David Giuntoli) is a homicide detective with an uncannydeductive ability. Turns out he’s also a direct descendent of the brothersGrimm, of fairy-tale fame. Only the tales weren’t really fiction, and we are definitelydealing with the original, not-for-kids Grimm’s Tales. The Grimms have beendefending humanity from the various critters that hide among them for centuriesnow, the gift of being able to see the monsters among us passing from onedescendent to another as the previous Grimm dies. (Slayer-syndrome, anyone?)The summary sounds like something that could be really bad, but the show pullsit off, largely through meticulous attention to the details of the fairy-tales,including some brilliant Easter-eggs for the viewer, as when the co-ed joggerin the first episode dons her red sorority hoodie to go into the woods and down“Talon Trail,” where she is dismembered and partially eaten by a wolf-ting witha penchant for the color red. Red Riding-hood has left the path again. The actingis good, and I think I can already call the breakaway talent as Silas WeirMitchell, who plays the wise-cracking, pilates-fanatic, coffee-gourmandizingside-kick to Giuntoli’s befuddled detective, a side-kick who, by the way, isalso a blutbad, better known to uskids as a Big Bad Wolf. Mitchell’s comic timing and rapid dialogue are bothequally brilliant, and he provides a much needed stream of exasperated, why-can’t-you-just-leave-me-alone-alreadyhumor to what could otherwise be a very, very dark show. Honestly, the onlyreason I haven’t given Grimm an “A”is that I’ve only seen two episodes, so who knows where the show will actuallygo. Looking good so far though!

Well, that hits the high-spots, readers mine, or at leastmost of them. How about you? What’re you watching these days?

What's On My TV, Part I

2011-11-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

Technologically speaking I live in a bit of a mixedenvironment. In my garret student-apartment where I live during the week, Idon’t have cable, but I do have a really nice LCD TV with a built in DVD-playerand HDMI jack, so between my computer and Netflix, I manage to watch as much TVas I like during a week. The great advantage to this system is that it allowsme to watch only shows which I choose, which leads to a pretty solid stream ofQuality TV. Since this is an area I am coming more and more to focus on in mywriting, I thought I’d start a semi-regular column here and let you know what’sgoing on in my own personal TV-land. Of course, you’ll see some currentlyairing shows here as well, because at home Mock’ and I most certainly do havecable, and a DVR, and all the modern TV conveniences. So, Readers Mine, here’swhat’s on my TV.

Breaking Bad: So Good It Doesn’t Fit on the Scale, A+^∞.

Seriously, if you haven’t been watching Breaking Bad, which just finished up its fourth season, get yourass to Amazon or iTunes or wherever and buy all four. This is, beyond a shadowof a doubt, the best show on TV and for my money may well rank as the currentpinnacle of Quality Television as a whole. In brief, the show follows WalterWhite (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) into the world of massproduction and distribution of crystal methamphetamine, which Walt and a geniuschemist, knows how to make better than anyone. The show brilliantly places theviewer in the most morally ambiguous of relationships with the main characters, who you like, but know damnwell are going places from which they can never, should never be allowed to,return. Alongside a humor so black it often reminds you of the gulf betweenstars, show creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan and his crew pay exquisiteattention to detail, and there are no true minor characters, every one beingfleshed out as a unique individual, from the criminal lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) to the meth-whore Wendy(Julia Minesci), to Goodman’s secretary Francesca (Tina Parker), Gilligan &Co. take the time to make them all real. Watch this show, and watch out formore about it right here.

Justified: A-.

A show recommended to me over a year ago by the great MaryAlice Money, which I finally got around to watching this fall. I’ve been aTimothy Olyphant fan since Deadwoodso I was happy to see him getting regular work, and tuned in expecting a prettystandard police procedural. Happily, I was completely wrong. Oh, there areelements of that, but Justified goesmuch farther. Olyphant plays Deputy U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, something ofan anachronism with a Stetson and a Glock whose sense of justice winds upgetting him exiled from the Marshalls office in Miami, to Lexington, Kentuckywhich is too close to the infamous coal fields of Harlan County, where Raylangrew up, and where his father, a ne’er-do-well lifelong criminal, still lives.The series is based on the character of Givens as created by Elmore Leonard,and sucked me in immediately. As with BreakingBad local color is a huge part of this show, but instead of the hard, aridspaces of New Mexico, Justified takesthe viewer into the almost claustrophobic lushness and humidity of Southernforests and small towns, and lives that are consumed in the black hells of thecoal mines. The reality of Eastern Kentucky is a hard land with hard people,and Justified brings them eloquentlyto the small screen. Again, character realization here is exquisite,particularly in the case of recurring sort-of villain Boyd Crowder (WaltonGoggins). My one complaint is that the series doesn’t do so well by its womencharacters, although I have only seen the first season, so things may wellimprove. Indeed there are strong hints that they will in the burgeoning charactersof Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter) and Helen Givens (Linda Gehringer). Atremendously well-acted show with a solid blend of humor throughout. Anotherthat’s at the top of my list.

Babylon 5: A.

The oldest show I’m currently rewatching, and still one ofthe very best. Babylon 5 is J.Michael Straczynski’s epic, ground-breaking, Hugo award-winning science fictionseries detailing five tumultuous years in the lives of a group of humans andaliens who live in “one million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal…all alone in the night.” Straczynski plotted out the show as a five season arcbefore the first episode was ever written. This intricate plotting and extendedarcs earned the series the reputation of a “novel for television,” and the fiveseasons can be read as the five basic parts of a novel: exposition, risingaction, climax, falling action, and dénouement. This was something new intelevision, and although long story arcs are now part and parcel of the smallscreen experience, Straczynski started it all. Not to mention usinggroundbreaking CGI on a weekly basis, and attracting some of the best andbrightest in SF to script individual episodes (including D.C. Fontana, HarlanEllison, Neil Gaiman, and David Gerrold). Again, it's an exquisitely acted show with an incredible ensemble cast including Bruce Boxleitner (John Sheridan) Mira Furlan (Deleen), the late, great Andreas Katsulas (G'kar) and the unforgettable Peter Jurasik (Londo Mollari).

More than all of that, however,Babylon 5 was the first time Irealized how powerful, how wonderful, TV could be. Back in the early 1990s,when the show first aired, I didn’t have cable, and the local station thatbroadcast B5 did so at 2 am on Sundaymorning, so every Saturday, without fail, I stayed up to watch it. It was thefirst time a TV show ever made me tense up in my chair, made me laugh out loud,tear up, and spring from my seat with a “Holy Shit! Did you see that?!??!” Babylon 5 is where Quality TV begins forme, and now after several years, I’ve finally convinced Mock’ to watch it withme. So far, it holds up beautifully, and watching it with her, seeing her seeit for the first time, is absolutely incredible. The entire series is availablein whatever format you prefer. Watch it. You’ll never regret it.

Well, this turned out to be longer than I was thinking itwould be, so I’m going to dub it “Part I,” and break up my TV post intoseveral. Tune in soon, Readers Mine, and in the meantime, happy TV watching!

Catching Up A Bit

2011-10-29T18:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, it’s been more than a while since I’ve posted here andI’m sorry for that, but to be fair I did warn you that this semester the blogmight get few and far between. Fear not, though, I’m still kicking!

In NOLA, plotting a bit of the ol' ultraviolence.

To briefly catch up, the PCAS conference in New Orleans wasan absolute blast, and Mock’ and I managed to eat our way through the French Quarterwith some fantastically smart, fun, and funny friends whom we see far toorarely. Our presentations went off well, and we enjoyed a nice long weekendtogether away from all of the usual routines. I’m not sure what it says aboutus that having someone come into the room and make the bed while we’re gone, andreplace all of the towels we’ve thrown into the bathroom floor with freshlylaundered ones feels like luxury bordering on decadence, but it does, and weenjoyed every minute of it. For more details, head on over to Mockingbird’sprofessional blog, Unfettered Brilliance, for her NOLA wrap-up as well as alook at the ongoing Great Buffy Rewatch and her Intro to Film class.

In school news, classes are going very well, and I’m pleasedto announce that the GRE is done with and my scores look to be pretty good, alltold. Now to start cranking out the applications! I’ve also been expanding my “newmedia presence,” which translates into setting up a Twitter account. You canfollow me there as @EnsleyFGuffey, should you be inclined to internet-stalk me.The Farscape paper has beensubmitted, approved, and is in my pile of stuff to do awaiting some tweaking,and so you can look for my chapter, “Warand Peace by Woody Allen Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love theWormhole Weapon” in Tormented Space,Uncharted Territories, and Wormhole Weapons: Critical Explorations of the Farscape Universe, edited by Sherry Ginn from McFarland and Co. inearly 2013. Pretty groovy, huh?

There are some other plates spinning and some I’m in theprocess of trying to get spinning, but that covers all the highlights for now.Now that my schedule seems to have produced a relatively clear space for a bit,I’ll try to make up for some lost time here, Readers Mine, with a few posts inthe coming week, starting out with some reviews of what I’ve been reading andwatching recently. The reading has been pretty good, the watching (at leastwhen it comes to movies) not so much. Until then, be well.

What I Would Do at Geek Girl Con, Part I

2011-09-22T09:39:00.000-07:00

While I’m in New Orleans in October, Seattlewill be playing host to the first Geek Girl Con on October 8 and 9, an eventdescribed by the GGC’s press kit as “dedicated to promoting awareness of andcelebrating the contribution and involvement of women in all aspects of thesciences, science fiction, comics, gaming and related Geek culture through conventionsand events that emphasize both the historic and ongoing contribution andinfluence of women in thisculture.” Good enough!

Honestly, this is a Con I’d love to go to, and a great oneto get in on the ground floor of, because I have a feeling it’s going to gohuge, fast. Unfortunately the scheduling conflict with the Popular Culture in the South Conference (you didn’t think I’d be completely self-promotion free here did you?), as well as alamentably tight travel budget, means that I will have to miss Geek Girl Con.However, this does nothing to stop me from idly fantasizing about going, andwhat I might do while there.

So, if I were able to attend Geek Girl Con:

I would seek out Chase Masterson and ask her to autographthe largest boxed ear-wax removal system I could find (fellow ST:DS9 fans will understand).

After a Friday night in the hotel room spent with a highlighterand the GGC Programming Guide, I’d get up Saturday morning and start hittingpanels:

10:00 – 11:00: StarTrek & Beyond with Chase Masterson. The actor who launched hercareer as Leeta on Star Trek: Deep SpaceNine and who now continues to act, sing, and produce speaks on fan-activismamong genre fans.

11:00 – 12:30: The Heroine: Journey, Culture and Narrative.Haviva Avirom (mod.), Sara Freeman, Catherine Bailey, and Erin Lovejoy-Gurondiscuss the heroine’s journey in popular culture from Claudette Colbert toWonder Woman to RPGs. I think I’d come prepared to ask about their takes onHaley Atwell’s character Peggy Carter in CaptainAmerica: the First Avenger.

12:30 – 1:00: Somekind of junk food lunch.

1:00 – 2:00: Trina Robbins on Tarpé Mills and Miss Fury.I don’t know Tarpé Mills but the programming guide makes me want to: “TrinaRobbins, ground-breaking herstorian and comic author, introduces you to one ofthe greatest female creators you never knew existed. Author Tarpé Mills’created Marla Drake, aka Miss Fury, has been described as the “grandmother thatBuffy Summers and Sydney Bristow didn’t know they had.” Time for a historylesson!” I will even be willing to overlook the twinge that “herstorian” givesme. For now.

2:00-2:30:Shopping for cool stuff, particularly books!

2:30-4:00: History of the Universe as Told by WonderWoman. Kristy Guevara-Flanagan (mod.), Gail Simone, Trina Robbins, JenniferK. Stuller, Mike Madrid. Footage from Guevara-Flanagan’s documentary History of the Universe as Told by WonderWoman will be shown, and the panelists will discuss our obsession with superheroes,and the evolution of female empowerment in the culture. Note historians TrinaRobbins and Jen Stuller. Jen is one of the most delightful, brilliant people it’sever been my pleasure to know, and both women are applying the historian’s artto fields too long neglected by traditional historiography. Definitely aprofessional interest in this one for me, but also (hopefully) a chance tocatch up with someone I haven’t seen face-to-face in too long.

4:00 – 5:00: Character Studies: Geek Girls in PopularCulture. Jennifer K. Stuller (mod. [okay, obviously we’ll have to catch uplater, Jen!]), Amy Berg, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Sara Kuhn, Jessica Mills, andStephanie Thorpe take a look at geek girls in film, TV, comics, etc. They’llalso discuss the status of geek girls in our culture. Good stuff.

5:00 – 5:30:Snack? Sit dazed for half an hour? Cat-nap?

5:30 – 6:30: Whedonistas. Naturally. Teresa Jusino(mod.), Jane Espenson, Nancy Holder, Mariah Huener discuss Joss Whedon’s workand the impact his shows have had on them, on the culture, and on Whdeon’sfans, who have become some of the world’s most active, particularly for women’srights.

6:30 – 7:00:Dinner. See Lunch above.

7:00 – 8:30: Viscera Film Fest. I’ll let GGC’sprogram guide have this one: “Heidi Honeycutt hosts a mini-Viscera Film Fest.They will screen selected horror short films created, written, directed,produced, acted, goredup, and designed by women. You’ve never seen horror likethis before. Operating since 2007, Viscera is committed to expandingopportunities for female horror creators.” How frakkin’ cool does this sound? Iknow, right!

9:00 – 11:00: Whedonesque Burlesque. “Man, if yougotta ask, you’ll never know.”

Then, I’d stagger back to the hotel, collapse into bed, andrest up for Sunday’s events… Which will constitute Part II of this little exercisein imagination. Until then, Reader’s Mine, maybe some of you might need to booka flight or two to Seattle, eh? Failing that, you can show your support forGeek Girl Con, by donating here.

Goings On

2011-09-20T15:37:00.000-07:00

Well, there’s a Latin exam tomorrow, but I’ve spent fourdays studying for it, and believe I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns,which, with other homework being done, leads me here. It’s been a busy couple of weeks since my last post, Readers Mine. Schoolis rolling along, and there is an ever growing stack of books threatening tooverflow my shelves on everything from Samuel Colt to the Late Roman Republicto the Alhambra and Moorish Grenada to the cuneiform tablets of Sargon II. Thereis much reading still to be done, followed by much writing. Also test taking.

Samuel Colt

First up (aside from the aforementioned Latin exam) is thePopular Culture/American Culture in the South Conference, which is being heldin New Orleans in October. I’m presenting a paper which uses the character ofSam Colt in Supernatural as aspringboard to examine the historical Samuel Colt and his place and part inAmerican popular culture. I hope to have that written by the end of thisweekend. Good thing too, as the conference falls right before UNCG’s fallbreak, meaning that all of my midterm exams, papers, etc need to be finishedand turned in before I head south, so I’ll probably need all of next week togear up for that. The up-side, of course, is that I can enjoy the conferenceand the city with a pure heart unburdened by looming assignments.

Ed, Spike, Faye, and Jett

And one hell of a conference it promises to be! Along withthe usual PCA/ACA crowd, the first LOST mini-conference will be held, featuring the one and only Nikki Stafford askeynote speaker. I’m looking forward to the whole shebang, not merely for theusual crop of great papers, but for the all too rare opportunity to catch upwith friends from hither and yon face-to-face rather than by Facebook ore-mail. Mockingbird and I are both going, as usual, and she will be unveilingthe first part of a look at the influences of Cowboy Bebop on Joss Whedon’s Firefly.Part II she’s saving for Slayage 5 inVancouver next summer.

Gigi Edgley as Chiana

After the conference I’ll have two and a half weeks before takingthe GRE, by which point the application process needs to already be rollingalong. I am seriously hoping that I manage to get accepted into a school whereI can go straight through to a doctorate, as applying for school is one of themore tediously stressful things in life. Almost as much so as applying forjobs. Along with graduate school applications, there will still be regularundergraduate work to be done, and also, sometime before the end of the year, Ishould be seeing my Farscape chaptercome back to me with notes for revision. It’ll also be time to start theresearch for my own paper to be presented at Slayage 5, which reminds me, the deadline for proposals there is 1December!

Like I said, busy semester.

In other news, the GOTP (Grand Ol’ Tea Party) is gleefullyfucking up my home state of North Carolina through a series of legislativeactions which have gutted the education budget, set women’s rights back by a few decades, and now they seem to think that putting civil rights up for a popular vote is sensible (which it is, assuming your goal is to deny a minoritygroup its civil rights). My hope is that the conservative movement hasoverreached at last, and that the fine people of North Carolina will stand up,throw the bums out, and tell the next bunch of “representatives” that we’relooking for frakin’ jobs, not lawsthat make things harder on all of us. Jackasses.

Finally (for now), it seems I'm precognitive. If you are not watching Breaking Bad, you are missing a masterpiece of storytelling, and film. Don’t let the fact that its television fool you, this is something special. It’s on AMC. Watch it, bitch!

Apollo 18: "A-"

2011-09-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

Russian poster for Apollo 18,
where it apparently was first released!

To celebrate a long weekend together, Mockingbird and Idecided to take in a movie (among other things), and since we were looking formore of a popcorn flick than art film, we decided to check out Apollo 18. The film’s premise is prettystraightforward: after Apollo 17, the last official moon mission, NASA and the Departmentof Defense sent another Apollo mission to the moon, this time in secret.Ostensibly there to set up a series of early-warning devices to detect a Sovietnuclear ballistic missile launch against the US, the intrepid three-man crewdiscovers… something else.

I have to say that we were pleasantly surprised by the film.The back-story is that the audience is watching an edited version of someeighty-five hours of video files recently uploaded to www.lunartruth.com (which, in a furthertouch, has apparently been “blocked,” making it unavailable), exposing themission, so all of the film is ostensibly from the cameras aboard the Apollomodule and lunar lander, as well as a battery of hand-held andspacesuit-mounted 16mm cameras, and some tripod-mounted automatic cameras whichthe astronauts set up here and there. This leads to one of the more brilliantaspects of the film, as it has been meticulously made to appear as if it wasactually shot using this equipment, and the film “stock” has been appropriatelyaged to give it an early 1970s unrestored archival look. The viewable area ofthe theater screen is even cropped to a square area with rounded corners tofurther the effect of watching old 16mm film. The technical work done here isastounding, as is the films attention to detail in recreating the livingconditions of the Apollo astronauts in what were truly tiny metal shells fullyequipped with such delicacies as “ham paste.”

In a nice change from frantic SF pacing, the movie buildsslowly and evenly, ratcheting up the tension through several seeming climaxeswhich serve only to wind things a bit tighter still. It is as much apsychological thriller as it is an alien menace piece, and director GonzaloLopez-Gallego does a brilliant job of using the strange mix of claustrophobicspacecraft and utterly inhospitable lunar space to work on both the astronautsand the audience. I was also pleased to see lead actor Warren Christie, who canalso be seen weekly on SyFy’s Alphas,get some big-screen time, and prove that he has the chops to be there. Christiebrilliantly portrays the deep confusion and mistrust of a young career militaryofficer who has been badly shaken by the Watergate scandal, reminding theaudience that the film is set in a time when the now habitual mistrust of theAmerican government on the part of its citizens was only just beginning to takeroot, and betrayal by that government was as unexpected as it was bitter.

I give Apollo 18 an“A-” over-all, however, because there were unfortunately times when the close-upsof frantic astronauts had me thinking “Look, it’s Blair Witch in Space!” but that has more to do with brief visualsthan writing, directing, acting, or overall cinematography. Also, there remains the somewhat glaring plot-hole of just exactly how the footage from the hand-held and suit cameras made it back to Earth! Overall though, Apollo 18 is a thoughtful thriller thatrelies on acting and artistry to achieve its chills, and takes the time tobuild a real story rather than endless shrapnel-filled explosions andplucky-humans-against-evil-aliens clichés. Go see it.

Ave Minerva!

2011-08-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s the end of August again, which means back to school for yours truly. I begin what is hopefully my last year of undergraduate study early tomorrow morning, and in most respects it’s stacking up to be a good semester. I’m only on campus Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which leaves Tuesdays and Thursdays as workdays, which has proven to be a very effective arrangement in the past. It’s amazing what you can get done when you don’t have to go anywhere, see anyone, and have a coffee pot in your room. I’ll be living with the in-laws again and driving about forty minutes each way to good ol’ UNC-Greensboro, where Athena continues to watch over me.

As usual I’ll start out my day with Latin, and this semester I’ll follow the noble language with Spanish history, ancient Near Eastern history, and an independent study on the rise of Augustus and the establishment of the Principate in ancient Rome. Heavy on the history, but that is the major, after all. Plus, thanks to some long semesters earlier and summer classes, I only have to take twelve hours each of these last two semesters, so the work load should be doable.

That’s the school workload, of course. Beyond school, I’m lucky and excited to be involved in several writing projects. First, I’m working on finishing up a chapter for a forthcoming edited collection on the US/AU/UK science fiction series Farscape where I’m examining the show’s story through the lens of military-political history. Next comes a paper on Samuel Colt in fact and fiction to be presented at the Popular Culture/American Culture—South conference in New Orleans in October, and then beginning/stepping up the research process for Slayage 5 in Vancouver next July, where I hope to present the first in a series of papers on “War in the Whedonverses.” Finally (for now) I’m proud, flabbergasted, and downright giddy at being asked to serve as an assistant editor to David Lavery for a forthcoming project on the life and works of Owen Barfield.

Beyond all of that there’s studying for and taking the GRE. Getting together writing samples, letters of recommendation, applications, transcripts, etc to send off to prospective graduate schools, and dealing with a “commuter marriage” after a wonderful, too short summer season in which Mockingbird got me used to all of the myriad pleasures that come with sharing the same nest all the time (including co-authoring a post for Nik at Nite's Buffy Rewatch which goes up Tuesday!). One does what one has to do, of course, and all of this driving and separation is leading to a goal which will allow us to keep said nest well-feathered, but I do miss her, Readers Mine.

All of which is to say that, if you think posts here have been few and far between this summer, you may very well have not seen anything yet. I’ll try to pop in regularly, but I guarantee there will be times when other elements of life will be taking priority. In the meantime, though, be well and remember, as Jeff Bridges’ mom said “Have fun, and don’t take it too seriously.”

Marilyn, Suddenly

2011-08-13T08:01:00.000-07:00

My Mockingbird had to have routine surgery Thursday (all went splendidly, and she is already healing rapidly and well), so the night before we went out for a feast to prepare her to fast from midnight until after the surgery. After we’d ordered, I excused myself in order to head to the bathroom to pee and wash up. So, I go in, turn into the first stall, unzip, and then Readers Mine, penis in hand, I look up at the wall above the toilet and see:

Marilyn Monroe by Milton H. Greene

Marilyn.

Barefoot. Sitting low, almost kneeling. Bare shoulders. Heavy breasts only barely covered by a spill of white that becomes translucent as it covers her long legs. One hand rising from her lap to auto-erotically caress her collarbone as her eyes look up at mine and her lips part. In a wonderfully sudden and enormously powerful moment of eroticism, a bolt of electric passion surged from the oldest parts of my brain to the organ I held in my hand.

I’ve never been a particular fan of Marilyn Monroe, and while not unaware of her sex appeal, I’d certainly never been moved by it like this! Grinning widely, I resisted the temptation to commit the Sin of Onan on the spot, finished my business, washed up, and went back to join my deliciously sexy wife for dinner.

But I think I’m a Marilyn fan now. Oh yes.

Captain America: A

2011-07-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

Last Friday Mock’ and I decided to have something of a play-day, and after some morning chores, we headed off to the matinee showing of Captain America. I’m not exactly easy to please when it comes to superhero movies, particularly when it comes to my favorite characters. In truth, Captain America was never exactly a favorite in terms of dedicated collecting of his solo title, but I dipped in and out of the Avengers for years, and Cap was almost always there. In fact, one of the most memorable comics moments for me was a page in Avengers (I have no idea what issue), showing the aftermath of a battle that had left Avenger’s Mansion in ruins. Cap was on his knees in the remains of his room, his cowl pushed back, and holding a scrap of paper in his hand. When one of his teammates asked him if he was all right he held up the charred paper and said something like “This was the only picture I had of my mother, and now it’s gone,” and he cried, man. It was one of those moments when you realize that comics aren’t kid’s stuff, aren’t trash, aren’t a waste of time, but are an art form that tells stories every bit as engaging as any novel or film, and brings to life characters so real that you find yourself weeping with them. Comics can and do matter as an art form, and as a medium worth respect and critical study.

And Hollywood can fuck them up so easily. But every once in a while, Readers Mine, they get things right.

Captain America is one of those times. This is a big deal because Cap is so very hard to get right. It’s way too easy to fall into jingoism, or to make Cap a cardboard cutout spouting patriotic clichés. It’s a problem that Marvel itself has struggled with for decades, particularly in the Captain America title, but also in The Avengers and the many other titles Cap has made appearances in. Peter Sanderson describes the heart of the character perfectly in Marvel Universe:

Here is the essence of the super hero myth: it elevates the will and conscience of one man above those of the rest. [Cap’s alter-ego] Steve Rogers is the perfect American who does not exist in real life, but who embodies Americans’ idealized image of themselves, a Frank Capra hero turned super hero.

That kind of hero is hard to buy in the cynical world of the 21^st century. Starting in the 1980s superheroes went dark, becoming more gritty, violent, and real. Marvel had long made its trademark with characters with all too human foibles, and the new esthetic seemed made for the company. Even the ultimate Boy Scout, Captain America, got a makeover with the launching of the Ultimate titles, emerging as a shoot-first-and-follow-up-with-a-grenade hard-boiled combat vet who was as likely to use his Thompson SMG as his shield. But the problem is, that’s not Cap. Look, we all know that the world has edges that just seem to get sharper, and after awhile, repeatedly capturing an evil villain, only to have to recapture him all over again months or years down the line just starts to seem a bit… stupid. Some people, we seem to believe, just need killing. Maybe, but the truth is that what we all secretly want is something to believe in, someone who really is good, who really does to the right thing, no matter the cost. We want Mr. Smith to go to Washington and Mr. Deeds to go to town. We want to meet John Doe. We want Captain America, who acts on the best sprit of American idealism, despite what the government or the public may want or think. We’re hungry for the better angels of our nature, and no superhero has ever done that better than Cap when done right.

Joe Johnston and Chris Evans do Cap right, and deliver in a big way. Not to mention that for the first time so far, we get in Haley Atwell’s Peggy Carter a female who’s tough, smart, savvy, sexy, and no pushover, even for the tall, blonde, hunk that is our hero. The supporting cast is nothing short of awesome, and includes Stanley Tucci, Tommy Lee Jones, and the inestimable Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull, who makes Hitler and the Nazis look strictly minor-league. The film and its hero are indeed Capra-esque. When asked by the aristocratic, highly educated, fanatical Red Skull why he was chosen to receive the super-soldier serum, what makes him so special, Cap replies with a small grin, “Nothin’. I’m just a kid from Brooklyn.” In the end it is this that sums up Captain America and makes the film work. Increased strength, dexterity, stamina, memory, etc are all well and good, but what makes Cap a hero isn’t any of that. Steve Rogers is a good man. And that is the difference.

Reading on the Mind

2011-07-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

There has been an unintentional theme to some of my reading lately, revolving around ideas of mind, thought, will, consciousness, and language. Unsurprisingly, two of the three books I propose to write about today fall into the science fiction category. Unsurprisingly because SF is one of the few fiction genres still able to ask the big questions like “what is consciousness?”, “how does language work?”, “do humans have free will?”, and the like. Indeed, the great and tragic Philip K. Dick made a career out of repeatedly asking “what is human?” and “what is God?” Those who dismiss SF as mere genre fiction miss a rather crucial part of the continuing human attempt to make sense of who we are and what – if anything – that may mean. That being said, Readers Mine, let’s get down to cases.

Crysis: Legion by Peter Watts

Okay, before you strain a muscle rolling your eyes at the fact that the first book is the official novelization of a video game (which game was itself plotted by the darkly brilliant Richard K. Morgan); realize who you’re dealing with here. Peter Watts has been on the bleeding edge of SF since Starfish hit the shelves in 1999. Watts’ holds a Ph.D. in marine biology, and shows a recurring interest in the biological determinants of human intelligence and sentience. Indeed, his most recurrent theme is that free will is an illusion and that the vast majority, and quite probably all of our consciousness, cognitive-processes, and interactions with the world around us and with each other are hardwired deep into our neurophysiology. The corollary is that when we forget this and begin to believe our consciousness’ own press, we are generally on deadly ground. (It should be noted that one does well not to believe Peter’s own press about himself as “Peter ‘Fucking Hardcore’ Watts” the utter pessimist. He’s actually one of the most kind and thoughtful people you’ll ever meet. Fortunately, Peter himself doesn’t seem to really believe his own press either.)

Nor does Watts disappoint with Crysis: Legion. Within the tight constraints of the gameworld, and forced to guard against his more obvious tongue in cheek snarking (the editor of the book rejected this absolutely wonderful bit as breaking the 4^th wall), Watts nonetheless delivers some fantastic jabs at gaming, rigid structures, the ridiculousness specific to Crysis 2, and some of the most memorable lines I’ve read in a while (“Behold motherfucker, I stand at the door and knock”). The plot also falls right into Watts’ playground as the protagonist is being slowly incorporated into an advanced battle suit, actually going through most of the book as a dead man who’s consciousness is being kept alive through a process of nanotechnology, bio-mechanical fusion, and materials harvested from his own corpse as a kind of handy trail-mix snack. Along the way, the suit serves up a complex mix of chemicals and stimulus that keep our hero going and motivated. What makes someone want to do something, anyway? Well, basically, neuro-chemicals and stimulation of certain centers of the brain. Keep that stuff going and choice doesn’t really enter into it. Peter Watts, ladies and gentlemen, Peter Watts!

Embassytown by China Miéville

Miéville takes a different path into mind with Embassytown, focusing on language through human interaction with an alien race known as the Ariekei. The Ariekei have two mouths and the ability to sense the sentience behind a speaker. Their dualism, however, results in single-mouthed human language coming across as so much meaningless noise even if speaking the words and grammar of their own language correctly, and their sentience-sense only works on speech they recognize as speech, so humans were first not recognized at all as sentient beings. Most interesting however is the fact that the Ariekei cannot lie. Indeed, the idea that one can speak something that is not the truth is wholly antithetical to their cognition. This has led to the Ariekei turning figures of speech into something like performance art, the highest level of which is the simile. So, for example, in order to say that something is like a rock that has been split in two and then put back together, the Ariekei must literally, physically split a rock in two and put it back together, because if a thing does not exist, it cannot be expressed in language. So when they need a new figure of speech they must create it, at least temporarily, in the physical world. But some of the Ariekei want to learn how to lie, and gatherings are held where audiences tremble with excitement at hearing the greatest almost-liars among their people.

There is quite a bit more in this novel than this focus on language, but it is at the center of the book nonetheless. The novel turns on the Ariekei being able to progress from the use of simile, saying something is like something else, to the use of metaphor, saying something is something else. Because, after all, a metaphor is a lie. If I tell my wife “you are my heart,” this is obviously not the literal truth. It is a metaphor for how much she means to me emotionally. The transition from simile to metaphor causes an evolution of Ariekei consciousness, and reveals that their language, though perfectly serviceable, may never have been real language at all. This is the first book I’ve read by Miéville, but it will not be the last.

Saving the Appearances a Study in Idolatry by Owen Barfield

This brings us to the final, and only non-fiction, book in today’s discussion. Owen Barfield was a friend and contemporary of C. S. Lewis, and each thought the other to be the most brilliant man he’d ever met. Unlike Lewis, however, Barfield was not an academic, spending his career as a barrister in his family’s London law firm. He was, however, a great thinker and reader, particularly when it came to the idea of an evolution of human consciousness. Saving the Appearances came to me about a year ago as a gift from the brilliant, polymathic, and prolific David Lavery who is one of the leading Barfield scholars in the US. I dipped into the introduction when I first received it, and then put it aside until I could have time to devote solely to a close reading of the book. Barfield gets right down to it, and the ideas and overarching concepts of consciousness, language, and the interaction of human sense and consciousness with the natural world begin on page one of the introduction.

The foundation of Barfield’s argument is that the world as we experience it is not the world as it is, as demonstrated by particle physics. The solid table upon which my laptop sits as I write this actually anything but solid, being composed at the atomic and sub-atomic level of mostly empty space. It is my senses which perceive the table as solid, and my consciousness that forms and names it “table.” We thus move through a world of representations created by our senses and consciousness but which bears little or no resemblance to the actual particles which make up the world. Our interpretation of these particles are “collected representations,” which basically means that the particles most of us see as the oak tree in my front yard or your Honda Civic are seen in the proper manner by most of human society who sees them as tree and car, and are not seen properly by my crazy Uncle Quixote who sees the tree as a tower and your Civic as a dragon in need of a good lancing. Barfield posits that these interpretations have evolved over time, moving from an “original participation” in which humans were well aware that we were creating representations of true forms which lay hidden behind the representations, through a time in which direct knowledge of this participation was lost and thus fueled the scientific revolution by allowing us to conceive of these representations as objects separate from us and therefore amenable to comparison one with another, and towards a future “final participation” in which we recover the working knowledge of the world as representations, but see the truth of these representations not behind them, but as springing from within ourselves.

Barfield is not an easy read, and I do recommend reading him at the beach, where your eyes can rest on a far horizon while your brain begins to digest the ideas you’ve just read, but he is well worth the effort, and his writing is richly veined with a wonderful sense of humor and a deep affection for and kindness towards humanity.

Okay, that about wraps it up for now, Readers Mine. I’m off to the midnight showing of Captain America: the First Avenger on Friday, so look for yet another comic to movie review here over the weekend. In the meantime: Excelsior!

Tooting My Own Horn A Bit

2011-06-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

Well, Readers Mine, I'm pleased to be able to announce that as of today, I'm officially a published writer. Watcher Junior: the Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies, published it's latest issue today, and I'm in it! "'We Just Declared War': Buffy as General" grew of out a presentation of the same name I gave at Slayage 4 in St. Augustine last year, and I'm still pretty proud of it. Go check it out!

Books, E-books, and Reading

2011-06-29T11:20:00.000-07:00

My Kindle, as Appian's The Civil Wars

I’ve been chewing on this one for most of a year now, Readers Mine, so I figured it was about time to ruminate publicly. As you may know, I am an avowed bibliophile, and have been since my early teens. Over the years I’ve managed to compile a respectable library, and have developed into one of those people who, in the words of Anna Quindlen, “believe that decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.” Let’s be clear, though. I’m not a collector. Oh I have a few moderately valuable editions, and some signed copies, but they came to me through accident or happy opportunity rather than careful acquisition. Above all, I’m a reader, so my library is as much mass market paperback and ex-library editions as anything else.

All of that is to remind you that I am a lover of books not merely as communications technology, but also as things, as objects to be possessed and treasured, touched, held, and smelled. At the same time, I am a reader, so the idea of having the equivalent of my library accessible through one, lightweight, hand-held device that I can carry with me pretty much anywhere is a heady proposition. So I waited, and watched e-readers – and the Kindle specifically – go through a few generations, and kept an eye on the development of e-books in general, and finally, last year, I bought my Kindle. It wasn’t an unprepared plunge. By this point I’d dipped into Project Gutenberg and Google Books, and even had the opportunity to read a book on a first-gen iPad. I find computers and other back-lit screen devices adequate for short pieces, but when I get the chance to curl up for a weekend and really read a novel or two, or get so hooked in one that I say to hell with it and stay up until 3am to finish it, the back-light really begins to hurt my eyes. It seemed that the Kindle’s (and now Nook’s), non-backlit, e-ink display was the way for me to go.

And it was. Crisp, print-like text, light (particularly when compared to the iPad), and capable of storing approximately 3500 books, the Kindle is a device built for readers like me, who are apt to spend hours on end reading. To be fair, I was also not looking for a device that lets me play Angry Birds or surf the web, or play my music. I just wanted an e-reader, pure and simple, and that’s what the Kindle is. Financial concerns also entered into my decision. Not so much the cost of the device (though I waited until competition had begun to have its effect, price-point-wise), as the cost of content. Look, as far as I know, it is impossible to obtain hardcopy formats of the complete works of Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, H. Rider Haggard, Mark Twain, Alexander Dumas, A. Conan Doyle, etc, etc for $5 or less apiece. I have all of the above on my Kindle for about the price of a hardcover book. Literally over 1000 books, plus stories, poems, essays, etc, for the price of one. Not only that, but many of these writers’ works are hard to find, even when you’re just looking for Haggard’s Alan Quatermain adventures. I’ve always wanted complete collections of these guys, and now I have them. Of course, the price is reflective of their (mostly) public domain status, but still.

Beyond the classics, I’ve read histories, classic and modern SF, how-tos, PDFs (which the Kindle isn’t so hot with), poetry, and even used a Kindle version of the Bible for a recent class. I really like the device. Reading on it is a joy, the battery-life is fairly long, and the thought of having so much content right there in my hand still makes me a bit giddy. I’ve read on the Kindle in waiting rooms, on vacation, at home, over lunches, and my Kindle travels with me to class every single day, slipping into my backpack without adding any appreciable weight, and insuring that I never unexpectedly find myself without something to read. It’s fantastic. That being said, e-books are not going to replace books for me. They comprise reading material in addition to, but not in place of, books. When favorite authors publish a new book, I still want it in hardback. Add to that the usual discounts offered by Amazon and Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble on new releases, and hardcovers generally aren’t much more expensive than e-editions. Yet. I still want the sense of physical possession that books bring, especially with favorite writers, and e-books just don’t cut it when it comes to that.

Of course, I have to face the fact that this likely springs from the fact that easily 95% and more of my reading life has been through books. It is a format I am intimately and unconsciously familiar with. When I want to find a specific passage or quote in a book, I can often find it because I remember where it falls, physically, in the book, and so open the book to the appropriate section without need for a look at the index or table of contents. My brain and body have been programmed through years of practice to be a surprisingly efficient search tool when it comes to books. Plus, whether I buy a book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Got Books? I only need one “device” to read it: the book itself. (The real revolution in e-books will occur when there is one standard file format, or all e-readers come with the built-in ability to reformat files so that I can read all my e-books on one device, no matter where purchased.) Younger generations, particularly those who will grow up with e-books, will undoubtedly develop similar technology-specific skills as those I have for books.

In the end, go get an e-reader. It’s totally worth it, though I recommend doing some research and test-drives to determine which one is right for you, and whether you want a dedicated device or something more like a tablet. It turns out the magic isn’t in the device, anyway. It’s still in the words.

Super 8: B-

2011-06-20T08:20:00.000-07:00

A couple of weekends ago, Mock’ was throwing a fillies only shindig in honor of the Belmont Stakes, so I picked my horse, placed my bet, and then ABD and I got out of there and headed for the theater to check out Super 8. The movie earned a resounding “meh,” from us both. There is much of the nostalgia piece about this movie, for those long ago days when Spielberg really knew how to make a movie. Echoes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. abound, although given a somewhat different, darker twist by director J.J. Abrams. It’s a period piece, and necessarily so as some pretty significant plot points hang on having to wait three days for 8mm film to be developed, and on the lack of cell phones and the internet.

In a nutshell, a group of young teens and ‘tweens have been bit by the moviemaking bug, made possible by Super 8 cameras and a proliferation of amateur movie-making and Fangoria-esque monster-makeup magazines. The hero of the piece is the techie, Joe Lamb, the talented model builder turned sound-man and makeup artist for the kids’ monster movie, played by Joel Courtney who falls hard and innocently for the 14 year old ingénue Alice Dainard, played by Elle Fanning. Keep an eye out for these two actors. In fact, keep an eye out for all 6 of the young actors who form the core of this film. They bring a level of talent and heart to the screen that I haven’t seen in far too long. Fanning, in a lovely movie-within-the-movie scene where she is rehearsing an emotional goodbye to her husband in the kids’ film, manages in a few lines to remind us how magical the art of acting can be, and how powerfully we can be moved by it. I really just can’t heap enough praise on this group of young actors. They make the movie worth it.

Unfortunately, the talent is better than their vehicle. The plot proceeds along the expected lines. Witnessing a horrific train accident, the kids are the first to know that something fishy’s going on in this small Ohio town, and knowing more than the adults who refuse to listen to them, they set out to investigate and eventually our boy-hero saves our girl-heroine and the alien gets to go home. Pretty much cookie cutter filmmaking here, Readers Mine. Still the first hour to hour and fifteen minutes of the movie are quite good. J.J. Abrams is actually very good at portraying human interpersonal relationships, often very complex ones, and in creating three dimensional characters, and when he sticks to that, as he does with the kids in the first half of the film, he's really good. However, he didn't take the time to equally develop the adults in the story or their relationships with their kids, and this winds up really hurting the film. Where Abrams consistently falls short, though, is when he attempts to bring the fantastic, whether aliens or islands.

In the last half of the film it begins to feel like you’re watching two different movies that never quite manage to get together as the kids’ storyline and escaped alien storyline careen into overdrive and at best just kind of glance off one another. I literally found myself thinking in classic MST3K fashion, “meanwhile, in another movie…” This is exacerbated by Abrams' stock trick of delaying the reveal of the monster through a series of fast, blurred, and partial glimpses of the beast, or just sound effects followed by shots of after the fact devastation. It doesn’t work. Not in LOST, not in Cloverfield, and not in Super 8. The reveal, as usual, is a letdown. It just can’t compete with the monster you’ve built in your head, and doesn’t. This kind of tease-and-reveal is incredibly hard, and even artists who are really good at it, like H. P. Lovecraft was, have a hard time pulling it off. Abrams isn’t good at it. Rounding out the stock-plot is the evil military colonel, the misunderstood alien, and parents learning the lesson of how wonderful their kids really are. All great stock-plots. Stock-plots that made Spielberg! Abrams, however, is no Spielberg, and in his hands the final half of the film winds up clunky and forced. (And let’s face it; once the monster has started chowing down on humans, I’m with the bad colonel. Hell, I’m with Ripley: nuke the town from orbit: it’s the only way to be sure. Letting the thing escape just doesn’t seem like a good idea, you know? Round up the kids and send in the SRBMs.)

So, over all, Super 8 gets a “B-,” mostly due to the efforts of the group of young actors at its center, and for the first half of the film. Be sure and stick around for the credits to see the 8mm movie the kids were actually making during the film, it’s one of the best parts. Super 8 is well worth putting in your Netflix cue or hitting for a $5 matinee, but go to the Dollar Store before hand and smuggle in your candy. No need to give the theater too much money for this one.

Watching TV (on DVD)

2011-06-06T06:31:00.000-07:00

Recently I’ve undertaken a rather intensive rewatch of the insanely wonderful Australian science fiction series Farscape on DVD. This comes on top of – and for the moment is supplanting – my ongoing rewatch of Angel, and comes only a few months after viewing the first five seasons of Supernatural on DVD in a four month period. I’ve been watching a lot of TV on DVD lately, in other words, and it’s got me thinking.

As someone who has begun to look at TV as something worth studying critically, and who remembers the days before even VCRs were generally affordable, I’m struck by the way technology has changed not only how we access various TV shows, but the individual and cultural experience of TV as well. Over the past four years I’ve done a lot of catching up on TV shows through a variety of media. I watched the last 2 seasons of Battlestar Galactica via my DVR (and deleted every episode in a fit of pique after the atrocious series finale was phoned-in from the SF Plot Convenience Warehouse, completing the last season and a half’s utter betrayal of the show’s brilliant promise) since my work had me getting home halfway through the original air-time, and often beat to boot. I used the DVR again during the mercifully brief run of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, so that Mock and I could watch them together, and we watched the series finale “Epitaph 2” streaming from Hulu when Fox changed the air-time and the DVR missed it. I caught up on the dark, brilliant, and beautiful genius that is Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad (back on July 17^th, BITCH!) by means of DVD sets for seasons 1 and 2, and, with the kind permission of a friend, iTunes for season 3, which I watched on my larger screen TV via a HDMI cable. Recently, I’ve been advised to watch Showtime’s Spartacus via streaming media from Netflix.

So, DVR, DVD, free streaming through Hulu, paid downloads from iTunes, and subscription streaming through Netflix. That’s how I watch my TV today. Seriously, Readers Mine, these days the only time I watch a TV show on its original air date and time is when I’m in a hotel, or idly flipping through channels on the couch with Mock’ and she finds something she’s willing to light on for longer than 1.8 seconds (or decides to torture me by stopping on the “History” Channel, which will be showing something about Ice Road Truckers, or How to Make a Snickers Bar, which, while it may be interesting, ISN’T FRELLING HISTORY!!!!). This is wildly different from the TV habits of my youth, when if you missed the original airing, you had to wait for the rerun, and in the era before cable began its habit of the 1 hour later, then every hour on the hour for three days reruns of shows they thought were popular the wait could be a long one. This change in the means of viewer access has led, in turn, to a change in viewer culture, and the rise of an interesting type of nostalgia-viewing, typified by the rewatches of Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Nik at Nite, the blog of Nikki Stafford, who literally wrote the books on both shows.

As TV became common throughout the United States, viewer culture grew up around the imposed schedules of the Big Three (later Four, then Four and A Half) networks. Viewers became used to a schedule of programming where a show aired at a certain time on a certain night, weekly, with terrible doldrums in the summer months perhaps enlivened by reruns or old favorites now in syndication. In any event, sometimes millions of people would all gather around their TV sets at the same time, on the same day, watching the same channel to follow the ongoing adventures of Marshal Dillon, or Hawkeye Pierce, Archie and Edith, Andy Sipowicz, or Buffy. That episode was followed by a week of waiting, often discussing the show with fellow viewers in “water-cooler talk,” and anticipating the following week’s installment of the story. This anticipatory period was heightened between seasons, when one had to wait several months for new episodes, often after the previous season had wound up with a cliff-hangery finale (to borrow a term from David Lavery’s Buffy Lexicon). TV was a strange sort of shared experience, even if the people you were sharing it with lived a thousand miles away. A fairly big chunk of America was howling right along with you as Jerry dealt with a woman with “man hands,” or the reanimated corpse of Lenin awoke and began a zombie-like quest to destroy capitalism because Homer Simpson was in command of a US ballistic nuclear submarine (deep cuts folks, deep cuts), or were waiting just as anxiously as you were for November to roll around to see if Chris Carter had really killed off Mulder and/or Scully.

With the evolution of fast and reliable mobile broadband, and growing ownership of smart-phones, TV is becoming as ubiquitous as music and with just as much potential variation in content being viewed at any one time. TV is now available on the viewer’s schedule rather than the networks, and content providers are struggling to keep up. Note the rise in “on demand” and “start over” programming. And we’re already way beyond DVDs. DVR/TiVo devices, streaming media from an ever-growing number of sources, a multitude of ways to have access to an enormous amount of material without it ever taking up space on your shelves or the storage space on your hard-drive (if the device you’re watching it on even needs a hard drive). The collective aspect of TV is disappearing. People no longer necessarily even try to watch shows when they air, preferring to wait for the inevitable DVD release after the current season. And there’s no longer any need for that deliciously annoying anticipatory period between episodes or seasons, you can watch Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes back to back until “Zinda – his face black, his eyes red” if you want. Cliff-hanger finale? No sweat, pop in the first disc/start streaming the first ep. of the next season, no muss, no fuss, no commercials, no waiting – ain’t America great?

And it is! It is great. I love it, love being able to forgo commercials and watch two years worth of TV in two months or less. Love being able to return to Babylon 5 again and again and revel in the stories, love having the ability to watch what I want, when I want, how I want, where I want – mostly. And yet… The thing about the art form of television that has set it apart from film, theater, and novels is that all of the former are brief experiences, whereas M*A*S*H premiered the year I was born, and aired it’s last episode when I was 11. ST: TNG began its run on my 15^th birthday and when it ended I had already been a college drop-out for 4 years. You can have a frakking relationship with a TV show. You can grow up with a TV show. A film is over in two hours or less, generally. Hell, it wouldn’t even take more than a couple of years – max – to read Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth/Mission Earth series if you wanted to (but you really don’t), but man, I lived with some TV shows for years! Now what used to be a committed relationship boils down to an affair of a few months. I suppose it’s the difference in hearing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 on your handy-dandy iPod and going to see it performed by a professional orchestra. Live. In 1826. When music wasn’t available at the touch of a button, or at all beyond your and your friends’ own abilities to remember and carry a tune. Can you even imagine what it must have been like to assemble in a hall full of people, in that day and age, and hear such music? What the experience must have been like? How much power the music would have held? I think it must have been something like catching a glimpse of God.

Now you can just pause playback if something comes up, or just have it on for background noise, you know, without really listing to it. Don’t get me wrong, I love music on command, but sometimes I think I might trade it for music with the power to stop the world and make it listen. I wouldn’t trade my DVDs and streaming capabilities, but sometimes I kind of miss staying up until 2 am on a Saturday night because I didn’t have cable and that was the only time I could catch Babylon 5 when it originally aired. I was there, every week. I gritted my way through the season breaks and every continuing story arc. It was a part of my life for five years. Babylon 5 was also the first TV series I ever owned on DVD, and revisiting it at my leisure is one of the pleasures of my life. While it’s lovely to be able to pick and choose my episodes these days, I can’t escape the sense that I’m not seeing the work as J. Michael Straczynski composed it, as if I was reading War and Peace by dipping in at chapter 30, then chapter 3, etc. The experience is fundamentally changed, and the tension between acts is oddly diluted without the commercials to build-in anticipation.

I think this kind of nostalgia is what drives the rewatches over at Nik At Nite, where a limited number of episodes are viewed each week, and in the interim, participants engage in an ongoing conversation via comments on Nikki’s blogs, discussing the episodes they’ve just seen, sharing their personal experiences with watching the shows either currently or previously, and speculating on where things are going and why, and where things have been, and why. It’s a throwback to the old TV culture, ironically made possible by the same technologies that have fundamentally changed that culture, and people love it. So, maybe we can get the best of both worlds as fan-culture continues its long-time mass infiltration of the interwebs, so that no matter what show you’re into, you can find your people, be they ever so rare or, you know, Dutch. It also appears that the new media are at least partly responsible for the Golden Age of Television we’re currently living in. Neilson and his families no longer have control, or at least have less of it.

So is this actually a win-win situation for the viewer? You know, I think it may be. For the moment anyway. If anyone’s got any thoughts about this, I’d love to hear them. Comment away, Reader’s Mine – I’m off to watch some TV.

Thor: Grade "C", but the Destroyer is "A+"

2011-05-15T08:49:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, while Mock’ was having a girls’ night, I called up my friend All-But-Dissertation (ABD), and we headed out to the movies to see Thor. Now, I’ve been a Thor fan for many years, particularly of the Walter Simonson years, and may actually have squealed a little back in 2007 when Marvel asked J. Michael Straczynski to head up their Thor reboot. Over the next two years, Straczynski would put the God back in the God of Thunder in a big way and thus make my Geek Guy fan-love for him eternal. (I’m kidding. He had me at “I was there, at the dawn of the Third Age of mankind…”) Furthermore, my interest in the Thor comics grew out of an even earlier interest in Norse mythology, so I walked into the theater last Saturday already primed to dislike the film, as both mythology and the comic’s narrative history would undoubtedly be “Hollywoodized.”

Nor was I wrong. In the end I gave the film a “C.” ABD, on the other hand, who is not familiar with either the comic or Norse mythology, gave it a “B” to “B-.” Judging from the box office numbers, his reaction is closer to the norm, and my letter-grade difference can no doubt be mostly chalked up to everything I brought into the theater with me. Mostly. I was both delighted and a bit appalled to see Straczynski get writing credit on the film. Delighted because it’s always great to see such a good writer getting some big-bucks, big-film exposure, and appalled, because this Thor was so NOT Straczynski’s Thor. Turns out Straczynski was involved in the writing in a very early stage, breaking and outlining the story, and only sought screen credit at the behest of the other writers on the film. This reassures me somewhat, and it was nice to see him get a bit of a cameo in the film too!

However, I have some real problems with Thor. First and foremost, there seemed to be an almost desperate haste to reassure the audience that the Asgardians were most definitely not gods, and never thought of themselves that way, but instead were just some type of humanoid, Viking-esque, technomagically advanced alien race, who had only associated with humanity in order to fight off the evil frost giants who, for reasons left unexplained (lebensraum?) were intent on turning the Earth into Hoth. So don’t worry, Jesus, they’re not Gods, just aliens, and everyone knows those don’t exist. (Please come to see the film! It’s inoffensive! We promise! Please?)

Okay, so Hollywood is running scared of declining box-office numbers and thus becomes a complete wuss when it comes to summer “blockbusters” in order to maximize audience numbers by trying to offend no one. I get that. It’s idiocy, but I get it. What I don’t get is why Natalie Portman has apparently decided to stop playing strong female characters altogether. Portman plays Jane Foster, who in this version has gone from nurse to brilliant theoretical astrophysicist, and who comes completely unglued with one look into Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) blue eyes and proceeds to fulfill every trope and clichéd stereotype of the Hero’s Love Interest and Hapless Female up to and including being a woman who can’t drive well! Seriously, Foster as Woman Driver is a recurring gag throughout the film. Portman’s character is about as two dimensional as you can get, and was obviously written to be that way, with the glaring exception of a pair of false eyelashes that seem to leap off of the screen, even in the 2D version we were watching. Of course, the magically scientific Asgardians are no better. At the end of the film, when Thor has destroyed Bifrost, the magic wormhole generator that connects Asgard with Earth, the Asgardians, Odin included, have apparently thrown away the blueprints and forgotten how they built the damn thing in the first place, so they are left waiting for Foster to figure out how to recreate their connection with Earth, which she is striving to do out of her boundless love of Thor. Apparently, with tall, blonde, and blue-eyed off the planet, Foster is able to revert from dewy-eyed ingénue to dedicated genius physicist. But only to get her sweetie back, and then, I’m sure, he can take charge again.

The Marvel movies have not done well by their women characters thus far, and the trend is continuing. Which is odd since Straczynski did a phenomenal job in making both Spiderman’s Mary Jane (and a kick ass Aunt May) and Thor’s Jane Foster into strong, independent, three-dimensional characters during his run on the comics. I guess comic book readers are better able to handle strong women than move-goers in America.

In spite of all of this, Thor has some good stuff. Asgard is beautifully rendered as the ultimate science-fantasy city, the power of Thor is well done, and the story of a vain, powerful, o’erweeningly prideful prince learning humility and responsibility (Henry IV Parts One and Two and Henry V anyone? Now you know why Branagh.) is well done, if somewhat predictable, and the Destroyer is absolutely perfect. In fact, the Destroyer is the best part of the film, and was the one point that got my heart beating in sheer joy at seeing a piece of my childhood really come to life on the big screen. I mean that thing was AWSOME!!! Even the sound effects of its blasts were exactly right, a sense-blotting KRAK! that obliterated every other sound in the scene. This was by far the best job of bringing a Marvel bad-guy to the screen that I've yet seen.

Perhaps because the Destroyer device/creature steps onto the screen straight off the comic-page without adulteration, updating, or re-imagining. Hummm...

There’s a lesson in that Hollywood. Pay attention.

Old Seed, New Breed

2011-05-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

I am a feminist. This means that I recognize the fact that women are 100% complete, real-live human beings in and of themselves, and need no type of male validation, permission, etc to enable them to achieve this status. Furthermore, this means that any and all social, cultural, religious, political, economic, and military structures which fail to recognize this simple fact, and continue to treat women as inferior based solely upon their gender, are deeply flawed and must be reexamined and reformed for the betterment of human society as a whole.

Recently, I’ve been following the debate surrounding a form of feminist activism called a SlutWalk. My purpose here isn’t to join in this debate directly (the best overview of which can be found here), but to address the core issue involved, which is violence against women, and particularly sexual violence against women. Currently it is estimated that 1 in 4 women in the U.S. will be sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, and that 80% of those assaults will be committed by someone the women knows. I browsed about the interwebs checking this statistic, and found it to be accepted by multiple sources. (For a quick, well documented breakdown of this and other stats, check out this PDF from the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence). This, Readers Mine, is unacceptable. Note that these statistics apply to the United States alone, not the world, and not an undeveloped, violence-wracked nation teetering on anarchy, and the numbers become an abomination.

The people committing these crimes are overwhelmingly men, so it follows that the problem must be addressed in the way men are raised and educated in our culture. Radical feminists often argue for the total abolition of patriarchal social structures, but I believe that a few very specific elements of that socialization are worth retaining. For the case in point, the traditional injunction to males from earliest childhood on that a man must never hit a woman and that such an act is unconscionable by any decent male. (I will insert a caveat here that any woman who is intent on causing grievous bodily harm to another person leaves herself open to preventative and defensive violence as defined under the social and legal codes of self-defense and defense of others, as does any other human being.) This injunction against violence towards women is deeply rooted in the patriarchal system, and in ideas of women as the lesser, weaker sex. However, it seems to me that it can be divorced from these roots and retained as a valuable tool of socialization.

This code of non-violence towards women was a part of my upbringing and was given to me largely by my father, the core being that good men, decent men, don’t hit women, and furthermore, they do not sit idly by while bad, indecent men do so. Indeed, a good man is almost always obligated to intervene in such cases. I’m not saying that women can’t take care of themselves in a physical conflict. I know better. What I am saying is that it is up to men to create a culture in which violence against women is taboo, and punished by severe sanctions, particularly cultural, extra-legal sanctions administered by the larger male culture itself. The instillation of non-violence towards women can begin at an extremely early age, and I believe, lays the groundwork for a later enlargement of the principle as the adolescent male develops sexually which defines unwanted sexual acts against women as violent and therefore taboo as well.

Note that there are two vital elements in this process: instilling the belief that physical violence directed against women is wrong, and that unwanted sexual acts of any type towards women are a form of physical violence, and therefore just as wrong.

Will teaching male children not to hit girls/women eliminate sexual violence against women? Sadly, no. In addition, there are other, non-physical forms of violence used by men against women, which can be equally as devastating as physical/sexual violence, and which are beyond the reach of this particular process of socialization. Nonetheless, will it help? Hell yes. Our social and cultural ethics are created early on. We must begin to teach male children that violence against women in all forms is just plain wrong, wholly unacceptable, and is only practiced by degenerates who may be male but will never be men. Further, we must teach them that it is the duty of all good men to stop and punish the perpetrators of violence against women and so begin to create a new masculine culture in which such violence is properly viewed as the abomination that it is.

“Remember Johnny, you must never hit a girl. Ever. Good boys never hit girls.” Small seeds, big frellin' trees.

PCAS/San Antonio Wrap Up

2011-05-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, Readers Mine, with exams knocked out it’s time to finish up my San Antonio Tales. Saturday, our final full day, was not so much about the conference as it was about getting out and playing tourist in San Antonio. To which end we linked up with a couple of friends who’d driven out from Huston and set out to do the town, starting in the logical place:

The Alamo. Which is right downtown among a lovely series of public spaces and parks, where San Antonio was hosting a celebration of Turkish food and culture all day, complete with kebabs, dancers, music, and fezzes. Unfortunately we just didn’t have time to dive into that, but it was an interesting admixture to the day. For months before the trip every time I would say that we were going to San Antonio, I’d be asked if we were going to see the Alamo, and when I replied in the affirmative I’d get some variation on “Well, don’t be disappointed. It’s really small.” Actually, it’s not. First there’s this huge neo-socialist realistic monument in the middle of the street across from the mission that is anything but small. The surviving building, the mission church itself, is no Notre Dame de Paris, but it’s not exactly an outhouse either. Near this are the surviving Long Barracks were the Texians and their fellows made their last, hand to hand, stand, and between is a beautiful, cool, and shady park dominated by an ancient live oak that spreads its twisting limbs over something like half a city block. Now, maybe people are referring to the fact that the structures which have survived since 1836 comprise only a small portion of the original structures within the Alamo’s walls, but I have to say that overall the Alamo is one of the most beautiful, well maintained, pleasantly informative historic sites I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting. Plus, you get a deep cut from Phil Collins, who turns out to be the world’s #1 collector of Alamo relics and a long time supporter of the historic site (pictured above in his Geneva home with some of his Alamo memorabilia). He even narrates the voice-over for the diorama re-enactment in the History Store which sits atop the active archaeological dig, and provides visitors with a look at the actual dig and the artifacts found there. One note I will make is that, when you go buy the audio guide for the mission church and gardens, but don’t bother with it once you get into the Long Barracks, the historians and Daughters of the Republic of Texas who have overseen the site since the early 1900s, have provided comprehensive historical displays and readings that far outstrip the audio-tour’s narration (NOT done by Phil Collins), and you get to the point where you can read faster than the guy on the audio tour talks. All in all it was a really fun day for a total of $11/person.

The Original Mexican Restaurant was next on the agenda, since walking about the Alamo for several hours can bring on an appetite. The Original Mexican Restaurant solved this dilemma with some fantastic Tex-Mex cuisine. I recommend the Chiles Rellenos, and if you don’t try the fresh guacamole, particularly on a hot San Antonio day, you have made a grave error, and missed something special. The restaurant is right on the river-walk, and for those looking for a bit of a break from the heat is nicely air-conditioned inside.

The Mercado. After being revived with great food, we hopped one of San Antonio’s trolleys and headed out to the Market Square, or Mercado, a several block square collection of shops and restaurants, where is stocked a truly astounding quantity of Mexican imports, up to and including Mexican Wrestling masks! Much fun was had tracking down souvenir gifts to take back to family, friends, and dog sitters, while Mock’ managed to find one or two things for us as well.

Clash of the Titans (1981). Finally, after returning to the hotel for a nap we rejoined our friends and set out for the PCAS/ACA Science Fiction Area’s annual Saturday night movie and raffle, where Mock and I sat in the back and snarked through the film a la MST3K, much to the delight of our seat-mates, fortunately. Still, how can you resist poking fun of a film that includes Laurence Oliver as Zeus, Burgess Meredith as the plucky theater owner, and Harry frakkin’ Hamlin as the hero Perseus? Release the Kraken!!!

Afterwards we bid our friends goodbye all prepared to return to their various homes and schools across the country and in Canada, and, truth to tell, I think everyone was ready. The conference was a huge success, and massive fun, but it takes a little out of you, for sure. Still, I’d go again in a heartbeat, and I can unreservedly recommend San Antonio to anyone as an absolutely lovely, fun city to play around in.

Reading Day

2011-04-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

Today, Reader’s Mine, is Reading Day, the day before exam week begins where there are no classes and students have the opportunity to catch up on sleep and study for the upcoming final sprint. I celebrated Reading Day by sleeping very late, lingering over a couple of cups of good dark-roast coffee, and getting my head straight for the tasks ahead. There are two relatively minor essays to be written today and then I’ll be hitting the notes from Russian History until 1900, and beginning my review for my Latin exam Monday. It’s been a good semester; though with unexpected surgery to replace my ICD and the PCA/ACA conference, I’ve managed in some areas to miss fully two weeks of class here in the second half. Fortunately, my profs have all been very understanding and completely willing to cooperate (and it doesn’t hurt that I’m a pretty good student, if I do say so myself). Nonetheless, that’s made the last few weeks something of a crunch, and I have e-mails of notes from very kind friends and professors which I haven’t even looked at yet for being up to my eyeballs in various papers.

All of which is to say that, for today, I’m taking a break from the review of PCA/ACA, and hitting the books. Look for the conference wrap-up in the next day or so, and probably a rambling screed on H. Beam Piper after that, and then… well, who the hell knows? Stick around and find out!

PCA/ACA Conference Day 3

2011-04-26T12:38:00.000-07:00

Well Readers Mine, today is the day when my guest post goes up on The Great Buffy Rewatch over at Nik at Nite, so hopefully some of you reading this are new to Solomon Mao’s. If so, welcome. Basically, this is the place where I post at least semi-regular notes on books, movies, TV, popular culture, politics, academia, conferences, higher education, and occasionally other URS*. I also tend to shill for the various blogs you see under Solomon’s Blogs to the lower left, and for friends and authors doing good work across the media spectrum. There’s also a bit of construction going on around here, so please excuse any sudden format changes, I’ll try and quit messing with things shortly. So, come often, read a bit, visit some of the other writers linked, and feel free to drop a comment or two if you get the urge.

We now return to our blog-in-progress covering recent adventures at the Popular Culture/American Culture Association national conference in San Antonio, Texas:

Friday was a short day for me, conference-wise. As usual, I was up and ready to face the world by 11:30 with the Life and Works of Jack London panel. Here George Adams took us into the deep end immediately with a look at what London concealed and revealed in his John Barleycorn. I have to admit to being a bit snowed under by specialized vocabulary with this one, but the gist I got from Adams was really good. He posits that London practiced the fine art of avoidance in his “Alcoholic Memoir,” rather than simple deception or denial. Thus in reading this and similar autobiographical works, the reader must pay close attention to what is mentioned in order to note what is carefully being not mentioned. Next up was Michael Martin, who gave a thoroughly enlightening and enjoyable paper on Jack London as the premiere, and usually uncredited, American road novelist, drawing on The Cruise of the Snark and The Road to demonstrate London’s mastery of this perhaps quintessentially American form, and even giving us Ernest Darling as a kind of early 20^th century Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady. Great work there, and a lot of fun. The next presenter, and Jack London Area Chair Jay Williams, examined London’s young adult fiction published in the magazine Youth’s Companion from June of 1899 to February of 1903. The magazine was chartered as a vehicle to encourage and help instill “industry, thrift, and upright Christian living and family,” and Williams posits that London’s sea stories unintentionally subverted the magazine’s mission statement by extolling travel, adventure, and a life apart from the traditional family structure. He also points out that the youth market was important for allowing London to experiment generically during this early part of his career, giving him the opportunity to stretch as a writer. I really loved this panel. It was somehow exciting and comforting to be among a group of scholars who are so passionate about London and his works. He is an author too often ignored, to our detriment.

I skipped the 1:15 panels in order to grab some lunch and take care of another important piece of conference business: buying books. Various academic publishers always show up at conferences, setting up tables of their books and usually offering pretty generous discounts, which is great because even the cross-over presses (i.e. presses which sell to a wider market than just schools and libraries, i.e. most of them these days) do limited runs, making a trade-paperback size book run anywhere from $25 - $40, and the hard covers even more. So I always try and pick up a pile of books when I’m at a conference. Okay, so this is a lie. I’m a bibliophile, so I always try to pick up a pile of books. Period. End of statement. True to form I found some great titles, and had a thoroughly good time doing so and chatting with the various reps from the publishers. I don’t have the books here in front of me however, having sent them back to the house with Mockingbird after we got home so as not to be distracted during this last week of school and exams. But fear not, Readers Mine, you’ll be seeing them in one or another o my regular my regular reading posts here as I crack them one by one.

Refreshed and gloating over my new acquisitions, I headed to the 3:00 panel on H. P. Lovecraft: New Perspectives. Great panel. The session began with a look at arctic places as liminal spaces by Jasie Stokes, who traced the use of such places through Mary Shelly, Edgar Allen Poe, and of course, Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Stokes theorizes that each author’s treatment of the arctic and Antarctic reflects how they and their society viewed science. For Shelly, science would undoubtedly take us in new directions and change the world, but how and to what ends? Hers was a largely pro-scientific view, but also advocated for restraining scientific investigation and exploration to safe areas. Poe, on the other hand encourages bolder exploration of unknown spaces, in spite of – or perhaps because of – the fear such unknown places evokes in us. Finally Lovecraft, though a life-long admirer and proponent of science and scientific endeavor, has the most profoundly anti-science stance of them all, the horrors of the Antarctic mountains being so terrible as to drive his protagonist, an explorer extraordinaire, to devote himself to putting an absolute end to all further exploration of the continent. There was a lot in this paper and Stokes got the audience churning with all of the possibilities in her approach. Next Connie Lippert took a deep dive into intertextuality in Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, a fictional tome containing forbidden knowledge that even reading it is an invitation to madness. Lovecraft encouraged the sharing of his work and his worlds, and the phenomena of the Necronomicon has continued to grow not merely in works of fiction (think the Evil Dead trilogy, among others), but to manifest itself in several versions and editions purporting to be the true lost grimoire, at least one of which is actually used as a book of spells and rituals by groups practicing “chaos magic” in the real world. (Or at least in the physical world. How real these folks’ worlds are remains open to debate.) Brilliant paper that is almost infinitely expandable. Lovecraft is intertextuality writ large, crossing from horror to fantasy to science fiction to mystery to film to television, and back and forth from all of them again. Finally, Carl Sederholm called for a wider scholarship on Lovecraft, beyond biography and examinations of single works, to an approach to Lovecraft’s body of work as a whole, and used an examination of Lovecraft’s views on sex to demonstrate. See, Lovecraft doesn’t do sex, except in the most negative way (“pulsing, dripping monstrosities”). He seems to have had a philosophical objection to it as something bestial, and beneath the notice of true human beings. Sederholm just gave a brief glimpse of the possibilities inherent in this subject, and I hope that others will follow and take up his call for a wider scholarship.

After this panel broke, up it was time for a late lunch/early dinner with a whole passel of friends, when some 25 of us descended en masse upon a nearby Italian restaurant and gave the staff something to do during the afternoon lull. The meal was good, and the company better as Mockingbird and I met and got acquainted with a couple of new friends, Dominick Grace and Lisa Macklem who had presented on Steven King and Supernatural, respectively. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see either presentation, but after meeting them, I certainly wish I had, and will certainly be looking out for future opportunities to hear them both. A good time and lots of carbs were had by all. Then Readers Mine, I was forced to retreat to the hotel room where I spent the next four hours grudgingly working away on an historiographical essay for my Russian history class. It was the biggest assignment for that class this semester, and with the conference falling at the end of the term, I knew I’d have to buckle down and bust it out eventually, which I did, pouting all the while because I was missing the showing and sing-along of Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I was cruelly separated from my people by the tyrannical demands of higher education!!! Woe! WOE, I SAY!!

Oh well. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” after all.

*Utterly Random Shit.

PCA/ACA Day Two

2011-04-24T19:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve fallen a couple of days behind in my conference posting, Readers Mine, but once you read the next couple of posts, you’ll understand how a fella could get a bit distracted.

Day two of the PCA/ACA national conference began at the crack of 9:30, so we could make it to an 11:30 panel called Civil War and Reconstruction: Images of the War: Photography, Iconography, and Cultural Tradition. This was a big one on my list, having just spent a semester delving into the craft of using photographs as historical evidence and writing a term-paper on a series of photos taken by Timothy O’Sullivan during the war. I was not disappointed. Jennifer Lynn Gross started things off with “Confederate Widows: Icons of the South,” in which she examined the strange cultural phenomenon after the war where the widows of Confederate general-officers became something like professional widows, and saw themselves as owners of their husband’s stories. These remarkable women were responsible for writing their husbands memoirs, founding the Daughters of the Confederacy, and taking an active role in what would become known as the Lost Cause presentation o Southern history. Next James Lundberg took a different look at the times surrounding the war with “Picturing Manhood, Picturing War: Photography and Facial Hair in the American Civil War.” Lundberg became fascinated with the truly incredible facial hair sported by American men in this period, and proposes that the reason may not stem from years of camp life and missed opportunities to shave during the war, but may well have been at least partially the result of photography itself. The primitive technology tended to wash out a clean-shaven face, the bright light required for photography often erasing subtle facial structures. Structures which were enhanced and given more shape and shadow by, you guessed it, moustaches, beards, goatees, sideburns, and soul-patches of every possible description. A really well researched, fun paper. Finally, Pamela Venz wound the panel up with “Survivors in Silver: Photography’s Relationship with American Civil War Medicine.” Venz focused on the attempt by photographers, newspapers, and the Army to show the modern, clean, and up to date medical care the troops were receiving both at the front and in hospitals back home. Of course, such photographs were all highly composed and carefully staged, but their very existence reveals the concern with the availability of medical care for the Union soldiers.

From the Civil War we proceeded to fan studies for the panel entitled “Fan Culture and Theory: Reimagining Convergence.” this turned out to be a really interesting panel. First, Lincoln Geraghty spoke about the strange transformation of collectables, from action-figures to autographed photos of favorite series actors, into objects of memory in the hands of their possessors, showing how a collectible figure purchased at, say, Comic Con, becomes not merely evidence of one’s pleasure in the show or comic or whatever represented by the figure, but also a key to memory of Comic Con itself, and moving from the commercial to the purely personal. Then the incomparable Tanya Cochran delivered a stunning presentation, “’Past the Brink of Tacit Support’: Fan Activism in the Whedonverses.” Suffice it to say that Joss Whedon and his fans provide a really fascinating example of a fan base that practices activism well beyond the realm of “save our favorite show,” and into the realms of real-world political, social, and cultural activism. There’s a story to how this activism began, but Mockingbird’s Nest has it better than I could put it, so follow the link. Cochran is working on a book focusing on this fan activism, and from her presentation, it’s going to be a must read. To wrap things up, Stephen Andon talked about a different, but equally dedicated type of fan activism. With “Sports Apparel DIYers: Circumventing Corporate Authority and Subverting Hypermasculinity in Sports Fandom,” Andon presented the audience with a look at a group of dedicated fans, particularly baseball and American football fans, who spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and effort to hand-make their own jerseys. In these hyper-regulated sports where the NFL will land on you like a ton of bricks if you try and sell merchandise and aren’t Nike or Adidas/Reebok, individual fans are making unique, high-quality gear for their personal use and thus avoiding the corporations that “own” the teams, merchandising rights, etc. We’re talking about very manly-men taking the time to learn to sew like professional tailors, and whose attention to detail is incredible. These men take great pride in their work, and may be using it as a way to claim their own “ownership” of the teams they love so much. Good stuff.

At 3:00, I ate, rested, and reviewed my paper, “’No Half Measures’: Violentization and Emotional Realism in Breaking Bad” which I presented in the 4:45 session.

My co-presenter (our third didn’t make it) was Carlen Lavigne, who’s “Two Men and a Moustache: Masculinity, Nostalgia, and Bromance in The Good Guys” gave us a look at a show that had an all too brief run and which I had honestly never heard of. Lavigne delved into how the show played with nostalgia for 1980’s cop-shows, riffed off of modern conceptions of the “sensitive man” and connected with the long history of buddy films and television shows in the US. Excellent paper that made me want to watch the show. My presentation went well too. I was using Lonnie Athens’ theory of violentization to illuminate the characters of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad and how such a realistic portrayal of violence creates a level of emotional realism that draws the viewer into the show and evokes a feeling of emotional complicity in the violence portrayed. I was very pleased with the Q&A session afterward, where the questions were excited, probing, intelligent, and let me know that the audience were definitely wanting to hear more. I left floating about 6 inches off the floor. Good day!

Finally, we took in the 6: 30 session The Works of Joss Whedon: teaching, Translating, and Tracing Symbol in Whedon’s Buffy. Jeffrey Bussolini led things off with a funny and intriguing look at how Buffy is dubbed into French and Italian. It turns out that the Italians do a better job with all the various “Buffy-isms,” colloquialisms, and oddities than do the French, though both seem in desperate need of Oreo cookies, as the cookies popular in Europe have chocolate on the inside and vanilla or something on the outside, and thus mangle one of Willow’s better jokes. Next Nikki Fuller gave a Campbellian reading of Buffy with her “Death and Sacrifice: Season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” examining in particular the episodes “The Body” and “The Gift” and the gang’s forced confrontation with the facts of death and life, sacrifice and loss. It was a brilliant, poignant presentation, and a nice look at Buffy’s particular hero’s journey. Finally, Erin Waggoner approached Buffy in the classroom directly, looking at visual rhetoric in “Hush,” where the town is struck silent by the uber-creepy Gentlemen, and everyone must figure out non-verbal ways to communicate, and where the audience and cast/crew of the show much communicate non-verbally as well. It is a reminder of how we really do speak to one another, even when using all of those troublesome words.

After that, Mock’ and I decided that it was time for some TexMex, and so strolled down San Antonio’s beautiful riverwalk until we found the Lone Star Café, where we snarfed down huge plates of enchiladas smothered in cheese, gravy and with sides of real, fresh, refried beans. To top it off we retreated to an upper-level ice cream parlor and sat on the balcony watching the people and river go by as we cooled down with some cold sweets. Which was (and is) pretty much a perfect ending to a fine Texas day!

PCA/ACA National Conference, Day 1

2011-04-21T14:07:00.000-07:00

Day one of the PCA/ACA national conference dawned groggily, or maybe that was just me. I tend to forget how travel, nowadays stripped completely of any remaining glamour it once had, can just wear you out. Fortunately, the conference didn’t get rolling until 11:30, and I didn’t get rolling until 3:00 well after a big-ass omelet smothered in salsa and a nap.

The first panel for me was Critical Approaches to Mystery Science Theater 3000 I, a subject both Mockingbird and I are highly interested in, as we own every MST3K box set save three, and most of the stand-alone DVDs. Diving into the deep end, we were treated to examinations of MST3K as metafilm by Nathan Shank, as postmodern meditation on technophobia and technophilia by Kevin Donnelly, and as cinematic palimpsest a la Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia by Ben Wetherbee. All three of these scholars are young and if these presentations are any indicator, you can probably expect to hear more from them.

Net up it was homecoming with the Whedonites for Fans, Time, and History in Whedon. Alyson Buckman led off by examining the characters and Serenity herself through the lens of Bakhtin’s chronotope, where time, place, and genre interact to create the narrative flow, and especially the idea that we make our place and out place makes us. (I have a feeling I need to read Bakhtin.) Next up Susan Fanetti gave us a looking inside the Whedon community on the interwebs, via an examination of the community’s reaction’s to bloggers taking on either rewatches or first time viewings of Buffy and/or Angel, and the conversation between fans and the blogger(s). To finish up the panel, K. Dale Koontz went intertextual and showed how The X-Men inspired Whedon and eventually, through Kitty Pryde, helped give birth to Buffy Summers, and how Whedon, in turn paid homage to his past and the work of Chris Claremont in his run later on Astonishing X-Men. The audience, myself included, was completely enthralled (and I’m not just saying that because I’m lucky enough to be married to the woman. She had ‘em all hooked good.)

Finally (and to be honest, my notes for this panel are sketchy because Solomon was beginning to fade by this point), we took in another Whedon panel, this one on Power and Whedon where first, Mae Mendoza asked whether Firefly and Serenity actually portray a society in which the U. S. and China have merged politically and culturally, or is just a mash-up of Asian techno-culture as constructed by the West. Whedon doesn’t come out so good in this one. For all the random Mandarin phrases dropped into conversation, there just aren’t really any Asians in the ‘verse. Next, the incomparable Sherry Ginn took a look at aggression and violence in Firefly. Sherry always seems to be digging into the most interesting psychological spaces and this presentation was no different. Then came a truly exciting look at Whedon’s Dollhouse by Samira Nadkarni, who used the golem myth and its evolutions (think Frankenstein) to interpret Whedon’s “actives” who come to life only after being infused with the personality (spirit) needed for their current job. Wonderful!

After that, my brain being full of new ideas, and my body weary, it was time for a long, conversation and laughter filled dinner with Mock’ and old friends, and then to bed, so we can get back to it today.

"The Stars at Night...."

2011-04-19T19:22:00.000-07:00

I seem to be starting off each of these posts with an apology lately, so from now on when it has been a while between posts here, just take the apology as read and move on.

It’s crunch time in the Land of Academia, with an historiographical essay, an essay on St. Augustine’s Confessions, the usual homework, exams within 9 days, et cetera (literally “and the rest; the remainder”). First up, though, there’s the Popular Culture and American Culture Association national conference!

Yep, this here blog is being written from the great state of Texas, which Mockingbird and I flew into around noon local time, landing in the truly wonderful city of San Antonio. Everyone who’s been raving to me about the city over the past few months has been proven right, and it looks like things are lining up to be an absolute blast. Oh sure, I have three papers of varying length to work on while I’m here, but that still leaves plenty of hours for conference fun. The main problem facing us now is the sheer number of sessions to choose from. Seriously, Readers Mine, the frakkin’ program comes in at 468 pages in length!

So far I’ve managed to figure out my plan of attack for Wednesday and Thursday, with a few must-see sessions scoped for Friday and Saturday. This week, I’ll get to hear papers on Mystery Science Theater 3000, Fringe, Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, Civil War photographs, how to get a job out of graduate school, Breaking Bad, and, of course, Joss Whedon. Lots and lots of Whedon as I catch up with some of my favorite folks (who also happen to be some of the smartest people you’ll ever meet) from Slayage, PCA/ACA South, and that’s just a starting point, being the subjects I spent a couple of hours highlighting in my program this evening.

As for my own doings, I’m presenting a paper called “’No Half Measures’: Violentization and Emotional Realism in Breaking Bad” somewhere between 4:45 and 6pm local time on Thursday. One of my fellow panelists is also presenting on Breaking Bad, but as far as I can tell we’re the only two out of some 3000 presenters, which means (hopefully) that we’ve got an opportunity to shine and do some original work. We’ll see. In any event, Mock’ and I are in a kind of academic-geek heaven for the next few days, and are determined to enjoy it. (She is presenting in the same time slot as I am, but a day earlier, a paper entitled “Pryde and Prejudice: the Origins of Buffy in The X-Men,” and believe me when I tell you, she’s done some absolutely incredible work, as usual.)

So, I’ll try and throw up some posts throughout the week, but no promises. There’s much to do here at the Alamo, after all.

Back to Books

2011-03-23T19:45:00.000-07:00

Well Readers Mine, it’s been a bit of a dry-spell, blog-wise, and I don’t think the rainy season’s upon us yet. I’m moving into the last month of the semester, and on top of the homework, exams, and papers associated with school, the national PCA/ACA conference in San Antonio kicks off on 20 April, and I’m presenting a paper on Breaking Bad on the 21^st, so I’ve managed to get at least one too many plates spinning as usual. The long and the short of all this is that Solomon Mao’s is going to be sliding a bit further down the priority list than I might like, but I’ll try to slip in a pithy post every now and again, and get back to meatier fare ASAP. In the meantime, here’s a quick look at a favorite subject.

Quatermain Returns! Never fear that in the recent bout of political postings that I’ve given up the reading life for a more activist role. Reading is the one thing I manage to make room for no matter what, and a day without a book is… well, there’s just no such thing as a day without a book. Lately I took the opportunity offered by Spring Break to return with great pleasure to the world of H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, and regret to report that with Miawa’s Revenge: or, the War of the Little Hand, I have now read the complete series. I really kind of hate that, but luckily, it had been so long since I had read King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain (which are the last books chronologically in Allan’s world while being the first ones written in ours) that I was able to start all over again. The up side is, thanks to Amazon and the Kindle, I have some 50 other novels by Haggard, so maybe I’ll discover untold treasures in new worlds to come.

Ancient Empires! On the non-fiction side of things, I’m about half-way through The Might That Was Assyria by H. W. F. Saggs, an exquisite overview of ancient Assyria, by a man who possessed a great facility with words, deep knowledge of his subject, and a sense of humor that shines brilliantly throughout the book. Here’s a sample:

“The reader will notice that I actually like the Assyrians, warts and all: I make no apology for this. Though the Assyrians, like the people of every other nation ancient and modern, were sometimes less than kind to their fellow humans, I feel no compulsion to be continually advertising my own rightmindedness by offering judgment upon their every action or attitude in terms of current liberal orthodoxy.”

Or this on Assyrian trading concerns in Cappadocia:

“Who were the local consumers of these products in Anatolia? …What was the system of native government in Anatolia and the relationship of the Assyrian merchants to the local government? The threat is never far distant of one of these problems, or others of like nature, festering into a Ph. D. thesis.”

Lovely stuff. As to the subject matter, the book provides the best single volume look at the Assyrians I’ve ever come across, and reveals a nation and a culture that is too often ignored by historians and distorted by Biblical scholars intent on what was a very small piece of a very large Assyrian Empire.

Operas in Space! During an unexpected hospital stay last week (about which more later), I had the opportunity to read Echo, the latest by Jack McDevitt. One of my favorite contemporary SF authors, McDevitt specializes in a kind of Lonely Universe sub-genre, where the galaxy is vast, humans are moving out through it, and discovering with extremely rare exceptions, that we are alone after all. Oh there have been others, but by the time we’ve come along what’s left of them belongs to the fields of xeno-archeology and –anthropology. Meanwhile, human technology and society has advanced to the point where life can be lived pleasantly by everyone on most worlds. Perhaps too pleasantly. In one of the more interesting themes in recent SF, McDevitt is examining the consequences of a society that, while not exactly decadent, is comfortably complacent. The first excitement of interstellar colonization is long past, and the exploratory urge and curiosity sparked by the development of relatively fast interstellar drives has faded in the face of centuries of human life in space, and the discovery of only two extant intelligent alien species in that time. The extraordinary has become commonplace, and why spend months cooped up on a ship to go see a twin binary system up close when you can see any number of astronomical wonders in a single evening from the comfort of the living room via immersive holography? Human society has turned inward again, and begun a soft retreat from the stars.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone, and the dream of becoming an interstellar pilot still burns strong in some, only to be somewhat dampened by the reality of routine travel routes well within explored space that make up the lives of most pilots, and keep them away from family and friends for months at a time. McDevitt’s characters are the Victorian Adventurers of this far-flung future, rooted and glad to be so in the civilized life of the advanced worlds, but also willing to follow a mystery, or just their own curiosity, out beyond the edges of the known. It is an interesting, and sometimes uncomfortable world, as the reader can’t help but draw parallels between McDevitt’s ‘verse and our own. Echo is a return to the lives of two of McDevitt’s perennial heroes, the roguish gentleman-scholar and antique-dealer Alex Benedict, and his partner and pilot Chase Kolpath. Benedict and Kolpath have been McDevitt’s protagonists for three other novels, and Kolpath again serves as the narrator for the book, which follows the series’ usual structure of Alex and Chase being drawn into mystery, intrigue, and danger by a strange, ancient artifact, their investigation set against a magnificent backdrop of deep space. Echo is more pensive than the other books in the series and the tone throughout is somewhat melancholy, but there is something beautiful there as well. In any event, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read over a hurry-up-and-wait weekend in the hospital, so McDevitt remains near and dear to my heart. Give him a try.

Well, that’s it for now, and it took long enough to get even this bit o’ fluff written. I’ll try and catch up again soon, so in the meantime, be well.

An Economics Lesson

2011-02-27T07:36:00.000-08:00

I have a commodity to sell.

My production of this commodity is limited and finite over roughly a 60 year time span. I am only one of many people with this, or a similar, commodity who are all trying to sell in a common market. The value of my commodity is relative to fluctuations in the market. Sometimes there is more of my commodity than prospective buyers need, which reduces its value, but sometimes there is less of it than buyers need, and so its value is increased. Its absolute value, however, is always greater than zero. My goal in a relatively free, capitalist market system is to sell my commodity for the highest possible amount, bearing in mind the above market fluctuations in its relative value. Sometimes I will be able to get more for my commodity than others, but my goal remains to get the maximum value possible for it.

The prospective buyers of my commodity typically have greater economic leverage than I do as an individual producer. Often they have the need and means to purchase not only my commodity, but those of many others as well. Our commodities are absolutely necessary to allow these buyers to produce commodities of their own, which they will, in turn sell in the same relatively free, capitalist market. Their goal is similar to mine in that they want to get the maximum value for the commodities they produce, being constrained by similar market forces. One of the ways they can maximize what they get for the commodities they produce is to pay as little as possible for my commodity, because that lowers their costs of production.

Still with me, Readers Mine?

Now, on a level economic playing field (and again, we’re modeling a relatively free market capitalist system here), where I’m trying to get the most for my commodity and prospective buyers are trying to pay as little for it as they can, what would happen naturally is that we would wind up meeting somewhere in the middle. I might not get as much as I’d like for my commodity, but they probably have to pay more for it than they’d like, so it’s something like a fair price for them and fair value for me. Everyone is – if not happy – at least able to take home some scratch and keep on economically keeping on.

Unfortunately, the playing field is not level. The prospective buyers of my commodity have much greater economic leverage than I do. Remember, they have the need and ability to buy not only my commodity but also those of others, sometimes many others. For my commodity, though necessary and valuable, is far from being uncommon. Sometimes this means that buyers are able to purchase it well below what should be a fair market value, because if I won’t sell my commodity to them at that price, they can find someone who will, despite the fact that the price offered is lower than what they themselves need to get by. In short, the potential buyers of my commodity have the power to control the market, which, if you’ve been paying attention, is pretty much antithetical to the idea of a relatively free, capitalist market economy.

So, how do I compete with entities which possess so much more economic leverage than I do, and who are using that leverage to manipulate and distort the market? Well, if I get together with other people like me, who are also trying to sell their commodities in a market vulnerable to this manipulation, and we work together, refusing to sell our commodities (which, in the end, our prospective buyers have to have) for less than a fair market price, we limit the pool of potential commodity sellers the buyers can purchase from, and force them to raise their price back up to a fair market level. It’s the same idea behind credit unions where a bunch of people with a little bit of money join together in order to compete fairly with a few people with lots of money. Or like a food co-op where a bunch of independent small farmers join together to sell their produce competitively with chain grocery stores.

Okay, here’s the kicker.

My commodity (and yours) is my labor. The entities with the power to manipulate and control the market to my detriment are large scale employers, both private and public. My credit union or co-op? A union. A union that allows me and my fellows to operate in the free market capitalist system as any participant in that system should be able to: by buying and selling at fair market prices as determined by the market.

Is it perfect? No. Is it necessary? Does it provide for better conditions and more dignity in work than non-union situations? Yes. Hell yes. Eight hour days, 40 hour weeks, overtime, sick days, health care, child labor laws, safety laws all of these were brought to you by the American union movements, and most of them within the past 100 years.

So, when you’re watching what’s happening in Madison Wisconsin and many other places, and you hear politicians ranting and raving about “out of control public sector unions” ask yourself how many rich firemen do you know? How many millionaire policemen? How many high school, community college, or university teachers driving Bentley’s? How many postal workers belong to your local yacht club? How many EMTs wearing Versace coveralls? Because those are the folks who belong to those “out of control public sector unions.” Now look at the number of politicians and business executives who fall into the rich, millionaire, Bentley-driving, yacht-club membership, Versace set. Which group is comprised of your neighbors, and the people you can count on to be there to help when bad things happen?

Solidarity. Forever.

At the Movies

2011-02-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

This week, Readers Mine, let me start out with a bit of advice: never watch two cinematic masterpieces during the course of a week, and then follow them with James Cameron’s Avatar on the weekend. The latter’s weaknesses, already quite visible, become glaring. That being said, it is hard to imagine a film that would stand up well against Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Ikiru is the story of a 30-year career bureaucrat, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) who is diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer and realizes that, despite being an old man, he has never lived. In Japanese, “ikiru” means “to live,” and the remainder of the film is devoted to Watanabe’s search for a way to give meaning to his life in the six months he has to live. I scooped up the Criterion Collection edition of the film on DVD as a late birthday present, so I got all sorts of extra goodies with the film, including a nice little booklet in which a noted historian and biographer of Kurosawa proceeded to misinterpret the film as a modern existentialist statement. Instead of a negation of meaning, however, Ikiru beautifully renders what is a core tenant of humanism: that the meanings of our lives are found in what we do with them, in the meanings we choose to imbue them with. As the inimitable Joss Whedon would have it, “if nothing that we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do.” As Mockingbird pointed out to me, the first half of that line is existentialism, the second, and dominant, half is humanism. Watanabe does indeed imbue his life with meaning in a mere six months, even as his cancer kills him, and gives the film its soul in the wonderful line:

“I can’t afford to hate anyone. I haven’t got that kind of time.”

If you should get a chance, see this wonderful film, made by perhaps the greatest film auteur of the 20^th century. Personally, I still see Red Beard as his humanist masterwork, but Ikiru is a thing of beauty to light the modern soul with hope, and how can you not fall in love with such a film?

Next we turn to a film which I’m ashamed to say I’d never seen until this week, Vertigo. One of the ways Mockingbird and I are dealing with our Commuter Marriage is to try, once a week, to watch the same movie on the same night in our separate digs, so we have a kind of date night and something to talk about in the following days besides work and school. We’re trying to go through the films neither one of us has seen but for one reason or another think we want to or ought to. (Avatar was part of this too, and now that we’ve seen it, we never have to see it again.) So this week was Hitchcock’s disturbing masterwork Vertigo.

I always like it when a film that is billed as disturbing really disturbs me. The ability to make me actively uncomfortable is a sign of great narrative filmmaking, and Vertigo does this in spades. The film tells the story of a retired police detective (James Stewart), who is hired by an old college buddy to follow his psychologically unstable wife (Kim Novak). Hitchcock leads us gently along the garden path with his easy pacing for the first half of the film and then throws us into a house of mirrors-maze and locks the exits for the second. It becomes a frighteningly intimate portrait of a shared descent into madness, obsession, and control that had me squirming in my seat, not least because of what Jeff Bussolini has called the “intertextuality of character” inherent in Jimmy Stewart, who is far afield from his normal, lovable, aw-shucks-merry-Christmas-everybody characters, and into deep, dark waters indeed. Plus, Hitchcock actually manages to make Kim Novak over into a cheap, frowzy broad with some hair-color, bangs, and exaggerated eyebrow-penciling, while Novak herself shows some serious acting chops as she moves from personality to personality throughout the film.

Perhaps the most striking thing to my eye, however, was Hitchcock’s use of color, and particularly the capabilities of Technicolor, where you can get not just blue, but !!!BLUE!!! Hitchcock uses the technology with tremendous artistry, keeping the colors muted and realistic for most scenes but using the full glory of Technicolor with the surety of a Fauvist master. A bed of red flowers there, emerald cocktail dress here, a sticky day-glow neon green from a neon sign there, until the color itself becomes a character in the film, wrapping you round and drawing you into an uncomfortable intimacy of creeping insanity. This is a creepy, creepy film, and if you’ve never seen it, you are really missing one of the highlights of American Cinema.

So now I’ve done some quickie film reviews here, which full-well count as scribblings, and was a lot of fun to boot. Mock’ and I have a bunch more movies coming this semester, so maybe there’ll be more of these in future. Until next time, be well.

Egypt Goes Dark

2011-01-31T17:39:00.000-08:00

So I managed to stick to my New Year’s resolution to post here at least once a week for exactly three weeks, Readers Mine, but at last the inevitable happened and I let it slide last week. Still, no great harm done I expect, and we’re here now, so I might as well try and figure out something to write about.

Well, here’s something disturbing from Mobiledia: It seems that the government of Egypt under President Hosni Mubarak has managed to cut the entire country off from the World Wide Web. As of today, the last ISP in Egypt has apparently shut down, effectively cutting the country off from international internet access. The Egyptian government is responding to the use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter by anti-government protesters to organize and mobilize. According to Renesys, an internet monitoring firm, the last Egyptian internet link to the wider world went dark at 20:46 UTC, or about 3:46pm EST. This is the first time a government has managed to cut its country’s access to the internet, and the results promise to be unpredictable. Egypt trades on international markets, and the internet has increasingly become the standard tool for international finance worldwide. Of course, cellular systems are apparently functioning, though they too were blacked out for a short period Friday.

The surprising thing isn’t the government’s attempt to deny the protesters ready access to international connectivity, but rather that the government was able to succeed in the attempt. Internal, national networks are apparently still functioning, but nothing is getting in or out. This marks a dangerous precedent. If Egypt can exercise such control over its citizens’ access to the internet, how likely is it that other governments can’t? Oh, I suppose the wealthy west would probably be a more difficult exercise in control (the more complex a system is the harder it is to control, generally speaking), but think about it folks, an entire nation has just disappeared off the grid, and tens of thousands of people who have taken to the streets to try and get a little more liberty and a little more say in their own country’s political process have lost the ability to communicate news about what’s happening in Egypt to non-Egyptian government controlled entities. There will be no viral videos of dying teenagers in Cairo’s streets, or of Egyptian Army units opening fire on protesters, no international surge of support as for the Iranian Greens.

Or so Mubarak hopes.

But if the internet has taught us anything, it is that there are more than twelve ways to skin a cat, and revolutions have been happening since long before Edison told Watson to “come here.” The human animal is the most cunning and dangerous critter this planet has ever evolved, especially in crowds. So here’s sending hopes and prayers to Egyptian friends and, as Bogy put it, “Success to crime!”

Insha’Allah.

Quick and Linky

2011-01-22T21:12:00.000-08:00

Well, Readers Mine, it’s going to be a quick and linky one this week, I’m afraid. I’m still trying to find my groove for the semester where every day doesn’t wind up feeling too short with too little time devoted to play, and this weekend is proving that further adjustments are necessary. Still, a Saturday post counts, so here we go.

The Great Buffy Rewatch continues over at Nik at Night. This week’s guest poster is Dr. Matthew Pateman, brilliant, funny, friendly and every centimeter the English gentleman, he delves into the episodes “Angel,’ “I Robot, You Jane,” and “The Puppet Show” with critical acumen and an abiding passion for his subject that always makes his work an engaging read. Matthew was also the first person I really met at Slayage 4, and made me feel welcome and a part of that strange and wonderful group of scholar-fans, so he’s pretty much the dog’s bollocks in my book.

A happy belated and posthumous birthday goes out this week to the late, great DeForest Kelley, the one and only Dr. Leonard McCoy of the original Star Trek, and always my personal favorite of the Triune God of Geeks. Kelly made a career in the movies and television that spanned 53 years, beginning in 1945 and ending in 1998, about a year before his death at the age of 79. To the character of Leonard “Bones” McCoy he brought a mix of Southern charm, fiery compassion, and genial irritability that have come to be standard tropes for talented medical characters in American television from Hawkeye Pierce to Doc Cochran. When he died in 1999, an era ended, for never again could Kirk, Spock, and McCoy “boldly go where no man has gone before.” Be Well, Mr. Kelley. I hope you find your own Yonada out there after all.

Finally, I thought I’d give a shout out to Geek Girl Con, which takes place October 8-9 this year in Seattle, Washington. To quote GGC’s own Erica McGillivray, ‘“GeekGirlCon is a one-of-a-kind convention celebrating geeky women and the wide variety of geeky things they are interested and involved in.’ The first of its kind, GeekGirlCon strives to be an event that celebrates women in the fields of math, the sciences, fiction, games, comics and more.” Jennifer K. Stuller, friend of Solomon Mao’s and author of Ink Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology is one of the folks working hard on the project, and with Jen involved, you know it’s going to be a good time, so check ‘em out and if you’re going to be on the North-Left coast this fall, take the opportunity to be a part of something pretty damn cool.

Yeah, I know, you got used to some thoughtful, occasionally insightful posts there for a few weeks, and there may be some of those again one day soon, but it is not this day. Still, follow the links, surf about a bit, and (God willing and the crick don’t rise) I’ll see you back here sometime next week for a fresh plate of whatever’s on my brain’s burner.

January's Histories

2011-01-15T13:58:00.000-08:00

I generally try to stay away from anything resembling a resolution around the New Year, because resolutions tend to be best kept in their breaking. I will admit, however, to an urge to pause, reflect, and reinterpret some things around January every year. This time around one of the outcomes of this exercise was a determination to post here at least once a week, even if the post is short, or nothing more than a book review. Today, Readers Mine, you get at least one of those options.

I’ve started off the semester with some histories, beginning with Michael K. Jones’ The Retreat: Hitler’s First Defeat. Jones styles himself as a “battle psychologist” who uses firsthand accounts to reconstruct not only the historical events he is concerned with, but also the psychological effects of these events on the people involved. The first of Jones’ works: Leningrad: State of Siege was a truly remarkable work, and his second, Stalingrad pretty much insured that I would read anything the man writes. That being said, The Retreat, dealing with the German retreat from the outskirts of Moscow in the face of determined Soviet counterattacks in the winter of 1941/42, doesn’t match Jones’ earlier works in either clarity of historical presentation or emotional verisimilitude. Part of the problem lies in the fact that the book is – rightly – approaching things mostly from the perspective of the German army and the accounts of individual German soldiers. It is difficult to really feel distressed at the hardships of people who early in the book are exulting in their success as invaders, and who throughout demonstrate a disturbing lack of concern for both captured prisoners of war or the civilian population around them. In short, we’re more than a little glad that the Nazi’s found themselves repeating Napoleon’s mistake, and rather happy to see them suffering defeat and general misery. Jones does not quite manage to hide his own pro-Russian bias in the book, and one gets the feeling that he perhaps didn’t really try as hard to humanize the Germans as might have, and that he is enjoying their failures quite as much as the reader is. Still, it is a valuable addition to any library dealing with the Soviet-German war, and Jones does deliver source material previously unpublished. Like many writers on the Great Patriotic War, however, he is somewhat defeated by the sheer scale of the events he describes. Military movements occur across literally hundreds of miles of front, and literally millions of soldiers are involved. It is a difficult subject, and may well defy Jones usual, wonderfully intimate approach to history.

Next up is The Reconstruction Presidents by Brooks D. Simpson, a work detailing the administrations of Presidents Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, and Hayes as they dealt with the various processes and phases of post-American Civil War reconstruction. The book is divided into four sections, and Simpson does a good job of demonstrating that Reconstruction was as much a matter of national policy from Washington D.C. as one of specific policies for the several states. This is a period that has come to hold great interest to me of late. I think sometimes we forget how easy it is to destroy something, especially in war, and how difficult thereafter to try and rebuild or repair it. From 1865 to roughly 1876, the United States was faced with the problem of reinventing itself as a united nation, and for the first time a nation without slavery. The questions surrounding black freedom and suffrage that arose during Reconstruction haunt the nation to this day, and the answers reached by white Americans of the time represent something like the failure of national will in the greatest of causes, and something like the creation of the cornerstones upon which tremendous structures of liberty would later be built. It is a bit of both in the whole, and on the whole, a sad time in our history. I’m only about a quarter of the way into Simpson’s book, but thus far it is detailed, meticulously researched, and knowledgeable while being a powerful read. I’m looking forward to knowing more at its end that I did at its beginning.

So that’s about it for my current reading. Amidst all of this a new term has begin that promises to be very full of assigned reading, writing, and general knowledge building, all of which is good but will undoubtedly make posting here from time to time difficult. If you stick with me, however, I’ll stick with you, and continue to scribble along.

In the meantime, be well.

The N-word

2011-01-08T07:03:00.000-08:00

There’s been a small uproar recently about New South Press’ decision to publish a heavily revised edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Long story short, “Injun Joe” will become “Indian Joe” and “nigger” will become “slave.” I’ve got a lot of problems with this, not least of which is a sanitizing of American history on par with the most egregious acts of the Texas School Board, but I’ll save my rant against mucking about with Twain for another day. What I want to talk about today is “the N-word.”

This cowardly little phrase has crept into the English language until every article or television news report dealing with the use of the word nigger begins to sound like the titillated exposition of an 8 year old showing how good he is by using cute euphemisms instead of swearing while simultaneously demonstrating a thorough knowledge of forbidden language. How far off is a report of protesters “allegedly shouting the N-word at members of the Black Caucus” from “Sally said the S-word Mommy, an’ wanted me to say it too, but I would never, ever say the S-word *giggle*?”

I believe the late, great George Carlin said it best:

“I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse.”

The word nigger is as American as apple pie. It just represents the side of America that reeks of rotting blood and horror. Nigger represents a half millennium of slavery and brutal oppression followed by a hundred years of Jim Crow laws and lynchings, followed by forty-five more years of crawlingly slow progress against ideas about race which are demonstrably false, but which remain ingrained even in the best of us at times. I could write this paragraph in the blood of murdered children, and it would still not begin to express the history borne by the word nigger, and our response to this history, our method of dealing with it, is to cover it up with a pretty quilt and spray some Febreze around. To say “the N-word” and then congratulate ourselves on how enlightened we’ve become.

Neither individuals nor nations can effectively deal with real problems by ignoring them or dressing them up or rewriting history. Racism in America is deep-rooted and still blooming. If we really want to put an end to it, we must begin by taking a deep breath and turning to face the problem directly. We need to start talking about “nigger” and not talking around “the N-word.”

And So it Begins...

2011-01-04T13:29:00.000-08:00

Well Readers Mine, it’s time for the Great Buffy Rewatch of 2011 to begin. Starting tonight, and continuing every Tuesday night in 2011, Nikki Stafford will host a diverse group of writers on her blog Nick at Nite as we work our way through the seven televised seasons of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. On average, three episodes a week will be covered, in order, beginning tonight with Nikki her own self covering the first three episodes of season one: “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” “The Harvest,” and “The Witch.”

If you’re already a Buffy fan, it’s a great excuse to revisit the show and remember why we love it so. If you’ve never seen the show, this is the perfect opportunity to experience something amazing, while also getting pithy comments and commentary from some of the funniest, smartest, and pun-tastic writers on the internet. You’ll also be introduced to these writers and their work, so you might just find some new reasons to increase the size of your library. So grab your Netflix queue or your DVDs, some popcorn, and your favorite snuggle-buddy, and settle in for quality television that both takes names and kicks ass.

Vale MMX! Ave MMXI!

2011-01-02T13:45:00.000-08:00

It has come to my attention that it is apparently incumbent upon me as a blogger to ruminate on the year just past and on the one just begun. Let me tell you, 2010 is going to be hard to top. I got married. I earned an Associate’s Degree and began the last two years of study for a Bachelor’s. I presented my first paper at an international academic conference, and had that paper accepted for publication in a reviewed journal. I moved – three times. I spent five days in the hospital with a dodgy heart, and afterward began to learn how to live with more than a little anxiety about it. I made some incredible new friends, and wrote quite a lot. So much happened in 2010 that, even though most of it was really good stuff, my score on the Holmes and Rahe stress scale taken at the end of the year placed me in the “Holy-Shit-Your-Head- Is-Gonna-Explode-Any-Second” category. Still, I was usually having too much fun to realize how stressed out I should have been, and I’m currently writing this in the home I share with a brilliant, beautiful, sexy, and (for the moment) redheaded woman who turns out love me and to be the Girl of My Dreams, so I’m putting 2010 pretty much at the top of my personal “Best Years Ever” list.

And 2011? Well, that remains to be seen, doesn’t it, Readers Mine? Oh, I plan to knock out most of the work on that Bachelor’s Degree I mentioned earlier, and present a paper or two here and there, as well as participate in the Great Buffy Rewatch of 2011, and to be writing from the same house with the same loving woman puttering about, and hopefully the two of us will be stronger for another year of love and life. So much for my plans, but as the poet has it,

“The best laid schemes o’ Mice and Men

Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!”

So in 2011, I’ll pray. For the courage, wisdom, strength, and serenity to meet whatever may come, be it joy or grief. To be able to think about someone else more often than I do of myself, and to be an agent for the good rather than a man of evil. For my shit to hold together when it hits the fan, and to hold my tongue lest I should be the one who throws it. To love well, and be loved well in return, and to be okay in sunshine or storm. Most of all, I’ll pray to remember that every day is a new year, one day at a time, and that I don’t have to spend the days alone, even when I’m all by myself.

Ave Minerva!

Purga mentem. Purga corpus. Purga animum.

Ita est!

Amen.

Legends of Our Time

2010-12-30T09:14:00.000-08:00

I’ve just finished reading The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade by Peter Carroll. The book tells the tales of some of the 2800 Americans who volunteered to fight in Spain against the fascist revolt led by General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Carroll, who served as official historian for the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) organization, had access to a great deal of source material, some of it previously unpublished, and took advantage of the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s to examine materials long unavailable to historians. His focus is unique, detailing the lives and struggles of the men and women involved during, but also before and after their service in the Spanish Civil War. What emerges is a collection of biographical vignettes, lives in brief, which also serve to reveal the history of the radical movements in the United States from the Great Depression to Gulf War I.

Carroll is, of course, dealing with a limited sample, primarily composed of the people who remained politically active or who returned to such activism after a period of time, and the reader is well advised to remember that perhaps the majority of Spanish Civil War veterans who returned to the US (some 930 died in Spain), became depoliticized and often unconcerned with VALB or other organizations. It is well too to remember what I consider to be perhaps the most fascinating element of the late 1920s through the mid 1940s: the astonishing belief in the power of ideology and political systems to change the world for the better. The Great Depression seemed to reveal a fatal weakness in the traditional Western capitalist system, and most national political systems appeared to be incapable of ameliorating the suffering of their citizens. People began to look for alternative systems, and found them in the radical movements of the Left and Right.

What is difficult for the modern American reader to understand is the depth of belief among those involved in these radical movements, and the unity of purpose imposed by socialist, communist, and fascist party structures. The political cynicism that is so common today was often wholly absent among the primarily working-class followers of the radical movements. These men and women saw communism or fascism as solutions to the problems of their nations and the world, and truly believed that these political systems would really work, if everyone just got behind them. They were possessed of a socio-political naivety that is almost incomprehensible to the modern reader. And their views were widely held. Think about it: when was the last time you heard of 2800 Americans volunteering to go and fight in a war that the US government actively avoided involvement in? When was the last time you read about American citizens defying the State Department to travel across the Atlantic and sneak into a country in order to fight against a cause that they found abominable?

Readers Mine, between 1936 and 1939, elements of the armies and air forces of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy deployed in Spain on the side of their fellow fascist Franco, while the US, UK, and France held to neutrality laws that insured that the forces of the legally and democratically elected republican government of Spain would not receive the support and weapons necessary to defeat these fascist forces that in less than four years would plunge the world into the largest, most horrific conflict in human history. Arrayed against these forces was a small Spanish Republican Army, bolstered by International Brigades composed largely of radical leftists, with some support from the Soviet Union. And in the XV International Brigade were 2800 Americans, many of them communists, who chose to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini and Franco when their government would not, because they believed that people working together could make a better world than dictators, and they were willing to put their very lives where their mouths were.

Oh, I’m not saying that the American Communist Party and the Lincoln Brigadiers were angels. Their party line came from Moscow and Stalin more often than not, and duplicity and secrecy were standard operating procedure in party politics, but the individuals who risked everything to fight in Spain by and large did so because they truly believed that it was the right thing to do, because the Spanish people should be allowed to determine their own fate and their own government. They were naive, and young, and they were defeated, coming home to take up their lives again, many fighting bravely in World War Two in the US Armed Forces, only to face the terrific persecution of the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism, and eventually to emerge as the elder statesmen of the protest movement, working for the Civil Right Movement and protesting the Vietnam War. They are remarkable people, though now all but passed from the earth. They will not pass from memory though. In the words of La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibarruri, in her farewell address to the survivors of the Lincoln Brigade in 1938:

“You can go with pride. You are history. You are legend.”

Other Decembers

2010-12-15T07:26:00.000-08:00

There’s a rest stop at mile marker 100 on I-85 southbound in North Carolina, roughly between the towns of Thomasville and Lexington. Once upon a time these were furniture factory towns turning out tons of beautiful wood pieces every year. People came from across the country to shop the outlets and factory stores for everything from end-tables to bedroom suites, and enjoyed the local BBQ in bustling Southern downtowns. Today most of the factories and outlets are deserted, and there are more empty storefronts than not. Like a lot of industry in North Carolina, furniture making has gone elsewhere, or gone so upscale that you don’t need many people to produce the few pieces you sell every year.

But back to the rest stop, where you can stretch your legs, grab a Coke and some Cool Ranch Doritos, use the facilities, and pop your back after a few hours on the road. While you’re there, you can also visit the North Carolina Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Yes, Readers Mine, at the rest stop. Just a little bit beyond the bathrooms and vending kiosk, there’s a brick walkway leading down in a series of broad steps to a kind of tumulus of banked earth formed into a grass-covered toroid, open at one end. Here there is a low stone dais over-flown by the national, state and POW/MIA flags:

“Dedicated to the 216,000 North Carolinians who served and the over 1600 who were killed or missing in the Vietnam War.”

I was there on a chilly fall day, when most of the leaves had already blown off the trees, and the wind was enough to make me turn up the collar on my pea-coat and pull my watch cap down over my ears. It was mid-afternoon, and the rest stop was moderately busy, but there wasn’t a soul in the memorial. Inside the earthen walls, the memorial is a great circle with a brick walkway running around the circumference, small brick benches placed here and there and a central field of grass already turning yellow-brown in preparation for winter. At the far side of the enclosure from the entrance is a brick wall, maybe 10 feet high, and inscribed on the inside bricks of this wall are some 1620 names, arranged alphabetically. At my feet as I stood before the wall were more bricks, these inscribed with the names of the 100 counties of North Carolina, all of which had sent native sons and daughters to war.

It wasn’t exactly quiet there – I-85 was just a couple of hundred yards away – but the sounds of the interstate and of kids released from cars to expend some of their built up energy was muted by the earthen walls. About as peaceful as you’re going to get in such a setting. I found out later that the land for the memorial had been donated by the state’s Department of Transportation, which went some way towards explaining the location. Plus, I’m sure, the same state crews who take care of the rest stop also tend to the memorial grounds, so the memorial may well be more sustainable over the long run than others. Still. An interstate rest stop. Oh, there’s a big statue-memorial in the state capital, Raleigh, but this is the official state memorial. At a rest stop.

I’m really not one to get overly emotional at memorials (though I defy anyone to make the long walk down the length of Maya Yeng Lin’s national Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C. and not be moved), but I think it’s good that there are such places. Good to remember those who served and those who died or disappeared, perhaps especially so in the days before the all-volunteer military and in a war that seems so horrifically pointless. I admit I’m a bit irked at the placement of this memorial. It seems… disrespectful somehow. I could be wrong. In fact, being at a rest stop on a major North-South route may well bring the memorial more visitors than it would get otherwise. Probably does, as a matter of fact.

I’d like to think that the reality would be different though, that people would want to travel some distance to visit the memorial, take the time to make a deliberate trip and stand before the wall, read some of the names. I’d like to think that we’re better than we are, and that we’d make a point of remembering and, yes, honoring the people whose names are on those bricks, and all the rest who, thank God, don’t have to be listed on bricks or in polished black stone because they made it back home alive. That maybe we’d take a minute to ponder what causes or interests are really worth 1620 lives, and dedicate ourselves to the proposition that such bloody currency only be spent with the greatest reluctance, most meticulous care, and deepest grief.

In December of 1968, there were 540,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines deployed in Vietnam. By the time the last serviceman was withdrawn in 1975, some 58,000 Americans had died there.

To absent friends, past and present.

Good luck, and Godspeed.